Democrats have a bumper crop of presidential candidates for 2020 already. But many progressives still lament that Sen Sherrod Brown decided not to run for  President in 2020. At salon.com, Matthew Rosza has a short interview with Sen. Brown, an Ohio progressive who actually wins state-wide elections with strong support from white working-class voters. Brown shares some of his insights regarding how Democrats can win in 2020 in this excerpt:

First of all, I don’t see the divide as great as the media wants to make it out to be. I’ll start with that. I think the big D issue is the Republicans moving further and further to the right and following Donald Trump off a cliff with his divisive, racist rhetoric. I mean, that’s the issue or the story of the two parties. But I’ll still answer the question directly.

I think there’s a false choice between “you speak to your progressive base” or “you talk to working-class voters of all races, some of whom don’t think of themselves as progressive.” I think it’s a false choice. I think you talk to both.

I’ll use an example: If I go to Zanesville, Ohio, and I don’t win, it’s an industrial city. There are ten Zanesvilles in Ohio. There’s Mansfield, Zanesville, Springfield, Chillicothe, Portsmouth, Lima, Ravenna, cities that are working class cities, racially pretty diverse, some more than others. Globalization has been unkind to all of them, I’ll just put it that way. But I do okay in those communities, even though they may not like my position on guns, they may not like my position on choice, and they may not like my ‘F’ from the NRA, my lifetime ‘F,’ they may not like it that I’ve always been pro-choice, they may not like it that I’ve supported marriage equality for 20 years. But enough of them vote for me because I talk about their kids going to Eastern Gateway or Stark State or Rhodes State. I talk to them about the cost of prescription drugs and how I fought the drug companies. I talk to them about getting access to healthcare and pre-existing … and protecting them if they have a pre-existing condition.

…Some won’t vote for me. Some will never vote for me because of my ‘F’ in the NRA. I can live with that. Some of them still won’t want me to be their senator. I’ll still work hard to help them with their Social Security check or with a problem they have with pollution coming from a local river or something. But you talk to them as a progressive on economic issues. You don’t compromise on civil rights, you don’t compromise on women’s rights. But you can win in those communities…The people I talk about in Lima or Zanesville or Mansfield, many, many of them understand that I fight for them against a utility company or against a drug company or when their job has been outsourced because of bad trade policy.

…I mean, elections are about contrasts and he’s [Trump] really had nothing improve. All that he’s done, all that he’s said in trade has been mostly pretty good. All that he’s done in trade, in trying to address trade issues has been muddled and bungled, in how he’s done it.

For more information about Senator Brown’s policies, click here.

The following article by Christopher R. Martin, author of the forthcoming No Longer Newsworthy: How the Mainstream Media Abandoned the Working Class (Cornell University Press) and professor of Digital Journalism at the University of Northern Iowa, is cross-posted from Working-Class Perspectives.

It should be easy to run against Trump’s rural America record. Aside from his made-for-Fox News rallies, he has little to show for in rural policy except for self-inflicted wounds that risk returning rural America back to the farm crisis of the 1980s.

Trump’s misguided tariff wars and scuttling of NAFTA have exacerbated crop prices that were already slumping, especially corn, soybeans, and wheat. This year, farm loan delinquencies have hit a nine-year high. Since land is the basis for farm loans, another disturbing trend is the fifth straight year of decline in Midwestern farmland values, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, which represents a region of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, and Wisconsin, all states (except for Illinois) that Trump won in 2016. According to the Chicago Fed, this is “the longest downturn since the 1980s” in farmland valuations. And, although unemployment is low in the Midwest, it masks the long-term disinvestment and depopulation of rural locations in the region.

And Democrats should have learned from 2016 that ignoring rural Midwestern states, or assuming their support, is a proven bad approach. As Pulitzer Prize-winning, editorial writer Art Cullen of Iowa’s Storm Lake Times recently noted, “The main problem with Democrats is not showing up in flyover country, and they paid for it with the election of Donald Trump.”

A huge group of Democrats are already showing up in Iowa to compete for the nation’s first caucus next February. On March 29, five of those Democratic presidential hopefuls appeared in Storm Lake for the Heartland Presidential Forum to address their vision for rural America. Julián Castro of Texas, John Delaney of Maryland, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and Tim Ryan of Ohio took questions from Cullen, two reporters from HuffPost, and audience members at the more than two-hour event. Of course, showing up is just part of being a candidate. The bigger test is what ideas they have for rural America, including Iowa, which turned to Trump in 2016.

All of the politicians were adept enough to endorse rapid federal aid to the region’s communities ravaged by flooding rivers this spring. They all also suggested some long-term policies to confront the economic malaise of rural areas. Both Warren and Klobuchar proposed confronting big agribusiness. “A generation ago, 37 cents out of every food dollar went into a farmer’s pocket,” Warren said. “Today, it’s 15 cents. And one of the principal reasons for that has been concentration in agribusiness…I want to see the enforcement of our antitrust laws.” Klobuchar hit a similar note about the handful of multinational corporations that control agribusiness. “I think we are now entering what is essentially a new gilded age, and we need to take on the power of these monopolies,” she said.

Delaney, who was the first to announce his run (in July 2017!) and whose commercials have been staples of Iowa television, introduced his “Heartland New Deal,” with proposals for health care, infrastructure (including the popular idea of broadband for rural areas), agriculture policy reform, and especially investments. “I believe in the power of investment,” said Delaney, who made his fortune running investment companies and offered the least imaginative vision.

Castro, like all of the speakers, advocated for local schools and community health care, but most strongly emphasized his support of immigration, which brings badly needed workers to agriculture and slumping rural towns. “We can have a secure border and also be compassionate and recognize the value of our immigrant community.” Castro’s comment was followed by substantial applause from an audience right in the middle of Republican U.S. Rep. Steve King’s district, demonstrating that rural voters aren’t monolithic in support of anti-immigrant politicians like King and Trump.

Ryan, who hails from Youngstown, Ohio, tried to make the urban-rural connection. “How do we get these manufacturing centers and some of these urban centers who have been hollowed out in the last 30 or 40 years, tied together politically with rural American. Same issues – hospitals closing down, children leaving – kids leaving our communities, opiate epidemic, failure to be able to fund our local public services, our local schools,” he said.

Ryan has a point. Some of the answers to the question, “What does it take to enable rural America to survive?” also apply to those hollowed-out industrial centers. Yet all of the candidates at the conference ignored three important issues where federal policy can make a significant difference in both places.

First, an often-overlooked component to small-town health is a post office. In a digital economy, package delivery is essential. Having a local post office literally puts a town on the map. One post office advocacy group counted nearly 1,600 post offices closed from 2008 to 2017, estimating that three-quarters of those padlocked locations are rural. But blighted urban neighborhoods have lost post offices, too.

Aside from deliveries, post offices can offer another function to help working-class towns and urban neighborhoods flourish. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York (who missed an opportunity in her absence from the Heartland Forum) has introduced legislation to require U.S. Postal Service offices to offer basic financial services to customers, an idea supported by both Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. This would expand financial services into rural towns that may have none, providing services like free checking accounts and debit cards to those who cannot afford the fees of commercial banks. Most important for working people is the proposal that postal banks could make small loans of up to $500 at low interest rates, undercutting the exploitative payday lender business and helping the 11 percent of adults who have had to resort to payday loans. This system works in 87 other countries, including Great Britain, France, Switzerland, Canada, Australia, Japan, and Singapore. The whole idea may sound un-American to some, but it’s worth remembering that the U.S. had its own post office banking system 1911 to 1966.

Second, the federal government can also help sustain small-town schools, another essential institution for rural towns in Iowa and urban neighborhoods like those in Chicago. In Iowa, school consolidation has meant downsizing from 458 school districts in 1965 to 374 in 2000 to 330 last year and closing many school buildings. The Cedar Rapids Gazette reported that “Losing a school often spells the end for its town, too. The idea of losing an entire community — a hometown, a childhood, an identity for many — has brewed fear and anger.” A parent from Chicago’s South Side noted a similar effect when her schools closed. “The community was just one family and when the school closed and the building shut down, it shut down our family,” she told WBEZ in Chicago.

Finally, while nearly all of the candidates observed that economy has increasingly left workers behind, none talked about empowering workers with a significant bump in the minimum wage and restoring collective bargaining rights (both important issues in Iowa). Instead, they offered disappointing economic visions like Tim Ryan’s: “embrace” artificial intelligence and additive manufacturing, infuse it into existing industry, “and cut the American worker in on the deal.”

It’s good that Democratic candidates are showing up early in flyover America. But judging from their presentations in Storm Lake, they have a lot of work to do in honing their message for the rural (and urban) working class. Midwestern voters in a faltering economy are going to want more than vague assurances that government and business leaders will “cut the American worker in on the deal.”

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

Why Aren’t Hispanics an 80-20 or 90-10 Democratic Group?

That’s the question Tom Edsall asks in his latest New York Times column. Well, the answer to that is pretty simple: they aren’t black and black voters are so overwhelmingly loyal to the Democrats for very specific and well-known historical reasons.

So, not a big mystery there. That said, Edsall seems to be implying that Democrats are significantly underperforming among this group relative to what one would reasonably expect from how awful Trump is, etc.

Grace Sparks explains why “The majority of Americans tend to agree with Democrats on top issues, polling shows” at CNN Politics: “In reality, the polling shows the majority of the public usually backs policy positions preferred by the Democratic Party…A new Gallup poll released Thursday showed that two-thirds of Americans said protecting the environment should be a higher priority than economic growth and only three-in-10 who said economic growth should be given priority, even if the environment suffers to some extent. This is the highest prioritizing of the environment since spring 2000…Eight-in-10 Democrats and 71% of independents prioritize environmental protection, versus 35% of Republicans who said the same…Another poll out this week by Pew Research Center found that Americans’ biggest frustration regarding the country’s tax system isn’t the amount they pay, but that corporations and the wealthy don’t pay their fair share…Overall, 62% said that the feeling that some corporations don’t pay their fair share bothers them a lot and 60% said the same of wealthy people. Those are both made up of huge majorities of Democrats — 79% of Democrats who said those bother them a lot (on both). Independents were in a majority, as well, 62% who were bothered by corporations not paying their fair share, and 60% wealthy people, while 42% and 37% of Republicans said the same, respectively.”

Sparks continues: “Those are two examples but there are many other issues that fit under this umbrella, including immigration, gun control and abortion…- Guns, Quinnipiac University poll (March 1-4, 2019): 60% of registered voters support stricter gun laws in the US…87% of Democrats support stricter gun control laws…The border wall with Mexico, CNN poll conducted by SSRS (January 10-11): 56% oppose building a wall along the entire border with Mexico…89% of Democrats oppose building a wall along the whole of the southern border…A national “Medicare-for-all” plan, Kaiser Family Foundation (March 13-18): 56% have a favorable view…78% of Democrats have a favorable view of a potential national Medicare-for-all program…Abortion, Fox News poll (February 10-12): 57% of Americans said the Supreme Court should let Roe v Wade stand, 21% overturn…73% of Democrats don’t want Roe v. Wade overturned…Same-sex marriage, Gallup (May 1-10, 2018): 67% of Americans thought marriages between same-sex couples should be recognized by the law as valid…83% of Democrats want marriages between same-sex couples to be recognized by law.”

On immigration-related issues, Sparks notes that “There are some areas where the positions held by Democrats in Congress are also matters of bipartisan agreement among all voters….DACA, CNN poll conducted by SSRS (February 20-23, 2018): 83% of Americans said they want to continue the policy and allow immigrants who meet the qualifications to remain in the US.” A “Quinnipiac University poll (January 25-28, 2019): 75% of registered voters thought immigration is overall good for the country…There are issues where Republicans are a majority, but they are few and far between (for example, crime and justice, especially the death penalty). Importantly, the issues where the Republican position is the more popular opinion aren’t the ones that Republicans focus vote on when voting.”

John Harwood reports at cnbc.com that “As the annual IRS filing deadline of April 15 approaches, just 17% believe their own taxes will go down, the NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll shows. By contrast, 28% believe they’ll pay more, another 27% expect to pay about the same and 28% don’t know enough to say…In the NBC/WSJ poll, that sense of missing out is nonpartisan. Just 33% of Republicans believe they’re getting a tax cut, while an even punier 10% of independents and 7% of Democrats do…Among core Trump supporters, 36% believe they’re getting a tax cut. But another 36% say their taxes are staying the same, while 6% say they’re paying more to the IRS.”

The polls are looking pretty good for Democrats at this stage, but Nathaniel Rakich sounds a cautionary note at FiveThirtyEight: “By our count, nine pollsters have polled either the same state or the entire nation more than once since the 2018 midterm elections, which is when we started collecting 2020 primary polls. But none of these pollsters have kept the same list of candidates for every poll — although some have been more consistent than others. This means great care must be taken in declaring a candidate is surging — or struggling — even when comparing his numbers in polls from the same pollster.^1…The good news is that, in most polls, the candidates who are rotated in or out are polling poorly, so it doesn’t make a huge difference whether they’re included or excluded. Plus, there can be good reasons for a pollster to update the roster of candidates it asks about; it’s important that a poll reflect the most up-to-date state of the race (e.g., Bloomberg looks like less of a factor now than he did in December, and Buttigieg looks like more of one)…This is especially true since getting at least 1 percent support in three national polls is one of two ways a candidate can qualify for the first two Democratic primary debates (the other is through fundraising).”

Oliver Willis notes at shareblue.com that “Trump approval tanks in 5 swing states he won in 2016,” and he writes: “In Morning Consult’s most recent survey, Trump is down in the following swing states: Florida (-24 points), Ohio (-20), Michigan (-19), Wisconsin (-18), and Pennsylvania (-17)…In 2016, Trump won all of those states, which together represent 93 electoral votes. Trump’s electoral vote margin of victory was 74 points that year…”

At New York Magazine, Ed Kilgore shares a positive sign of growing Democratic solidarity around working-class issues: “The good news for labor folk is that the Democratic Party as a whole seems more in sync with union interests and policy positions than at any time in recent memory. Candidates with a history of coziness toward Wall Street, Silicon Valley, or big donors are for the most part repenting, and on issues ranging from the minimum wage to trade to labor law are expressing an unusual degree of solidarity…Any “heartland strategy” for Democrats in 2020 will most definitely include a major effort to convince union members and their families that Trump has broken his promises to them. Perhaps this time labor won’t be licking wounds from internal divisions over the primaries.”

The New Republic’s Alex Shepard has some thoughts on whether Democratic candidates should go on Fox News: “The debate over whether Democrats should engage with Fox is a microcosm of the broader debate within the Democratic Party about engaging with Trump voters. Just as many Democrats believe that appearing anywhere on Fox legitimizes the network’s most offensive bloviators, many believe that courting Trump voters will require legitimizing the president’s views. Both fears are understandable, but quite overblown. If Democrats want to win back white voters—and that’s a big “if”—they need to meet those voters where they are…The argument against Democrats appearing on Fox News is that it would only serve to legitimize a network whose existential purpose is to excite Republican voters…The argument for Democrats appearing on Fox News is that winning back the older white rural voters is important if the party wants to win back the White House in 2020, something that has obsessed some in the party since the midwestern “blue wall” crumbled in 2016—and how can you do that without engaging with those voters?”

On the other hand, Shepard writes, “Fox is in essence a retirement community,” New York magazine’s Frank Rich wrote in an astute piece about Fox published back in 2014. “The million or so viewers who remain fiercely loyal to the network are not, for the most part, and as some liberals still imagine, naïve swing voters who stumble onto Fox News under the delusion it’s a bona fide news channel and then are brainwashed by Ailes’s talking points into becoming climate-change deniers…Letting Fox News host a Democratic debate doesn’t make sense for the DNC, given the network’s antipathy toward the party. But there’s no reason for candidates to cower, either.”

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

Can the Democrats Win with Identity Politics?

Perry Bacon Jr. considers this question in his latest article on 538. He starts out by noting:

The case for Democrats both running on populism and centering their electoral strategy around appealing to Midwestern white voters without college degrees is fairly strong. After all, polls show that voters are more aligned with the Democrats on some high-profile economic issues than on some hot-button cultural ones. Recent electoral history also seems to make this case. Then-President Barack Obama leaned heavily into economic populism during his successful 2012 re-election bid, when he won states including Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Hillary Clinton lost those three states and the election in 2016 after a campaign in which both she and President Trump spoke bluntly about issues around race and identity. In turn, Democratic congressional leaders emphasized a pocketbook messagefor the 2018 midterms, and the party’s candidates executed it, highlighting health care, particularly the GOP push to repeal Obamacare, more than perhaps any other issue. And the Democrats made huge gains in November.

Looking ahead to 2020, the easiest, clearest path for the Democrats to get 270 electoral votes is for them to win Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and all three states’ electorates have a higher percentage of whites without college degrees and a lower percentage of people of color than the nation overall. And those three states have already shown signs of bouncing back toward Democrats — the party won the governor’s race in all three in November.

I couldn’t have put it better myself. Bacon then proceeds to try to make the case for an alternative approach where Democrats “talk a lot about equality and identity issues, and…focus on turning out nonwhite voters and white people with college degrees as much as white people without degrees.”

One interesting point he makes here is is that Obama-Trump voters get a lot of attention but there are also Obama-nonvoter in 2016 and Obama-third party voters who could be targets and who have a different profile. So perhaps these voters need a good dose of identity politics. Bacon also notes how much of 2018 Democrats’ success was derived from opposition to Trump on non-economic issues like immigration..So identity politics could be a way of mining that part of the electorate.

Well, maybe. But it seems to me that any 2020 Democratic candidate will implicitly and explicitly be running against Trump’s rhetoric and policies around immigration and other culturally-inflected issues. I’m not sure a candidate needs to be very left or identity politics–oriented to convince voters that he or she is indeed an alternative to Trump and what he stands for.

But Bacon makes an interesting case and it’s worth reading. Honest fellow that he is, he admits that he himself does not completely buy his own argument and concludes:

“I’m making a case here, and it’s purposefully a bit provocative. The clearest way for Democrats to win in 2020 is for the party to carry Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — three states that have lots of white voters without college degrees and where Trump’s tax and health care plans are very unpopular. Perhaps Democrats aren’t disciplined enough to talk about race and identity without also talking about related issues (reparations, for example) that may turn off swing voters…..So I’m not sure that this kind of non-economic liberalism is the best strategy for Democrats. But I’m not sure it isn’t either.”

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

David Byler continues to do excellent data work at the Washington Post and is out with a new column that examines the role of the white working class in the Democratic party. That’s right, the Democratic party not the Republican party. As Byler reminds us, the white working class, despite shrinking as a proportion of voters and leaning strongly Republican these days, is still a very important part of the Democratic coalition (I should note here that the States of Change project will be issuing a major report in June on Democratic and Republican party coalitions, going back to 1980 and projected forward through the 2036 election. Watch for that!)

The Nation’s Editor Katrina vanden Heuval has the progressive response to Trump’s bellowing about “the best economy ever” under his Administration: “It’s true that wages have begun to rise a bit, with demand for workers and minimum-wage hikes in states and localities finally giving a boost to those on the bottom. But the average weekly pay has grown less than 1 percent per year for the decade. Low-wage workers’ hourly pay in 2017 barely surpassed what they earned in 1979, while that of high-wage workers has increased nearly 50 percent. Inequality is at extremes not seen since 1928. Workers are still not capturing a fair share of the increased productivity that they help to create…And while incomes have stagnated, key costs have soared. Health care remains remarkably expensive; millions go without insurance or are underinsured. Gallup reports that since Trump took office, the number of Americans without health insurance has increased by a stunning 7 million. Female, younger and lower-income workers have seen a greater decline than those who are male, older and/or wealthier. Life expectancy has declined for the third year in a row. The lack of health care explains part of that. The savage opioid epidemic—a disease of despair—accounts for another chunk.”

Osita Nwanevu explains how “Progressive Activists Are Pushing the Democratic Field on Political Reforms” at The New Yorker: “To the extent that Democrats have engaged with the appetite for political reforms, they have done so by endorsing ideas that the next Democratic President will probably be unable to see through, like the elimination of the Electoral College, or ideas that, while achievable and well grounded, like automatic voter registration or campaign-finance reform, do not resolve the main challenges to Democratic policymaking. The primary obstacle to the next Democratic President’s agenda will be the anti-majoritarian institutions and norms that shape federal policymaking. These could conceivably be altered by a Democratic President and Congress, but in ways, such as eliminating the filibuster and expanding the Supreme Court, that the Democratic Presidential candidates have mostly refused to explicitly endorse. Progressive activists have yet to truly penalize the 2020 contenders for their reticence. But, as the promises made by the candidates grow bolder by the week, we can expect more questions, like the toughest ones posed Monday, about how, exactly, they intend to keep them.”

Sure, there are lots of people who are happy with their health insurance, as well as millions more who are not. But you don’t have to look very far for the horror stories, nor for statistics that show how poorly the health insurance industry serves the public overall, as Roqayah Chamseddine documents in his article, “A Healthcare Industry Built on Premature Death: On the cruelty of private healthcare corporations.” As Chamseddine writes, “The industry is an architecture of misery, extracting profits from suffering. According to a report published in 2017 by The Doctor-Patient Rights Project, insurance companies “denied treatment coverage to one-in-four (24 percent) patients with a chronic or persistent illness or condition; 41 percent of the patients denied coverage were denied once, while 59 percent were denied multiple times.” Thirty-four percent of patients who had been denied coverage were forced to put off treatment, despite having a chronic illness. An astounding 70 percent of treatments for a chronic illness denied by insurers were for conditions referred to as “serious.” The grim reaper disguises himself in many forms, in this case that of an insurance agent.”

At shareblue.com, Oliver Willis has some talking points for Democrats regarding Republicans and veterans. As Willis reports, “Acting Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought testified before the House Budget Committee on Tuesday…In his 2019 budget, Trump has proposed rounding down the cost-of-living adjustments given to veterans. Military Times notes that the idea “has been decried by veterans groups in the past as unfairly using their earned benefits to balance the budget.”…Vought said, “We don’t think [the cuts] will have any adverse impact” when asked about the attack on veterans by Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA)…”No adverse impact? No adverse impact to decreased cost of living adjustments?” Moulton asked incredulously…”That’s correct,” Vought replied. “I think you should speak to some veterans, Mr. Vought,” the congressman replied, ending the exchange…The cold dismissal of veterans’ concerns is the latest in a long line of slights and attacks on the military from Trump. He largely views the armed services as a useful backdrop for his presidency, via venues like parades, rather than as an institution to be supported and respected…In the same budget document, Trump fraudulently takes credit for the “largest” increase in military pay in a decade, but the military received larger increases twice under Obama.”

Eric Levitz has some bad news for Dems at New York Magazine’s Intelligencer: “In Wisconsin’s gubernatorial race last year, Democrat Tony Evers defeated Scott Walker by one percent statewide — but won a majority of votes in only36 of the state’s 99 Assembly districts. That same night, Democratic candidates won 53 percent of all ballots cast for the state Assembly, even as Republicans won a 27-seat majority in that body…In other words: The 2018 midterms confirmed that the GOP has gerrymandered Wisconsin’s electoral maps so aggressively, it will be essentially impossible for the Democratic Party to gain control of that (purple) state’s legislature until its maps are redrawn…This point was not lost on the Wisconsin GOP. Immediately following Evers’s victory, Republicans convened a special legislative session to transfer powers from the popularly elected branch of government that Democrats had just won to the undemocratically elected branch that the GOP couldn’t lose…These developments forced Wisconsin Democrats to confront a harrowing possibility: that their triumph in the governor’s race would not stop the GOP from locking up the state legislature for another decade.”

At The Hill, Rachel Frazin reports that “Delaware Gov. John Carney (D) signed a bill that would give the state’s presidential electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote, according to The Associated Press…In signing the bill, Delaware became the 13th state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.” Frazin adds,

With the addition of Delaware, states that belong to the compact hold 184 electoral votes, still well short of the 270 needed for a candidate to ascend to the White House — which is also the threshold at which the pact takes effect.

Little Delaware only adds 3 electoral votes to the popular vote interstate compact total. About Two months ago, Colorado joined the list of states enacting similar legislation. Delaware changes the new total of Electoral College votes needed to 86 to insure that the popular vote would determine the outcome of presidential elections.

The smallest number of states needed to enact similar measures would be three states, including Texas (38 EVs), Florida (29 EVs) and Pensylvania (20 EVs). There is a larger number of combinations of four states which could also pass the initiative to end the domination of the Electoral College.

In general, Democrats strongly favor disempowering the Electoral College, while all but a few Repubicans support it, since the GOP has won two presidential elections since 2000, while losing the popular vote

Here is a list of some states that have not yet passed the compact, with the party breakdown of their state legislatures and governorships:

Florida: Repubican Governor, R+6 Senate, R+25 House

Georgia: Republican Governor, R+14 Senate, R+29 House

Michigan: Democratic Governor, R+4 Senate, R+6 House

Minnesota: Democratic Governor, R+3 Senate, D+16 House

North Carolina: Democratic Governor, R+8 Senate, R+10 House

Ohio: Republican Governor, R+13 Senate, R+23 House

Pennsylvania: Democratic Governor, R+4 Senate, R+16 House

Texas: Republican Governor, R+7 Senate, R+17 House

Virginia: Democratic Governor, R+2 Senate, R+2 House

Wisconsin: Democratic Governor, R+5 Senate, R+28 House

There are some other states that could add to the compact’s total. But these are states with the largest number of Electoral Votes.

Of course the Republicans would challenge the constitutionality of the compact, when it achieves the 270 vote threshold. But the Constitution does state quite clearly (Article II, Section 1) that states have the right to determine how to allocate their electoral votes. A nation-wide Democratic landslide in 2020 would be the game-changer.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

One of the most consequential decisions of Obama’s early administration was to let a small group of, as Simon Johnson puts it in an excellent American Prospect review essay, Status Quo Republicans–Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner and Hank Paulson–set the overall response to the financial crisis. As Johnson remarks, if you hire Republicans, you will get Republican policy.

Johnson’s review essay covers two books, a jointly written defense of their role in the financial crisis by Bernanke, Geithner and Paulson and Reed Hundt’s new book, A Crisis Wasted: Barack Obama’s Defining Decisions. (Hundt, FCC chairman under Bill Clinton, was on Obama’s 2008 transition team and, besides knowing all the players, had a close-up view of these decisions being made).

Hundt’s book is primarily concerned with why an alternative approach was not taken, rather than letting the Status Quo Republicans run the show. Hundt’s answer, as summarized by Johnson:

“Obama did not bring with him a large, experienced team, and during the campaign he developed only broad-brush ideas. The experts on the details were almost all people who had worked with the Clintons. They were Small Ball Democrats—smart people with admirable ideas, but hardly in a position to stand up to Status Quo Republicans. New Deal–style Democrats were conspicuous by their absence.

The financial sector was saved, largely intact, by unprecedented government support. If homeowners had received the same level of support in 2008-2009—for example, in the form of cheap refinanced mortgages—what would have happened? The American economy would have recovered, house prices would have risen, and everyone involved would have looked like a genius. Modern central banks control the price level and this has a primary, direct effect on asset prices—including housing. In most of the country, house prices bounced back but millions of homeowners could not finance their way through the trough. Powerful people in the financial sector could obtain cheap loans, even in the darkest days, because their access to credit was the top priority for both the Bush and Obama administrations.

The result, in rough chronological order, was: mass unemployment, greater inequality, collapsed opportunity, confused anger, and President Trump. The efforts put into financial reform—making sure this could not happen again—by Messrs. Bernanke, Geithner, and Paulson were weak. They lament that next time the central bank will not have the tools to deal with an incipient crisis. If that proves true, it is because their generation undermined the legitimacy of the Federal Reserve through inattention to regulation, consumer protection, and blatant bad behavior before the crisis, and through subsequently allowing the Too Big To Fail banks to become even larger and more dangerous—the total indebtedness of JPMorgan Chase today is in the range of $2.5 trillion.”

This really was the great failure of the Obama administration. Where it really counted, they just had the wrong people in charge and the consequences were immense. There is nothing more important than ensuring this does not happen again.

As Johnson concludes his essay:

“It is unlikely that the next Democratic president will want to be seen as another reincarnation of the Clinton administration. But are the potential home-run policy ideas being debated and honed in sufficient detail? Who will be hired—and with what experience—to be in charge of implementation? What are the plans for regulating the financial sector, which is more powerful than ever? And who exactly will be in charge when anything starts to go wrong in the macroeconomy? On these questions may turn both the election and the future of American democracy.”

I recommend you read this important essay in full and perhaps pick up Hundt’s book to boot. For extra credit, you could try Noam Scheiber’s book, The Escape Artists: How Obama’s Team Fumbled the Recovery, which is an excellent, detailed account of exactly what the subtitle says it is.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his Facebook page:

EJ Dionne, in his lengthy and generally sympathetic American Prospect review of John Judis’ new book, The Nationalist Revival: Trade, Immigration, and the Revolt Against Globalization, has coined a new term for my old friend and sometimes co-author. Here’s the end of Dionne’s review, where he applauds Judis’ grouchiness:

“[I]t is vital that progressives come to terms with what both of Judis’s books have to teach [about nationalism and populism]. It is certainly a form of willful blindness to underplay the role of racism and prejudice in Trump’s campaign and to deny that racism and nativism motivated a substantial share of his supporters. But in political terms, the more costly mistake would be to assume that all of Trump’s working-class voters were motivated by race alone and that they can therefore never be persuaded to an alternative politics.