Jordan Weissman explains why “Every Democrat Should Talk About Health Care Like Amy Klobuchar Does” at slate.com. Weissman quotes Sen. Amy Klobuchar at a CNN town hall, in which she plugged Sen. Brian Schatz’s health care reform bill, which lays the foundation for a public option through Medicaid buy-in:

What we need is to expand coverage so people can have a choice for a public option. And that’s a start. And you can do it with Medicare. You can do it many ways. But you can also do it with Medicaid, something I don’t think we’re talking about enough as a potential solution. This is a bill that I am one of the original sponsors of, Sen. Sanders is also sponsoring it, it’s a bill by Brian Schatz, who is a senator from the state of Hawaii, and what it basically says is “Let’s expand Medicaid so you can buy into Medicaid, and it’ll bring the prices down, and we can cover more people.”

Weissman praises Sen. Klobuchar for the way she frames the proposal “if you didn’t particularly like the substance of Klobuchar’s response, I think she deserves credit for being forthright; Democrats would be better off if more candidates talked about health care with her level of candor.” No matter which candidate you support, Klobuchar’s respectful tone could prove effective in winning popular support in the 2020  general election.

But Schatz’s bill is not intended as a final substitute for ‘Medicare for All,’ the health security reform brand most frequently associated with Sen. Bernie Sanders, who just entered the race for the Democratic presidential nomination as a leading candidate. Schatz’s billI is more of an interim reform on the path to universal health care coverage, one which may have some appeal to moderate Democrats, who are looking for legislation that could pass sooner than any of the ‘Medicare for All’ bills. Weissberg highlights some of the key features of the legislation:

…It would allow states to create public health insurance plans through Medicaid, with premiums capped at 9.5 percent of a family’s income. The policies could be sold on Obamacare’s exchanges and states would be free to include copays and deductibles. In states that adopted it, residents would be guaranteed access to health insurance priced at no more than one-tenth of their income; that’s progress from today’s status quo, where families that earn more than 400 percent of the poverty line have to pay the full cost of insurance, no matter how high premiums rise, and counties can be left without coverage options if private insurers decide to bail. It would also make Medicaid payments to primary care doctors more generous, which could encourage more physicians to accept it. And by working through Medicaid, it avoids the usual Republican attack that Democrats are somehow going to destroy Medicare by expanding it.

Part of the appeal of a public option is that it won’t alienate most voters who want to keep their health insurance, while it allows those who want a public option to try it out. Critics of the approach argue that the economics of universal coverage requires “all-in” participation. No matter which reform is eventually adopted, however, there will be unforseen problems and glitches that need to be fixed. Democrats should acknowlege that reality with an up-front commitment to making the needed repairs, while reminding voters that the Republican “reform” means letting insurance companies have their way with consumers.

Of course nothing is likely to pass before 2021, and then, only if Democrats win a Senate majority and the white house in the 2020 elections. If Democrats win by a landslide margin, a Medicare for All bill will become a practical possibility. If the margin is narrower, the Medicaid buy-in public option may be the more realistic possibility in the short range.

Either way, Democrats should not get suckered into internicine warfare between Medicare for All advocates and supporters of a public option through Medicaid buy-in. Don’t let the debate degenerate into a bitter false-choice exercise. Whichever approach gets prioritized after the election, it’s likely that it will win near unanimous support from Democratic Senators and House members in the final floor vote. Once it is passed, the other alternative will top the Democratic reform agenda. Indeed, expanding eligibility for both Medicaid and Medicare merits support from all Democrats as essential steps toward universal coverage for every American and all illnesses.

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

Now that a little more time has elapsed since the GND roll out, the responses on the left to the initiative have become clearer.

First, there are some folks–I would mention Mike Tomasky and Jonathan Chait here–who see the GND as being net negative because it’s so far over the top that it discredits the Democrats and provides abundant ammunition to the GOP. Tomaksy describes it as “a home run for Mitch McConnell”. Chait describes it as basically bad and a kind of anti-capitalist fever dream dressed up in green clothing.

That seems a bit harsh. Surely some credit is due for putting the general idea into play even if some of the specifics are, well, bonkers. On the other hand, another stream of left commentary is probably much too forgiving of the wackier aspects of the GND. (Examples: Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times; Maggie Koerth-Baker on 538.) The general idea here seems to be that since the basic idea is so good, we don’t really need to worry about nutty ideas that are associated with it. Hey, we’re moving the Overton window here, don’t bother us!

This is not convincing. The possibility and desirability of moving said window does not mean that you can loudly assert whatever wish list agenda you have and expect good results. The Overton window is indeed movable, but it’s not that movable. It still has to respect the underlying structure of public opinion and the state of real world politics.

Finally, there are those who are sympathetic to the general idea but recommend that a GND actually be at least somewhat economically and politically feasible and actually be targeted on climate change. I recommend here the approach of Noah Smith whose Bloomberg column on designing a GND “that isn’t over the top” is well worth reading. Some excerpts:

“I propose an alternative Green New Deal, which would focus on actually defeating climate change. Some of the proposals here are included in the Green New Deal resolution; some are not.

The first pillar of an alternative Green New Deal would be green technology. If the U.S. can discover cheap ways of manufacturing cement and concrete without carbon emissions, and of reducing emissions from agriculture, it will give developing countries a way to reduce carbon output without threatening their economic growth. To this end, the U.S. should pour money into research. The budget of ARPA-E, the agency charged with leading this research, should be increased from about $300 million to $30 billion per year.

The second way to move green technology forward is to encourage the scaling of these technologies. As companies build more solar power, batteries, smart grids, low-carbon building retrofit kits and other green technologies, the costs go down. To that end, the government should provide large subsidies to green-energy companies, including solar power, batteries and electric cars, as well as mandating the replacement of fossil-fuel plants with zero-carbon plants.

Infrastructure spending is also important. The original Green New Deal’s goal of building a smart electrical grid is a good one, as is the idea to retrofit American buildings to have net zero emissions.

Technologies developed in the U.S. need to spread quickly to other countries. All ARPA-E breakthroughs should be freely transferred to other countries….

[A]n alternative Green New Deal should include proposals to make sure as little as possible of the costs of the transition fall on the economically vulnerable. Government infrastructure and retrofitting projects will naturally create many green jobs. The proceeds of a carbon tax can be rebated to low-income Americans, either as a carbon dividend, or through earned income tax credits, child tax credits, food stamps, housing vouchers and income support for the elderly and disabled. These policies combine the goals of fighting climate change and supporting the poor and working class.

In order to sweeten the deal politically, an Alternative Green New Deal should also include some economic policies that aren’t directly related to climate change — but make sure these are things that should be done anyway, and which won’t break the bank. Universal health insurance….should be included [as well as] Increased spending on public universities and trade schools in exchange for tuition reductions, and grants to help lower-income students pay for these schools,…

Finally, an alternative Green New Deal should involve progressive taxes, both to raise revenue for the spending increases and to let the nation know that the well-off are shouldering more of the burden. Wealth taxes and inheritance taxes are good ideas…..

This alternative Green New Deal has similarities to Ocasio-Cortez’s version, but also has key differences. By focusing on technological development and international assistance, it would tackle the all-important problem of global emissions [while] avoiding huge open-ended commitments like a federal job guarantee or universal basic income…Ultimately, this plan would represent the U.S.’s best shot at fighting the looming global menace of climate change while also making the country more egalitarian in a safe and sustainable way. It would be a worthy successor to the original New Deal.”

This makes good sense to me. It’s plenty ambitious but actually has some intellectual coherence as a GND, rather than a wish list. It would likely be more effective and certainly more salable than the original proposal. If folks are really serious about a GND, that’s the direction we need to go in.

“House progressives are set to introduce a revised single-payer “Medicare-for-all” bill during the last week of this month, as Republicans sharpen their criticism of the policy and Democratic presidential hopefuls face questions about whether they support it, writes Mary Ellen McIntire at Roll Call. “The House bill from Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., will have at least 100 initial co-sponsors. It comes as Democrats are offering a range of bills to expand health insurance coverage, such as a proposal to allow adults between 50 and 64 to buy into Medicare that was unveiled Wednesday, and presidential candidates refine their positions on what “Medicare-for-all” should mean and the role private insurers would play…The intra-party divisions could complicate Democrats’ hope of keeping health care as a unifying issue and a central theme in the 2020 campaign, building on their capture of the House in 2018 by focusing on protections for pre-existing conditions and defending former President Barack Obama’s signature domestic policy achievement…“The most important thing for Democrats to do is outline a couple of core principles that they are for and what they mean by ‘Medicare-for-all,’” said Celinda Lake, president of Lake Research Partners, adding that candidates should focus on broad topics like covering all Americans, lowering costs and the ability to choose their own doctors. “It’s very, very important that we get some of those components and core values out.”…“At the end of the day, what people want is access to affordable health care for everyone,” said Mark Mellman, a Democratic strategist and president of the Mellman Group. “People are less concerned about the mechanism through which that’s provided and more concerned about the ultimate objective….Polling shows that most people support expanding coverage through Medicare, but support for “Medicare-for-all” fell when people heard it could cause them to lose their insurance. A Kaiser Family Foundation poll released last month found that support for a national health plan fell from 56 percent to 37 percent when people were told it would eliminate private insurance.”

Li Zhou and Emily Stewart consider “5 ways Trump’s national emergency declaration could be stopped” at vox.com, including: 1) A joint resolution of termination contesting the status of the emergency; 2) Congressional Democrats sue the White House; 3) Landowners sue the White House; 4) Liberal activist groups sue the White House; and 5) California and other states sue. There is a good chance that all of these challenges will soon be launched. As Zhou and Stewart explain “Trump is issuing the declaration under the National Emergencies Act of 1976, which lets presidents issue an emergency declaration but under certain constraints — namely, Trump can only use specific powers Congress has already codified by law, and he has to say which powers he’s using. The act doesn’t define what counts as an emergency…House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer announced Friday that they were prepared to take multiple routes to try to block Trump’s efforts. “The Congress will defend our constitutional authorities in the Congress, in the Courts, and in the public, using every remedy available,” they said in a statement.”

At CNN Politics, Priscilla Alvarez explores the question, “Will the Supreme Court stop Trump’s national emergency?” Alvarez notes, “How and where these legal challenges proceed is unclear, but it’s likely they’ll bubble up to the Supreme Court — potentially testing for the first time the 1976 law that formalized the structure by which a president can declare a national emergency…There’s been virtually no litigation in the 43-history of the National Emergencies Act about that statute,” said Steve Vladeck, a CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor of law at the University of Texas School of Law. “To a large degree, what is about to happen is not precedented,” he added.”…the administration could face legal challenges on what statutes he relies on to merit pulling from funds that haven’t been appropriated for his wall. Trump invoked Section 2808 of Title 10 of the US Code, which allows him to dip into a stash of Pentagon funds that are earmarked but have no signed contracts for spending that money. Section 2808, specifically, requires the use of the armed forces.”

“By validating the Republican efforts to portray Democrats as outside the mainstream,” writes Ronald Brownstein in “Howard Schultz Is Already Helping President Trump: The former CEO has staked out a platform few Republican-leaning voters would endorse” at The Atlantic, “Schultz is helping Trump already. He would help him even more if he runs as an independent behind a platform that aligns much more closely with the views of Democratic voters than with those of Republican voters. An independent candidacy that splinters the vote would reduce the share of the vote required to win, inexorably benefiting a president who has never sustained support from more than about 45 percent of the public. Unlike Clinton, who sought to remake the Democratic Party from within, Schultz could debilitate Democrats…With minorities and Millennials replacing working-class whites in the Democratic coalition, the party is more liberal than during Clinton’s era. But enough voters inside the coalition still share the views Schultz has expressed for him to exert influence within the party if he chooses to. Instead, he’s pursuing a course that may only help Republicans.

In his article, “One blue wave was not enough: Democrats need another in 2020: Beating Donald Trump might not be Democrats’ biggest task in 2020: A second blue wave could reshape history.” Paul Rosenberg writes: “Altogether, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is initially targeting 33 GOP-held seats, for 2020. Chairwoman Cheri Bustos, D-Ill., has declared that “2018 was just the tip of the iceberg for Democrats,” adding, “We have a clear path to expanding our Democratic majority, and by putting our plans in motion earlier in the cycle than ever before, we are demonstrating to Democrats across the country that the political arm of House Democrats is operating in high gear from the start.”…What’s more, the DCCC pointed out, 20 of the 33 seats it’s targeting “are held by an incumbent Republican who has never served in the minority before,” making them especially likely to retire and create a more winnable open-seat race…Pundits have largely tuned out on the House amid the early furor of the impending presidential campaign. That’s a mistake. Just as 2018 was all about the House, 2020 is expected to be all about the White House — with a secondary nod to the Senate. But a second wave election in the House could be crucial for longer-term Democratic success. And making further gains in state legislative races will be crucial to the redistricting process after the 2020 census is complete.”…“In 2020 we can defeat Trump and set up decades of progressive victories,” a Swing Left spokesperson told Salon. “That requires winning the White House, the Senate, key state races that will determine redistricting, and protecting our majority in the House. Put simply, the blue wave can’t be a temporary movement, and it can’t be confined to the House. We need to build a comprehensive and sustained approach to activating grassroots energy to win elections up and down the ballot.”

Rosenberg continues, quoting Jane Kleeb, founder of Bold Nebraska and chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party: “There’s no question that Democrats need rural voters in order to win back the White House, as well as to win statewide races like U.S. Senate,” she said. “Unfortunately, Democrats have lost an entire generation of rural voters because there’s been this cycle of mutual neglect. Democrats don’t invest in the state parties, and then they don’t have the money to talk to rural voters. We don’t talk to rural voters, so they don’t vote for Democrats.”…One old-timer put it bluntly to her husband at a town hall, Kleeb recalled: “Let’s just be honest, if there’s only one church in your community, guess what religion you become.” Kleeb added that Democrats “have to start including the solutions that rural people are already putting on the table to the big issues facing our country and our party.”…“Real investments have to be made in red and rural states if we’re going to win the White House and critical statewide elections,” Kleeb said. “Specific examples are investing in state parties who know their communities best; opening up our primaries to independents, since we need their votes to win elections; and talking about issues that matter to rural people, like ending eminent domain for private gain, providing broadband access and ensuring competitive markets for family farmers and ranchers.”

At The San Antonio Express-News, Kevin Diaz reports that Dems see a “Texas ‘focal point’ of Democratic congressional strategy in 2020.” Diaz explains, “Smelling blood after picking up two Texas congressional seats in November – along with Beto O’Rourke’s narrow loss in the U.S. Senate race – House Democrats on Monday announced six new 2020 targets in the Lone Star State.” Diaz notes that Democratic strategists see 33 pick up opportunities for House of Reps seats in 2020, and 6 of them arte in Texas. “The targeted Texas lawmakers include Houston-area Republicans Michael McCaul and Pete Olson. Around San Antonio, the Democrats are putting two other Republicans in their sights: Freshman Chip Roy, a conservative stalwart who worked for U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, and moderate Will Hurd, who represents a heavily Latino border district. Rounding out the list are Republicans John Carter of Round Rock and Kenny Marchant of Coppell…”All six have suburban areas experiencing population booms and an increasingly diverse electorate. These factors gave Republicans a taste of what is headed their way.” said DCCC Chairwoman Cheri Bustos, an Illinois Democrat, in a memo released Monday…Republicans still represent 23 of the state’s 36 congressional districts. Flipping six seats would give Democrats a 19-17 majority in Texas.”

“While Northam is looking to atone for his actions, black organizers and activists say that he has a lot to do before he can be forgiven…Northam declared last week that he will stay in office, promising to help Virginia “heal” and use the blackface scandal as an opportunity to be more active in addressing racial inequality. That hasn’t stopped protests, though, or ended calls for his immediate resignation…Strong turnout among black Virginians, coupled with the fact that 87 percent of black voters in Virginia backed the Democrat, pushed Northam to a decisive victory over Republican Ed Gillespie…With Northam staying in office in hopes of riding out the scandal, the focus now shifts to how he will address the issue moving forward. On Tuesday, the governor’s office released a statement touting Northam’s record on restoring civil rights to people with felony convictions, a group that is disproportionately black. The Washington Post reported last week that the governor’s office is planning a statewide “reconciliation tour”, and Northam will attend a February 21 discussion on race at the historically black Virginia Union University. — From P. R. Lockhart’s “Ralph Northam wants forgiveness. Virginia’s black activists want him to work for it: The embattled governor’s fight for redemption is just beginning” at vox.com.

Lockhart reports that some groups, including the national and Virginia NAACP and county branches of the organization are still calling for Northam to resign. Other groups have have seized on the Northam meltdown to convert the controversy into an opportunity to advance a stronger civil rights agenda. The ACLU has called on him to support a constitutional amendment to protect the right to vote for those who have been convicted of felonies. Also, “In a letter sent to Northam this week, an activist group called the Virginia Black Politicos outlined their own set of policy proposals, including the removal of Confederate monuments, the creation of funds supporting black entrepreneurship and Virginia’s historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), and a new office focused on issues affecting people of color.” Virginia’s legislative Black Caucus, which earlier called for his resignation, may be the most influential organization in shaping the outcome. Much depends on whether they will see a way for Northam to continue in office, in light of his record of support for civil rights reforms and the outright hostility to civil rights by Virginia’s Republican leaders.

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

There are few policy questions more important for Democrats than how they’re going to handle the debate about deficits and the national debt. This is because every time Democrats come up with some good new programs that would actually help people and make the country better and more productive over the long haul, the standard response is: we can’t afford it, that would run up the debt, we’ll become like Greece, etc. That is, unless you want to raise taxes to cover every nickel of that spending–and good luck with that.

But the conventional economic wisdom on deficits and the debt is shifting–finally–and that should help Democrats keep their heads on straight about this stuff. It’ll still be a struggle to hold off the conservative attack dogs and their pals in the deficit hawk community. But there is hope that the ideological tide on government spending is turning.

Paul Krugman:

“[T]here are…two big questions [about the debt]. First, how much should we care about debt? Second, will a double standard continue to prevail? That is, will the deficit scolds suddenly get vocal again if and when Democrats regain power?

On the first question: One surprising thing about the debt obsession that peaked around 2011 is that it never had much basis in economic analysis. On the contrary, everything we know about fiscal policy says that it’s a mistake to focus on deficit reduction when unemployment is high and interest rates are low, as they were when the fiscal scolds were at their loudest.

The case for worrying about debt is stronger now, given low unemployment. But interest rates are still very low by historical standards — less than 1 percent after adjusting for inflation. This is so low that we needn’t fear that debt will snowball, with interest payments blowing up the deficit. It also suggests that we’re suffering from chronic weakness in private investment demand (which, by the way, the 2017 tax cut doesn’t seem to have boosted at all).

So in the past few months a number of prominent economists — including the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund and top economists from the Obama administration — have published analyses saying that even now, with unemployment quite low, debt is much less of a problem than previously thought…..

[B]orrowing at ultralow interest rates to pay for investments in the future — infrastructure, of course, but also things like nutrition and health care for the young, who are the workers of tomorrow — is very defensible.

Which brings us to the question of double standards.

You don’t have to agree with everything in proposals for a “Green New Deal” to acknowledge that it’s very much an investment program, not a mere giveaway. So it has been very dismaying to see how much commentary on these proposals either demands an immediate, detailed explanation of how Democrats would pay for their ideas, or dismisses the whole thing as impractical.”

Noah Smith:

“[E]conomists’ views on the subject of debt are changing. Economist Kenneth Rogoff, who once ran into criticism for a dubious claim that debt reduces growth, now advocates more deficit spending for the U.K. The IMF has softened its tone on debt, and is beginning to embrace the idea of fiscal stimulus for distressed economies. And Olivier Blanchard, a respected macroeconomist and former IMF chief economist, has a new paper questioning the idea that higher deficits would impose any real cost on the U.S. economy.

Blanchard begins with a simple observation: If the interest rate paid by the government is lower than the rate of economic growth, government debt doesn’t have to be paid down. Instead it can be infinitely rolled over, and as the economy grows, the debt burden will have a tendency to shrink all on its own. Blanchard notes that interest rates on short-term government debt have generally been lower than the rate of nominal GDP growth during the past few decades:…

Blanchard notes that effective borrowing costs may be even lower for the government, since some portion of the interest paid to bond holders gets taxed, ending up back in the government’s coffers. Taking this into account, he finds that during the past half-century, the U.S. almost always could have afforded to take on more government debt than it did.”

Sometimes you just gotta borrow the money. And quite frequently, and especially now, that’s fine.

In “2020 Democrats Try to Woo Back Trump’s Union Voters” at The Daily Beast, Gideon Resnick shares some insights on the role of labor unions in the 2020 election: “Trump made inroads with labor in 2016. Those looking to unseat him now are making moves to ensure it doesn’t happen again…In 2016, the AFL-CIO supported Clinton but when they conducted exit polls on how their members voted in the presidential election, they saw a nine percentage point drop among active and retired members from the level of support Obama had. That decline, union officials say, is what could have contributed to the narrow margins of victory for Trump in Midwestern states…“It was much more of a drop off in enthusiasm for Clinton than it was a big shift of union voters from Obama to Trump,” Thea Lee, former deputy chief of staff for the AFL-CIO, told The Daily Beast…But union officials say Trump’s pitch seems to have faded and his hold on that voting bloc seems to have cracked, as evidenced by midterm results that saw Democrats gaining the governorships, House seats and holding Senate seats in the Midwest states that have often comprised the so-called Blue Wall. With those voters seemingly up for grabs in 2020, Democrats have made a concerted effort to speak the language of labor, talking more about disadvantaged workers, income inequality, wealth gaps and health care. Warren has advocatedfor allowing workers to elect at least 40 percent of board members for corporations with over $1 billion in revenue. Sanders has gone directly after Amazon and Walmart, successfully pushing the former company to raise wages for workers. Brown wants to eliminate incentives for offshoring for corporations that emerged as a byproduct of the recent GOP tax bill. And they’ve all talked about the importance of unions in restoring the middle class.”

Nate Silver comes right out and says what lots of Democrats are thinking, if not saying, in his FiveThirtyEight post,  “Everyone’s Running — And That Could Be Dangerous For The Democrats: When the field gets big, the primaries get weird.” As Silver writes, “The crowded field developing for 2020 doesn’t necessarily imply that an anti-establishment candidate will prevail. Even when party elites don’t get their first choice, they usually get someone they can live with. But the high number of candidates does imply a higher-than-usual risk of chaos.” In all likelihood, says Silver, “we’ll end up with a total of between 17 and 24 Democratic candidates, including the 10 (one since withdrawn) we have already…a very big, possibly even record-breaking field.”…larger fields are correlated with more prolonged nomination processes in which both voters and party elites have a harder time reaching consensus…But the past electoral cycles where the field was nearly as big as this one shouldn’t exactly be comforting to Democrats, and it should be particularly worrying for next-in-line candidates such as Biden. Democratic voters like a lot of their choices and feel optimistic about their chances of beating Trump in 2020. The large field is both a sign that there may not be consensus about the best candidate and a source of unpredictability.”

At New York Magazine, Ed Kilgore also sees the large Democratic presidential field as problemtic, and notes, “Putting aside the aforementioned 2016, 1972, and 1976 cycles, there have been seven other presidential fields that reached double digits: Democrats in 1988, 2004, and 2008, and Republicans in 1996, 2000, 2008 and 2012. Only two of them produced victory, and that includes a 2000 George W. Bush election that required overtime and an intervention by the Supreme Court…So it’s reasonably safe to say that very large presidential fields have more often than not led to defeat and/or eccentric nominees. They’ve also often produced nominees who didn’t get anything close to a majority of the popular vote in the primaries, which was less problematic back when Democrats didn’t have the kind of strict proportionality in delegate awards that they do now.”

The title of Zack Beauchamp’s article, “Howard Schultz’s CNN town hall revealed the emptiness of elite centrism: Schultz’s vacuous politics are a reflection of his class” at vox.com captures the feeling Schultz seems to leave with many Democrats. Beauchamp elaborates: “The CNN town hall from former Starbucks CEO and potential 2020 candidate Howard Schultz on Tuesday was revelatory: It showed he has no agenda beyond blaming the “extreme left” and “extreme right.” Asked repeatedly to explain his policies for fixing America’s biggest problems, Schultz proved himself entirely incapable of proposing new ideas or specific solutions…One audience member asked Schultz what he would do to fix the health care system. His response: “This gives me another opportunity to talk about the extreme left and the extreme right.” CNN’s Poppy Harlow asked him for specifics two more times, to explain what exactly he would do to overhaul American health care. Schultz had no plan…A Houston resident, citing his city’s damage from Hurricane Harvey, asked Schultz what his plans would be to address climate change. Schultz responded by bashing the Green New Deal and complaining about the federal debt.” Sort of centrism for its own sake. I’ll be surprised if Schultz is still in the mix in six months.

Writing at The Daily Beast, Michael Tomasky sees the ‘Green New Deal’ as “a home-run – for Mitch McConnell.” As Tomasky explains, “It’s overly broad and grandiose. Getting to zero carbon emissions by 2030 is basically impossible. Serious environmentalists are shooting for 2050. Sweden hopes to be carbon neutral by 2045. That’s Sweden. The United States has 32 times Sweden’s population and 39 times its gross national product…Ernest Moniz, Barack Obama’s energy secretary, is a brilliant person. No one knows more about energy than he does. He told NPR: “I’m afraid I just cannot see how we could possibly go to zero carbon in the 10-year time frame. It’s just impractical. And if we start putting out impractical targets, we may lose a lot of key constituencies who we need to bring along to have a real low-carbon solution on the most rapid time frame that we can achieve.” Tomasky believes that a the Senate vote ont he Green new Deal resolution McConnell plans to scedule is designed to “reveal a big split in the Democratic caucus” and divide Democxrats…Credit AOC for getting the Green New Deal in the camera frame. Climate change is an issue that needs serious attention. But it doesn’t need this sort of attention. Let’s hope this lesson about throwing a hanging curveball over Mitch McConnell’s plate has been learned.”

Many Democrats, who saw Virginia as the emblematic red-to-blue transition state, are shell-shocked by the sudden credibility meltdown among its top Democratic leaders. Looking toward Virginia’s future, Kyle Kondik argues that “Democrats hope for a nationalized Virginia election this fall: Richmond chaos could threaten state legislative takeover but big-picture trends still favor team blue” at Sabato’s Crystal Ball. As Kondik sees it, “So here we are, with the top three officials in the state all damaged to at least some degree, but without any real indication as of this writing (Wednesday evening) that any will leave office voluntarily...What is at stake in the state is more than the future of the three state-level, statewide elected Democrats. Before this cascade of revelations and party chaos, Virginia Democrats were looking at the very real possibility of total state government control and — given that many Southern states were ruled by conservative Democrats before Republican dominance in the region — perhaps the most liberal (or progressive, if you prefer) state government in the post-Reconstruction history of not just Virginia, but the South in general…No doubt, the Richmond scandal is an immense headache for Democrats, and a black eye for the commonwealth. If Democrats fail in the fall, the scandal probably will be part of the reason why. But it may be that Democrats suffer through agony all year and then win the state legislature in the fall anyway. If that happened, it would be another triumph for the long-term, nationalized trends that have more often animated politics across the country in recent years than the local ones that seem so politically important in the moment they are happening.”

Top experts on Virginia politics Larry J. Sabato and Kyle Kondik also provide a more in-depth look at the stakes in the battle for control of the Virginia state legislature in light of the current scandals: “Looming over all of this is the upcoming state legislative elections in Virginia this November. Republicans are hanging on to very slim majorities in the state House of Delegates (51-49) and state Senate (21-19). Democrats made a net 15-seat gain in the House of Delegates in November 2017 as Northam, Fairfax, and Herring won statewide. Democrats seemed like favorites to win both chambers — we’ll analyze these races later in the year — particularly because a new state House of Delegates mapimposed by judicial order will improve Democratic odds in that chamber. Some Virginia Democratic operatives, even before the current mess, were concerned that the white hot intensity that fueled Democrats in 2017 and 2018 might cool in 2019, particularly without any statewide elections on the ballot. Lower turnout might help Republicans, whose voter base in Virginia (and elsewhere) can be more reliable in off-year elections. Still, the growing nationalization of American politics could help the Democrats by pushing them to maximize turnout in Virginia by focusing again on the unpopular President Trump. But one could imagine the opposite happening, particularly if Northam hangs around and depresses Democrats, or the Fairfax allegations continue to churn. Perhaps a statewide election for lieutenant governor, if it happens, will increase turnout in Democrats’ favor. Or if Northam stays, could we see Democratic state legislative candidates running on impeaching their own party’s governor? It’s not impossible, and it would be just the latest crazy development in a state rocked by them over the last week.”

There may not be much hope for atonement and rehabilitation for Virginia’s Democratic  Governor Ralph Northam, since most of the state’s African American leaders have reacted to revelations of his black-face mockery in the 1980s by calling for his resignation. Complicating factors include Northam’s positive track record as a progressive Governor, the fact that overt Republican racists always get a free ride with their party and the reality that the next two Democrats in the VA succession order are also in very hot water, while the fourth in line is a Republican. At cnn.com, John Blake makes a case that “Some of the biggest champions for black people in America’s past have been white politicians who were racists.” Blake cites  Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, LBJ and Abraham Lincoln as primary examples, along with racially-insensitive remarks by former Vice President Biden and former President Bill Clinton. Blake concludes that “there is not much room for a politician to evolve in today’s environment. There is a “rage industrial complex” that fixates on the latest racial flashpoint: an outrageous video, remark or image that’s passed around social media like a viral grenade.” But, what if Virginia’s African American leaders embraced a different strategy of insisting Northam hire African Americans for his top staff and workshopping him through a process of rehabilitation? Might that be a more instructive and healing way to address racist behavior?

And at The Nation, Joan Walsh writes, “So where a week ago it seemed unlikely that Northam could survive this crisis, as of Monday it looked possible. While Carroll Foy said she backed the black caucus call for Northam’s resignation, “now that he’s said he’s not going anywhere, and it’s not an impeachable offense, I can use it as a teachable moment.” Keeping Northam in office, as opposed to turning the state over to Republicans, is “better, given that the Republicans say no to unions, no to women’s equality. Even though [Northam and Herring] made this mistake, they are better than the other party” on racial-justice issues…In an interview with The Nation, the Rev. Jesse Jackson acknowledged that he called for Northam’s resignation last week, because “he is less able to govern because of the blackface situation.” But while he denounced blackface as “part of the old scheme of humiliation,” he accused the media of caring more about Northam’s old photo than Mississippi Senator Cindy Hyde Smith’s saying she’d be happy to sit in the front row of a lynching, or Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp taking “thousands of black voters off the books” to defeat Stacey Abrams and become governor…“I have to think that when Northam supports Medicaid for all, voting[-rights] enforcement and took the higher side on the Charlottesville march, that should matter more,” Jackson said. He pointed to President Lyndon Johnson as someone who had supported Southern segregation in his youth, but became a champion of civil rights and poverty reduction as president. “We’ve seen what people who are fighting for redemption can do.”..The question in the days to come is whether Northam can convince black voters that he’s serious about redemption.”

The following article by Michael Tomasky, editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas and author of “If We Can Keep It: How the Republic Collapsed and How it Might Be Saved,” is cross-posted from The Daily Beast:

So now we have nine declared Democratic candidates for president, with presumably a few more on the way. I don’t know yet if it’s a great field. They all have strengths, they all have weaknesses.

But here’s one thing I like so far. I’m not hearing many sappy calls for unity or pledges to bring the country together. This is a grand development.

Pundits of course are supposed to bemoan this and demand that presidential aspirants summon us toward our better angels. I may have believed this once, but those days are gone. Calling for unity is a sucker’s game for Democrats and has been for a number of years.

It’s been clear since the 1990s that the Republican Party has had no interest in uniting the country. The GOP’s interest—since Newt Gingrich, the rise of Rush and the radio talkers, the illegitimate Bill Clinton impeachment, and the Brooks Brothers Riot of the 2000 election—has been to win. To dominate the other guys. Yes, George W. Bush said while campaigning in 2000 that he’d be a “uniter, not a divider,” and of course he employed some of that kind of rhetoric after 9-11.

But he rarely governed that way. This is largely forgotten now, but after the Supreme Court named him president, there were calls for him—the man who had lost by 500,000 votes and had very obviously carried Florida only because of a bad ballot design that had Palm Beach Jews voting for Pat Buchanan—to appoint moderates to key positions and govern from the center. He did nothing of the sort.

Barack Obama did talk more about unity, and about working across the aisle. What did it get him? Steamrolled, mostly. Key Republicans gathered at a restaurant the night of the inauguration and made a pact not to give him any support on his major initiatives. Mitch McConnell said openly that his goal was to make Obama a “one-term president.” They failed at that, but the list of initiatives on which Obama hoped for but did not receive any bipartisan support is long indeed (minimum wage, infrastructure, overtime pay, and on and on).

Then along came Donald Trump. I give him a perverse kind of credit for not making any stupid, empty pledges to unite the country. He needed a deeply divided country to have a chance, and he knew it. So he stoked division.

I’m not saying this cycle’s crop of Democrats should do that. Obviously, no Democrat would talk like Trump anyway, because that kind of bigoted talk would get a person drummed out of the country’s multiracial party even as it got him celebrated and elevated in the country’s white ethno-nationalist party.

I am saying, though, that Democrats should stop pretending they can unite the country. They can’t. No one can. What they can do, what they must do, is assemble a coalition of working- and middle-class voters of all races around a set of economic principles that will say clearly to those voters that things are going to be very different when they’re in the White House.

I like most of what I’m hearing so far on this front. Putting aside for present purposes their possible weaknesses, which we’ll have plenty of time to discuss, several candidates have come out of the gate emphasizing fighting for their America instead of some dreamy, chimerical vision of contentless unity. “Kamala Harris for the People” is a fighting slogan. For my money, she’s not nearly specific enough yet about what precisely she’s going to fight for, especially on economic questions, but it’s a start. Amy Klobuchar’s speech had some good pugilistic rhetoric about the pharmaceutical companies. Elizabeth Warren’s speech used the word “fight” 25 times.

And not-yet-declared candidate Sherrod Brown struck similar notes in a speech to the New Hampshire Young Democrats Saturday night. Brown also did something else very smart, something I’m on a kick about and will write a hundred times between now and the end of the primary season next year: He talked about small towns. He talked about the opioid crisis, which is crushing rural America but isn’t really on New York, California, or Washington radar screens. Brown is out there saying “I can get enough small-town white people back on our side,” while also emphasizing his record on civil rights and abortion and LGBTQ issues.

That’s a kind of reaching out that is absolutely necessary. But it is not the same as making some treacly, sentimental unity pitch. Brown is saying come join the fight. But saying that acknowledges the existence of the fight.

That’s where Democrats need to be. I hope that if Beto O’Rourke jumps in, he gets this. It’s where people’s heads are now anyway. We’re locked in a fight for the direction of the country. We have a president who’s about to use emergency powers to build a wall that a majority of the country doesn’t want. And in economic terms, we’re at a potentially historic and even revolutionary moment. As I wrote in the Times recently, there are strong and encouraging signs that supply side’s hegemony has run its course, and the public may be open again to Keynesian principles.

Is it kind of sad that unity rhetoric has no place in today’s politics? Sure. But the best way to unite the country, to the extent that such is possible anymore, is to win the White House and Congress and start passing laws and imposing rules that will help regular people again.

And I’m all for reducing polarization–I just wrote a book about it–but that’s a project that will need 20 years, and besides, reducing polarization requires defeating extremist radicalism. That requires pugnacity. Let the disunion begin.

In Geoffrey Skelley’s “Is Socialism Still An Effective Political Bogeyman?” at FiveThirtyEight, he writes: “If President Trump’s most recent State of the Union address is any indication, socialism could be at the forefront of his 2020 campaign rhetoric. In his Feb. 5 speech, Trump said that “we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country” and declared that “America will never be a socialist country.”

No shocker there, and it’s not just Trump. Republicans have parroted similar inanities for as long as all of us have been alive. But Skelley may be right that we should expect an uptick in GOP references to the socialist bogeyman in the 2020 campaigns.

The Republicans are desperate after getting creamed in the midterm elections. And now they have to own millions of voters getting screwed by G.O.P. tax “reform,” and their utter failure to enact any improvements in America’s health care. They can’t run on their record, so here come the distractions, including the fear-monger’s twin bogeymen, the Dangerous Undocumented Immigrant and the dreaded Creature of the Socialist Lagoon.

Skelley notes that “Unlike in the 1940s, Americans today are more likely to identify socialism with “equality” than with “government ownership or control,” according to polling by Gallup.”  Skelley notes, further,

Gallup periodically asks Americans how they feel about socialism, and in 2018, the pollster found that 57 percent of Democrats held a positive view of socialism, compared with just 16 percent of Republicans.³ For Democrats, this represented essentially no change from 2016, although it was a bit higher than in 2012, when 53 percent of Democrats said the same. As for Republicans, positive feelings toward socialism ranged from 13 percent to 23 percent in the four Gallup polls of the question since 2010…And in a January poll from Fox News, 80 percent of Republicans and 34 percent of Democrats said it would be “a bad thing” for the United States “to move away from capitalism and more toward socialism.”

…In June 2015, Gallup asked Americans about whether they’d vote for a socialist if their party nominated one — and found that 50 percent of respondents said they would not be willing to. The poll tested 11 different candidate characteristics — for example, whether someone was an evangelical Christian or a woman — to see what voters disliked most, and it found that the biggest disqualifier for both parties was a candidate who identified as a socialist. Thirty-eight percent of Democrats said they weren’t willing to vote for a socialist, and 73 percent of Republicans said the same.

Skelley adds that “59 percent of Democrats and 71 percent of independents said they would have “some reservations” or would feel “very uncomfortable” supporting a self-descibed socialist. He argues that “these numbers suggest that there is still an opportunity for Trump to score points by painting his opponent as a socialist in 2020.”

However, Skelley concludes, “it’s 2019, not 1949; socialism doesn’t automatically evoke the Iron Curtain anymore, and fewer Americans now associate socialism with government control or ownership. Trump’s anti-socialist message may find less success than he hopes.”

Fair enough. But that doesn’t mean that Democratic candidates have anything to gain by proclaiming themselves “Democratic Socialists.” Why even go there? Let the social scientists debate the differences between democratic socialism and social democracy. Democratic candidates should never take the bait and get suckered into arguments about political terminology.

Numerous surveys indicate that most Americans, even many of those who self-identify as conservatives, are “operational liberals,” who support a range of progressive policies that could fairly be termed “socialist” in origin. Thus, defend policies not ideological brands. Even long-time democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders often shruggs off the socialist brand when confronted and pivots to the issue of concern.

To address socialist bogeyman accusations in debates, interviews or tweets, Democratic candidates could ridicule the fear-mongering with brief, well-prepared retorts and soundbites, like “you may call decent health care (or fair taxes, gun control, labor laws or bank regulation) socialism, but I call it responsible government.” if they persist, “I doubt most Americans are so scared of that  bogeyman; what people want are reforms that can improve their lives in the real world.” Or crack wise, “Our party isn’t the one caving to Putin’s entire agenda. That would be the Republicans”

If the discussion still gets prolonged, point out that Republicans once called Social Security, Medicare, the minimum wage and all of the now-popular policies of the New Deal and Great Society as “socialist.” Make them say whether they now believe such programs should be abolished in the name of the ‘free market.’ Redirect the heat where it belongs.

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

1. The most important states for the Democrats to carry in 2020 against Trump lie in the upper Midwest and Rustbelt.
2. The Democrats’ best chance to carry these states lies in a candidate with roots and appeal in that area like Sherrod Brown or Amy Klobuchar.
3. Therefore, a candidate like Brown or Klobuchar should be the Democratic nominee.

Discuss. Seriously, this logic seems pretty strong to me. Not to say these candidates are the only ones who could win, just that, by this logic, they’d have the best chance. And it seems very, very important that the Democrats win this election.

More on this argument from David Leonardt in the New York Times:

“[I] Democrats wanted to identify their best hope for beating Trump, what would that candidate look like?

Above all, it would be a candidate good at persuading Americans that he or she was on their side — on their side against the forces causing the stagnation of American living standards. More specifically, this candidate would be someone who could persuade swing voters of this allegiance.

Swing voters still exist. Enough Americans switched from backing Barack Obama in 2012 to Donald Trump in 2016 to House Democrats in 2018 to help decide those elections. I understand why some Democratic activists are instead drawn to the idea of victory through turnout: It offers the promise of avoiding any political compromise. The problem is, there are virtually no examples of Democrats winning close races without emphasizing persuasion. The 2018 attempts, in Florida, Georgia and Texas, all fell short.

Yet progressives shouldn’t despair — because swing voters are quite progressive, especially on economic issues. For years, we’ve been hearing about a kind of fantasy swing voter, conjured by political pundits and corporate chieftains, who is socially liberal and economically conservative (as many pundits and chieftains are). The actual swing voter leans decidedly left on economics, in favor of tax increases on the rich, opposed to Medicare cuts and skeptical of big business.

Still, these swing voters don’t think of themselves as radical. They are typically patriotic and religious. Many think of themselves as moderate and, strange as it may sound, many thought of Trump as moderate in 2016. When Republicans can paint a Democrat as an out-of-touch elitist — like they did Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Al Gore or Michael Dukakis — the Republican candidate often wins these voters. When Democrats can instead come off as middle-class fighters, they tend to win…..

[I]f I were Trump, I would fear Klobuchar and Brown. Either would be well positioned to take back blue-collar states Trump needs, like Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and maybe even Ohio and Iowa. They could also play well in the Sunbelt suburbs of Arizona, Florida and North Carolina.”

A little more detail on this. The formula for success in the upper Midwest/Rustbelt is clear: Carry white college graduates, strongly mobilize nonwhite voters, particularly blacks, and hold deficits among white non-college-educated voters in the range of 10 to 15 points. Unlike Hillary Clinton in 2016 (she was obliterated among white non-college-educated voters in state after state), Democrats in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota (especially Amy Klobuchar!) got all three parts of the formula right in 2018.

Brown in Ohio got it right, too. According to exit polls, he carried white college graduates by five points and lost white non-college-educated voters by a mere 10 points.

Success against Trump in 2020 in the upper Midwest/Rustbelt region will depend on repeating this formula. The necessity to keep down deficits among white non-college-educated voters, especially in rural and small-town areas, will be hard with Trump on the ballot. But the 2018 results from likes of Klobuchar and Brown show Democrats the way in these states.

QED.

The following article is cross-posted from an email from Democracy Corps:

On behalf of the Voter Participation Center and Women’s Voices. Women Vote Action Fund, Democracy Corps conducted live dial-meter testing of the 2019 State of the Union among the Rising American Electorate (African Americans, Latinos, white unmarried women and white millennials), white working-class women, and white college women. Here are some of the key findings:

• Voters, including those in our dial-meter groups, watched the address with an extraordinary high level of political engagement.
• The Democratic presidential vote was not eroded and Trump’s job performance gains were unimpressive.
• The president made immigration and border security the central pitch of his address, but if the goal was to create a new context for a possible shutdown or emergency declaration, then he failed.

• The biggest gains of the night were on making healthcare more affordable, but Trump made these gains championing positions his administration does not support.
• The president saw a rise by recognizing women in the workplace and in Congress, but we suspect this were driven more by the celebrations of the Democratic women and the president playing along.
• Criminal justice reform delivered some of the highest moments in our dials, particularly among African Americans and white millennials, but he did not improve his standing with these groups.

In the end, the Rising American Electorate said that they want Democrats in Congress to be a check on Trump rather than to work with him by a two-to-one margin, marking even greater resistance to Trump and his agenda than last year (60 check to 40 work in 2018).

READ THE KEY FINDINGS REPORT & VIEW THE SLIDES

STREAM THE DIALS ON YOUTUBE & FACEBOOK LIVE

Senator Mark Warren (D-VA) has a novel proposal to end shutdowns, not just once, but forever. As Sam Stein reports at The Daily Beast: “And then there’s the “Stop Stupidity (Shutdowns Transferring Unnecessary Pain and Inflicting Damage In The Coming Years) Act.” The mangled-acronym inspired bill was introduced this week by Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA). It takes the keep-things-level-approach [via a continuing resolution] and offers a twist. In lieu of a failure by lawmakers to reach a spending deal, the current funding levels of the government would automatically continue — except for those monies meant to pay members of the legislative branch and the office of the president.” Of course, the CR should be indexed for inflation. But if we get another temporary fix, or no agreement, maybe it’s time for a nation-wide petition/citizen lobbying campaign for an automatic CR trigger that kicks in absent an agreement by a specific date.

The Green New Deal being proposed by Democrats Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14) and Senator Ed Markey (MA) is being greeted with both applause and skepticism. Applause because it’s about time somebody cranked up public debate in support of an environmentally-responsible infrastructure initiative, which is really the heart of the GND. Credit Ocasio-Cortez with making good use of her popularity in advancing discussion of these two critical priorities, which deserve more serious media coverage. Skepticism because it is extremely broad and isn’t going anywhere until Dems win a Senate majority and the White House. But despite the GOP’s cheap shots directed at the GND, successful reform movements begin early and a great political party needs to stand for a big vision. At this point, it’s a resolution, not a bill. As a practical matter, the GND would be honed and broken down into more detailed specific measures to be enacted in digestible bites over a realistic period of time.

However, Jonathan Chait offers some more substantial criticism of the proposal in his post, “Democrats Need an Ambitious Climate Plan. The Green New Deal Isn’t It” at New York Magazine. An Excerpt: “The operating principle behind the Green New Deal is a no-enemies-to-the-left spirit of fostering unity among every faction of the progressive movement. Thus, at the same time, the plan avoids taking stances that are absolutely vital to reduce carbon emissions, it embraces policies that have nothing to do with climate change whatsoever. The Green New Deal includes the following non-climate provisions: –A job with family-sustaining wages, family and medical leave, vacations, and retirement security…–High-quality education, including higher education and trade schools…–High-quality health care…–Safe, affordable, adequate housing…–An economic environment free of monopolies…–Economic security to all who are unable or unwilling to work.”

“Sixty-three percent of Americans believe “upper income people” pay too little in taxes, according to a new survey from Morning Consult. The poll also found that 61 percent of Americans either “strongly” or “somewhat” favor 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren’s tax plan, which would levy a new tax on households with a net worth of $50 million or more. The pollster found less enthusiasm for the idea that Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York floated recently to tax income that exceeds $10 million a year at a rate of 70 percent — but more on that in a moment.” —  from Geoffrey Skelley’s “Most Americans Support Warren’s ‘Ultramillionare Tax’: How they feel about hefty taxes on the rich depends on what you call them” at FiveThirtyEight.

Skelley notes further, “However, even though the public has long thought the rich don’t pay enough in taxes, Americans are comparably cooler toward the concept when it’s framed as income redistribution, which Warren and Ocasio-Cortez have both embraced as a way of combating wealth inequality. For example, in 2016, Gallup found that 61 percent of the public felt that wealthy people didn’t pay enough, but only 52 percent said they believed the government should redistribute wealth through “heavy taxes on the rich.” The difference gets at a common disconnect in how people think of taxation and wealth redistribution — both processes that collect a portion of residents’ income and use it to benefit others — and how different terms can produce seemingly inconsistent answers from poll respondents.”

Regarding the mess in Virginia, Amanda Sakuma writes at vox.com: “Virginia residents are at an impasse over whether they feel Gov. Ralph Northam should step down after a racist photo from his past caught up with him last week, though a majority of black voters say they have still his back, according to new polls released this week…The overall divide is an even split: 47 percent of Virginians want to see him stay; 47 percent want to see him go, according to a Washington Post-Schar School poll released Saturday. But what’s significant about the poll results is the racial breakdown of Northam’s support: Even after the governor admitted to using shoe polish to wear blackface in the 1980s, black Virginians still support him more than whites…Roughly 58 percent of African Americans polled said Northam should remain in office, compared to 46 percent of whites who said the same.” There is no polling data yet on how Virginians feel about whether or not Lt. Governor Justin Fairfax should resign as a result of recent allegations of sexual assault against him.

If the Trump Administration wants to keep the Mueller report on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election private, they will have to buck an overwhelming majority of Americans who want it made public. As Geoffrey Skelley reports in “other Polling Nuggets” at FiveThirtyEight “According to a CNN/SSRS survey, 87 percent of Americans want a report that includes the findings from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election to be made public. Nine percent said the report does not need to be made public. And this desire bridges the partisan divide: 92 percent of Democrats, 88 percent of independents and 80 percent of Republicans said investigators should issue a public report.”

A hopeful closing note from Bob Moser’s “A New South Rising: This Time for Real: The midterms made clear that progressive candidates can retake the region with young and minority voters” at The American Prospect: “The urban centers of the Sun Belt won’t stop growing, and becoming more diverse and more progressive, any time in the foreseeable future. The rural South is as stagnant as the rest of rural America—and increasingly, in a state like Texas, that’s all the Republicans will have. One of the most startling assessments of the new reality that I’ve seen recently came from Brandon Rottinghaus, a political scientist at the University of Houston. “If Republicans can’t keep Democratic numbers below 60 percent in urban Texas, winning elections is going to be much more difficult going forward.” Let that sink in: Republicans in Texas, the country’s largest Republican redoubt, reduced to cooking up ways to hold the Democratic vote in Dallas, Houston, Austin, and San Antonio below 60 percent…That, my friends, is not a political shake-up. It’s an earthquake. And the reverberations will be felt for generations to come.”