If half of the warnings in Dana Milbank’s WaPo column “A Putin-sponsored October surprise?” pan out,  the closing weeks of the 2016 election could make the ‘Brook Brothers Riot,’ hanging chads and  voter suppression scams of the 2000 election seem like a day at the beach.

The really scary thing is, Milbank’s warnings seem plausible, considering what we know of Putin’s character, track record and priorities. Milbank elaborates:

We learned earlier this summer that cyber-hackers widely believed to be tied to the Kremlin have broken into the email of the Democratic National Committee and others. The Post’s Ellen Nakashima reported Monday night that Russian hackers have also been targeting state voter-registration systems. And, in an apparent effort to boost Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy, they’re leaking what they believe to be the most damaging documents at strategic points in the campaign.

Last week, we learned something else: The Russians aren’t just hackers — they’re also hacks. Turns out that before leaking their stolen information, they are in some cases doctoring the documents, making edits that add false information and then passing the documents off as the originals.

Yes, that’s right. Forgeries crafted to obliterate the integrity of U.S. elections and create an outcome that serves Putin’s agenda, specifically the election of Donald Trump. Milbank continues:

Foreign Policy’s Elias Groll reported last week that the hackers goofed: They posted both the original versions of at least three documents and their edited versions. These documents, stolen from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, were altered by the hackers to create the false impression that Russian anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny was funded by Soros. A pro-Russian hacking group, CyberBerkut, had inserted Navalny’s name, bogus dollar amounts and fabricated wording.

This raises an intriguing possibility: Are Vladimir Putin’s operatives planning to dump edited DNC documents on the eve of the presidential election?

At this point, maybe the smart answer is another question: Why wouldn’t they? If they can hack the Soros Foundation, perhaps they wouldn’t have too much trouble hacking into the offices of Secretaries of State, particularly “red” states where Republicans run election day operations.

And what sort of b.s. memes might the Russians try to implant? Milbank offers a few possibilities, including “Perhaps they’ll show that the Clinton Foundation has been funding the Islamic State, or they’ll have Hillary Clinton admitting that she didn’t care about those Americans who died in Benghazi after all.”

If this sounds a little too ‘out there,’ consider Milbnk’s reminder that “Russian “dezinformatsiya” campaigns such as this go back to the Cold War; the Soviet portrayal of AIDS as a CIA plot was a classic case.” Milbank conceders that “this type of cyberwar — email hacking and, now, the altering and release of the stolen documents — is a novel escalation.” Further, adds Milbank:

…On Sunday, Neil MacFarquhar wrote in the New York Times about Russian attempts to undermine a Swedish military partnership with NATO. The campaign is spreading false information that there’s a secret nuclear weapons stockpile in Sweden and alleging that NATO soldiers could rape Swedish women with impunity. This Russian use of “weaponized information” helped cause confusion in Ukraine in 2014, when conspiracy theories spread by the Russians about the downing of a Malaysian Airlines jet helped Russians justify their invasion of Crimea.

…Putin has meddled in domestic politics in France, the Netherlands, Britain and elsewhere, helping extreme political parties to destabilize those countries. He appears to be doing much the same now in the United States, where, in addition to the DNC and state voter system hacks, there have also been reports this summer about Russia hiring Internet trolls to pose on Twitter and elsewhere in social media as pro-Trump Americans.

Could Putin make Trump his puppet? Trump is still hiding his taxes from public scrutiny, but it appears that they have some economic interests in common. As Milbank observes, “Trump and Putin have expressed their mutual admiration, and even after the departure of Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, Trump and several top advisers have close ties to Moscow.” It’s even been reported that Trump’s daughter is hanging out with Putin’s wheeler-dealer girlfriend.

“The hyper-competitive American media environment,” concludes Milbank, “is vulnerable to the sort of technique the Russian hackers used in the Soros case — stealing documents, altering them, then releasing them as the original.” Given all of the above, the biggest surprise would be if Putin decides not to meddle in our presidential election to help elect Trump.

It may seem counter-intuitive that Putin would prefer Trump to Clinton, since Democrats are far more of a pro-worker party than Republicans. Russia as a whole has prospered in recent years under Putin, but is now mired in a deep recession. The World Bank projects Russia’s poverty rate to increase to over 14 percent this year. Never much of a socialist, Putin has not been an enthusiastic champion of Russia’s workers. He has put his KGB cronies on industrial boards, not workers, and he has restricted human rights in general.

The labor movement is still weak in Russia, but there have been wildcat strikes and protests in recent years. Putin has been able to deflect much worker discontent with nationalist distractions, like the invasion of Crimea. It’s not hard to see why he would like Trump better than Clinton, with whom Putin clashed during her tenure as Secretary of State. Don’t be surprised if Russian-doctored emails and other forged documents designed to discredit Clinton suddenly appear in the weeks ahead.

The following article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, is cross-posted from HuffPo:

• Grievance-Driven Nationalism.
• The narrative that the majority of people have been victimized by enemies – foreign and domestic.
• The legitimation of conspiratorial thinking.
• The argument that only the one strong man can come to the people’s rescue.

These things are true whether they describe the authoritarian regimes of history like Mussolini and Stalin, or those of the current period, like Kim Jong-un in North Korea, or Putin in Russia – both of which Donald Trump apparently admires.

Read more…

Trying to better understand Donald Trump’s use of language may seem like one of the least agreeable chores a sensible person would want to embrace. As George Lakoff acknowledges at HuffPo in the final installment of his two-part analysis of how to understand Trump (we flagged part one on August 1) :

Responsible reporters in the media normally transcribe political speeches so that they can accurately report them. But Donald Trump’s discourse style has stumped a number of reporters. Dan Libit, CNBC’s excellent analyst is one of them. Libit writes:

His unscripted speaking style, with its spasmodic, self-interrupting sentence structure, has increasingly come to overwhelm the human brains and tape recorders attempting to quote him. Trump is, simply put, a transcriptionist’s worst nightmare: severely unintelligible, and yet, incredibly important to understand.

…Trump’s crimes against clarity are multifarious: He often speaks in long, run-on sentences, with frequent asides. He pauses after subordinate clauses. He frequently quotes people saying things that aren’t actual quotes. And he repeats words and phrases, sometimes with slight variations, in the same sentence…Some commentators have even attributed his language use to “early Alzheimer’s,” citing “erratic behavior” and “little regards for social conventions.” I don’t believe it..

As unappeling as studying Trump’s communication may be, it is pretty important to do so. As Lakoff puts it, “the very fate of the nation, indeed human civilization, appears destined to come down to one man’s application of the English language — and the public’s comprehension of it.” Lakoff cautions, however, that ridiculing Trump’s language and dismissing it as unworthy of analysis may be a mistake:

…I have found that he is very careful and very strategic in his use of language. The only way I know to show this is to function as a linguist and cognitive scientist and go through details.

Let’s start with sentence fragments. It is common and natural in New York discourse for friends to finish one another’s sentences. And throughout the country, if you don’t actually say the rest of a friend’s sentence out loud, there is nevertheless a point at which you can finish it in your head. When this happens in cooperative discourse, it can show empathy and intimacy with a friend, that you know the context of the narrative…

Trump often starts a sentence and leaves off where his followers can finish in their minds what he has started to say. That is, they commonly feel empathy and intimacy, an acceptance of what is being said, and good feeling toward the speaker. This is an unconscious, automatic reaction, especially when words are flying by quickly. It is a means for Trump to connect with his audience.

With respect to the way Trump addresses his adversary’s attitude toward the Second Amendment, for example,  Lakoff notes, “his words are carefully chosen. They go by quickly when people hear them. But they are processed unconsciously first by neural circuitry — and neurons operate on a thousandth-of-a-second time scale…Trump begins by saying, “Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish the Second Amendment.” He first just says “abolish,” and then hedges by adding “essentially abolish.” But having said “abolish” twice, he has gotten across the message that she wants to, and is able to, change the Constitution in that way.”

Never mind the “well-regulated militia” part of the second amendment. Trump, like all Republicans and NRA minions, ignores it. “The Second Amendment has been reinterpreted by contemporary ultra-conservatives as the right of individual citizens to bear contemporary arms (e.g., AK-47’s),” adds Lakoff.  “The term “Second Amendment” activates the contemporary usage by ultra-conservatives. It is a dog-whistle term, understood in that way by many conservatives.”

Lakoff quotes Trump, who explains, “By the way, and if she gets to pick [loud boos] — if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know.” Lakoff breaks it down:

“By the way,” marks a parallel utterance, one that does not linearly follow from what was just said, but that has information relevant to what was just said.

“And” here marks information that follows from what was just said.

“If she gets to pick …” When said the first time, it was followed immediately by loud boos. The audience could finish the if-clause for themselves, since the word “pick” in context could only be about Hillary picking liberal judges. Trump goes on making this explicit, “if she gets to pick her judges…”

“Gets to” is important. The metaphor here with “to” is that Achieving a Purpose Is Reaching a Destination” with the object of “to” marking the pick. The “get” in “get to” is from a related metaphor, namely, that Achieving a Purpose Is Getting a Desired Object. In both Purpose metaphors, the Achievement of the Purpose can be stopped by an opponent. The “if,” indicates that the achievement of the purpose is still uncertain, which raises the question of whether it can be stopped.

“Her judges” indicates that the judges are not your judges, from which it follows that they will not rule the way you want them to, namely, for keeping your guns. The if-clause thus has a consequence: unless Hillary is prevented from becoming president, “her judges” will change the laws to take away your guns and your Constitutional right to bear arms. This would be a governmental infringement on your freedom, which would justify the armed intervention of ultra-conservatives, what Sharon Angle in Nevada has called the “Second Amendment solution.” In short, a lot is entailed — in little time on a human timescale, but with lots of time on a neural timescale.

With respect to Trump’s “Nothing you can do, folks,” Lakoff explains, “This is a shortened version in everyday colloquial English of “There will be nothing you can do, folks.” That is, if you let Hillary take office, you will be so weak that you will be unable to stop her. The “folks,” suggests that he and the audience members are socially part of the same social group — as opposed to a distant billionaire with his own agenda.”

Then Trump’s punch line, which created a media mess that lasted for days: “Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is.” Lakoff adds “Although the Second Amendment people” calls up the alternative for those who would act violently to protect their Second Amendment right.” Lakoff continues:

“I don’t know” is intended to remove Trump from any blame. But it acts unconsciously in the opposite way. It is like the title of the book I wrote, “Don’t Think of an Elephant.” The way the brain works is that negating a frame activates the frame. The relevant frame for “Second Amendment people” is use of arms to protect their rights against a government threatening to take away their rights. This is about the right to shoot, not about the right to vote. Second Amendment conservative discourse is about shooting, not about voting.

The point here is that Trump’s use of language is anything but “word salad.” His words and his use of grammar are carefully chosen, and put together artfully, automatically, and quickly.

Trump never overtly used the word “assassinate.” He says he was just suggesting that advocates of the Second Amendment vote, and was being sarcastic. A sarcastic invocation to vote would sound very different. A sarcastic invocation to vote might be, “The American way to change things is to vote. But maybe you care so much about shooting, you won’t be able to organize to vote.”

It’s important for Dems to understand that this is not just verbal diarrhea. “He chose his words very, very carefully.”

Lakoff has much more to say about Trump’s deployment of carefully-chosen terms like “believe me” and “many people say,” as well as the reasons Trump appears to ramble “off topic,” when really he is “always on topic,” as Lakoff sees it.

…But you have to understand what his topic is. As I observed in my Understanding Trump paper, Trump is deeply, personally committed to his version of Strict Father Morality. He wants it to dominate the country and the world, and he wants to be the ultimate authority in this authoritarian model of the family that is applied in conservative politics in virtually every issue area.

Every particular issue, from building the wall, to using our nukes, to getting rid of inheritance taxes (on those making $10.9 million or more), to eliminating the minimum wage — every issue is an instance of his version of Strict Father Morality over all areas of life, with him as ultimately in charge.

As he shifts from particular issue to particular issue, each of them activates his version of Strict Father Morality and strengthens it in the brains of his audience. So far as I can tell, he is always on topic — where this is the topic.

Lakoff cautions that “He is a talented charlatan. Keeping you off balance is part of his game. As is appealing to ordinary thought mechanisms in the people he is addressing.” Further, “It is vital that the media, and ordinary voters, learn to recognize his techniques. When the media fails to grasp what he is doing, it gives him an advantage. Every time someone in the media claims his discourse is “word salad, “ it helps Trump by hiding what he is really doing.”

Lakoff also flags Trump’s fake ‘apology’ and Trump’s disclaimer: “Too much is at stake for us to be consumed with these issues.” However, says Lakoff, “note how carefully he has chosen his words. And what is the intended effect? He should be excused because inaccurate word choice is so natural that it will inevitably occur again, and he should not be criticized when the stress of the campaign leads inevitably to mistakes in trivial word choice.”

“The words he carefully uses,” concludes Lakoff, “often over and over, get across his values and ideas, which are all too often lies or promotions of racist, sexist, and other un-American invocations. When these backfire mightily, as with the Khans, there can be no hiding behind a nonspecific “regret” that they were just rare, accidental word choice mistakes too trivial for the public to be “consumed with.”

Once Dems understand that Trump’s ‘word salad’ is not mere buffoonery, but a carefully calculated ploy to mask his anti-democratic ideas in a self-righteous cloak, then Dems can begin to refute his real agenda and media domination with more compelling responses.

The following memo by Democratic strategist Stan Greenberg is cross-posted from Democracy Corps.

Date: August 22, 2016

To: The progressive community

From: Stan Greenberg, Democracy Corps

The Wave

America is about to experience a once-in-a-lifetime earthquake of an election, but progressives do not seem to trust the new American majority and its ascendant values and thus, continue to be tactical, reactive, and fight old wars. As a result, they may miss the chance to create a governing majority after November 8th.

Hillary Clinton is beginning to emerge with the kind of lead you would expect in a country where over 60 percent of the electorate will be racial minorities, single women, millennials, and seculars and where the positive sentiment about the Democratic Party is 9 points higher than for the Republicans.(1)

Progressives, pundits and the media are consumed with the pivotal role of angry white working class men when their vote share is declining every presidential election and will be only 18 percent of the electorate this year. When Clinton’s margin was only 3 points, their share of the electorate would have to jump to 25 percent to push the overall vote to parity.(2)

I am the person who invented the term “Reagan Democrats” and took Bill Clinton to Warren in Macomb County, Michigan. But then, the white working class men’s share of the electorate was twice what it is today.

Today, I want progressives to embrace an economic narrative that seeks to “level the playing field,” because that is key to motivating working class voters, white and minority, including women who are now a majority of the working class, not because of its appeal to Reagan Democrats.

Because progressives did not trust the new American majority, they thought Donald Trump’s dark convention and speech was effective and waited for the polls to be sure. They thought Pennsylvania would be close, underestimating the new dynamics in the state. And their priority and strategy was to stop Trump in the Rust Belt states to stamp out any chance of Trump being elected.

But Trump already lost this election before his disastrous last week, as only 6 percent of Clinton voters would even consider supporting Trump. The number of potential switchers in this election has shrunk to just a third of what it was in the last three presidential elections.

This misplaced priority comes at the expense of efforts to produce the biggest possible wins in the elections for the U.S. Senate and House and state elections.

Campaigns and media should be focused on this number: 38 percent. That is the percent of the vote that Trump is likely to win in this multi-party election, matching the vote share for George Bush in 1992 when he lost to Bill Clinton by 5 points. That 38 percent should concentrate the mind on what is the real opportunity for Republican votes and voters to disappear down the ballot.

Here is what progressives should focus on to maximize that opportunity.

Task 1: Get Clinton voters to vote Democratic down-ballot

Clinton is beginning to build comfortable leads in the diverse and Rust Belt battleground states, but the Democratic Senate and House candidates are performing less impressively.

We know from the WVWV/VPC June state battleground research that 16 percent of the likely electorate in these states are Clinton voters who are not yet voting for the Democratic candidate for Senate. Three-quarters of these unconsolidated voters are members of the Rising American Electorate – minorities, unmarried women and millennials at the heart of the progressive coalition. They are mostly Democrats (70 percent), yet half said they were casting ballots for the Republican Senate candidate, and about 40 percent are undecided.(3)

We know who they are, but we need to learn what gets them to cast a Democratic vote down- ballot.

 Trump ticket and nationalized election. The DCCC correctly points out that our presidential election years are increasingly nationalized. They are rightly attacking Republican candidates for continuing to support Trump. Whether this will work long- term is an empirical and testable proposition. It is critical to learn whether it will work when an increasing number of Republicans are putting distance between themselves and Trump. Will it impact down-ballot voting at the state level?

It is quite possible that this strategy helps to build a GOP brand image that is independent of Trump and rationalizes split-ticket voting. Or not.

The Republican brand values at the national and state level. We need plan B, and it may be one that focuses on the GOP itself. At the national and state level, the Republican Party is associated with extreme positions on abortion, guns, discrimination against the LGBT community, and women. With the goal to get Clinton voters to vote straight ticket, informing voters of these GOP positions may prove more motivating – as you can see in the graphs below. Two-thirds of Clinton voters not yet supporting the Democrat for Senate become very certain to switch their vote when they hear that list of Republican positions.

(click here for graphic, “Voting for Clinton, but not for Senate Democrat”)

This underscores the critical need for a strategy for these unconsolidated Clinton voters that could readily produce a major shift to the Democratic candidates for Congress and state legislatures. The right strategy could be embraced by the Senate and House campaigns, the state parties, as well as the national Clinton campaign.

Task 2: Getting Trump voters to punish GOP establishment candidates

While Trump is getting 38 percent of the vote, some proportion of them will not vote Republican down-ballot if Trump is angry at candidates who are distancing themselves from him. This is a potential gold mine. There is a reason why so many Republican leaders are tongue-tied in the face of today’s election. A GOP House candidate who does not support Trump pays a much higher price with GOP voters than one who supports him and this is quantifiable: almost one in five of those voting for the Republican House candidate (or undecided) are much less likely to support him or her – if they are not supporting Trump.

(Click here for graphic on those voting/not voting for GOP candidate who supports Trump)

Trump will do most of the work for progressives on this task, though pressing all Republicans on where they stand on Trump increases the number of campaigns Trump voter resentment becomes a significant factor down-ballot.

Task 3: Fueling the Republican civil war and getting moderates to vote Democratic

This is the biggest opportunity for progressives to play offense and produce a sustainable fracturing of the Republican Party that impacts the Congress, the states and the issues that get taken up after this electoral earthquake.

His vote would not be at 38 percent but for these Republicans who are holding back. Public research shows 20 percent of Republicans are currently not voting for Trump, and we know from Democracy Corps’ Republican Party Project that most of those self-identified Republicans are moderates.(4)

(Click here for graphic on GOP moderates president preferences)

The fracturing and potential is very real: moderates comprise 31 percent of the Republican base electorate. These are college-educated, socially liberal voters in a white working class, socially conservative GOP. They feel alienated from their own party, which means it may be possible to shift the partisan plates.

Our research from the Republican Party Project done earlier this year says it is possible to move them to vote for Clinton and Democrats down-ballot, but Democratic campaigns and progressive institutions have been reluctant to reach this far.

Again, because these are college-educated, moderates and socially liberal, they respond to a Democratic candidate who says let’s get beyond divisive social issues, supports infrastructure investment, encourages long-term corporate investment, supports work and family policies including equal pay for women. They should be a visible target for campaigns at all levels, and these college-educated registered Republicans are easily targetable.

Progressives need to become strategic and opportunistic to make sure this year is really an electoral earthquake.

_______________________________________

(1.) Huffpollster average, August 11, 2016. Democrats viewed favorably by 44 percent, Republicans by 35 percent.

(2.) In a three way race, white non-college educated men vote for Trump over Clinton, 58 percent to 22 percent. In a two way ballot, 61 percent vote for Trump and 35 percent vote for Clinton. With all else equal, white non-college men would need to count for 25 percent of voters in order for Trump to tie Clinton in a competitive three-way race and they would need to count for 36 percent of the electorate in order for Trump to tie Clinton in a two way race.

(3.) On behalf of Women’s Voice. Women’s Vote Action Fund and the Voter Participation Center, Democracy Corps conducted a nine-state battleground survey of 2700 likely voters from June 11th – 20th. Three hundred cases were completed in each state: Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The margin of error for the entire survey is +/- 1.89 percent at the 95 percent confidence level. The margin of error within each state is +/-5.66 percentage points. Margin of error is higher among subgroups.

(4.) Democracy Corps national web-survey of 800 likely Republican voters conducted February 11- 16, 2016 using a voter file sample; 81 percent of Republicans were voting for Trump in the August NBC/Wall Street Journal poll of 800 registered voters, July 31- August 3, 2016 and see “Can Trump Catch Up?” Amy Walter, Cook Political Report, August 11, 2016.

At Politico Daniel Strauss reports on plans for a heightened role for Sanders in support of Democratic presidential nominee Clinton and other party candidates for congress, state and local offices. Strauss notes that the effort is being coordinated by Interim DNC Chairwoman Donna Brazile, former Sanders campaign head Jeff Weaver and state Democratic Party leaders, along with other DNC officials and Sanders aides.

Strauss reports that Brazile met with Weaver and Sanders’ top campaign adviser Mark Longabaugh, followed up by Brazile’s conference call with top Democratic National Committee officials including chief of staff Brandon Davis and state party leaders. The topics discussed “Sanders’ schedule as well as voter mobilization among former Sanders supporters,” notes Strauss, who adds,

Brazile told those on the conference call that Weaver had agreed to help her “through this election process and beyond.”

The call focused on a 50-state strategy for the November election to be implemented soon by members of Clinton’s campaign and Sanders’ former presidential team.

The close interactions between the interim DNC chairwoman and the Sanders campaign is in stark contrast to earlier in the presidential cycle when the campaign criticized now-former DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz as unfairly partial to Clinton.

“I know that sometimes in primaries there can be sharp elbows, and I hope I haven’t bumped into too many of you,” Weaver said on the call. “But as we go forward into the general election, I’m very happy to be working with members of the Clinton team in trying to get the secretary elected.”

Brazile affirmed her determination to strengthen the 50 Democratic state parties and support down-ballot Democratic candidates, and a fund-raising campaign in support of that effort is underway. “Marlon Marshall, the Clinton campaign’s director of states, and Brazile highlighted red states around the country where they thought Democrats could make immediate inroads, including Georgia and North Carolina,” notes Strauss.

“We’re continuing to look at places where we can expand opportunities to vote,” Marshall said. “We’re working to expand early vote sites in some of these places like Florida and North Carolina. And we’re starting our heavy push of recruitment of lawyers” to be at polling locations in battleground states.”

Looking beyond 2016, Brazile reiterated her strong commitment to the 50-state strategy. “We know what’s coming up in 2020. We know what’s coming up in 2018,” she explains. With the DNC, the Sanders and Clinton campaigns working together so well, improved Democratic voter mobilization and turnout should Give Dems an additional edge in 2016 and beyond.

At CNN Opinion Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington, explains why “Democrats must resolve economic identity crisis.” Marshall defines the central choice Democrats face;

No doubt Democrats are enjoying the GOP’s agonizing moment of truth, but their party also faces a big strategic choice. Will Democrats wage the fall campaign as pro-growth progressives or as angry populists?

Marshall sees a “huge opening” for Democrats, if they “offer anxious voters a hopeful counterpoint to Trump’s fearful narrative — a positive plan for parlaying our country’s strengths in technological innovation and entrepreneurship into stronger economic growth that works for all Americans. Trump’s  “retro vision of what makes America great — namely, low-tech, middling skilled, labor-intensive manufacturing jobs that are highly vulnerable to automation — is a major political liability.”

“Yes, it taps into the gnawing sense of economic and cultural dispossession felt by many blue-collar workers,” adds Marshall. “But it doesn’t speak to the aspirations of middle-class voters who now mostly work in offices, use digital technology to boost their productivity, and understand that their jobs depend both on keeping their skills up to date and on their companies’ ability to succeed in global competition.”

Marshall challenges “the conventional view among party elites” that Clinton must keep blasting “populist bogeymen,” like free trade and Wall Street  to energize  “white, working-class voters in Midwestern swing states”  and to placate Sanders’ voters. But “such calculations” are bettter focused on “primary and caucus voters rather than the national electorate” Further,

Nor does it make much sense for Democrats to compete with Trump in pushing blue-collar America’s hot buttons. In the first place, non-college-educated whites have been voting predominantly Republican for a generation…Instead, Democrats should recalibrate their primary message to appeal to aspirational voters across the middle of the political spectrum — independents, college-educated suburban moderates and a substantial slice of Republicans who can’t abide Trump…A business-bashing populism, on the other hand, would put Democrats on a narrower path to the White House, with a slimmer margin of error…To win in red states and competitive House districts, however, the party’s candidates can’t sound like Sanders.

Now that Sen. Bernie Sanders has enthusiastically endorsed the Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, his campaign has begun the transformation into a social change movement that has the potential to achieve significant reforms, as well as electing progressive Democrats down-ballot. In her Washington Post column, “The Sanders movement is only just beginning,”  Katrina vanden Heuval explains:

Last week, Pramila Jayapal, one of the rising stars of the Bernie Sanders movement, won a decisive victory in the primary race for Washington’s 7th Congressional District. She will advance to the November general election, where she is favored to win. She is not alone. Jamie Raskin, a progressive state legislator and leading constitutional authority on civil rights and voting rights, won his primary to fill an open Democratic seat in Maryland. Zephyr Teachout, who literally wrote the book on political corruption and challenged New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) in the gubernatorial race two years ago, is running a brilliant campaign in an uphill battle for a Republican-held seat in New York.

These are not corporate or Blue Dog Democrats. These are “small d” democrats running movement campaigns. They aren’t running for power’s sake; they are running to change America.

“The vision has to be to fundamentally change the system,” Jayapal says, carrying the Sanders message that “corporations and special interests have their voice in Congress, and they have too many members scared of their power. What Congress needs is a progressive voice who is unafraid to take on these powerful interests — who is willing to fight for all Americans, not just the wealthiest 1 percent.”

Added Sanders: “When you think of the political revolution, I want you to think about Pramila.”

Sanders supporters are also forging the organizational infrastructure needed to elect progressive candidates for years to come, reports vanden Heuval,

Sanders and his supporters are intent on giving these efforts institutional backing. The Vermont senator has announced the formation of Our Revolution, which will support progressive candidates up and down the ticket. Organizers from the Sanders campaign have launched Brand New Congress, an ambitious effort to run 400-plus populist candidates for Congress — including independents and Republicans as well as Democrats — in 2018, with “a single, unified campaign with a single plan,” and centralized crowd-sourced financing — small donors contributing to a national pool in a historic effort to transform a Congress that is corrupt and dysfunctional. These new efforts will augment progressive groups like the Working Families Party, MoveOn.org, Democracy for America, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and People’s Action, all of whom are growing in energy and ambition in the wake of the Sanders campaign.

Berniecrats.net, a website listing all active candidates at every level who endorsed Sanders in the primary, already has some 480 entries. Most of these are long shots running shoestring campaigns. But if the more than 2 million individual Sanders campaign supporters do move in large numbers to support Our Revolution and other offshoots in 2016, these challenges will get more serious in 2018 and 2020.

Vanden Heuval observes that “the Sanders revolution is only beginning…Now he and his supporters are moving to build the political revolution that too many in the media mocked at the beginning of this year.”

As a long-haul progressive warrior, Sanders understands better than most that empowering his movement to compel progressive change is going to take time. But, as vanden Heuval reveals, the Sanders movement has already created some impressive organizational vehicles. With adequate suppport, they will become a force for needed social reforms, as well as an enduring Democratic majority.

GOP nominee Donald Trump has built his presidential campaign around his image as an advocate of curbing trade to keep jobs in America. In reality, however, he has called for policies that do something quite different.

Dave Johnson’s post, “Trump Trade Position Is Opposite Of What People Think It Is” at Campaign for America’s Future clarifies Trump’s actual trade polcies:

One of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s stronger economic appeals to working-class voters is his position on trade. Trump understands that people are upset that “trade” deals have moved so many jobs out of the country and he offers solutions that sound like he is saying he will bring the jobs back so wages can start going up again.

But a deeper look at what he is really saying might not be so appealing to voters.

Trump says the U.S. is not “competitive” with other countries. He has said repeatedly we need to lower American wages, taxes and regulations to the point where we can be “competitive” with Mexico and China. In other words, he is saying that business won’t send jobs out of the country if we can make wages low enough here.

Trump even has a plan to accomplish this. He has said the way to make U.S. wages “competitive” is to pit states against each other instead of using China and Mexico to do that. He has said, for example, that auto companies should close factories in Michigan and move the jobs to low-wage, anti-union states. After enough people are laid off in one state, he has said, “those guys are going to want their jobs back even if it is less.” Then companies will be able to “make good deals” to cut wages. He says that companies should continue this in a “rotation” of wage cuts, state to state, until you go “full-circle,” getting wages low enough across the entire country. Then the U.S. will be “competitive” with China and Mexico.

Put another way, all of Trump’s bluster about bringing jobs back to America is a smokescreen to mask his   support of hammering wages down to Mexican and Chinese levels. Under his plan, workers in America’s pivotal auto industry, for example, would no longer make a living wage. They would be reduced to subsistence wages. Their unions would be crushed and the effects would reverberate throughout the economy.

Johnson quotes from a Detroit News interview with Trump, in which the GOP nominee “said U.S. automakers could shift production away from Michigan to communities where autoworkers would make less”: “You can go to different parts of the United States and then ultimately you’d do full-circle — you’ll come back to Michigan because those guys are going to want their jobs back even if it is less,” Trump said. “We can do the rotation in the United States — it doesn’t have to be in Mexico.”…He said that after Michigan “loses a couple of plants — all of sudden you’ll make good deals in your own area.”

Like most Republican leaders, Trump urges tax cuts for the rich, fewer regulations and lower wages. Johnson notes that Trump has recently learned to stop talking so much about his belief that wages are too high. Yet lower wages remain a cornerstone of his economic policy agenda, and a vote for Trump is a vote for gutting middle class jobs, cutting wages and swelling the ranks of the working poor — a message point Dems ought to emphasize between now and election day.

The following article by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, author of The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, is cross-posted from HuffPo:

The problem for a campaign and political party where you seem to be way ahead is the tendency to get cocky and begin to coast. There is great danger in such a moment, especially for a party in need for a historically big victory, as Democrats are right now. Now is the time to work with even greater urgency and aggressiveness to win this campaign, and hopefully win it by a big enough margin that we crush Trumpism and throw it into the dustbin of history. But right now we are at a particularly dangerous moment. Democrats should take nothing for granted and work our hearts out to make damn sure this moment and this potentially historic victory does not slip away from us.

Before talking more about 2016, let me go back in time and remind everyone of some presidential elections in past years. In 1976, Jimmy Carter came out of the two conventions with a huge lead, more than 20 points in many polls. Jerry Ford was burdened with the residue of Watergate, his pardon of Nixon, and an especially nasty recession over the previous couple of years. Had Carter won that race by a big margin, building on the Republican wipeout in 1974, Democrats would have had enough votes and momentum to easily pass sweeping legislation on health care and labor law, and change the political dynamics in the country for a long time to come. Instead the Carter campaign played it safe and coasted, and the lead kept shrinking. In the end, Carter won by only two percentage points. Had a very close Ohio result gone the other way, he would have lost the race entirely. There were no coat tails, no political momentum, and Carter’s early mistakes led to a very weak presidency. In 1988, Dukakis led by 18 points after his convention, with voters tired of a lack of pay raises and massive deficits over the last 8 years. Dukakis took a long August vacation, didn’t respond to the infamous Willie Horton attacks, was awful in the debates, and ended up losing by six points. And in 2000, Gore came out of the conventions up by five points, and I remember Democrats in D.C. being surprised when I said it would be a close race coming down to a few votes in a few states. But Gore was weak in the debates, Karl Rove ran a very effective campaign, and we end up with the Supreme Court giving the election to Bush.

Presidential races can change in a heartbeat or alternatively go slip sliding away. An over-confident campaign can lose its edge, become too cautious and be reluctant to aggressively answer attacks, all of which combine to gradually cause the campaign to lose momentum. In the 1992 Clinton campaign (which, full disclosure, I was a part of), there was never any chance of us losing our edge because we had all just lived through the horror of watching an over-confident and slow to respond Dukakis let his big August lead be reversed. And I have a feeling that Hillary Clinton, being the steely competitor that she is, won’t let her team get over-confident. But the entire Democratic party, from elected officials to grassroots activists, are going to need to, in the old Obama campaign’s signature phrase, stay fired up and ready to go. Never forget that in politics, it is the aggressor who usually wins. Especially in an unpredictable, anti-establishment year, where the pundits and the polls have been proven wrong repeatedly, we must make sure we don’t let Trump, the ultimate unpredictable anti-establishment guy, get a second life.

At the same time we need to fight with the same urgency as if we were in a dead heat or even a little behind, Democrats should be working hard to create the biggest, most sweeping wave election possible. This might seem like a contradiction but it isn’t. Both scenarios demand that we keep our edge and stay aggressive; both scenarios require that we leave no stone unturned to get out every vote possible and persuade every swing voter we can. In fact, I would go so far as to argue that the two most likely scenarios in this election are a Democratic wave and a narrow Trump victory — the latter coming if Hillary’s campaign loses their edge and aggressiveness, and if Democrats in general don’t put enough resources and passion into turning out the Democratic base vote.

Here’s the other thing: Democrats should work toward a wave election with a great deal of urgency, because we are in big need of one. Two of the last three elections have been massive Republican wave elections up and down the line, giving them the biggest margin in the House since the 1920s and most of the governorships and state legislative chambers. We desperately need to build a counter-wave to make up at least some of those numbers, especially considering that off-year turnout in 2018 isn’t going to be demographically as favorable as in a presidential year. And think about how much more Hillary and Democrats can get done if we get a big enough wave to retake the House as well as the Senate, which is a lot more possible in a wave election than conventional wisdom would allow. To actually have at least two years where we could try to pass some good legislation and a decent budget rather than constantly dealing with Republican threats to shut down the government would be a pretty phenomenal thing. One more note: if this turns into a close race, Trump is going to stoke up the “we were robbed” theme and we could have ugliness and violence in this country not seen since the Civil War. If we win big, on the other hand, Trump is humiliated, and Trumpism goes into history’s dustbin.

Such a big year up and down the ticket is in fact made possible by this year’s unique Trump dynamic. It is important to understand the recent history of wave elections: Republicans have been able to keep from losing as many seats in a wave election against them as Democrats have because they have maintained party unity and focused on turning out their base vote. In the 1994 election, Republicans won 52 House seats; in 2010, they won 63. In the 2014 blowout, the only reason they didn’t pick up those kinds of numbers in the House was because they had already won so many two cycles before, and hadn’t lost all that many in 2012, but in statewide races and races further down the ballot they dominated us. By contrast, Democrats only picked up 31 seats in 2006 and 20 more in 2008, both very good years up and down the ballot for Dems. The reason that Democrats tend to get blown out in down years is because they have historically shown much more disunity in bad years, running from their president and their party’s historic message and platform. The result is the Democratic base turnout tends to be abysmal in those kinds of years. Republicans in Democratic leaning years, on the other hand, have doubled down on the historic anti-government, anti-tax, traditional values rhetoric of their party in order to keep their base from deserting them, and thus been able to cut their losses — in 2006, for example, we actually lost more House close races than we won, missing our chance at a much bigger wave.

This year, the Trump factor turns this traditional GOP unity on its head. As Glen Bolger, a Republican pollster working on many of this year’s races asked in an important NYT article,

Do we run the risk of depressing our base by repudiating the guy, or do we run the risk of being tarred and feathered by independents for not repudiating him?… We’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t.

This dynamic gives Democrats a huge opportunity if we only keep our edge and press our advantage. So what does this mean in practical terms? For local progressive activists and Democratic Party people, we shouldn’t only be focused on beating up on Trump. We have a genuine opportunity to win a lot of elections — congressional, state legislative, local offices — that we might not win in another kind of year. We should be doubling down on getting out the vote and energizing the Rising American Electorate (RAE): young people, unmarried women, and people of color around those local races while we keep reminding them of how important it is to beat Trump.

For national party people and the Clinton campaign, an election like this where we are running ahead means a couple of big things:

First, double and triple down on voter registration and getting out the vote. We don’t need ever more TV ads in this environment; we just need to stay on the air at respectable levels in the target states to make sure Trump isn’t coming back. What we do need is the biggest investment ever in making sure every Democratic leaning voter and constituency makes it in to vote, especially in the face of all the voter suppression the Republicans have done and will continue to do. We could still lose this election if voter turnout is weak among the RAE in key states, but if we can expand the RAE vote to 2008 levels, we could deliver a serious sweep for Democrats.

Second, expand the map. When you are leading nationwide by several points, you have the opportunity to force the other side to play defense in all kinds of states they don’t normally have to worry about, and we should press our advantage in states that are suddenly in play. In 1992, I was on the Clinton campaign’s targeting committee, and we forced the Bush campaign to spend tons of money holding us off in states like Texas and Arizona that we were unlikely to win. One example: in Texas, we spent $400,000 on advertising, a few hundred thousand more on Latino and African-American voter registration and GOTV, and that modest amount made the numbers close enough that the Bush people ended up spending $27 million holding us off. More importantly, we helped down ballot Democrats win crucial contests they wouldn’t have otherwise won.

Right now, Hillary Clinton leads Trump or is very close in traditionally Republican states like Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina, Indiana, Missouri, even Utah. Spending a modest amount of money right now in those states on voter registration and digital media to keep them in play for at least a while will force the Republicans to scramble, dilute their resources, and pay dividends down the road in terms of potential down ballot pick-ups.

We need a big win in 2016. We can’t afford to take this election for granted, and we can’t afford to let the opportunity for a sweeping victory to pass us by — we need to do everything in our power to keep aggressively pushing for every possible Democratic vote in every race.

At Brookings William A. Galston and Elaine Kamarck explain why “Trump’s acceptance speech failed to broaden his support“:

Donald Trump faced two main political challenges in his acceptance speech—unifying a badly divided party and expanding his support beyond the passionate minority that has rallied to his cause.

How did he do?

On the first challenge, pretty well. For the first time in weeks, he didn’t attack other Republicans, although it must have been tempting to say something about Ted Cruz. In fact, he has flipped his campaign in recent weeks to focus on security and law and order issues that tend to bring Republicans together, and they dominated the first and longest part of the speech. He endorsed the policy concerns of the party’s major interest groups, including the NRA…Only the corporate and financial communities came away empty-handed.  The party of business could not have been happy about Trump’s repeated opposition to almost every trade deal that has been negotiated in the past quarter century—or his declaration that the era of multilateral trade agreements is over.

Turning to the second challenge, he and his warm-up acts did in fact reach out beyond the base…Perhaps the most surprising outreach came from Trump himself when he talked about protecting the LGBTQ community against Islamic terrorism after the hateful attack in Orlando. And then Trump followed up with  an unscripted comment meant to emphasize the point: “As a Republican, it is so nice to hear you cheering for what I just said.”

…Nonetheless, his Nixonian invocation of “law and order” gave no ground to the many African-Americans who experience contemporary policing as oppressive and unfair. His stated determination to enforce the law against illegal immigration could not have swayed the millions of Latinos whose families will be directly affected.

Galson and Kamarck add that “No one believes that Mr. Trump can win with 41 percent of the vote, even if the Libertarian and Green Party candidates do much better than ever before. So he needs to move some voters in groups not naturally inclined to back his candidacy.” Further,

The broadest question is whether Trump’s dark picture of a country under threat, in decline, and undermined by elite corruption is shared by a majority of his fellow-citizens.  While most Americans are frustrated, many fewer are as angry as were most of the Republican delegates in the hall.  Are the American people prepared to lurch from hope and change to fear and loathing?

Kamarck and Galston conclude that Trump’s speech “left Republicans more reassured and unified than they had been during the first three days of their convention” although he quickly reversed whatever good he did with his response to the Khan family and his refusal to endorse JohnMcCain or Paul Ryan’s for re-election.

In his analysis of Hillary Clinton’s Democratic convention speech, Galston said,

As Hillary Clinton came to the podium to deliver her acceptance speech, a well-run Democratic convention had already accomplished a number of important political tasks.  Careful preparation, especially the incorporation of platform planks that Bernie Sanders had pushed into the Party’s platform, helped heal the breach between Sanders’ supporters and the Clinton campaign.  Well-crafted speeches by leading Democrats laid out the stakes in this year’s election and sharpened the case against Donald Trump.

..Her task was to achieve a credible balance between continuity and change—to argue that President Obama created a firm foundation for the change we must build together during the next decade…Her second challenge was to drive a wedge between change in the abstract, which 7 in 10 Americans favor, and the kind of change Donald Trump is offering, which is ill-informed, misguided, and much too risky to be worth the gamble…Her third challenge, on which much ink has been spilled, was to begin the task of reversing negative perceptions of her character—most important, that she cannot be trusted…

…Her challenge was to make a virtue of necessity by underscoring the principles (and the faith) that have guided her public life.  This strategy could also help counter a related accusation, that she is a cold-blooded pragmatist, moved by burning ambition, who lacks a moral core and changes direction in response to shifting political winds.  In the end, trust rests on authenticity.

All very difficult challenges, but Clinton, Galston argues, did well with it:

It was not an oratorical masterpiece, but it was a sturdy, workmanlike presentation of who she is, how she thinks, and what kind of president she would be…She acknowledged being a public servant who has always been more comfortable with the “servant” rather than the “public” dimensions of her work.  She affirmed the obvious: she is a policy wonk who sweats the details, as she insisted a president should.  She set forth her guiding principles and quoted the Methodist credo.  She praised the accomplishments of the Obama-Biden administration while making it clear that she is far from satisfied with the status quo.

And she raised questions about Donald Trump that go to the core of his candidacy…In one of the speech’s most notable lines, she said that “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.”

“By itself, a single speech cannot solve a candidate’s problems,” concludes Galston. “But it can set a sense of direction and mark out a way forward.  Hillary Clinton’s acceptance speech was a good beginning—an honest presentation of self.  In that sense, it was completely authentic.  And authenticity is the basis of trust.”

All in all, both the Trump and Clinton convention speeches served the Democratic cause well enough, as Galston and Kamarch show. Trump’s meltdown since then has added momentum to Clinton’s candidacy, to the point where a Democratic landslide that could flip majority control of both houses of congress is no longer a distant dream. The most important decision Democratic strategists now face may now be  how to allocate resources between investing in House and Senate races.