Now that the Democratic presidential nomination contest is winnowed down to two candidates, both of whom have strong appeal to different constituencies, it is useful to consider strategies for each of them. At Vox David Roberts has a post, “Give a little thought to what a GOP campaign against Bernie Sanders might look like,” that merits a sober reading and discussion.
If Sanders wins the nomination, Democrats will be challenged by a range of strategic considerations. As Roberts explains:

… The left insurgent candidate, Bernie Sanders, has also had a mostly free ride…If you say something like this on social media, you’ll be beset by furious Sanders supporters. (If there’s one thing it’s easy to do on social media, it’s get yourself beset by furious Sanders supporters.) But it remains true that Sanders has faced very few serious attacks.

Sanders supporters will respond by noting the criticism by Clinton and other moderates has been pretty tough. Yet he has had a pretty easy ride compared to what is coming, should he win the nomination. “But c’mon,” says Roberts. “This stuff is patty-cakes compared with the brutalization he would face at the hands of the right in a general election…His supporters would need to recalibrate their umbrage-o-meters in a serious way.”
Roberts reminds Dems that the Republicans are highly-skilled at criticizing Democrats. That’s why they continue to hold their House majority and dominate a healthy majority of governorships and state legislatures. They have been relatively easy on Sanders so far because they hope he wins, believing, wrongly or rightly, that he will be easier for them to defeat. Further, says Roberts,

But if he wins, they will rain down fire.
And the organs of the right will feel absolutely no obligation to be fair. They’re not going to be saying, like Sanders’s Democratic critics, “Aw, Bernie, you dreamer.”
They’re going to be digging through his trash, investigating known associates, rifling through legal records…They’re going to ask struggling middle-class workers how they feel about a trillion dollars in new taxes to fund a grand socialist scheme to take away everyone’s health care insurance and hand them over to government doctors.
They’re going to ask when he stopped being a communist, and when he objects that he was never a communist they’re going to ask why he’s so defensive about his communist past, why he’s so eager to avoid the questions that have been raised, the questions that people are talking about.
And when Sanders and his supporters splutter that it’s inaccurate and unjust and outrageous, the right will not give a single fuck.

Roberts reviews Sanders’ vulnerabilities, including his age. The Republicans will relentlessly characterize him as a tax-loving Socialist Boogeyman, because they believe, not without some evidence, that meme repetition eventually sinks in, regardless of the validity, especially when it is not well-challenged. Dems need to be ready for this.
“…Based on my experience,” adds Roberts, “the Bernie legions are not prepared. They seem convinced that the white working class would rally to the flag of democratic socialism. And they are in a state of perpetual umbrage that Sanders isn’t receiving the respect he’s due, that he’s facing even mild attacks from Clinton’s camp…More vicious attacks are inevitable, and that no one knows how Sanders might perform with a giant political machine working to define him as an unhinged leftist…His followers should not yet feel sanguine about his ability to endure conservative attacks. Also they should get a thicker skin, quick.”
If Roberts is overstating the naiveté of the Sanders campaign, he is surely right about the viciousness of attacks yet to come. The viciousness will also be amplified if Clinton wins the nomination. But Clinton is battle-tested and she has amassed a very tough and experienced team of political operatives, who could help Sanders, should he win the Democratic nomination.
Sanders is a smart, tough guy and he didn’t get this far by being a pussycat. But he’s going to need all of his personal strengths to overcome the Republicans’ disciplined messaging and bottomless economic resources, if he is nominated. Equally important, argues Roberts, he will have to make sure his staff is not too thin-skinned nor unprepared for the tsunami of vitriol, onslaught of distractions and dirty tricks that would be headed their way.
Properly prepared, Sanders can beat any of the Republicans, all of whom all have glaring weaknesses begging to be exploited. No matter which Democratic candidate wins the nomination, the talents, manpower and economic resources of the Democratic adversary in the coming primaries will be essential for victory in November.

Most discussions of political strategy center on national and state politics — how to elect presidents, senators, House members and governors. Attention is even more narrowly focused in contentious election years like 2016.
But while the media and public are all yammering on about those high-profile electoral contests, a powerful progressive transformation is accelerating in America’s cities. Claire Cain Miller addresses the trend in her NYT Upshot column, “Liberals Turn to Cities to Pass Laws and Spread Ideas“:

If Congress won’t focus on a new policy idea, and if state legislatures are indifferent or hostile, why not skip them both and start at the city level?
That’s the approach with a proposed law in San Francisco to require businesses there to pay for employees’ parental leaves.
It might seem like a progressive pipe dream, the kind of liberal policy that could happen only in a place like San Francisco. But Scott Wiener, the city and county supervisor who proposed the policy, sees it differently.
“The more local jurisdictions that tackle these issues, the more momentum there is for statewide and eventually national action,” he said.

Miller cites Baltimore’s ‘living wage ‘ law enacted in 1994, along with “soda taxes, universal health care, calorie counts on menus, mandatory composting and bans on smoking indoors” as examples of the phenomenon. Many cities, she adds, are well-positioned to serve as “incubators of ideas” and policies to fill the void left by a gridlocked federal congress.
There is significant opposition to the cities taking the lead, coming from conservative organizations like ALEC, the NRA and the tobacco lobby, which have had some success in blocking reforms passed by cities, including “gun control, plastic bag bans, paid leave, fracking, union membership and the minimum wage.”
Yet the reforms enacted by cities have sometimes take root as causes gaining national support. As Miller notes,

Paid sick leave is an example. The first city to require it was San Francisco in 2006. It is now the law in 23 cities and states, and President Obama last fall required federal contractors to provide it. (Meanwhile, more than a dozen states have pre-emption laws to stop cities from requiring paid sick leave.)
Minimum wage is another example. SeaTac, Wash., passed a $15 minimum wage in 2013. Nearby Seattle followed, and then so did San Francisco, Los Angeles, Mountain View, Calif., and Emeryville, Calif.
Fourteen states have since changed their minimum wage laws, two bills in Congress would do the same nationally, and all three Democratic presidential contenders have said they would raise the federal minimum wage.

Democrats are driving the reforms in the cities and in some key states, like California. What has changed most significantly is the severity of gridlock in congress, which gives added incentive to the cities to lead the way in building America’s future. If the cities can meet daunting challenges like eliminating traffic jams, pollution and crime, their examples will prove irresistible to national politicians, rendering the GOP’s gridlock strategy inoperative.

Damien Cave’s NYT article, “Yes, Latinos Are Rising, but So Are Latino Nonvoters” provides a good update on the potential of Latino voters to determine the outcome of the 2016 election. Here’s an excerpt:

Even though 27 million Latinos will be eligible to cast a ballot in November — an increase of 17 percent since 2012 — the Latino population is becoming more distant from the American political process, according to a new report from the Pew Research Center.
Most Latinos who could vote in the last three national elections chose not to. Turnout was just under 50 percent in 2008, and fell to 48 percent in 2012. It dropped to 27 percent in the 2014 midterms, the lowest rate ever recorded for Latinos.

Cave notes further that “among Latino leaders and social scientists, there is a growing recognition, and increasing concern, that Latinos are punching beneath their weight, and may be stuck in a cycle of disconnection. The question is: Why?” Further, adds Cave:

Pew argues it’s at least partly a matter of demographics. Around 55 million Latinos live in the United States, a group that includes citizens, green-card holders and roughly 11 million immigrants living in the country illegally. In all, that’s about 17 percent of the population (Asian-Americans are about 5.5 percent of the population), but the Latino electorate skews young. Millennials make up a larger share of the Hispanic vote, at 44 percent, than the white (27 percent), black (35 percent) and Asian-American (30 percent) electorates.
Young people are less likely to vote regardless of background. And even among millennials, Hispanic turnout is weaker than that of other groups. Pew researchers found that just 37.8 percent of Latino millennials voted in 2012, compared with 47.5 percent of white millennials and 55 percent of black millennials. Only Asian-American millennials, a smaller group, voted in lower proportion, at 37.3 percent.
Latinos are also concentrated in states that are not heavily contested in presidential elections, making it harder to spur political engagement. Three states — California, New York and Texas — account for 52 percent of all eligible Latino voters, according to Pew. California and New York reliably swing Democratic, and Texas goes Republican in national elections. One exception, Florida, with a large and growing Hispanic population, could prove crucial as a battleground state.

Cave cites voter suppression, with Texas as exhibit A, as a leading reason for low Latino turnout. But there is also political apathy among younger Hispanic voters, partly as a result a sense of hopelessness. He believes that the quality of outreach urging political engagement of Latino eligible voters has been sorely lacking in nuance and quotes Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julián Castro, who says “The approach has not evolved that much…It’s generally just been, ‘Say a few words in Spanish, with a message about family.’ ”
Republicans’ 2016 Hispanic voter outreach seems to be all about having a couple of Latino presidential candidates, neither one of whom offers anything substantial in the way of educational or employment opportunities. With ‘Millennials’ projected to be nearly half of eligible Latino voters in November, however, Democrats can — and must — provide a message that speaks more directly to the aspirations of young people in Hispanic communities, backed up by a well-organized turnout mobilization.

From “Callused Hands: The Shrinking Working Class White Vote” by Keith Gaddie and Kirby Godel at HuffPo:

SO HOW ARE WHITE WORKING CLASS VOTERS DIFFERENT? We used a technique called OLS regression to introduce statistical controls for several white voter features, including party identification, ideology, education, income, age, and sex, so we could isolate the effect of being self-identified white working class, and living in a union household, to compare working class whites to other whites on attitudes towards government, the role of government in the economy, and race issues.
Attitudes Toward Government: Whites in the working class are more distrustful of government than other Americans…Working class whites express greater cynicism toward government than the middle or upper class. However, these differences are not larger now than 40 years ago.
Attitudes Toward Equalitarian Values and Government Spending: A major controversy about working class whites is that they vote against their economic interests because of social issues – ‘what’s the matter with Kansas’ argument popularized by Thomas Frank. Data from ANES show working class white support for government jobs, government spending for services, and equalitarian values are unchanged since before the Reagan Revolution.
Working class whites are more supportive of government guaranteeing jobs and income and, in general, of equalitarian values than other whites. They are not, however, more supportive of government spending on services in general, probably because it is hard to tell what target groups would benefit from this spending.
One way of interpreting these results is to say that self-identified working class whites should be receptive to populist arguments for a more active federal government. But, that support is conditioned on government activity being aimed at improving the wages and employment opportunities available to white working class people.
Racial Attitudes: Does race matter? There has always been a racial subtext to the white working class…The working class whites support for greater economic equality does not translate into support for race-based policies…This primarily reflects differences between working class southern whites and all other whites more generally…
…Our initial look into the political world of working class whites afforded few surprises. We see a political world of the white working class that is less efficacious, less trusting, and finds government less responsive. This world is open to government action on jobs, but not on programmatic poverty spending. It is a world that is skeptical about aid to minorities, especially among southern working class whites.
…Government is an acceptable actor to intervene in the economy if it does so to create employment. But, when government acts to assist through programs or other policies that do not promote employment or wages, the working class reacts with skepticism. And, it is skeptical of assistance to blacks, especially the southern white working class.
These are not surprising findings. But, these results describe a political world where the white working class is increasingly hunkered down. They confront a political environment where they are divided from other whites based on education, economics, and expectations. And, they are divided from working people of color by both different political worldviews but also skepticism regarding how government engages race policies. And, they have become smaller as a political force and have less economic clout and security in this era than at any time in the last 80 years.

If the authors are right, Democrats may be able to increase their share of the white working class vote by emphasizing their support for government action that promotes economic uplift and jobs for all races. Even a small increase in Democratic share of this still-large, though shrinking demographic entity could secure a stable majority for decades.

Thomas B. Edsall’s “The Republican Party’s 50-State Solution” delves deep into the Republican edge in state politics. It’s a sobering read for Democrats, and Edsall’s insights could prove invaluable, if Democrats refine and implement a more effective strategy to challenge the GOP’s domination at the state level. Here’s a couple of his more interesting observations:

Seven years ago, Democrats had a commanding lead in state legislatures, controlling both legislative chambers in 27 states, nearly double the 14 controlled by Republicans. They held 4082 state senate and house seats, compared to the Republicans’ 3223.
Sweeping Republican victories at the state level in 2010 and 2014 transformed the political landscape.
By 2015, there were Republican majorities in 70 percent — 68 of 98 — of the nation’s partisan state houses and senates, the highest number in the party’s history. (Nebraska isn’t counted in because it has a non-partisan, unicameral legislature.) Republicans controlled the legislature and governorship in 23 states, more than triple the seven under full Democratic control.

One of the keys, adds Edsall, is a new way of financing state campaigns:

“What’s changed seems to be the result of the relatively recent nationalization of state campaign financing,” Morgan Kousser, a professor of history at Caltech (and, as it happens, Thad Kousser’s father), wrote in an email:
The Koch brothers understand the importance of controlling state legislatures; George Soros doesn’t. I’m not sure why this should be the case, but since we’re really talking about a relatively small number of mega-donors who have caused this, it’s a rather restricted question.
Liberal foundations, in the view of Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at the New America foundation, “have for a long time got perpetually distracted by fads and short-term metrics, whereas conservative foundations were willing to invest much more in long-term organizational capacity.”
“How the Right Trounced Liberals in the States,” by Alexander Hertel-Fernandez and Theda Skocpol, in the Winter edition of the journal Democracy, documents the failure of the left to keep pace with the substantial investments by the right in building local organizations.
Liberals, according to Hertel-Fernandez, a graduate student at Harvard, and Skocpol, a professor of government and sociology there, “have left behind little more than a litany of abandoned acronyms.”

Ouch. Edsall goes into much more detail explaining the mechanics behind the conservative takeover of most states and credits the GOP with “the most effective gerrymandering of legislative and congressional districts in the nation’s history.” He concludes that “the right has institutionalized a dangerous power vacuum on the left.”
Read the entire article here.

The following article by William A. Galston is cross-posted from Brookings:
Something is stirring among Iowa Democrats. In the four surveys of likely Democratic caucus-goers conducted between December 7th and December 21st, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton led Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders by an average of 13 points, 50 to 37. In the four surveys of likely caucus-attenders taken between the 2nd and 10th of January, the race is a dead heat.
This trend echoes the contrasting results of two Quinnipiac polls, one conducted in early December, the other released at noon today. The former gave Clinton a 51-40 lead; the latter gave the edge to Sanders, 49 to 44. Fortunately, Quinnipiac releases a number of key cross-tabulations, so we can see the key building-blocks of Sanders’ lead and to some extent, what’s driving the shift between early December and now.
To begin, there is a huge gender gap: men back Sanders by 61-30, while women break for Clinton, 55-39. In December, by comparison, Sanders’ lead among men was only 52-39, so Sanders has gained 9 points among men in less than a month, with Clinton losing the same number. During the same period, he has cut into Clinton’s lead among women, which was 27 points a month ago but only 16 points today. He has also reduced Clinton’s lead among Democrats with college degrees from 17 points to 4 while turning her 4-point edge among non-college Democrats into a 10-point deficit.
There has been no change in the issues Democrats care most about. In both December and January, 35 percent of likely caucus-goers named jobs and the economy as the most important issue, 15 percent selected health care, and 11 percent climate change. In each of these issues, however, Sanders has improved his standing at Clinton’s expense.

Read more…

James Hohman’s Daily 202 column at WaPo, “The Daily 202: Trumpism rejected by Obama in State of the Union and Nikki Haley in GOP response,” spotlights a host of interesting reactions to President Obama’s State of the Union speech. Here we’ll just share some responses to the GOP rebuttal by Governor Nikki Haley:

— In the latest sign that the GOP establishment fears an electoral debacle if Trump is the nominee, the official Republican response from Nikki Haley also made the case – albeit a little more gently – against going down the path Trump offers. “During anxious times, it can be tempting to follow the siren call of the angriest voices,” the South Carolina governor said. “We must resist that temptation.”
— Haley’s speech has become a Rorschach test on the right…The far right hated it.
Breitbart headlined its story: “Republican Party Uses State Of The Union Response To Attack Trump.”
“Trump should deport Nikki Haley,” Ann Coulter wrote in one of six-anti Haley tweets.
Radio host Laura Ingraham chimed in: “The country is lit up w/ a populist fever & the GOP responds by digging in, criticizing the GOP candidates dominating polls?! NOT SMART.”
Former Ted Cruz aide Amanda Carpenter wrote: “Haley’s speech would’ve been good except for the GOP self-loathing.”
More mainstream elites in the right-leaning media loved Haley’s speech:
Charles Krauthammer, on a Fox News panel, called it the best State of the Union response he can ever recall hearing.
The Washington Examiner’s David Drucker said Haley’s response “will likely elevate her to the top of the list of potential vice presidential contenders.”
National Review editor Rich Lowry said it’s “always a tough assignment”: “Haley was a little shaky at beginning, but moving treatment of Charleston shooting and nice riff on GOP agenda.”

If one of Obama’s goals was to out the Republicans’ internal divisions, the President succeeded admirably.

The following article, by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Today, Monday, January 11, will have a big impact on the American Middle Class and all of those who aspire to it.
Today, the United States Supreme Court hears oral arguments in the case of Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association.
This case has been brought to the Court by the Koch-sponsored “Center for Individual Rights (CIR) ” — an outfit that made its reputation challenging civil rights laws. The CIR is asking the Court to break with forty years of precedent to impose radical new limits on the rights of workers to negotiate together for higher wages and better working conditions.
Four decades ago, the Supreme Court ruled — unanimously — that since public sector unions must represent all of the employees in a bargaining unit, labor agreements can require all employees that benefit from that representation to pay a fair share contribution to support the costs of negotiating and servicing the labor agreement.
This does not mean that all employees are required to join a union and contribute to its lobbying and political work — or to anything else it might do that is not directly related to negotiating and enforcing the terms of a contract.
And recall that public sector unions represent only groups of workers that have voted to form — or join — a union to represent them.
The Supreme Court found that it would make no sense to allow a situation where employees get the benefit of wage increases, paid holidays, health care benefits, etc. that are negotiated by the union leaders elected by the employees — but they can simply refuse to pay the costs of getting those benefits.
Billionaires like the Koch Brothers think otherwise. They want to make it as hard as possible for all workers to bargain together for higher wages, because they actively support a low-wage economy where CEOs, big corporations and Wall Street Banks can pay employees as little as possible and they can keep as much as possible for themselves.
The Friedrichs case itself deals only with public employees. But the Koch Brothers would like to weaken the rights of all employees to organize unions — and they think that a sharp reversal by the Supreme Court would be a great first step in that direction.
Trouble is, if the Koch Brothers get their way it will deliver a body blow to the chances of ordinary Americans to live secure, middle class lives. Remember, the wages of ordinary people have not increased in the United States since 2000. In fact, virtually all of the considerable economic growth that we’ve seen in America over the last three decades has gone to the wealthiest 1%.
That’s because people like the Koch Brothers have used massive campaign contributions and an army of lobbyists to rig the rules of the American economy.
We desperately need to reform government so it will once again level the economic playing field and build an economy that benefits all ordinary Americans — not just the wealthy, CEOs and big corporations.
If the Kochs get their way at the Supreme Court, it will do just the opposite. It will tilt the game even more in the favor of huge CEO salaries, enormous Wall Street bonuses, and gigantic corporate profits.
And it will make it harder for people like teachers, firefighters, road workers, and paramedics to negotiate for the kind of wages that allow them to live secure, middle class lives.
These are the kinds of people that were the foundation of the American Middle Class. It was their skill that educated and protected Americans for generations. And it was their middle class incomes that provided the buying power that allowed the American economy to explode — to become the economic envy of the rest of the world.
And let’s remember that it was the ability of public sector employees to organize and negotiate together for decent wages and safe working conditions that lifted so many out of poverty and made them part of the Middle Class.
Next week Americans celebrate a national holiday to commemorate the life of Dr. Martin Luther King. Fifty-one years ago, Dr. King was shot in Memphis where he had gone to support a strike by mainly black sanitation workers who were organizing to demand the ability to negotiate together for better wages and safer working conditions
The event that touched off that strike was the death of two sanitation workers who were crushed by an unsafe, malfunctioning garbage truck compactor. It had been cheaper to pay the occasional death benefit to a low income, African American sanitation worker’s family, than to invest in safety equipment on those garbage trucks.
The ability of those workers to organize together to negotiate — to form a union — not only brought them higher incomes and safer working conditions. It gave them dignity. In fact, the slogan of that organizing campaign — and the civil rights marches that supported it was: “I am a Man.”
Dr. King always believed that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Organizing campaigns like the Memphis sanitation workers strike bent that arc. So did the Supreme Court case that legitimated the rights of public employees to organize and provided them the ability to succeed.
It’s not surprising that an organization like the CIR — that has tried to weaken civil rights laws for decades — wants to bend that arc back toward injustice — to gut the ability of working people like those sanitation workers to organize to secure a decent middle class income and the dignity that accompanies it.
When the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the rights of people like those sanitation workers 40 years ago, it did so unanimously. Every member of the Court — the most conservative Justices and the most progressive Justices — all of them certified the notion that when a majority of workers vote to form or affiliate with a union, then everyone who benefits should be asked to pay their fair share of the costs associated with increasing their pay or making them safer on the job.
Every one of them agreed with the sentiments of teachers like Reagan Duncan, a first grade teacher in Vista, California, who was quoted last week in The New York Times:

It’s not right for some people to get union benefits for free while others have to pay. If I went to a grocery store, I wouldn’t walk out with my groceries and not pay while the guy behind me had to pay for my groceries and his groceries. She added: “It’s corporate special interest that are backing this…”

Precisely.
And frankly. it would be shocking if the Supreme Court of the United States were to over turn a 40-year-old unanimous precedent and make it even harder for ordinary people to restore the American Middle Class.

At The Atlantic Molly Ball profiles “The Pugnacious, Relentless Progressive Party That Wants to Remake America,” a.k.a. the Working Families Party. In one part of her article, Ball focuses on the activism of one of the WFP’s top leaders, Analila Mejia, director of New Jersey Working Families:

A longtime union organizer who actually postponed her wedding to work on the Obama campaign, Mejia had previously served as New Jersey political director of the powerful mid-Atlantic janitors’ union, SEIU 32BJ, whose 145,000 members can be found everywhere from Yankee Stadium to the Pentagon…
Union work was satisfying but limiting for Mejia. Given the dramatic contraction of the labor movement, which has fallen to just 7 percent of private sector workers (in 1984, it was 16 percent), she longed to improve the lives of all workers, not just those lucky enough to be in a union. (In this sense, the WFP represents a stab at an American labor party, a common feature of European democracies that the U.S. has historically lacked.)
The WFP gives activists like Mejia an outlet for their frustration with national politics. It channels their anger at the constricting terms of the national debate into ground-level organizing–where the politics may seem unglamorously small-time, but there’s a chance to make a difference in people’s lives.
“We’ve found ways of electoralizing our issues,” Mejia told me. “We make politicians walk the walk–and pay the price if they don’t.” The idea is to make Democratic politicians more accountable to their liberal base through the asymmetric warfare party primaries enable, much as the conservative movement has done to Republicans. “The rules are rigged against working people, so we have to think outside the box to find different ways to win at this game,” Mejia said.
When the Democratic-controlled New Jersey Legislature wasn’t advancing a statewide paid-sick-leave bill, the WFP went to the municipal level to find a workaround; 10 New Jersey cities have now mandated paid sick leave. And when Governor Chris Christie vetoed a set of voting reforms–including automatic voter registration and restoring felons’ voting rights–the party set out to collect signatures to put it on the ballot instead, hoping to put the issue before voters in November 2016.
Mejia has also spearheaded the party’s role as Christie’s chief harasser–a task the state’s sclerotic, Christie-co-opted Democratic Party originally hesitated to take up. The WFP’s protests, ethics complaints, and calls for Christie’s resignation helped put the Bridgegate scandal on the map, severely wounding the presidential hopes of the man once considered a top 2016 GOP contender. The party also worked to elect Ras Baraka, an opponent of education reform, to succeed Cory Booker as mayor of Newark over a better-funded candidate. (WFP-style liberals generally side with teachers’ unions in viewing education reform, which the Obama administration and many Democrats have championed, as a corporatist plot to undermine public education.

Ball details many other WFP accomplishments, which leads readers to conclude that this is the progressive vanguard role the Democratic Party should be embracing and supporting to expand its voter base. The Democratic Party clearly needs more progressive activists with strong working-class roots, like Mejia, who would likely find traditional Democratic Party structures and too limiting, slow and timid. Yet when presented with the stark two party choice on the ballot, most WFP members will likely vote Democratic, instead of sitting it out or casting votes for a third party candidate who have no chance.
Ball quotes WFP National Director Cantor:

The WFP, Cantor explained, doesn’t expect to overthrow the two-party system–nor does it want to be a hopeless cause like the Greens or the Libertarian Party. “Every good idea in American history started with a third party: abolition, the eight-hour day, women’s suffrage, child-labor laws, unemployment insurance, Social Security,” he said. “These didn’t start with the Democratic or Republican Party–they started with the Free Soilers and the Liberty Party and the Populist Party and the Socialist Party. That’s where these things germinate, and then when you do well, they get adopted by one of the major parties, or in very rare cases the major party collapses.
“So we’re not naïve,” he continued. “The Democratic Party is not about to collapse. But we think there’s a huge number of people inside the Democratic Party that actually agree with us, and we want the Democratic Party to be feistier, tougher, and more focused on the needs of ordinary people, not the preferences of their donors.”

Ball adds “The WFP’s victories to date have been numerous but small-bore–a far cry from the Tea Party’s attention-getting mass rallies and defeats of veteran U.S. senators. But the WFP would argue that, with Congress gridlocked and in Republican hands, more effective policymaking happens at the state and local level.”
The WFP, which distributes “Kicking Ass for the Working Class” bumper stickers, endorsed the presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders in December. But Clinton, or any other Democrat, would likely get an overwhelming share of their votes if nominated.
Although many WFP members are quick to criticize the Democratic Party, many see themselves as advocates for the reforms Democrats must pursue to become a stable, majority party. Thus the Working Families Party is a significant plus for the Democratic Party, and it will become an even more influential force in the future.

The following article by John Russo, a Visiting Research Fellow at Virginia Tech’s Metropolitan Institute, Visiting Scholar,Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor of Georgetown University, and former Co-director, Center for Working-Class Studies, is cross-posted from Working Class Perspectives:
While the white working class is shrinking in the US, it remains the largest voting block in the country. That may be why leaders of both parties are concerned that white working-class voters, especially in the Midwest and South, are supporting populist candidates like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. They don’t understand that many of these voters blame Wall Street, corporate leaders, and politicians – the East Coast establishment -for destroying their jobs and communities over the past few decades.
Recent polls suggest that almost 60% of Americans, both Democrats and Republicans, “don’t identify with what America has become.” According to Cliff Young and Chris Jackson, these “nativist” Americans are older, whiter, and less educated than the rest of the population – more working-class, in other words. For some middle-class professionals, this “nativism,” exemplified in support for Donald Trump’s racial comments, simply reinforces the assumption that the white working class is inherently racist and foolish. They conveniently ignore the way racism is resurfacing among the middle class as they, too, feel resentment over their economic displacement. As Barbara Ehrenreich warns, “Whole professions have fallen on hard times, from college teaching to journalism and the law. One of the worst mistakes this relative elite could make is to try to pump up its own pride by hating on those — of any color or ethnicity — who are falling even faster.”
The focus on racism and xenophobia ignores an essential reality: precarity is bringing working-class and middle-class voters together politically. As Guy Standing has argued, the emerging precariat is a political class in the making. We see this in the “Fight for $15.” The struggle to increase the minimum wage seeks economic improvement for both the non-college and college educated.

Read more…