The following article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, is cross posted from HuffPo:
Just when you thought that the fringe right-wing politicians who have taken over the Republican Party couldn’t veer any further out of the American political mainstream, they prove once again that they are willing to discard any democratic institution or constitutional principle that stands in their way.
In fact, for all their talk of “original intent” or strict adherence to the rule of law, or the language and spirit of the Constitution, they couldn’t give a rat’s back end when their radical right wing agenda is in jeopardy.
Without even waiting to see whom the President would nominate to the Supreme Court to succeed the late Justice Antonin Scalia, the Senate GOP leadership has announced that they will reject any Obama appointment. Wouldn’t matter to them, they say, if the nominee had the qualifications of say, Abraham Lincoln, the founder of the Republican Party.
No they say, in the words of that legal genius Marco Rubio, “There comes a point in the last year of the president, especially in their second term, where you stop nominating, or you stop the advice and consent process.” Rubio wants to wait until a new President is elected — which, of course, he hopes will be him.
GOP leaders claim there is “no precedent” for confirming a Supreme Court nominee in an election year. That is empirically wrong.
Actually, Marco, there is no point in time when, under the Constitution — or historically — Presidents stop nominating.
In fact, six Justices have been confirmed in presidential election years, including three Republicans. And another 11 have been confirmed in non-Presidential election years.
Most recently, Justice Kennedy, a Reagan appointee, was confirmed by a Democratic-controlled Congress in February 1988.
It would be completely irresponsible to let a vacancy on the Court extend into 2017. If the Senate fails to act, the Supreme Court will go for well over a year — stretching over two terms of the Court, with a vacancy.
That would be unprecedented for the modern Supreme Court. In fact, since 1980, Congress has almost never left any vacancy during a single Supreme Court session — and there has never been a vacancy spanning more than one term.
In fact, there has never been a vacancy for longer than four months during a single Supreme Court session.
The President has a Constitutional responsibility to appoint successors for vacancies on the Supreme Court. And the Senate has the Constitutional responsibility to consider those nominees.
Since 1980, there have been 12 appointments to the Supreme Court. Every one of these has been given a prompt hearing and vote within 100 days. There are 340 days left in President Obama’s term of office — plenty of time for nominees to be approved.
And it’s worth noting that the previous 11 times that the Senate has confirmed a Supreme Court justice nominated by a president of the opposite party, it’s been Democrats confirming Republicans. They include Justices Clarence Thomas, David Souter, Anthony Kennedy, John Paul Stevens, William Rehnquist, Lewis Powell, Harry Blackmun, Charles Whitaker, William Brennan, John Marshall Harlan and Chief Justice Warren Burger.

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In his Mother Jones post, “The 2016 Election Is Likely to Be a Close One,” Kevin Drum quotes from an L.A. Times article by Maria Bustillos, who writes in making her case for Sen. Sanders that, “the very clownishness of that madly tootling Republican vehicle, I believe, virtually ensures that whichever Democrat secures the nomination will win the general.”
Drum warns, however, that this is a very dangerous assumption for progressives. “Democrats have held the White House for eight years and the economy is in okay but not great shape. Those are not great fundamentals for a Democratic victory.”
Given the chaotic mess of the Republican campaign for their party’s presidential nomination, it’s understandable why many Democrats are expecting an easy victory in November. There is reason to hope for a Democratic landslide, but assuming it will happen is a big mistake. Further, adds Drum,

Now, it’s also true that demographic shifts are making the electorate steadily more Democratic. And candidate quality matters: If Republicans nominate a Donald Trump or a Ted Cruz, they’ll be shooting themselves in the foot. Nonetheless, every bit of history and political science modeling suggests that this will at least be a close election–and possibly one that favors Republicans at the start.
You should vote for whomever appeals to you. But if you’re operating under the delusion that Democrats can literally nominate anyone they want because nobody sane will vote for any of those crazy Republicans, you’d better think twice. This is a belief that betrays both a lazy liberal insularity about the nature of the electorate and an appalling amnesia about a political era that’s brought us Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, Dick Cheney, Paul Ryan, and the entire tea party. This election is no runaway, folks.

A sobering assessment, and one which ought to cause supporters of both Clinton and Sanders to reject overconfidence about the general election. American voters are evenly divided on many issues, and numerous factors, including a national security crisis, a sudden economic downturn and voter suppression, to name a few possibilities, could tip the election to the right. (This video clip should be required viewing for overconfident Democrats).
A Democratic victory in November will certainly require an all-hands-on-deck commitment to electing the Democratic nominee, even if their first choice doesn’t win the nomination.

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.

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