From Kira Lerner’s report on the Voting and Elections Summit 2015, “5 Ways To Fix America’s Dismal Voter Turnout Problem” at ThinkProgress:

According to a U.S. Census report from 2013, 14 percent of nonvoting respondents were unable to participate because of an illness or disability, 8.6 percent were out of town, 12.7 percent did not like the candidates or campaign issues and almost 19 percent were too busy. Some people cannot take time off from work on a Tuesday in November, which has led lawmakers including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) to call for making Election Day a federal holiday. Others may not feel engaged in politics or informed enough to vote, while 5.85 million U.S. citizens are prohibited from voting due to a felony conviction on their records.

Lerner observes, optimistically, that “Unlike laws that restrict access through voter ID laws, shorter registration and early voting periods and disenfranchising felons, these proposals are likely to have support from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and would not be difficult to implement to get voters to turn out in higher numbers.” But significant bipartisan support for any such reforms might not be so easy.
Still, Lerner notes,

…More states have been pushing to allow people to register online, a proposal that has bipartisan support. As of December, 20 states had implemented online voter registration and four others had passed legislation to implement the technology. A number of Republican election chiefs have supported the technology, including Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams (R) who told ThinkProgress that his state has developed a website which allows voters to register in minutes and helps avoid errors that occur when poll workers attempt to read voters’ handwriting. Ohio’s Jon Husted, notorious for attempting to suppress votes, has also recently called for online registration.

Among the creative reforms Lerner cites is a Virginia initiative, “Revive My Vote, “a digital workspace” connecting volunteers with convicted felons in to help thread the procedures to restore their voting rights.
It seems reasonable to hope that here and there a few Republicans in state legislatures and perhaps even some Republican members of congress will come forward to support expanding the franchise through various measures. But most of these reforms are unlikely to get much traction until we get a wave election favoring Democrats. What state and local Democratic party chapters can do on their own is make a more substantial commitment to recruiting, training and developing better candidates from blue collar America, as well as the “rising American electorate,” including women, people of color and younger Democrats.

The following article is cross-posted from a DCorps e-blast:
As reported by Thomas Edsall in the New York Times, Democracy Corps conducted dial testing during the 2015 State of the Union address with white swing voters and follow-up online focus groups of two groups critical to the Democrats in 2016 – white working class voters and white unmarried women. These dials suggest that key demographics:

• Appreciate the President’s empathetic narrative in identifying with the tough times that millions of Americans continue to endure
• Balk at Obama’s assessment of a recovered, ‘strong’ economy and his confidence in its direction
• Endorse the President and Democrats’ forward-looking, middle class-focused economic agenda, including bold plans for free community college, closing tax loopholes, investing in innovation and modernizing our nation’s infrastructure, paid sick leave, and affordable childcare

Swing voters respond to the idea that, like the Erler family whom the President cites frequently, this nation faced a monumental struggle, endured tough times, and has clawed its way back. But, they do not accept the idea that the State of the Union is strong – that the nation’s economy is robust and that they are sharing in it. They don’t think middle class economics has worked yet.
Nonetheless, these voters embrace the President’s agenda for middle class economics in the future. In particular, the President’s proposals to take on issues facing working families hit home. This agenda appeals greatly to voters across party lines, resonating especially well among white unmarried women and white working class voters, groups which are among the main strategic targets for Democrats for the next several years and who share a set of priorities for middle class prosperity.
Voters’ main concerns with this agenda regard its potential cost implications and the reality that a gridlocked government makes it unlikely many of these policies will come to fruition. Moving forward with a bold and aggressive agenda that calls for real reforms on waste in government and closing loopholes for special interests that can help middle and working class families turn the page to a new economic prosperity will be crucial in attracting these voters in 2016.
Read the Full Memo Here.

From Derek Willis’s “Online Political Ads Have Been Slow to Catch On as TV Reigns” at NYT’s The Upshot:

For all of the advances in the use of data and digital tools, broadcast advertising still claims the largest share of campaign budgets. Digital advertising is still a work in progress, especially at the level of House races and further down the ballot. Targeting voters with online ads is difficult, messy work, even under ideal circumstances. It can be easier to accomplish in statewide or national campaigns, where building a large enough audience is less of a problem.
“It’s never quite as smooth or seamless as it sounds,” said Zac Moffatt, a co-founder of Targeted Victory. But like a lot of other data-intensive campaign tasks, such as matching absentee ballots to a campaign’s email list, it has improved over time. That message is echoed by other digital advertising professionals: The technology to make it happen is available, but the process is not perfect.
…A look at campaign spending data reveals that most competitive House races are not emphasizing that kind of spending.
It is hard to find evidence of a shift from broadcast spending to digital in the 10 most highly contested House races in 2014. Spending that clearly went toward digital efforts (sometimes it is hard to tell) accounted for a small portion of the money spent by candidates…Candidates in those 10 most competitive races spent more than $34 million on television and radio advertisements and production, according to Federal Election Commission data. They spent less on digital efforts (about $1.1 million) than they did on direct mail or polling.
This shows a reluctance on the part of campaigns and consultants to move away from television, and uncertainty about the effectiveness and accuracy of online targeting.

As for the future, digital media may gain some leverage in the years ahead with a few tweaks. Digital is getting better at targeting users by neighborhood, instead of just cookies. Willis notes also that “the consumption of media on phones, tablets and other devices is increasing.” In addition, high-turnout seniors who are still digital-averse will slowly be replaced by more digitally-hip oldsters. For now, however, data indicates that digital technology is better for political fund-raising than for ads which win hearts and minds.

From Rev. Jesse Jackson’s op-ed “Voter Suppression Did Not End in Selma” in the Chicago Sun-Times: “In North Carolina’s tight Senate race in 2014, Republican Tom Tillis beat incumbent Kay Hagen by about 43,000 votes (1.7 percent of the vote). Tillis had ushered through the state legislature one of the harshest voter-suppression laws, eliminating seven days of early voting (and at least one Sunday of “get your souls to the polls” rallies at African-American churches), eliminating same-day registration, forcing voters to vote in their own precinct and more. 700,000 voters had voted in the now eliminated early seven-day window in 2012, 200,000 in the 2012 by-election. Some 100,000 voters, largely African-American, took advantage of same-day registration in 2012. The voters eliminated may well have exceeded the vote margin.”
In his post “How to Protect the Vote,” The Nation’s Ari Berman writes: “One reason it’s so easy to restrict voting rights is that, although there are constitutional amendments protecting the right to vote free of racial discrimination (Fifteenth), granting women suffrage (Nineteenth), banning the poll tax (Twenty-fourth) and raising the voting age to 18 (Twenty-sixth), there is no provision guaranteeing the basic right to cast a ballot. House Democrats Mark Pocan and Keith Ellison have proposed changing that with a simple amendment stating: “Every citizen of the United States, who is of legal voting age, shall have the fundamental right to vote in any public election held in the jurisdiction in which the citizen resides.” Yet, “With federal legislation unlikely, the best prospects for election reform are in the states, primarily blue states controlled by Democrats. According to the Brennan Center, twelve states quietly passed measures expanding voter access in 2014–including Illinois, which adopted election-day voter registration and expanded early voting.”
At ThinkProgress Ian Milhiser observes: “According to a new poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation, only 27 percent of the public agrees with the Republican leaders’ strategy to take health care away from millions of Americans if they get an assist from the Supreme Court…The same poll determined that “[m]ost see lawmakers’ proposals to change the ACA as an attempt to gain political advantage (63%) rather than to improve the law itself (29%).”
Julian E. Zelizer has a retrospective article, “When Liberals Were Organized,” about the Democratic Study Group at The American Prospect, in which he notes, “Since 1994, congressional liberals have failed to replicate a powerful, independent organization like the Democratic Study Group. They have been dependent on a House leadership that is sometimes but not always sympathetic to their goals. The closest thing to a DSG, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, has been a pale imitation of its predecessor, a fragile informal coalition that has lacked the same kind of leadership, money, publications, communications strategy, or clout…The history of the DSG demonstrates that their organizational prowess was hugely important in moving forward a liberal agenda and in making sure that liberal electoral gains were institutionalized in the operation of the House. Enthusiasts of the DSG believe Democrats, continuing in the minority after 2014, could use something like the DSG to gain momentum before the next elections.”
“Can Moral Mondays Produce Victorious Tuesdays?” Barry Yeoman provides an update on the grass roots uprising that began — and continues — in NC, also at The American Prospect.
If the Koch brothers’ nearly $900 million in projected spending on the 2016 campaign wasn’t enough of a headache, read Shane Goldmacher’s National Journal post “Buying a Nominee: The secret fundraising scheme forming for this contest will make super PACs look quaint.”
Ed O’Keefe’s “House Democrats retake the House? It’s a long shot, but they’re getting ready to try” at The Washington Post offers some perceptive observations, including: “Getting the 30 they need will be a very steep climb,” said Nathan L. Gonzales, editor and publisher of the nonpartisan Rothenberg & Gonzales Political Report. “If the president’s numbers continue to climb and people feel good about the economy, that’ll be good for Democrats, but they’ll still have to convince voters to throw out Republicans. A good economy usually benefits all incumbents, no matter their party.” Also, “There’s no conventional wisdom in politics anymore,” said Rep. Linda T. Sánchez (D-Calif.). “Would anyone have predicted that [Republican former House majority leader Eric Cantor] would lose his seat? We’re in an environment where anything can happen.”
At The Upshot Brendan Nyhan urges his readers to “Fight the Temptation to Pay Attention to Polls.” Nyhan has convincing data to back up his advice, and notes “For now, you should ignore surveys testing potential Democrat/Republican matchups for the 2016 presidential election…We know head-to-head polls won’t be useful for more than a year. Until then, your time is better spent following the direction of the economy — the most important predictor of presidential election outcomes…” The real value of such early polls is for campaigns to monitor how their candidate is doing with specific demographic groups.
Morris P. Fiorina’s “If I Could Hold a Seminar for Political Journalists…” at The Forum asserts that many political journalists conflate “polarization” with “party sorting.” As Fiorina explains, “Rather than polarization in the distribution of public opinion, what has happened in the US is that the parties have become better sorted since the 1970s…in common usage, polarization tends to connote a process of individual conversion – individuals move from moderate to more extreme positions as they listen to Rush Limbaugh or watch Rachel Maddow, for example. In contrast, sorting is more often a compositional phenomenon – rather than change their views, the categories to which people belong change…While the two processes are not mutually exclusive, the evidence at the level of mass public opinion indicates that sorting is the dominant process in producing today’s historically high partisan conflict…”

No one should be surprised by reports that the Koch brothers are ramping up to spend nearly $900 million on the 2016 elections, nor that the amount could top $1 billion when all accounts are settled after the election. The figure does represent a substantial increase over their huge outlays for 2012 and 2014. But energy-related profits are soaring and that is their primary source of revenue. They’ve got the money, and there is little to stop them, thanks to the Citizens United decision.
Of course Democrats and really anyone who cares about the integrity of our political system, such as it is, should raise hell about it and blast the Koch brothers’ buy-out as unAmerican. Democrats will have a lot to say about it, as Sean Sullivan and Anne Gearan explain at the Washington Post,

The announcement this week that the vast political network backed by the wealthy industrialist Koch brothers aims to spend nearly $1 billion on the 2016 elections has reignited Democratic hopes of casting the brothers as electoral villains and linking them closely to Republican candidates.
It’s a campaign strategy that yielded little success for the party in 2014, a banner year for the GOP. But Democratic officials and operatives say they are hopeful that their anti-Koch message will have more potency in a presidential election year.
Groups supporting potential Democratic candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, as well as the House and Senate Democratic campaign arms, plan to single out the Kochs in their advertising and fundraising efforts.
…David Brock, founder of the pro-Clinton American Bridge political action committee, said his group will be retooling a 2014 war-room operation called “Real Koch Facts,” which he acknowledged did not achieve big results. The project aims to educate potential voters about what Democrats say is the Kochs’ largely hidden agenda and to attempt to shame recipients of Koch money.

But it would be folly for Democrats to expect that vilification alone will offset the harm done by the Koch’s spending. As Gearan and Sullivan explain,

Most voters don’t know who the Kochs are. Sixty-four percent of voters said they had no opinion or a neutral impression of them, according to an NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll conducted about a month before the November midterms. But among those who did, attitudes were overwhelmingly negative.

There are those who say, with some evidence, that campaign spending is overrated, less important than fronting good candidates. And certainly Democrats can always do more to recruit and develop better candidates. A boycott of the Koch industries, such as Georgia Pacific products, can’t hurt. But let’s not expect it to do much to stop them, since most of Koch revenues come from energy-related industries.
Democrats have little choice but to keep speaking out and organizing to overturn Citizens United, hoping that the public will begin paying more attention as the national discussion progresses to the point where more voters are going to take it into consideration on election day. That and contributing to Democratic candidates still offers the best hope for stopping the Koch Democracy takeover.

The following article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
The New York Times reported last week that in the closed-door Republican Senate Caucus retreat, Republican Leader Senator Mitch McConnell “encouraged the Republican troops to refocus policy on the stagnant middle class.”
That would be like asking the wolves of the world to stop hunting and refocus on cultivating asparagus.
But, of course, McConnell didn’t really mean he wanted his fellow Republicans to do something about the wealth gap. He wanted them to look like they were doing something about the wealth gap while they actually deliver the goods for the owners of the Republican Party.
The Republican Party, after all, is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of the .01% and doing something meaningful about the gap in wealth and income in America – revitalizing the middle class — requires taking wealth and income that is now being siphoned off by the .01% and giving it to the people who earned and created it – the vast majority of ordinary Americans.
Of course Republicans and apologists for Wall Street dispute that assumption. They argue that the economy is not a so called “zero sum game” – that the best way to improve the standard of living or ordinary Americans is to grow the economy. And they say that the best way to do that is to allow the wealthy to control more and more of the nation’s wealth, since they invest that wealth in new productive enterprises that create more and more new jobs.
That premise, of course, is the essence of “trickle-down economics.” The problem is that we know empirically that “trickle-down economics” doesn’t work. Economic growth does not necessarily increase the incomes of ordinary Americans.
In fact, over the last 35 years we’ve had lots of economic growth. Over that period per capita income has increased by a whopping 77% and made America wealthier per capita that any society in the history of the world. That should mean the average American is 77% better off today then he or she was three and a half decades ago. Problem is, we aren’t. Instead, the real buying power of the wages of ordinary Americans has barely increased at all. Instead, all of that growth had been siphoned off to the top one percent – and most to the top .01%. That is not a theory. It is a documented fact.
Don’t get me wrong. Economic growth – growth in productivity – is a very good thing. It is the foundation of a better life. But growth by itself doesn’t guarantee that the growing economic bounty will be widely shared.
In fact, today the stock market is at record heights, corporate profits are at record highs and the percentage of national income going to wages is at a record low.
Fixing these things requires that we change the rules of the economic game so they require that those who do the work to create the new wealth can share its benefits.
Rules like:

• Minimum wage laws that guarantee that everyone who works 40 hours a week must be paid a living wage – a wage that allows them to support a family;
• Laws guaranteeing that workers in every workplace can bargain through their unions and demand middle class wages and good working conditions –since union wages are consistently higher than non-union wages;
• Laws that require that women who do similar work are paid just as much as men;
• Rules that require employers to pay overtime to all employees except well-paid executives and professionals;
• Financial regulation that prevents big Wall Street banks from siphoning off and then risking billions of dollars on speculative gambling schemes;
• Laws preventing the sons and daughters of multi-millionaires from using the Trust Fund loophole to avoid paying billions in taxes – thereby forcing the rest of us to pay the difference if we want decent public services.

In his State of the Union Speech, President Obama outlined a program for Middle Class Economics that does just that. Not surprisingly, it was met with a resounding NO from the GOP – all the while they feigned increased interest in addressing the problem of stagnating middle class wages.
In fact, in his State of the Union speech, President Obama outlined the terms of the debate that will define the political dialogue over the next decade in American politics.

Read more…

The following article by TDS founding editor William Galson, author of The New Challenge to Market Democracies: The Political and Social Costs of Economic Stagnation, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
As President Obama strode to the podium to deliver his 2015 State of the Union address, he had good reason to feel confident. Helped by a surge of job creation, and probably by lower gas prices as well, public satisfaction with the state of the economy and confidence in its future course had risen substantially during the past three months. Not coincidentally, so had the president’s job approval. Seemingly unfazed by his party’s rout in the 2014 midterm elections, he responded by going on the offensive with a series of bold executive orders and actions. And the White House’s innovative decision to release major policy proposals in advance of the speech garnered public attention, much of it favorable.
Still, as Mr. Obama began speaking, a key uncertainty remained: What balance would he strike between the desire to shape the political terrain for 2016 and the imperatives of governing in 2015? The former required bold initiatives, of a kind likely to evoke sharply negative reactions from Republicans who command majorities in both the House and the Senate. But successful legislating this year will require compromise with those very majorities. Could he thread the needle, making the Democratic political case for next year without undermining the possibility of legislative progress this year?
Mr. Obama delivered a clear, forceful, partisan speech whose substance stood in tension with his closing invocation of One America. In working to shape the political terrain for 2016, he may have weakened whatever prospects there were for meaningful cooperation with the opposition this year on issues other than trade.
The White House apparently believes that Republicans will be able to distinguish between agenda-setting rhetoric and the quieter process of legislation. Republican leaders probably can. Whether their rank-and-file will be able or willing to do the same is another matter. Early in his speech, the president tried to crystallize the changing public mood. We’ve been through tough times over the part fifteen years, and for many, the tough times remain. “But tonight,” he declared, “we turn the page.” He dubbed 2014 a “breakthrough year” for the U.S. economy and cited the end of U.S. combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Overall, he affirmed, “The shadow of crisis has passed.”
No doubt many Republicans would disagree, especially about the state of the world. And they would have a case. There is an arc of crisis from Europe to North Africa and throughout the Middle East. As the United States has retreated, the forces of oppression and anarchy have advanced. In recent surveys, majorities of Americans have expressed rising fears about terrorism and doubts that Mr. Obama’s approach to our adversaries has been tough enough. The president’s stated determination to avoid “costly wars that strain our military” may not reassure these skeptics. And his declaration that he would veto new sanctions on Iran while negotiations on its nuclear program continue will only bolster the determination of many legislators in both parties to enact those tougher measures.

Read more…