Ronald Brownstein’s National Journal post “Being In the Middle Class Means Worrying About Falling Behind” reports on a new “Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor Poll exploring the public’s perception of what it means to be middle class in America today.” Brownstein explains:

…Fully 56 percent of those surveyed said they believe they will eventually climb to a higher rung on the economic ladder than they occupy now. But even more said they worry about falling into a lower economic class sometime in the next few years. Reaffirming the results in earlier Heartland Monitor polls, most of those surveyed said the middle class today enjoys less opportunity, job security, and disposable income than earlier generations did. And strikingly small percentages of American adults said they consider it “very realistic” that they can meet such basic financial goals as paying for their children’s college, retiring comfortably, or saving “enough money to … deal with a health emergency or job loss.”

In addition to this bleak prognosis, Brownstein notes that the perception of what defines a decent middle class life has headed south: “Asked to define what it means to be middle class, a solid 54 percent majority of respondents picked “having the ability to keep up with expenses and hold a steady job while not falling behind or taking on too much debt”; a smaller percentage defined it in terms of getting ahead and accumulating savings.”
Looking toward the future, the respondents are less than optimistic:”The share of Americans who say the country is on the right track reached a four-year high of 41 percent in the Heartland Monitor survey conducted just after his victory in November. But that optimism plummeted in the latest survey to less than three in 10. The number of people who expect the economy to improve over the next year also skidded.” He adds that “the results highlight how much economic anxiety and political alienation still shadow daily life, even after the blackest clouds of the Great Recession have lifted.”
The poll includes some interesting data on class self-perception:

Asked to define their class status on a 5-point scale, just 2 percent identified themselves as upper class and 12 percent as upper-middle class. More respondents placed themselves below the middle: 12 percent said they were lower class, and 26 percent called themselves lower-middle class. By far the largest group–46 percent–self-identified as middle class…Whites were twice as likely as minorities to say their children would settle in the lower class or lower-middle class and slightly more likely to predict they would reach the middle class. These somber sentiments, as in the earlier Heartland surveys, differed surprisingly little between whites with and without four-year college degrees.

Despite pessimism about the economy, many respondents retained a healthy optimism about their personal future, as Brownstein explains,

…Overall, 56 percent of those surveyed said they thought it very or somewhat likely they would reach “a higher class at some point” in their lives. Just 42 percent thought it unlikely they would climb. Optimism is even more common among Americans of working age; more than four-fifths of adults under 30, more than two-thirds of those in their 30s, and just over three-fifths of people in their 40s think they will rise, compared to much smaller proportions of seniors and workers soon to retire.
But once again, the racial divide was substantial. Almost three-fourths of minorities said they considered it likely they would rise; whites, though, split exactly in half, with little difference between those with or without a college degree.

Yet, even underlying this basic optimism, “Fully 59 percent of respondents voiced concern “about falling out of [their] current economic class over the next few years,” including 28 percent who were “very” concerned. Only 40 percent said they weren’t concerned about losing ground.” Much of the anxiety centered around fear of losing jobs and/or health insurance and the data shows lots of worry about paying for their children’s a college education and quality of retirement.
Nearly all of the extensive data in the survey affirms Brownwstein’s contention that “most families now believe the most valuable–and elusive–possession in American life isn’t any tangible acquisition, such as a house or a car, but rather economic security.” It’s not enough that Republicans have demonstrated their utter incompetence in helping to foster broadly-shared economic security. Somehow, the Democratic Party has got to persuade a healthy majority that our candidates offer the best hope for creating policies that can support their aspirations.

Dear Readers:
Rand Paul’s recent appearances on largely African-American college campuses to promote the notion that the GOP was always a firm supporter of civil rights and the true friend of African-Americans was met with widespread and well-deserved ridicule.
But the commentary failed to confront a key fact: this claim is an integral part of a larger attempt by conservatives to whitewash the GOP’s shameful past on racial issues, an attempt that extends from Glenn Beck, the Tea Party and other right-wing commentators on the one hand, to the pages of the National Review on the other.
TDS is pleased to offer the following TDS Strategy Memo that sets the record straight:
The media coverage of Rand Paul’s “the GOP was always for civil rights” revisionist history failed to clearly report the central reality: that the exploitation of white racial resentment was for decades the GOP’s fundamental political strategy regarding African-Americans.
To read the Memo, click HERE

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:
When I think of Elizabeth Warren, I think of her as a fiery warrior on behalf of consumers and the 99 percent, fearlessly taking on the biggest and baddest of all the special interests, Wall Street. But she is also the senior senator from the great state Massachusetts, and her first speech on the floor of the Senate was not on any economic issue, but on the terrorism at the Boston Marathon. It was a beautiful speech, well worth taking the time to read or view below. While, on one level, it was the classic kind of post-tragedy speech you would expect from a politician who represents the place the terrible events happened, full of praise for the courage and resolve of her home state’s people, she did something more with the speech which reminded me of why I love her:

She talked about the value of community, about our responsibility for each other. She used one of my all-time favorite quotes, from early Pilgrim John Winthrop. Winthrop is most famous for his “City on a Hill” speech, which has inspired many Americans with its idea of American exceptionalism. But for Winthrop, this new land would only be exceptional, would only be blessed by God, if we looked out for each other, if we were our brothers and sisters’ keepers. In the passage Warren quoted, Winthrop said that our mission was:

to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, we must be knit together, in this work, as one man. … We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together…. So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.

Winthrop understood that America could only be great if its people created a beloved community where we all cared about each other and were there for each other, and that is the central idea driving Warren’s philosophy as well. As she put it, echoing Winthrop’s most fundamental idea:

To all the families who lost their children; to all those who were injured and wear the scars of tragedy; to all the citizen-heroes, the first responders, the healers, who acted with courage in the midst of chaos; to all those who bore witness at Boylston Street; and to the people of Boston and of Massachusetts: No one can replace what we have lost. No one can relieve the weight of our sorrow.
But here today, and in the days and weeks ahead, wherever we are, we will grieve together, hurt together, and pray together.
And so today, I rise to remember the lives of those we have lost, to support those who survived, and to honor those who served.
Today, we remember Martin Richard, an eight-year-old who, like third graders everywhere, spent time drawing pictures. A little boy who loved to play soccer, hockey, and baseball in his neighborhood in Dorchester. We also pray for his sister and mother to recover from their injuries.
We remember Krystle Campbell, who grew up in Medford and never missed the Marathon. Lively and happy, Krystle was always there for others. When her grandmother was recovering from an operation, Krystle moved in to help care for her, because that’s the kind of young woman she was.
We remember Lu Lingzi, who came to the United States from China to study statistics. She loved Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream, and she posted to her friends that morning that she had a wonderful breakfast. Her passing unites the world in our common humanity.
We will miss them.
To those who were injured on fifteenth of April, know that we are here for you.
Every year during the Marathon, we are one family. We cheer for each other, and we carry each other across finish lines. When tragedy strikes, we are also one family. We hurt together, and we help together.
In the weeks and months ahead, your struggles will be our struggles, your pain our pain, your efforts our efforts. We will be together through sorrow and anger, rehabilitation and recovery. We will be together because we are one family.

This is the kind of idea that makes me passionate in my love for this country: that out of many, we became one people, one American family. That in this most diverse of countries, that when tragedy strikes, we come together and help each other. That when bad luck knocks us down, that our fellow Americans lend a hand to help lift us back to our feet. That we run toward the sounds of danger, not away, when our brothers and sisters are in danger. That is a country worth fighting for, worth believing in. That is America at its best.

As the state President Obama lost by the smallest margin in 2012, North Carolina is as good a place as any for closely monitoring the temperature of public opinion on political issues. What makes NC even more interesting, however, is that voters are apparently beginning to oppose wingnut polices in impressive numbers. As Tom Jensen explains in his Public Policy Polling post, “NC voters oppose many GOP proposals“:

The Republicans as a whole are getting poor marks for their leadership over state government though- 38% of voters approve of the job they’re doing to 52% who disapprove. That’s largely a function of the legislature. Republicans legislators have a 34/53 favorability rating, and the General Assembly as a whole has just a 20% approval with 56% of voters disapproving of it.
A whole bevy of bills introduced by Republican legislators recently are proving to be quite unpopular:
-Only 25% of voters support a proposal to forbid parents from claiming college students registered to vote away from home as dependents on their state taxes, compared to 57% who are opposed. This is another one where the Republican legislators supporting the measure are out of touch with actual Republican voters- only 26% support it with 56% opposed, not that different from the numbers among Democrats which are 22% supportive and 61% opposed.
-Just 33% of voters support cutting the early voting period by a week, while 59% are opposed. Republicans do narrowly support this idea (51/42), but Democrats (22/70) and independents (28/62) are heavily opposed to it.
-Only 22% of voters support eliminating the state’s renewable energy standards, while 39% are against that idea. Republican voters (29/25) only narrowly support eliminating the standard while Democrats (13/47) and independents (28/41) are pretty firmly against it.
-Only 28% of voters support a proposal to make it a crime for law enforcement officers to enforce federal gun laws on North Carolina manufactured fire arms, while 42% are opposed. Democrats (33/41), Republicans (24/41), and independents (26/46) all think that one’s a bad idea.
-The only high profile Republican initiative we polled that has much traction with voters is the one to make Christianity the official state religion. 42% support that to 45% who are opposed and while much of that support is because a majority of Republicans favor it (53/33) it actually has 41% support from Democrats too, much more appeal across party lines than any of these other proposals. Despite the decent level of support for Christianity as the state religion, only 16% of voters agree with the state legislator who labeled a prayer to Allah as an act of terrorism last week, although that does go up to 25% among Republicans.

Despite all of the recent coverage about wingnut legislative proposals in NC, the political drift of the state’s voters is generally center-left. As Jensen adds, “…Democrats have a 45-41 lead on the generic legislative ballot…On another front it looks like North Carolina’s swing state status is likely to continue in 2016 if Hillary Clinton is the Democratic candidate for President. She leads Marco Rubio 49/42 and Rand Paul 52/40 in hypothetical match ups in the state.”
What NC Democrats may need more than anything to build on the goodwill edge they have with voters at present is money. NC conservative causes are lavishly funded by the state’s Republican sugar daddy Art Pope and other corporate minions. Dems who live in solidly blue states who want to contribute to strengthening the NC Democratic party can do so right here.

At the National Journal Charlie Cook’s “Too Early to Know Whether Democrats Will Fall Prey to Second-Term Jinx” offers an interesting snapshot analysis of the upcoming midterms:

… Recently, we have had three back-to-back wave elections, with 2006 and 2008 in favor of Democrats and 2010 benefiting Republicans. While 2012 cannot really be considered a wave, the election did display certain dynamics that benefited Democrats–at least in national races, although not in gubernatorial ones.
It’s important to remember that wave elections are not the norm–they are actually the exception to the rule…Ronald Reagan unseated President Carter by a 10 percentage-point margin, and Republicans gained 12 seats in the Senate and 34 in the House; this was the first wave election our country had seen since the 1974 Watergate upheaval. The next true wave election after 1980 was in 1994, during the Newt Gingrich-led Republican takeover of the House, which resulted in a 52-seat gain, accompanied by a strong eight-seat gain in the Senate. (Note: Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama switched from the Democratic to the GOP the day after the election, bringing the total Republican gain to nine.) After 1994, there was not another wave for 12 years. Then we saw three consecutive wave elections: 2006, 2008, and the reverse wave in 2010, when Republicans were the beneficiaries and Democrats were the victims.
The safer way to look at congressional elections is to start off assuming that any election will be a normal “all politics is local” situation, while constantly looking closely for signs that it might not be. Keep an eye out for the chance that it turns out to be a wave year, rather than a relatively level battlefield.

However, adds Cook,

… Certain seats gained in a wave election can’t be held in another election where that party isn’t enjoying the strong, beneficial dynamics of the previous election….Often, some of the candidates who win in these cycles aren’t that good–they just had the good fortune of running in a terrific year for their party…These seats are the ones that are often the first to go in an adverse or even normal election year.

But there is some reason for hope for Democrats, Cook believes

Coming out of the 2012 elections, the Republican Party is clearly facing some challenges. Some problems are demographic, specifically the damage to its brand among many minority, female, and younger voters. Others are more ideological: To many voters in the middle, the rhetoric and positioning of the GOP in the past few years has been much more off-putting to these nonideological individuals than that of Democrats. It’s important to note that at other times, the shoe is still on the other foot, and Democrats are the offending party to those middle-of-the-road voters.
Finally, Republicans have fallen behind when it comes to campaign technology. They have gone from a state-of-the-art operation in 2004, with the George W. Bush reelection effort led by Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman, to now appearing to be, on a multitude of levels, one, two, or three steps behind their Democratic foes. How long it will take the Republicans to catch up remains to be seen, but campaign-technology experts point out that given the rapid pace of technological change, any advantage by one party is only a temporary edge built on sand. It is not that hard for the other party to catch up or leapfrog ahead.

It’s encouraging that an astute political observer like Charlie Cook can imagine a pro-Democratic wave, thanks to the unprecedented obstruction that the Republican party has come to embody. But Cook is right, that a technology advantage can leapfrog from party to party, and the Republicans certainly have the dough to play catch-up. Clearly Dems should not waste a minute in leveraging their ground game edge. Perhaps even more important, Dems must amplify their message that the economic recovery can only proceed on the heels of a resounding defeat for the GOP in 2014.

Kevin Roose’s New York Magazine post “Meet the 28-Year-Old Grad Student Who Just Shook the Global Austerity Movement” is getting lotsa buzz on facebook and elsewhere. For those who haven’t seen it yet, here’s an excerpt:

Most Ph.D. students spend their days reading esoteric books and stressing out about the tenure-track job market. Thomas Herndon, a 28-year-old economics grad student at UMass Amherst, just used part of his spring semester to shake the intellectual foundation of the global austerity movement.
Herndon became instantly famous in nerdy economics circles this week as the lead author of a recent paper, “Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff,” that took aim at a massively influential study by two Harvard professors named Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff. Herndon found some hidden errors in Reinhart and Rogoff’s data set, then calmly took the entire study out back and slaughtered it. Herndon’s takedown — which first appeared in a Mike Konczal post that crashed its host site with traffic — was an immediate sensation. It was cited by prominent anti-austerians like Paul Krugman, spoken about by incoming Bank of England governor Mark Carney, and mentioned on CNBC and several other news outlets as proof that the pro-austerity movement is based, at least in part, on bogus math.
…Herndon chose Reinhart and Rogoff’s 2010 paper, “Growth in a Time of Debt,” in part, because it has been one of the most politically influential economic papers of the last decade. It claims, among other things, that countries whose debt exceeds 90 percent of their annual GDP experience slower growth than countries with lower debt loads — a figure that has been cited by people like Paul Ryan and Tim Geithner to justify slashing government spending and implementing other austerity measures on struggling economies.

It gets even more delicious. Do click on Roose’s post to savor the rest of the feast.

The following article, by TDS managing Editor Ed Kilgore, is cross-posted from the Washington Monthly:
Charles Pierce and others obviously beat me to the punch in mocking Maureen Dowd’s excoriation of the president for a failure of leadership on gun control. But an awful lot of people read the New York Times, and an awful lot of progressives seem to share Dowd’s attachment to the Action Figure model of the presidency. To an embarrassing extent Dowd’s expectations of Obama are based on Hollywood. People a bit more grounded in the real world often compare Obama unfavorably with Lyndon B. Johnson, thought to have imposed civil rights and health care legislation on a reactionary Senate by sheer force of will (I did a revisionist take on LBJ’s dominance of Congress for TNR back in 2009, noting that even this primal politician with an unequalled understanding of Senate rules and an unparalleled willingness to use every lever available to a president had to compromise more often than is now remembered).
Some readers are probably familiar with the Green Lantern Theory, a sardonic approach to the belief that sheer willpower is the essential ingredient in national and especially presidential power, as first developed by Matt Yglesias and elaborated upon by Brendan Nyhan and others. Dowd seems to have devolved this fantasy right down to the level of The Little Engine That Could, or maybe a Don Draper pitch from Mad Men:
There were ways to get to 60 votes. The White House just had to scratch it out with a real strategy and a never-let-go attitude.
Obama hates selling. He thinks people should just accept the right thing to do. But as Joe Manchin, the West Virginia Democrat, noted, senators have their own tough selling job to do back home. “In the end you can really believe in something,” he told The Times’s Jennifer Steinhauer, “but you have to go sell it.”
The problem, of course, is right there in Dowd’s text, though she doesn’t seem to notice it. Unlike LBJ in enacting Medicare or Medicaid, Obama didn’t just face the challenge of getting a majority of the Senate to enact Manchin-Toomey. Yes, LBJ did have to overcome a filibuster in securing passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but aside from all of the external events that helped make that happen, it took decades of efforts along with the blood of countless martyrs. Had LBJ faced a 60-vote Senate every day, even with the vast Democratic margins he enjoyed after his 1964 re-election, it’s unlikely his legacy would be as imposing as we rightly remember it.
So the demise of Manchin-Toomey can lead progressives in one of two directions. We can whine about Obama’s shortcomings or bewail the unholy power of the NRA and long for an action-figure president who can banish opposition with charisma and bare-knuckled exercises of power. Or we can put pressure on Senate Democratic leaders to use their own power to reduce if not abolish the unprecedented ability of obstructionist minorities to impose their views on the rest of us. Regular readers know which route I prefer. Filibuster Delenda Est.

Eric Alterman’s “More B.S. About ‘Both Sides” at The Nation does a particularly good job of holding false equivalency pundits accountable for their unbridled distortions — including even some Republicans. As Alterman expalins:

…The recently concluded 112th Congress set a record for the lowest number of laws passed since record-keeping began, in 1948. We are in the midst (and at the mercy) of a budget sequester that was intended only to scare Congress into behaving responsibly. Republicans, in thrall to Tea Party fanatics, refuse even to discuss new sources of revenue. Barack Obama, meanwhile, has not only proposed a remarkably impecunious domestic budget but has also broken what has been an iron rule of nearly all Democratic politicians for more than half a century by offering to reduce future Social Security payments through the mechanism of a “chained CPI” that slows down the cost-of-living increases built into the payments received by seniors. Predictably (and understandably), he has infuriated his base by doing so.
How are these diametrically opposed approaches being portrayed in the mainstream media? According to Politico’s Jake Sherman, Obama’s offer “might have been viewed as a bit more substantive. But [the] Republican leadership’s calculus has changed. Since the fiscal cliff tax deal, which raised taxes on families earning more than $450,000, Republicans are demanding more expansive changes to entitlements.” The rest of Sherman’s report is devoted to detailing the Republican wish list without any sense of the radicalism of these demands, or their consistent unpopularity with real people (as opposed to pundits).
What about Slate’s John Dickerson? He blames unnamed “forces of partisanship, ego, and limited imagination that have made crisis budgeting so dreary to watch…. The two parties have not even been in proximity of a major bipartisan deal in so long the very fact that they are in the same neighborhood is a possible sign that our system is not irreparably broken.” Meanwhile, in a column called “Reclaim the Center” on the opinion page of The New York Times online, multimillionaire investment banker and Democratic Party funder Steven Rattner complains of “proselyt-
izers of wacky, extreme ideas” from “the left,” as well as from “conservatives,” before demanding that “the sensible center…rise up and push for a rational approach to our fiscal challenges.”
…The Republican Party has gone off the rails by virtually every available measure, and the media continue to blame “both sides.

It’s never hard to find examples of false equivalency excesses in today’s political environment. But Alterman’s got some numbers too:

Let’s look at some data. According to a forthcoming study in the Drake Law Review by Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, we are experiencing “the largest and most uniform gap in the ideological orientation and voting patterns in the Senate and the House of Representatives in modern times.” Keith Poole of the University of Georgia and Howard Rosenthal of New York University analyzed decades of data and discovered that Republicans have moved approximately six times as far rightward as Democrats have leftward in recent decades (and the Democratic drift is due almost entirely to the collapse of the Southern conservative wing of the party). The respected pollster Andrew Kohut reports: “In my decades of polling, I recall only one moment when a party had been driven as far from the center as the Republican Party has been today,” referring to the Nixon landslide against George McGovern in 1972.

Amazingly, even some Republicans are getting sick of it:

…Scot Faulkner, personnel director for the Reagan/Bush campaign in 1980, and Jonathan Riehl, former speechwriter for the right-wing Luntz Global consulting firm, recently complained of the corrosive effects of a “Republican world view that was devoid of facts and critical thinking,” combined with the creation of “a new self-perpetuating political echo chamber.” This follows on the remarks by longtime Republican congressional staffer Mike Lofgren, who noted two years ago that “the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe.” And respected scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein announced last year that “The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

The most interesting question is whether or not this “blame both sides” fatigue will set in with swing voters in 2014. if so, anemic mid term turnout may no longer serve as the GOP’s favorite hole card.

Josh Eidelson’s “AFL-CIO’s Non-Union Worker Group Headed Into Workplaces in Fifty States” at The Nation spotlights a promising new project:

The country’s largest non-union workers’ group will soon announce plans to establish chapters in every state, achieve financial self-sufficiency and extend its organizing–so far focused on politics and policy–directly into the workplace.
“This organization has done really what nobody else thought could be done,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told The Nation, “and that’s recruit more than three million people without a union to be part of the labor movement.”
That organization is Working America, the AFL-CIO affiliate for workers without a union on the job. Created ten years ago, it now claims 3.2 million members–more than any of the individual unions in the AFL-CIO, or any of the other “alt-labor” groups organizing and mobilizing non-union workers in the United States. “We’re taking the momentum that we’ve built organizing workers in communities,” said Working America Executive Director Karen Nussbaum, “and beginning to organize a community in the workplace.”

Nussbaum envisions Working America chapters in all 50 states. “We want to figure out a way to make membership more open, to make membership in a union not depend on workers being willing to endure trial by fire in an election or extended pitched battle with the employer for voluntary recognition,” adds AFL-CIO General Counsel Craig Becker. Eidelson reports that a critical part of the campaign is establishing “financial self-sufficiency,” and:

Lacking union contracts with automatic dues payments from members, such groups generally draw the majority of their funding from donations from unions or non-profits. “In the long run, that’s the litmus test,” said Nussbaum, “because worker organizations that aren’t self-sustaining can’t be democratic.” Groups that are “dependent on outside funding,” she added, can “meet objectives, but they don’t sustain and build the labor movement in the long run. And I think that’s the challenge for us at this point.”…Organizers said last year that 15 percent of Working America’s members pay dues (suggested payment: $5 per year); they acknowledged that its membership ranks include people who no longer remember signing up in the first place.

University of Texas Law Professor Julius Getman, author of “Restoring the Power of Unions: It Takes a Movement” believes that Working America could help if “it puts the AFL-CIO in direct contact with workers, which is something that doesn’t always happen…there are lots of layers of bureaucracy and authority between the AFL-CIO and workers on lots occasions.” he believes it could help “develop a greater sense of working class solidarity” among non-union workers, and offer “a sense of being important, and being involved in something worthwhile.”
Restoration of a vibrant trade union movement in the U.S. remains a critical prerequisite for a stronger Democratic Party and a thriving middle class. Working America is looking increasingly like the vanguard organization the labor movement needs to make it a reality.

Michael A. Memoli and Melanie Mason have an L.A. Times post, “Gun control backers consider strategy after Senate defeat,” which provides some interesting observations. Regarding Democratic prospects for electing a more favorable Senate in 2014, the authors say,

Supporters of stricter gun laws have organization, money and — after the Senate blocked an expansion of background-check requirements — fury…What they don’t have is a clear path to changing the political arithmetic of the U.S. Congress.
None of next year’s Senate races offers a good opportunity to replace a senator who backs gun rights with one who supports tougher laws.

At present it appears that 2016 may offer Dems and gun safety reform advocates a better political landscape.”Several Republican gun rights supporters face reelection that year in states where gun control has strong voter appeal; none fitting that description is on the ballot in 2014,” note the authors.
Sen. Chuck Schumer, on the other hand, sees a groundswell of support for reform in the making. “”Things change quickly here in Washington…they’ve changed for gay marriage. They’re changing for immigration. And they will change for gun safety sooner than you think.” Then there is the likelihood of more mass shootings in the not-too-distant future, if historical patterns hold, which could help fulfill Schumer’s prediction.
But it’s not about transforming public opinion, since polls indicate 90 percent or more of the public, including hefty majorities of Republicans and even NRA members support national legislation requiring background checks. With respect to electioneering, Dems don’t have enough one-issue voters for whom gun safety trumps other issues. But it is certainly possible that the issue could rise as a political priority among swing voters, either by more tragic events, or alternatively through more effective educational outreach on the part of the white house or the Democratic Party.
There is also a possibility that fed-up Dem leaders will secure filibuster reform, which would likely insure enactment of a federal background checks. Looking towards the 2014 election, however, it’s not hard to understand why Harry Reid may once again prove reluctant to weaken the Senate minority leader’s filibuster options.
One of the key lessons of the defeat of background checks is that money and activism can trump mere public opinion — even overwhelming majorities. As J. Adam Skaggs, Sr.,. counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU Law School explains in a NYT forum, “Last year, the N.R.A. outspent the leading gun control lobby 73 to 1. Senators facing tough re-election campaigns ignore the wishes of 90 percent of Americans because they fear the gun lobby could mount a $9 million ad campaign against them.” Skaggs proposes:

The solution to this political dysfunction is to empower regular voters as a counterweight to big political money. The Empowering Citizens Act, sponsored by Representatives David Price and Chris Van Hollen, would do precisely that. By matching grass-roots donations from regular voters with public funds, the system would give Congressional candidates an alternative path to victory in which they depend on constituents and voters, instead of deep-pocketed donors seeking political favors. Such a system would give officials the courage to stand up and act in the public interest, not on behalf of the special interests.

The gun lobby certainly has a financial advantage over reform supporters. But campaign finance reform could be the game-changer gun safety reformers need to level the battlefield. Now would be a good time to work on that.