The following article by Michael Lux, co-founder and CEO of Progressive Strategies and author of “The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be,” is cross-posted from HuffPo:
With the middle class being beaten down, Wall Street and the top 1 percent still riding way too high, the Occupy and progressive movements finding new ways to make economic issues resonate in the media, a left-of-center populism is clearly on the rise. Even the famously restrained and centrist President Obama is kicking some serious populist ass. (Did you see the speech to the UAW he delivered on Tuesday? Amazing. I think it is my favorite Obama speech ever.)
One of the most interesting trends I am observing about 2012 era economic populism, though, is how much of it is being carried by women candidates. The original Populist movement back in the 1890s had some great women leaders like Mary Elizabeth Lease and Mother Jones, but in more recent decades most of the politicians one tends to think of as populists have been men — people like Jim Hightower, Tom Harkin, Paul Wellstone, Jesse Jackson, John Edwards, Brian Schweitzer and Sherrod Brown, for example. In this election cycle, though, the number of terrific economic populists who are women candidates is a new trend. There are a bunch of them in the House (including Darcy Burner in Washington, Sue Thorn in West Virginia, and Mary Jo Kilroy in Ohio), but I’ll just focus on the Senate today.
We can start of course with the inimitable Elizabeth Warren. She came on the national radar screen after being appointed by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to be the chair of the TARP oversight board, and she thrilled people by doing the unthinkable: she actually held officials from both political parties and the big Wall Street banks accountable. She has shown an uncanny ability to articulate in an understandable way how Wall Street messed up the economy, and is the most genuine and passionate advocate for the middle class that this country has seen in years. Full disclosure: she is a dear friend, so I am admittedly biased, but I think I speak for most progressives in saying she is one of the most exciting candidates for public office we have ever had run.
Here’s the deal, though: as good as Warren is, some of these other women candidates running for Senate this year, while not as well known, are in the same league as her. Take Tammy Baldwin, for example, one of the great, unsung workhorse heroes of the House. She has quietly built a reputation as a tremendously effective fighter on one progressive issue after another, and has been a true leader on economic issues. For example, it was Baldwin who took the lead in sponsoring a resolution in the House arguing against a weak settlement with the big banks on robo-signing fraud at a time when the issue was hardly on the radar screen for most members of Congress. With the Scott Walker and state Senate recall elections and Baldwin’s Senate race (along with being an important target state for Obama and having some other key races up and down the ballot), Wisconsin is ground zero for trying to win progressive victories this year.
Another likely Senate candidate with the news of Olympia Snowe’s retirement is Congresswoman Chellie Pingree. I have known Pingree since the mid-1990s when she was the state Senate Majority leader, and she has been a strong progressive leader throughout her career, including a stint as president of Common Cause before she ran for Congress. She will run a strongly populist progressive race going after the wealthy corporate special interests that are strangling the economy, and will be a tremendous advocate for the working class voters in Maine who have been hammered by this economy.
Another candidate that I am very excited about is Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota. Being an old-school Midwestern populist from Nebraska, I love small state races like this one where the costs are cheap and person-to-person campaigning is the single most important factor. Heitkamp is a serious populist who took on the tobacco industry and other big business interests as attorney general. She is far more like Byron Dorgan, the great North Dakota populist who retired in 2010, who had led the fight against the repeal of Glass-Steagall and for eliminating corporate tax loopholes, than she is like Kent Conrad, who is a decidedly more pro-corporate Senator.
In the Hawaii Senate race, I hear great things about Mazie Hirono. Hawaii’s politics are very different culturally from those on the mainland, so traditional heartland populist language isn’t always in vogue, but Hirono is clearly running as an unabashed progressive on a wide range of economic issues, and has established herself as the clear front runner in both the primary and general elections.
Finally, in Nevada, Congresswoman Shelley Berkley is running a populist race for Senate against far right-wing Congressman Dean Heller, whose vicious attacks on policies like the DREAM Act put him in a category with Sharron Angle. Berkley is also into taking on the big banks to help the 60 percent of Nevada homeowners whose mortgages are underwater. She is putting the fight for homeowners and strong, comprehensive immigration reform at the center of her campaign. And there is no one more quintessentially Vegas than Berkley, who knows and loves her hometown and the people in it with a passion.
These six women are all great candidates, and all are running on classically populist themes in talking about the economy. Elizabeth Warren has gotten most of the attention, and no one could be more excited about her race than me, but these other races are important as well. Baldwin would be the best senator Wisconsin ever elected, even better than Russ Feingold in my view because of her effectiveness as a legislator. Pingree would immediately vault to a leadership position on the money in politics issue, which with Feingold gone needs a strong Senate leader. Heitkamp would bring back some much needed populism from the plains states, Hirono would be the most progressive senator Hawaii ever had, and Berkley would bring passion to the fight for Wall Street accountability on housing. Each of the six are strong candidates, either ahead in the polling or well within range of pulling out a win.
If all or even most of this class of women senators were to win in 2012, it would be historic, easily the highest quality group of new women senators ever. Progressives should do everything we can to rally behind them and help carry them to victory.

Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, and labor lawyer Moshe Z. Marvit provide a much needed and timely reminder in their New York Times op-ed “A Civil Right to Unionize.” Kahlenberg and Marvit, authors of the forthcoming “Why Labor Organizing Should Be a Civil Right: Rebuilding a Middle-Class Democracy by Enhancing Worker Voice” provide some insightful observations about the current state of the American labor movement, among them,

Corporations will tell you that the American labor movement has declined so significantly — to around 7 percent of the private-sector work force today, from 35 percent of the private sector in the mid-1950s — because unions are obsolete in a global economy, where American workers have to compete against low-wage nonunion workers in other countries. But many vibrant industrial democracies, including Germany, have strong unions despite facing the same pressures from globalization.
Other skeptics suggest that because laws now exist providing for worker safety and overtime pay, American employees no longer feel the need to join unions. But polling has shown that a majority of nonunion workers would like to join a union if they could.
In fact, the greatest impediment to unions is weak and anachronistic labor laws….

The authors advocate a clear and simple proposal to address the problem:

…It’s time to add the right to organize a labor union, without employer discrimination, to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, because that right is as fundamental as freedom from discrimination in employment and education. This would enshrine what the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. observed in 1961 at an A.F.L.-C.I.O. convention: “The two most dynamic and cohesive liberal forces in the country are the labor movement and the Negro freedom movement. Together, we can be architects of democracy.”

The right to organize and join unions is clearly enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and protected by the U.S. Constitution and well established labor law. Yet the right is poorly protected “because the penalties — mitigated back pay after extended hearings — are so weak. ”
Marvit and Kahlenberg believe that the best specific remedy would be to amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to include protection of unions and their members:

Our proposal would make disciplining or firing an employee “on the basis of seeking union membership” illegal just as it now is on the basis of race, color, sex, religion and national origin. It would expand the fundamental right of association encapsulated in the First Amendment and apply it to the private workplace just as the rights of equality articulated in the 14th Amendment have been so applied.

The Civil Rights and Labor movements have a lot in common, and it makes sense that they should find protection under the same legislation, as the authors explain:

The labor and civil rights movements have shared values (advancing human dignity), shared interests (people of color are disproportionately working-class), shared historic enemies (the Jim Crow South was also a bastion of right-to-work laws) and shared tactics (sit-ins, strikes and other forms of nonviolent protest). King, it should be remembered, was gunned down in Memphis in 1968, where he was supporting striking black sanitation workers who marched carrying posters with the message “I Am a Man.” Conceiving of labor organizing as a civil right, moreover, would recast the complexity of labor law reform in clear moral terms.

“…There are many factors that help explain why the nation has progressed on King’s vision for civil rights while it has moved backward on his goal of economic equality,” note the authors. “…Among the most important is the substantial difference between the strength of our laws on civil rights and labor. It is time to write protections for labor into the Civil Rights Act itself.”
It’s an interesting idea, and one which could prove to be of great benefit to the Democratic Party.

On Tuesday J. P. Green flagged Ari Berman’s article, “Who Will ‘Reagan Democrats’ Support in 2012?” in The Nation. Berman’s perceptive take on Democratic prospects for winning the support of this pivotal constituency merits a little more attention.
Berman, author of “Herding Donkeys: The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics,” quotes TDS Co-Editor Stan Greenberg on the failure of Romney and Santorum to generate much excitement among white working class voters:

“There’s lots of evidence that Reagan Democrats have pulled back from Romney,” says Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg, who has studied this group of voters for three decades. “But we don’t know yet whether they’ll embrace Santorum. They do not really know him, though conservative pundits think he will have more of a working class appeal than Romney. Could be true–but only because Romney went Wall Street.”
Nor will Santorum’s outspoken social conservatism necessarily help him win Reagan Democrats. “I don’t think they are particularly socially conservative, if you are referring to abortion and family issues raised by Santorum,” Greenberg says. “They are fairly libertarian and anti-government intrusiveness–and are much more concerned with guns than the pill. They were/are strongly NRA in our research.” In 2008, Romney won Macomb County with 45 percent of the vote, while evangelical favorite Mike Huckabee came in a distant third.

In terms of Obama’s prospects, Berman adds that he lost the white working-class by 18 percent in 2008 and Dems lost them by a whopping 30 points in 2010. He notes Tom Edsall’s assertion that “Preparations by Democratic operatives for the 2012 election make it clear for the first time that the party will explicitly abandon the white working class.” However, says Berman,

Edsall’s prediction generated a lot of buzz, but turned out not to be true. Obama has a 43 percent approval rating among working class whites in the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll, higher than it was in 2008. At the beginning of 2011, Romney led Obama by around twenty points among blue-collar whites in Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin, according to internal polling by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner. At the end of last month, Romney led the president by only three among such voters in these Rust Belt battleground states, a seventeen-point swing over the past year. “White non-college voters in these states moved drastically away from Obama and Democrats between 2008 and 2010, but since then they have come back to basically the same levels they gave Democrats in 2008,” says GQR vice president Andrew Bauman.

And if Dems can stay in that range in the polls, 2012 should prove to be a very good year for the president and his party.

Eliza Gray posts at The New Republic on “The Five Senate Seats Democrats Want to Flip in 2012.” Gray begins by quoting Democratic strategist Tad Devine, who says “Olympia Snowe is the straw that broke the camel’s back for the Republicans in the Senate contest…The smart money six months ago was Republicans are going to take the Senate. The smart money now is they’re not going to.”
Gray sees solid prospects for Democratic pick-ups, including U.S. Senate seats in Arizona, Indiana, Maine, Massachusetts and Nevada, with the best chances in the two New England states. She provides an overview of the political climates and potential candidates for each state.
Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball has an unsigned post, which also has good news for Dems:

Maine is now the Democrats’ top opportunity to win a Republican-held Senate seat, better even than Massachusetts, where Democrat Elizabeth Warren is challenging Republican Sen. Scott Brown in a titanic struggle, and Nevada, where appointed Republican Sen. Dean Heller faces a stern challenge from Democratic Rep. Shelley Berkley. We recently switched Nevada to a TOSS UP, and Massachusetts has been a toss up in our ratings for some time. This gives Democrats another prime opportunity to play offense while they are defending many vulnerable seats across the country. The Senate is too close to call, but Harry Reid has a much better chance of remaining Senate majority leader today than he did at the start of the week…

With Dems having to defend 23 seats vs. the GOP’s defense of 10 seats, holding the Senate will still be a formidable challenge for Dems. But there is no question that Snowe’s retirement improves Dems chances dramatically.

Democrats can take encouragement from TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira’s article at The New Republic, “Why Obama’s Re-Election is Going to Look a Lot Like 2008.” Teixeira reviews the current political landscape’s GOP blunders and economic gains favoring Dems, and adds:

…It’s not just anecdotal evidence that suggests Obama’s re-election chances have improved–most of the polling data suggests the same. Obama has been running consistently ahead of his most likely challenger, Mitt Romney, in national polls–by an average of 4 points according to the Pollster.com website. Indeed, the closer you look at the numbers, the more reassuring the news: Obama, it seems, is well on his way to reconstructing the very coalition that elected him in 2008.
Consider these results from a recent Pew Center poll. In this poll, Obama is 8 points ahead of Romney, close to his victory margin in 2008 (7 points). But what is especially fascinating in this poll is its internals–how Obama is faring with key subgroups of voters. Start with minorities. Obama gets 93 percent of the black vote (he got 95 percent in 2008) and 79 percent of minorities overall (he got 80 percent in 2008). (The poll does not provide data on Hispanics, but the two most recent national polls of Hispanics give him 67 percent of these voters, identical to his 2008 performance.)
He also gets 44 percent of the white vote, compared to 43 percent in 2008. Moreover, if you break the white vote down by working class and college-educated, his performance is even more impressive. Among white college-educated voters he ties Romney 49-49, compared to the 4 point deficit he ran against John McCain, and loses white working voters by only 41-55, compared to his 18 point deficit against McCain.

Teixeira then takes a look at the factors driving forecasting models and sees more good news for Dems, especially in terms of the favorable change in the unemployment rate. Teixeira cites other improving economic statistics and notes that Nate Silver’s state-of-the-art forecasting model “gives Obama a 60 percent chance of winning, given a 2.5 percent growth rate this year and current job approval levels.” Teixeira adds that Alan Abramowitz’s forecasting model also give the President a good change to replicate his ’08 margins of victory.
In addition, notes Teixeira, President Obama’s rough first year in office may actually help him as voters contrast it with the recovery from those horrific economic numbers voters will hang on the previous administration. Teixeira adds that Larry Bartel’s forecasting model gives Obama an additional 7 percent bonus for managing the recovery.
Teixeira cautions against overconfidence, but concludes that “…the factors underlying these forecasts suggest that the recent re-emergence of Obama’s coalition is no fluke. If current trends continue, there’s a good chance that election day 2012 will look a lot like the one from 2008.”

Once again the conservatives have it backwards, this time regarding their assertion that the most Americans want no tax hikes or cuts in the military budget, notes TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira in his latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot.’ On military spending, Teixeira explains:

In a recent CBS/New York Times poll, the public overwhelmingly favored cutting military spending (52 percent) over cutting Social Security (13 percent) or Medicare (15 percent).

As for tax hikes:

And when it comes to taxing the rich, the public says bring it on! By a lopsided 67-29 margin, the public thought taxes on households earning $1 million or more a year should be increased to help deal with the budget deficit.

“The conservative approach to fiscal issues takes too many reasonable policy approaches off the table just because they don’t fit with conservative ideology,” Teixeira explains. “The public evidently agrees.”

Writing in New York magazine, Jonathan Chait offers a plausible explanation for the Republican leadership’s increasingly hysterical rhetoric — panic about demographic transformation:

…The modern GOP–the party of Nixon, Reagan, and both Bushes–is staring down its own demographic extinction. Right-wing warnings of impending tyranny express, in hyperbolic form, well-grounded dread: that conservative America will soon come to be dominated, in a semi-permanent fashion, by an ascendant Democratic coalition hostile to its outlook and interests. And this impending doom has colored the party’s frantic, fearful response to the Obama presidency.
The GOP has reason to be scared. Obama’s election was the vindication of a prediction made several years before by journalist John Judis and political scientist Ruy Teixeira in their 2002 book, The Emerging Democratic Majority. Despite the fact that George W. Bush then occupied the White House, Judis and Teixeira argued that demographic and political trends were converging in such a way as to form a ­natural-majority coalition for Democrats.

As for the key particulars of the demographic transformation, Chait observes,

…As a whole, Judis and Teixeira noted, the electorate was growing both somewhat better educated and dramatically less white, making every successive election less favorable for the GOP. And the trends were even more striking in some key swing states. Judis and Teixeira highlighted Colorado, Nevada, and Arizona, with skyrocketing Latino populations, and Virginia and North Carolina, with their influx of college-educated whites, as the most fertile grounds for the expanding Democratic base.

Chair believes the demographic dynamics were the real driving force behind the Obama phenomenon, not just his charisma.

…Above all his sweeping win reflected simple demography. Every year, the nonwhite proportion of the electorate grows by about half a percentage point–meaning that in every presidential election, the minority share of the vote increases by 2 percent, a huge amount in a closely divided country.

He argues that even Dukakis could have won in 2008, as a result of demographic change. He cautions, however, that the changes don’t necessarily translate into a permanent Democratic advantage because “eventually the minority learns to adapt to an altered landscape.” In addition, short term “shocks” like scandal, recession or war can reverse demographic advantages.
Chait adds that the tea party and the “apocalyptic rhetoric” are symptomatic of the panicked response of both conservative leaders and voters. He adds “What’s novel about the current spate of Republican millennialism is that it’s not a mere rhetorical device to rally the faithful, nor even simply an expression of free-­floating terror, but the premise of an electoral strategy.”
He believes it also explains the over-the-top voter suppression surge of the last three years.

None of this is to say that Republicans ignored the rising tide of younger and browner voters that swamped them at the polls in 2008. Instead they set about keeping as many of them from the polls as possible.The bulk of the campaign has taken the form of throwing up an endless series of tedious bureaucratic impediments to voting in many states–ending same-day voter registration, imposing onerous requirements upon voter-registration drives, and upon voters themselves. “Voting liberal, that’s what kids do,” overshared William O’Brien, the New Hampshire House speaker, who had supported a bill to prohibit college students from voting from their school addresses. What can these desperate, rearguard tactics accomplish? They can make the electorate a bit older, whiter, and less poor. They can, perhaps, buy the Republicans some time.

The 2012 election, Chait believes, is likely the GOP’s “last chance to exercise power in its current form, as a party of anti-government fundamentalism powered by sublimated white Christian identity politics. (And the last chance to stop the policy steamroller of the new Democratic majority.)” As desperate as the GOP strategy appears, the stakes are more than a little daunting for Dems, as Chait explains:

…If they can claw out a presidential win and hold on to Congress, they will have a glorious two-year window to restore the America they knew and loved, to lock in transformational change, or at least to wrench the status quo so far rightward that it will take Democrats a generation to wrench it back. The cost of any foregone legislative compromises on health care or the deficit would be trivial compared to the enormous gains available to a party in control of all three federal branches.

In short, either way, 2012 will be one of the most consequential elections since FDR’s 1932 victory. If any Dems needed a reason to go all in on re-electing the President, Chait’s article explains it well.

The Associated Press has a pretty good update on Democratic prospects for winning back the 25 seats needed for control of the House of Representatives. Dems have good opportunities in several states, but the AP article indicates that several races in CA could give Dems an edge:

…House Democrats’ path to power starts in Elk Grove, Calif., heads down to sunny Modesto and then rolls through the Central Valley to Riverside as the state’s friendly redrawn congressional districts and a number of GOP retirements offer Democrats their best opportunity for victories in November.
…Democrats envision gains in California, with the potential for four to eight seats. Illinois, Florida and Texas are fertile territory to increase their numbers. Even though Texas’ new election map remains in limbo, Democrats saw potential gains in the Republican-drawn version and figure court-approved boundaries will only get better as they take into account the state’s growing Hispanic population.

In all, Dems are focusing on 36 races nationwide, 7 of which are in CA. Recent polling indicates that Dems have a decent chance. As the AP notes, “An NBC-Wall Street Journal poll in January found that 47 percent of adults favored Democrats controlling Congress, compared with 41 percent who preferred Republicans. That was the Democrats’ biggest edge on that question this election cycle.”
The AP cites significant Democratic vulnerabilities as a result of unfavorable redistricting, Democratic retirements (21 Dems vs. 15 Republicans) and pro-GOP super-PAC’s. Yet, Rep. Steve Israel, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, sees a Dem edge in momentum, “We’ve gone from a gale force wind against us a year ago to a sustained breeze at our backs going into November…We’ve outraised the Republicans, we’ve outrecruited them in candidates and the House is very much in play…”I haven’t promised anybody 25 or more,” he said. “I am promising that it’s going to be razor-close.”

The President and the Democrats are indeed doing very well at the outset of 2012, and the Republicans are doing pitifully. They are not unrelated. Republicans in Congress and in the primary battles are driving independents into the Democrats’ camp and consolidating and energizing parts of the progressive base. There is improved optimism about the macro economy and the President’s approval rating is up to 50 percent.
But Democrats should keep their wits. Nearly all the gains have been produced by the Republican slide, not Democratic gains. Both parties and politicians are reviled. And most important, the voter has not seen personal economic gains and Democrats are no more trusted on handling the economy – the heart of this election. Some of the emerging Democratic messages are on target, but others miss what is really happening and pose considerable risks. The on-target messages set up an effective electoral choice around the middle class, but the off-target ones could give the Republican nominee a platform for challenging the President’s economic record.
See the full report Here
Voters are still very negative about the economy and their lives and a large majority of 56 percent want a change of economic direction. Voters report no improvement since last June in their job situation, experience with reduced wages and benefits, and health insurance coverage. Fewer have fallen behind on their mortgages, but this is a weak recovery at the personal level.
While Republicans have collapsed on nearly everything, 44 percent continue to trust them on the economy – unchanged over four surveys back to August. Just 40 percent trust the Democrats on the economy – about the same as the party’s average for 2011. The stubbornness of the Democrats’ disadvantage on the economy should be a lesson if they are really to prevail. These are still tough economic times.
Thus, it is critical that Democrats get to the right economic narrative that allows the President and progressives to identify with what is happening in the country, create an aspiration for the country and the middle class and pose a big choice with the Republican nominee.
Based on the State of the Union dial group research and this new national survey, we have to say the jury is out on the Democrats’ current economic narratives.

Wingnuts are still bent out of shape about the federal requirement that insurance companies provide full reimbursement for birth control for women, even when the women work at religously affiliated institutions. And they’re still angry about the Obama administration’s compromise requiring that the insurance plan, not the institution, pay the full cost of the contraceptive coverage.
As TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira explains in his latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot,’ “In fact, conservatives are doubling down on their opposition and are pushing the Blunt amendment in the Senate that allows any insurer or employer to deny coverage of any health service, including birth control, if they find such coverage morally objectionable.” Teixeira adds:

Conservatives seem convinced that this kind of “culture wars” approach will yield a substantial dividend of public support. Well, maybe in some alternative universe, but not in this one. A just-released CBS/New York Times poll finds the public supporting “a recent federal requirement that private health insurance plans cover the full cost of birth control for their female patients” by a wide 66-26 margin. Moreover, the poll finds that the requirement is supported by women (72-20), moderates (68-22), Catholics (67-25), independents (64-26), and even Republicans (50-44).
Even if the question is narrowed to focus on “religiously-affiliated employers, such as a hospital or university,” the public still favors full coverage of birth control by these institutions’ health insurance plans by a very substantial 30-point margin (61-31).

“Maybe conservatives should start looking for that alternative universe,’ says Teixeira. “Because their approach sure isn’t going to work in this one.”