The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

I’ve questioned the wonder-working powers of high voter turnout before but, shockingly, not everyone has agreed. But here is some more evidence undercutting the more-turnout-will-solve-everything thesis from a massive study by the Knight Foundation.

There’s a great deal in their report, including a very interesting typology of nonvoters, both their characteristics and reasons for not voting, which suggest a complex phenomenon not reducible to voter suppression and/or insufficiently radical candidates.

But, regardless of motivation,what if all those nonvoters really did vote? Surely the Democrats would kick Trump’s ass back to Mar-a-Lago for good. Sorry, it’s not that simple, as the chart of key swing states below shows. Democrats would benefit some in the national popular vote but wouldn’t be helped sufficiently in the Electoral College to take Trump out.

If this doesn’t make you question the turnout mythology currently popular in Sanders wing of the Democratic party, I don’t know what will.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from The Washington Post:

The following article by Jack Metzgar, is cross-posted from Working-class Perspectives:

When I talk with relatives who are not only Trump voters but Trump enthusiasts, I feel pretty damned polarized – especially when I lose my temper and find myself saying some of the things my tribe often hatefully says about theirs.  But as long as we don’t talk about abortion or gun control and tippy-toe carefully around immigration, we share a lot of common ground on a wide range of economic justice issues.  This broad agreement is reflected in survey research that almost never gets reported in the mainstream media.

Worse, that media seems completely unaware of any common ground.

One night during the impeachment trial coverage on MSNBC, for example, as the talking heads were marveling at polling results that showed more than 70% of people supported Democrats’ demands for new evidence and witnesses, Brian Williams quipped that this was astounding in a country that can’t agree that today is Thursday and tomorrow will be Friday.

The polarization around Trump is real, both intellectually and emotionally, but there are a whole bunch of people – not just the Russians and Trump – who have vested interests in keeping us ignorant of how much we agree with each other on economic justice.  It is, in fact, not at all unusual for some 70% of Americans to agree on:

• Reducing inequality by creating a 2% wealth tax (70%)
• Reducing poverty by “ensuring that all families have access to basic living standards such as health care, food, and housing if their wages are too low.” (72%)
• Creating good jobs by “investing $1 trillion in our nation’s infrastructure, including . . . expanded production of clean energy.” (78%)
• Capping prices on prescription drugs (81%), and
• Allowing “people who don’t get health insurance through their employer to buy health insurance from a public plan.” (81%)

Read more…

In his post, “Dems Should Temper Their disappointments” at The Cook Political Report, Charlie Cook shares a more hopeful perspective on the Iowa caucuses turnout:  “Washington Post columnist Karen Tumulty, whom I think very highly of, wrote the other day that Democrats “should worry” about the “mediocre” turnout at the Iowa caucuses, it being roughly the same as the 170,000 who attended in 2016 but far less than the 240,000 from 2008, when Barack Obama won. Another word for the turnout might have been “normal.” We shouldn’t use as a baseline for comparison a caucus that had unprecedented turnout, featuring not only an electric candidate like Obama, but also Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, in a three-way photo finish instead of the two-way this year between Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg.”

“Face it, Democrats,” E. J. Dionne, Jr. writes in his Washington Post column, “You are the diverse party and Republicans are the homogeneous party. Democrats include moderates and the left; Republicans are almost uniformly conservative. Among their elected officials, Democrats are the party of racial and gender diversity; Republicans aren’t. In the House, 37.9 percent of Democratic members are women, and 36.6 percent are African American or Latino. The numbers for the GOP: 6.6 percent women, 3.6 percent black or Latino.”

From Ruy Teixeira’s blog, The Optimistic Leftist: “Meanwhile, In Wisconsin – In the most recent Marquette Law School Wisconsin poll, Biden, who has been running the strongest of tested candidates in the state, was up on Trump by 4 points. That’s better than the December poll (a one point advantage) and the November poll (3 point deficit)…What’s Trump’s Achilles’ Heel in the state? I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: white noncollege women. In a recent Global Strategy Group study, Trump’s net approval was +28 among white noncollege men and -2 among white noncollege women. Wow. That’s a really big difference. Leverage that difference and the Democratic candidate wins the state.”

Perry Bacon, Jr. notes in “Other Polling Nuggets” at FiveThirtyEight that “Only 45 percent of Americans say they will vote for a “‘well-qualified” candidate who is a socialist, according to new Gallup polling. More Americans say they would vote for a candidate who is an atheist (60 percent), a Muslim (66 percent), over the age of 70 (69), under 40 (70), gay or lesbian (78), an evangelical Christian (80), a woman (93), Jewish (93), Hispanic (94), Catholic (95) or black (96.)”

However, Jason Sattler contends that “Moderate Democrats have a duty to consider Sanders. He has a clear path to beating Trump.” Subtitled “Bernie Sanders isn’t even my favorite senator running for the 2020 nomination. But I see his potential to unite the Democratic Party and oust Trump,” Sattler’s article explains that “If you believe in saving democracy, the courts and the planet, and reversing the unrepentant cruelty, corruption and carelessness that define the current administration, you have a duty to at least consider the candidacy of the most popular senator in America, the top fundraiser in the Democratic primaries, and the man who has generally beaten Trump in head-to-head polls for five years now…Sure, you can’t ignore a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll that shows “socialism” — half of Sanders’ “democratic socialist” brand — about as unpopular as capitalism is popular. Conventional wisdom suggests Republicans would love to run against a socialist as the stock market continually hits new highs, raising all boats that happen to float on a sea of 401(k)s…

“Establishment Democrats seem to live in terror of reliving the 1972 presidential election, when a triangulating Richard Nixon crushed lefty George McGovern,” writes Sattler. “But two much more recent nightmares — 2000 and 2016 — are far more instructive. When Democrats fail to bring their left-most flank into the fold, Republicans are able to swipe elections…Beyond his ability to woo the party’s most reluctant supporters, the best case for the strength of Sanders’ candidacy is that pretty much every argument against him ends up pointing to why he might be uniquely electable…Claims that “nobody likes him” in Washington, or that he can’t overcome his socialist branding, ignore what sets him apart from others. Brian Fallon, former spokesperson for the Hillary Clinton campaign, calls it an “authenticity factor.” …Bernie may be a lot of things, but he’s no one’s idea of a Capitol Hill slick…Yes, Sanders is not a Democrat. Neither are most voters. Independent is the most popular party affiliation in America by far.”

But Sanders is in 4th place in the largest swing state, as indicated by a recent Florida poll. As Max Greenwood reports at The Hill, “Michael Bloomberg is leading the pack of Democratic presidential hopefuls in Florida, according to a new survey from St. Pete Polls, a sign that the former New York City mayor has picked up traction in a crucial swing state before most of his rivals have even started to campaign there…The poll shows Bloomberg with 27.3 percent support in the Sunshine State, up 10 points from a similar poll released late last month. Biden, meanwhile, has seen his support in Florida plummet, falling from more than 41 percent in January to 25.9 percent this month…Former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) are jockeying for third place in the state, notching 10.5 percent and 10.4 percent respectively, while Sen. Amy Klobuchar sits in fifth with 8.6 percent support.”

At Vox Recode, Theodore Schleifer reports that “Furious Oracle employees are demanding that Larry Ellison cancel his Trump fundraiser,” and writes, “Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison’s decision to host a fundraiser for Donald Trump next week has awoken the usually passive workforce at his company, angering some employees who are going public with their disgust over Ellison’s actions…Ellison, the fifth-richest person in the US, surprised the tech industry on Wednesday when news broke that he would host Trump for a golf-filled fundraiser at his estate in California’s Coachella Valley next week. The event is, by far, the most significant public display of support for Trump 2020 by a tech titan…It is not as though Ellison’s support for Republicans is a total shock. Oracle has been one of the Silicon Valley giants that has worked hardest to cultivate ties to the Trump administration. Other tech giants have tried to keep at least some distance from the administration, but Oracle CEO Safra Catz has reportedly been under consideration to take senior roles within the White House, and she has hired several former senior Trump aides at Oracle.” The company’s products include database software and technology, cloud engineered systems, and enterprise software.

Ryan Fan’s medium.com post “How to Make Trump Supporters Change Their Minds” has some painfully-satirical ‘instructions’ for Democrats, which amplify James Carville’s recent comment about too many Dems emitting superiority “vapors.” Here’s a sample: “First, make sure to let Trump supporters know how stupid they are. Pull up a study that says educated people, like yourself, are less likely to support Trump to prove your point. Then, flaunt how much smarter you are than they are. Let them know they’re deplorables, and that if they lost their jobs or are going to lose their healthcare, they deserve it — especially the white working class…Let them know, verbatim, what John Oliver said last night, and then pat yourself in the back for being so funny and original. Ridicule them — that’s always the best tactic. Make sure to destroy them for reading fake news like Breitbart and Fox News, and then brag about how you read credible sources like The Huffington Post. Make sure to show them articles from The Borowitz Report, and then say “look at how ridiculous your President is.”…Let them know they’re on the wrong side of history. If they say something remotely racist, make sure to announce it to the world so no one can forget how much they deserve to be shunned. Attack anyone else that dares defend them as racist as well, and smirk at what a phenomenal debater you are.”

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

Matt Yglesias, who I’ve long suspected was the closet political realist among the Vox crowd, has a nice piece up on the case for Klobuchar. Well worth reading after Tuesday’s result in NH.

“Klobuchar…is a Sanders alternative who offers a genuine trade-off — she’s running on a less ambitious agenda, but that consists almost entirely of being careful to avoid politically unpopular positions. She’s for taking action on climate change, but not for a fracking ban. She’s for a public option and price curbs on prescription drugs rather than an expensive Medicare-for-all program. She’d do a better job than Sanders of appealing to swing voters, and Sanders would need to try to make it up by pulling in third-party supporters or new voters.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

You may have heard that Amy Klobuchar has run well in her elections in Minnesota. But you probably don’t realize how crazy good her performance has been there, as she’s swept across all demographics in the state, decimating the GOP in most groups, while reducing their margins to pathetic levels in their best groups.

Consider these data points, both from Klobuchar’s 2018 Senate run and, for comparison, from Clinton’s Presidential performance in the state in 2016. (All data from Catalist Analytics)

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

Sure, the current 538 model gives Klobuchar only a ghost of a chance (less than one percent) of getting the nomination. But that estimate can change rapidly as results come in. Look at what happened to poor Joe Biden after he got hammered in Iowa.

Speaking of Biden and Klobuchar, check out these critiques of Medicare for All at the last debate (from Ryan LIzza’s Politico article):

Here’s Biden hitting Sanders on Medicare for All:

“Look, Bernie says that you have to bring people together and we have to have Medicare for All. But Bernie says — and he says he wrote the damn thing. But he’s unwilling to tell us what the damn thing is going to cost.

The fact that we’re in New Hampshire, a very level-headed group of people, look at the numbers. How much is it going to cost? Who’s going to pay for it? It will cost more than the entire — the entire federal budget we spend now. More than the entire budget. The idea middle-class taxes aren’t going to go up is just crazy.

When they did it in Vermont, what happened? They doubled the state income tax and then had a 14 percent tax on withholding. And they finally did away with it. So how much is it going to cost? When Bernie — you ask Bernie that — I’ll ask him again tonight — sometime — if you ask Bernie that, he says, go figure, ‘I don’t know, we’ll find out.’ I think that was on CBS. He said, ‘We’ll find out’ or something to that effect.

Imagine you’re going unite the country, walking into the Congress, and say, ‘I got this bill. It’s going to provide Medicare for everybody. I can’t tell you how much it’s going to cost, we’ll find out later; it’s likely to be double whatever the — everything we spend in the federal government.’ Who do you think is going to get that passed? I busted my neck getting Obamacare passed, getting every Democratic vote. I know how hard it is.’

Here’s Klobuchar:

“I keep listening to this same debate, and it is not real. It is not real, Bernie, because two-thirds of the Democrats in the Senate are not on your bill and because it would kick 149 million Americans off their current health insurance in four years.

And let me say what else. Elizabeth wants to do it in two years. And, Pete, while you have a different plan now, you sent out a tweet just a few years ago that said, ‘henceforth, forthwith, indubitably, affirmatively,’ you are for Medicare for All for the ages.”

And so I would like to point out that what leadership is about is taking a position, looking at things, and sticking with them. I have long believed that the way that we expand health care to more people and bring down premiums is by building on the Affordable Care Act with a nonprofit public option. That is the best way to do it.

And practically, look at this–the Affordable Care Act is now nearly 10 points more popular than the president of the United States. So why would we talk about blowing it up?

What we need to do is build on it — mental health care, addiction, long-term care — those are the things that would make it better for everyone.”

Whoa–quite a difference! I can definitely see Klobuchar being quite effective against Trump…..Biden, well, less so..

So does she have a shot? As the chart below shows, she’s now within a few points of Warren and Biden. If she had a good night and blew past them to wind up in third….that just might be the beginning of something interesting (though granted her odds would still not be great). We’ll see.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

With the Iowa results (finally) in, the 538 model has flipped and now sees Sanders as the most likely candidate to garner a majority of delegates to the convention and therefore the nomination. This should make Sanders fervent supporters–and they tend to be very fervent–quite happy, even if his current advantage in this metric is fairly modest.

But let’s say Sanders does ride his current advantage to the nomination. Where would that leave the Democrats? Tom Edsall covered this topic in his Times column today and detailed both the reasons why Democrats might be optimistic and might be pessimistic. On the pessimistic side:

“Most political scientists I contacted this week saw greater disadvantages for the Democratic Party in a Sanders nomination than in the possible selection of other leading candidates.

Andrew Engelhardt, a postdoctoral researcher at Brown, wrote, that

“a Sanders nomination would be helpful for other party races to the degree he can encourage individuals who would otherwise not participate to actually turn out. It’s unclear if he helps Democrats win in more moderate districts.”

Engelhardt then noted that a January Economist survey “found that independent and Republican identifiers see Sanders as quite extreme relative to most other prospective Democratic candidates.”

Winning Republican voters is a lost cause for any Democrat, Engelhardt noted, but nominating Sanders could turn away
any who may at least consider someone like Biden or Buttigieg. Further, it may go so far as to encourage these individuals to turn out and vote against Sanders and other Democrats.

Wendy Schiller, a political scientist who is also at Brown, noted in an email that

“Sanders appears to generate the most fervent and intense enthusiasm among his supporters, but polls continue to show that Biden attracts more support among the key groups that are known to get out the door to vote in general elections, especially black voters and voters over the age of 35.”

At the moment, Schiller continued,

“the evidence today just isn’t there that Bernie Sanders at the top of the ticket can generate high enough turnout among black voters to put the Democrats in the White House 2020.”

Eitan Hersh, the Tufts political scientist, raised a different set of concerns about a Sanders nomination, primarily that he would mobilize conservatives:

“Democrats will turn out no matter who their nominee is because they are mostly motivated by their opposition to Trump. Republicans would look at a moderate like Biden or Klobuchar and think the stakes are lower than if the candidate is Sanders or Warren. So they might stay home more.”

How would a Sanders nomination influence the outcome of races for Senate, House and local offices?

“Lots of caveats here,” Hersh wrote,

“but if you want my best guess, it’s that the logic does apply: Democrats should be concerned about heightened counter-mobilization that limits their chances up and down the ballot if they nominate a more ideologically extreme candidate like Sanders.”

Now it may be that the country is ready to elect as president a 78-year-old angry democratic socialist calling for revolution. But if I were a partisan whose top priority was to bring the Trump presidency to an end, I would not bank on it.”

I would add to these observations, the data on key suburban community types recently released by Dante Chinni’s American Communities Project (ACP).

“This year, the ACP is partnering with Dynata, the world’s largest first-party survey insights company, to conduct monthly surveys to measure how each of the 15 community types is reacting to politics in 2020. Now that Dynata has completed its initial December survey, the ACP examines how each of the four big Democratic potentials — Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren — does in a head-to-head matchup against Trump in the Exurbs (1159 responses) and Middle Suburbs (569 responses).

The early results are good for Biden, less so for Sanders….

The Exurbs and Middle Suburbs are more than bellwether communities. Together they represent the pull and push of Trump and his unique brand of politics. The Exurbs underperformed for Trump, giving him less support than other recent GOP nominees. On the other end, the Middle Suburbs surged for the president. (Furthermore, the groups hold lots of voters in the states that were very close and that won Trump the White House: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.)…

Among the big four Democratic frontrunners, Joe Biden’s numbers are the strongest with voters in both community types. In the Exurbs, Trump’s eight-point victory margin would be a Republican low for this century and big red flag for his campaign.

And a one-point win for Trump in the Middle Suburbs would likely mean a big defeat overall. It’s the kind of number that suggests Democrats would win back Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Overall, Biden beats Trump by about six points in the national popular vote….

The numbers are less impressive for Sanders. Trump runs up a big 15-point win the Exurbs. That’s not a huge surprise. Exurban voters probably don’t see a lot to like about the idea of a “Democratic Socialist” as president. They have money in their bank accounts and in the stock market.”

Yep. Be careful what you wish for. The stakes will be pretty high this November.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his Facebook page:

How Worried Should You Be About Trump’s Rising Approval Ratings?

On the one hand, if his approval rating is truly going up a lot, you should be very worried. No matter who the Democratic nominee is, they’ll have a hard time beating Trump if his approval rating starts pushing 50 percent..

Since Gallup just reported a reading of 49 percent, perhaps it’s time to panic? Not really. The Gallup number appears to be an outlier; the current 538 poll-averaged approval number is 43.9 percent, at the high range of Trump’s first term but far below 49 percent. Still, the 538 rolling average does show an increase of about 2 and a half points in Trump’s rating since August.

Interestingly, even that increase could owe more to survey sampling problems (“differential nonresponse bias”) than an actual rise in Trump’s popularity. Political scientist Jacob Long explains on the Post’s Monkey Cage blog:

“As occasional Monkey Cage contributor [statistician] Andrew Gelman has explained, differential nonresponse bias refers to situations in which changes in polling results are caused by shifts in who responds to the polls rather than actual changes in public opinion. It may be that Trump’s approval is going up because Democrats feel demoralized by the apparently hopeless impeachment trial and so don’t feel like talking to pollsters. Or it could be that Republicans feel so moved to support Trump at when he’s under attack that they are more likely to talk to pollsters than usual.

One example of this occurred during the 2012 election. Gelman and his collaborators Sharad Goel, Doug Rivers, and David Rothschild showed that after Barack Obama’s poor first debate performance against Mitt Romney, the polls showed Romney’s chances of beating Obama surging. But when looking at the survey responses from a group of people who had been asked about their voting intentions repeatedly throughout the campaign, Gelman and colleagues found that survey respondents’ minds weren’t changing after the debate. Rather, Obama supporters were less likely to respond to the surveys during that negative news cycle.

As Trump was heading toward a widely-expected acquittal in the impeachment trial, were Democrats similarly just feeling unenthused about talking to pollsters?…

With Gallup, it looks like almost all the variation in Trump’s job approval from one poll to the next can be explained just by looking at how many of each party’s supporters are in their sample…..Gallup’s shift is the clearest and most dramatic among the pollsters, but there remains a general pattern that is largely consistent with probability that results are partly determined by differential nonresponse….

This means there is reason to believe Trump’s historically stable job approval hasn’t changed much since before the impeachment process began.”

Of course, none of this proves that Trump’s “true” approval rating is not creeping upwards in the real world. It could be and Long responsibly outlines some of the reasons why such a trend cannot be ruled out. But his quantitative analysis does make differential nonresponse bias a very plausible explanation for the recent upward trend in Trump’s approval rating.

So don’t panic…at least not yet.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

Ezra Klein’s new book, Why We’re Polarized, has been getting generally positive reviews, especially for its extensive summary of a vast literature on social psychology, group identities and emotional reasoning. How highly one values the book therefore depends a lot on how illuminating one finds this literature about our current political situation. I am less enthusiastic than some about this literature so I was less enthusiastic about the book

And I did feel the book had a serious weakness which Francis Fukuyama correctly noted in his review of the book in the Washington Post:

“The bottom line of Klein’s argument is that polarization was driven fundamentally by race. The Republican Party has become the home of angry white voters anxious that the United States is turning into a “majority minority” society, as California already has, a reality epitomized by the election of Barack Obama.

There is no question that race played an important part in the 2016 election and that for many Trump voters, cultural identity was a more significant factor than economic self-interest. It is otherwise impossible to explain why so many working-class whites supported Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare, a policy that benefited them above all.

But cultural identity is fed by many factors besides race, and understanding this complexity is very important if the Democrats hope to win back the Oval Office and Congress. Failure to appreciate the legitimate grounds for resentment by populist voters is a general failure of liberals everywhere, from Turkey and Hungary to Britain and the United States, and one of the reasons they keep losing elections…..

Klein dismisses economic drivers of populism like globalization and the loss of working-class jobs, noting that if those were the fundamental issues, then left-wing populism rather than the nativist variety should have seen a big upsurge in support.

There is no question that race has resurfaced in an ugly manner in American politics, driven by an overtly racist president. But culture and identity are much broader than race. Gender is at least as important: Men have been losing status and economic power to women in workplaces and families steadily for the past generation. Many people in 2016 didn’t so much support Trump as vote against Hillary Clinton, who represented to them a certain kind of self-satisfied feminism and came into the election with very low trust and favorability ratings.

The urban-rural divide that Klein correctly notes as central to the red-blue division encompasses a host of cultural values beyond race, related to religion, patriotism, respect for traditional sources of authority and other lifestyle issues. Working-class whites in rural areas have undergone a social decline epitomized by the opioid crisis, which has led to a drop in male life expectancy in the United States. As Angus Deaton and Anne Case have argued, this is a result of despair engendered by job loss and social isolation.

Opposition to our current immigration system does not necessarily have to stem from xenophobia and racism: Polls from Gallup and Pew show that more than 60 percent of Americans have positive views of immigration but more than 50 percent worry that so much of it is illegal. High culture today is produced in liberal agglomerations like New York, Los Angeles and London, and it has created a kind of intellectual snobbery that is bitterly resented by people who don’t like being dismissed as ignorant racists.”

I feel this is rather a big miss in a book that purports to explain our current level of polarization and the rise of right populism. Such a miss of course is consistent with the current world outlook of not just Klein and his website Vox but a wide swathe of contemporary liberal opinion in and around today’s Democratic party. In my view, if we’re ever going to become de-polarized that outlook needs to change.

You will not be surprised to learn that such a change is not among Klein’s recommended list of fixes for the polarization problem. That’s a pity.