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

The latest Quinnipiac national poll shows Biden with a comfortable lead over Sanders and Warren, consistent with other recent polling. But what really caught my eye was the white noncollege breakdown on these three candidates. As shown below, Biden and Sanders draw equally from white noncollege voters (24 percent support each) while Warren gets only a pathetic 9 percent. This is the kind of thing that really worries me when I think about her as a general election candidate.

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

Economic Dynamism = Democrats

Yes, there is a magic formula for generating Democrats. It’s called economic dynamism. And the formula for generating Republicans, particularly Trumpian ones, is exactly the reverse: economic stagnation and decline.

Ron Brownstein picks up on a just-released report by Brookings and the /Information Technology and Innovation Foundation on innovation jobs and economic growth. “Just 20 large metropolitan areas now account for a clear majority of the nation’s jobs in the 13 high-productivity industries that the authors identify as the nation’s most innovative.”

Brownstein connects this development to recent political trends:

“Correlating the study’s findings with the results of the 2016 presidential election captures the enormity of that shift. In the 5% of metropolitan areas that have attracted the largest number of these cutting edge jobs — a list of 20 communities that includes New York, Boston, Washington, Atlanta, Dallas, Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego and Seattle — Hillary Clinton won 59% of the vote and routed Trump by 11.5 million ballots, according to calculations provided by Brookings. Just those 20 thriving metropolitan areas provided her over 28 million votes — more than two-fifths of her total.

In the next 5% of metro areas that have attracted the most of these high-innovation jobs — a group that includes Pittsburgh, Orlando, Charlotte, Nashville, Austin and Portland — Clinton beat Trump by about eight percentage points, or roughly 1.2 million votes. In all, these two groups of thriving urban areas — the 40 communities that comprise the 10 percent of American metros that have generated the most of these highly-innovative jobs — provided Clinton over 36 million votes, fully 55% of her total.

In the metros that ranked between the 10th and 25th percentile for the number of these high-innovation jobs, Trump squeezed out a narrower advantage of about 200,000 votes, or half a percentage point. He beat Clinton soundly by 3.4 million votes in the remaining 75% of metro areas with the smallest numbers of these coveted jobs. Trump also won comfortably in the smaller communities that are not included in the nation’s roughly 400 metropolitan areas.

These stark findings reinforce the results of other studies over the past few years that show Democrats growing stronger in the places generating the most economic growth and Republicans solidifying their hold on the places displaying less dynamism. Brookings had found that although Clinton won fewer than a sixth of the nation’s counties in 2016, her counties generate almost two-thirds of the nation’s GDP.

Another recent Brookings study found that the average Congressional district held by Democrats now generates 50% more economic output than the typical district held by Republicans. Productivity per worker and the median income is now also substantially higher in the Democratic than the Republican districts.”

So there you have it. Want more Democrats? Figure out how to spread economic dynamism beyond the large metro areas where it is currently thriving. If not, Democrats will win some elections but they will not achieve the governing majorities they really need to move the country forward.

At Vox, Jen Kirby reports, “On Tuesday, House Democrats announced that they’d back the United States Mexico Canada Agreement (USMCA), the updated version of the North American Free-Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that the Trump administration renegotiated last year…Democrats are supporting the agreement now that they’ve secured changes to the deal, achieving concessions on labor and environmental rules and enforcement, prescription drugs, and other provisions that had long been sticking points between House Democrats and the administration.”

Free traders are grumbling, predictably enough, and so are a few progressives, who see any cooperation with Trump as a gift to him, a counter-narrative to impeachment. But Pelosi and other Democratic leaders see a significant upside for their party, because it shows Dems are capable of bipartisanship — when the cause is good. Also, Democrats won major pro-labor concessions few thought would be possible earlier this year.

“Make no mistake, we demanded a trade deal that benefits workers and fought every single day to negotiate that deal; and now we have secured an agreement that working people can proudly support,” Richard Trumka, the AFL-CIO president, said on Twitter,” notes Kirby.

As Pelosi explained, ““There is no question, of course, that this trade agreement is much better than NAFTA,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said at a press conference Tuesday. “But in terms of our work here, it is infinitely better than what was initially proposed by the administration.”

Kirby notes some of the major improvements in USMCA from the points of view of pro-labor progressives:

They said they’d strengthened rules for workers, including additional protections to make sure Mexico is meeting these standards. As part of USMCA, Mexico agreed to pass new workers’ rights laws, including guaranteeing the right to unionize and negotiate labor contracts. The updated USMCA will establish a committee to monitor Mexico’s progress and benchmarks for Mexico to meet. If it does not, it could lead to penalties.

Another big win for Democrats was the removal of a certain rule involving pharmaceuticals. The original USMCA extended the period that certain drugs (known as “biologics”) can be protected from generic competition to 10 years (it’s already 12 years in the US). Democrats objected to this provision, saying it could potentially thwart future efforts to lower the cost of some prescription drugs. That provision has now been removed from the USMCA.

…Already included in the USMCA were new rules that said cars must have 75 percent of their components manufactured in Mexico, the US, or Canada to qualify for zero tariffs (up from 62.5 percent under NAFTA) and provisions that 40 to 45 percent of automobile parts must be made by workers who earn at least $16 an hour by 2023. (Now with increased enforcement, per the Democrats.)

The USMCA also adds a 16-year “sunset” clause — meaning the terms of the agreement expire, or “sunset” after 16 years. The deal is also subject to a review every six years, at which point the US, Mexico, and Canada can decide to extend the USMCA.

Among the purely-political benefits of USMCA for Dems, noted by Kirby: “Democrats in more moderate districts were reportedly particularly nervous about leaving USMCA unresolved before the end of the year, and now they’ll have a legislative victory to take home, showing that they can still work with the administration on issues that benefit the American people — even as they’re holding the president accountable for his conduct.”

Going forward, “The House will vote on the USMCA legislation before Congress breaks for recess for the holidays, probably around the same time it votes on impeachment. The Senate must also take up the USMCA — though Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has indicated that the body won’t consider it until after Trump’s impeachment trial in January.”

Sure, the timing of the USMCA deal may not be optimum. But legislative timetables can’t always be controlled, especially toward year’s end. There should be no doubt, however, that USMCA is a big plus for American workers and their unions, and that fact will not be lost on working-class swing voters in the Rust Belt. Pelosi and House Democrats seized the moment, and got it done when they could. That’s what real leadership is all about.

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

It’s An Older Black Voter Thing, You Wouldn’t Understand

People continue to be mystified why the old establishment white dude who stumbles over his words comfortably leads the Democratic field. But Biden continues to refuse to collapse.

There are several reasons for this but surely one of the most important, if not the most important, is his strength among black voters. And not just black voters in general but older black voters in particular. And it is this latter trend that is possibly the origin of many observers’ failure to “get” Biden’s enduring popularity. Harry Enten explains:

“Biden’s averaged 49% among all potential black Democratic primary voters in our last two CNN national polls. That’s good enough not only for a 35-point lead over his Democratic competitors, but good enough to beat all of them combined by about 10 points.

But I think treating black voters as if they’re some sort of monolith creates some sort of a blind spot for those following the campaign: the wide faultline along age in the black community.

In our polling over the last two months, Biden is getting northward of 60% of the vote among black voters 45 years and older. His nearest competitor, Warren, is 50 points behind him.

Younger black voters are far less enthralled with Biden. A look at our polling over the last three months has him in the low 30s with black voters under the age of 45.

This large age gap has existed all primary long, and it’s not going away. If anything, our polling is indicating that it is getting larger.

The age gap in Biden’s support benefits him in a way that I’m not quite sure folks understand. Simply put, there are more older black voters than there are younger black voters. Those 45 years and older made up 60% of all potential black primary voters. In the majority black primary in South Carolina, those 45 years and older were 71% of all actual primary voters in 2016.

I cannot help but think this age divide imperils some folks ability to understand Biden’s appeal with black voters. If all you’re reading about is how a lot of younger black activists don’t like Biden (which is true), you’re missing most of the black voting population. This is also true if you’re someone who gets their news off of Twitter, where younger voices dominate in a way they don’t in the real world.”

I agree with Enten. I think many people are being sorely misled by what they hear on Twitter and from a sector of very visible black activists. Those views are not, by and large, the views of the black community writ large. It is the latter’s views that explain Biden’s continuing popularity and illuminate his future prospects.

Which are actually pretty good, when you consider how crucial the black vote is to the Democratic nominating process. The Times had an excellent piece on this with good accompanying graphics last week.

Candidates gain delegates based on voting in both states and districts, which are Congressional districts in all but a few places. While Iowa and New Hampshire may generate political momentum for a winner because they vote first, the two states award very few delegates. By contrast, a candidate who is popular in California, Texas and predominantly black districts in the South could pick up big shares of delegates.

A recent poll shows Mr. Biden at 44 percent among black voters in South Carolina, the early voting state with a majority-black Democratic electorate, and a historic harbinger for how the South will vote. The same poll had Mr. Biden’s next closest competitor, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, trailing him by more than 30 percentage points among black voters.

Mayor Randall Woodfin of Birmingham, Ala., who has yet to endorse a candidate, said national political analysts are underestimating the political advantages Mr. Biden enjoys in the South.

“It’s not that he’s weaker than people think,” Mr. Woodfin said. “He’s much stronger.”

Some of the most delegate-rich districts in Southern states like Tennessee, Alabama and South Carolina have large shares of black Democratic voters. (Vermont is an exception; its population is largely white, but it has only one district with 11 Democratic delegates.)

Under party rules, more delegates are awarded in districts with high concentrations of Democrats. Because black people overwhelmingly vote Democratic, areas with many black residents tend to have higher numbers of Democratic delegates.

This is a big reason why black Democrats are so sought-after in the race for the party’s nomination. Historically, black Democratic primary voters have tended to back a single candidate…The last Democratic candidate to win the nomination without winning a majority of black voters was Michael Dukakis, then the governor of Massachusetts, in 1988.”

I might add here that black voters are not Biden’s only advantage at this point. There’s also his adamant refusal to take politically toxic positions on hot-button issues to appease vocal critics on his left. We see this most recently in the run up to the release of his immigration plan. From the Post’s Daily 202:

“[The plan] will outline an end to Trump’s family separation policy, protections for “dreamers” and address the root causes of the immigration crisis. This will include a proposal for foreign aid to stabilize the Northern Triangle countries in Central America, similar to what Sanders and Warren had in their plans….

Biden’s plan will be more moderate than his rivals. So far, the biggest flashpoint in the Democratic immigration debate this year has been over whether to repeal a portion of the law that makes it a criminal offense to illegally enter the United States. The proposal was first made by former housing secretary Julián Castro, the first candidate to publish a detailed immigration plan, and it targets Section 1325 of the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act, which the Trump administration used to defend its family separation policies. Sanders and Warren endorsed Castro’s idea.

Biden still opposes repealing Section 1325, and that won’t change. He said during one of the debates that changing the law could incentivize more illegal immigration. “Repealing that section could undermine our immigration system. It could undermine efforts to combat human smuggling,” Alex said in an interview. “It would shift an additional burden into the immigration court system. Additionally, if the logic behind ending 1325 is to end family separation, there are likely at least eight other laws on the books that someone nefarious and anti-immigrant like Trump could use to separate families. So the problem isn’t 1325. The problem is Donald Trump.”

Not that I don’t have my doubts about Joe Biden. I worry about him as a campaigner against Trump. And, while I think his programmatic commitments as they are evolving are plenty progressive, I worry that he will surround himself with the kind of economic and budgetary advisers that will undercut that program. Personnel is policy and neoliberal personnel tend to promote neoliberal policy (see Reid Hundt’s A Crisis Wasted).

That said, he does have strengths–some very important strengths–and even those who don’t like him would do well to understand them.

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 strong economic report on Friday, there is some trepidation in Democratic circles that such reports will translate into a second Trump term. This is possible. The growth and jobs performance of the economy close to the election has a strong historical relationship to Presidential election outcomes. As a number of people have pointed out, incumbent presidents rarely lose re-election except when there’s a recession in the last two years of their term. And so far we haven’t seen one.

But the other side of this is that strong economic performance should translate into high approval ratings and we’re not seeing that either. Instead, Trump is mired in the low ’40s and seemingly going nowhere. And that is another very strong historical relationship: Presidents with low approval ratings tend to lose elections. And, as Harry Enten points out, we are very close to the period where approval ratings start to be very predictive of the ultimate election outcome.

“The next 100 days will be critical to understanding whether President Donald Trump will win a second term in office. His approval rating has been consistently low during his first term. Yet his supporters could always point out that approval ratings before an election year have not historically been correlated with reelection success.

But by mid-March of an election year, approval ratings, though, become more predictive. Presidents with low approval ratings in mid-March of an election year tend to lose, while those with strong approval ratings tend to win in blowouts and those with middling approval ratings usually win by small margins.

Let’s start with where Trump is right now: an approval rating in the low 40s. Since World War II, two presidents have had an approval rating at or below 45% in mid-March of an election year. George H.W. Bush had an approval rating at 39%, while Jimmy Carter’s was at 45% and falling fast. Both of them went on to lose reelection by greater than 5 points.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, there have been five presidents with an approval rating of 55% or above. There was Bill Clinton at 55%, Ronald Reagan at 55%, Richard Nixon at 58%, Dwight Eisenhower at 72% and Lyndon Johnson at 80%. All of these presidents won their elections by nine points or greater.

Finally, we have the group of presidents with approval ratings between between 46% and 54%. This includes Gerald Ford at 47%, Barack Obama at 47%, George W. Bush at 49% and Harry Truman at 51%. All of their elections were decided by less than 5 points.

[Only] Ford didn’t win.”

So all in all, I’d keep my eye on Trump’s approval rating. If economic performance is truly going to boost him to a second term, we should start seeing evidence of that in his approval rating. If not, and his approval rating stays where it is or declines, he is in trouble even if the economy keeps chugging along.

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

The good folks at Center for American Progress (full disclosure: I work there!), including my good buddy and co-conspirator John Halpin, have just released an enlightening poll on voter attitudes toward the economy, government and poverty. As Helaine Olen notes in the Post, the findings suggest the outlines of a winning Democratic message for 2020 (see the table below for some of those findings).

“As Democratic candidates slug it out with their primary rivals, a new report on voter attitudes toward the economy from the Center for American Progress and pollster GBAO offers guidance on what kind of message will put the eventual nominee and party in the best position for the general election.

Here’s the good news: Unity exists, even in the United States of 2019. “We see widespread support on reducing college costs, taxing the wealthy, checking corporate power and ensuring people have access to the basics,” John Halpin, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and one of the report’s co-authors, told me.

While the president remains divisive, the report finds majorities of Democrats, independents and Republicans agree on many things. Seventy percent or more of those surveyed, including majorities of Republicans, agreed with each of the following statements:

* College education is too expensive, and states should do more to “help people afford a college education without getting buried in debt.”

* “Rich families and corporations should pay a lot more in taxes than they do today, and middle-class families should pay less.”

* People who don’t receive health insurance from an employer should be allowed to buy into a public plan, and pharmaceutical companies should be “penalized” if drug prices increase faster than the rate of inflation.

* Increase “good jobs” with a $1 trillion investment in infrastructure, including both roads and “expanded production of green energy.”

* Reduce inequality with a 2 percent “wealth tax” on net worth in excess of $50 million.

That’s not all. People of every political persuasion give President Trump negative marks on his handling of health care and poverty. When asked what they believed is the most important issue that Trump and Congress should address in the coming year, “making health care more affordable” was cited by a majority of voters. Only a third of the entire electorate supported cutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in an effort to address the national debt. And 8 in 10 Democrats and three-fourths of independents believe corporations have too much power and should be “strongly regulated” — something even 49 percent of Republicans also signed off on.”

This is mighty sweet music to my ears. The ideas above are a popular and plenty progressive program a Democratic candidate should be able to run on and win. Not progressive enough for you? Allow me to quote the immortal words of Nancy Pelosi: “Just win, baby”.

Of necessity, Democrats must weave their ideals into a larger tapestry, fusing social and racial justice with a unifying economic program that transcends demographic divisions. That includes re-engaging the nearly 6 million people who switched from Obama to Trump, and who may be torn between concerns for their economic security, a distrust of government and a sense of cultural displacement.

To win, the party’s nominee must deliver a consistent message that, as much as possible, unites the party while expanding its reach. This is no easy task: One salient danger is that a fractious primary contest will drive candidates to the left, saddling the nominee with purple-state poison pills like “abolish ICE,” or “single-payer” as the only path to universal health care. The necessary alternative is crafting a broad progressive agenda that empowers the candidate to win ― and then enact real change.

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

Progressive economic policies–good idea!

Standard-issue progressive rhetoric–not so good idea!

Evidence continues to pile up that most of the Democrats’ progressive economic ideas sell well with the American public.

The question, however, is how do you talk about them so you win over the maximum number of voters. That’s not so obvious.

Robb Willer and Jan Voelkel described their intriguing research on just this question in the New York Times on Sunday. The results are food for thought. The authors take off from the Christopher Ellis/James Stimson research on how Americans tend to be operational liberals at the same time as they are symbolic conservatives (research I have frequently cited here).

Here’s what they did:

“An influential analysis of national polling data by Professors Ellis and Stimson suggests that the most effective candidate in a national election would combine the most popular feature of the Democratic Party, progressive economic policies, with the most popular feature of the Republican Party: the invocation of conservative ideology and values like patriotism, family and the “American dream.”

But are candidates free to mix and match their policies with their symbolic politics? If a Democratic candidate pursued such a mixed strategy, would it work? Or would it make him or her seem hypocritical or incoherent?

To investigate these questions we conducted two experiments, one using a nationally representative sample of Americans, in which we looked at Americans’ support for “Scott Miller,” a hypothetical 2020 Democratic nominee. The participants in our studies were presented with excerpts from Scott Miller’s speeches — but we systematically varied the content of the speeches to analyze the effects of policy platform and symbolic politics.

We found that the most effective Democratic candidate would speak in terms of conservative values while proposing progressive economic policies — with some of our evidence suggesting that endorsing highly progressive policies would be best….

What mattered [the most] was how Scott Miller talked about those [progressive] policies. We found that when he spoke of his platform in terms of conservative values like patriotism, family and the American dream, he consistently drew more support than did the Scott Miller who couched those same policies in more liberal values like economic justice and compassion.

Interestingly, most of the increase in support for the Scott Miller with conservative values came from participants who identified as moderate as well as those who identified as conservative. Notably, liberals were inclined to support the candidate regardless of which rhetorical approach he took.

These results suggest that the most effective Democratic challenger to President Trump in 2020 would invoke conservative values while offering progressive economic policies….

Some progressives may bristle at the prospect of a Democratic candidate who employs rhetoric associated with conservatism. But there are reasons that even stalwart progressives might soften on this point. For one thing, Democrats typically tack to the center after winning the nomination, often compromising or abandoning their most progressive policies. Wouldn’t it be preferable to stick to those popular progressive policies, making the case for them using language that would appeal to more Americans?

But the issue is not just rhetorical. There is nothing that inherently binds valuing family, security and the American dream to conservative economic policies. Perhaps these values are served just as well — or even better — by progressive economic policies. If so, Democrats should do more to stress that fact, emphasizing more strongly how their policies can address the concerns of a wider range of Americans.”

Granted, this kind of an experimental study is not definitive proof of how things might work in the real world. But it’s certainly worth considering.

At Working-Class Perspectives, Co-Editor John Russo, visiting scholar at the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University, writes: “We like to think that education is the great leveller, boosting poor and working-class young people into the middle class and beyond. If only more people had access to higher education, the theory goes, we would have less economic inequality. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t work that way. As Allison L. Hurst explains in this week’s Working-Class Perspectives, the economic and social advantages that well-off students bring with them into college also ensure then more opportunities after they graduate, while working-class graduates face more challenges.”:

Thirty years ago, after having dropped out of college after just one term, unable to pay for my dorm room, I was unsure if I would ever leave the working class.  Two years later I was a student at Barnard College, an elite small liberal arts college three thousand miles from my parents’ home.  To this day, I am not sure how I made that leap, but it was smoothed over by significant financial assistance from the college.  Unable to pay for my public university, I was able to graduate from one of the best private colleges in the country virtually debt-free.

Now I study higher education and its connection to what we call intergenerational social mobility, the movement (or lack of movement) between classes, comparing children and parents’ occupational outcomes over time.

I have some bad news.  While the path I took was not easy, gaining social mobility through college education is much harder for young people today.  Ironically, even as more children of the working class go to college, the educational attainment gap between the middle class and the working class continues to grow.

How can this be?  For one thing, the bar for “being educated” continues to rise.  As more people earn college degrees than ever before, the kind of college degree increasingly matters.  What type of institution?  What major field of study?  Also important is the level of education – in many fields a four-year degree is no longer enough to assure a middle-class salaried job.  You need a master’s degree, or even a PhD, for some work, even outside of academia.

Scholars of education (including sociologists like me) have known all of this for a while now, which is why so many of us have studied access to colleges and programs.  Colleges have struggled to open their doors to first-generation and working-class students.  They are paying more attention to ways of broadening access, sometimes pushed and shoved into doing so by state boards of higher education.  At the same time, budget cuts at public colleges and universities undercut many of these efforts.

But getting working-class students into colleges is only half the battle.  Keeping them and helping them thrive has proven difficult.  I explore some of the many reasons for this in my first book, The Burden of Academic Success:  marginalization, impostor syndrome, feeling out of place.  Even at open access two-year public colleges and universities that are the most open to working-class students, middle-class students predominate.

My experiences at Barnard reflect why that matters.  I rarely talked to anyone about my family, and, when I did, I regretted the ridicule, mockery, and disbelief.  I knew I was different.  Most of the time I was too busy juggling off-campus work and an overloaded academic schedule to care, but the isolated feeling was always lurking in the background.  If I hadn’t an abundant scholarship, I know I would have left.  As Tony Jack reminds us, “access is not inclusion.”

Getting working-class students into college and keeping them has proven difficult, but not impossible.  Successes – like me, Tony Jack, all the working-class academics out there —  do exist.  Here’s the real problem: even when we succeed academically, the gap between us and everyone else increases after we graduate, as Debbie Warnock’s remarkably honest account of her move into and through the academy so poignantly demonstrates.

In Amplified Advantage: Going to A “Good College” in an Era of Inequality, I demonstrate the many ways that parental resources and class cultures amplify the preexisting advantages of some students, even as colleges provide all students a solid education, expanded social networks, and useful cultural capital.  Based on a national survey of college students attending small liberal arts colleges, interviews, and a follow-up survey with recent college graduates, I found that colleges like Barnard did a lot of things well for their students.  Students generally had frequent interactions with faculty and peers, ample opportunities for doing research outside of class, abundant extracurricular activities, and a lot of institutional support for individual growth.  Given the quality of education and opportunity provided, the average $50,000 annual price tag for elite schools actually seems worthwhile, especially when low-income and working-class students receive sufficient financial assistance.

And yet, for all these colleges do to provide an equal playing field for students (all live on campus, everyone takes small classes, almost everyone is involved in useful extracurricular activities), once students graduate, their experiences and opportunities deviate sharply.  More elite students can leverage their advantages and resources in ways unavailable to other students.  They may, for example, take a risk on joining a start-up company, knowing that they have resources to fall back on if this risk does not pay off.  Others may rely on parental financial assistance to spend a year in New York City working at an unpaid internship or working for a nonprofit in a position that pays very little, expecting that such work will eventually pay off in a more secure and remunerative position.  Still others call on the friends and social networks of wealthy parents in the financial sector to ensure them high-paying jobs immediately after graduation, despite relatively shaky grades. Where elite students can afford to take big risks with potential big payoffs, knowing that the risk is ultimately ensured, working-class students’ choices are heavily constrained by circumstance and necessity.   Even compared with more middle-class peers, who may owe just as much in student loans, working-class students are much more likely to take jobs that they do not like and that do not match their skillsets in order to repay student debt. They may have accrued a ton of social and cultural capital while in college, but they can’t make use of it in the way of their peers.

In an increasingly unequal world, where elites outpace all others, reforming higher education from within won’t solve the problem. Class inequities shape students’ opportunities from before they enter college and long after they graduate. To the contrary, if we focus on education as the primary tool to level the playing field, we lose sight of the larger battle. As Andrew Sayer cautions, even reform efforts with egalitarian motives “are likely to be twisted by the field of class forces in ways which reproduce class hierarchy.”  In other words, the more we turn to education as a way out of class struggle, the more we may actually end up amplifying advantages of the few.

And we cannot afford to do that now. The time for ignoring the larger class struggle has passed, as we are all implicated in the game that is being played.  Simply put, expanding opportunities does not work because some players start off with extra resources, and they will use all the tools they have at their disposal to amplify their advantages.  Struggles might ensue over the value of those tools, which suit is “trump,” and which advantages accrue the most chips, but as the pot grows bigger and the stakes get higher, the game is still rigged against those who begin with fewer chips.  Do we want to keep playing this game?  Do we know how to stop?  It’s time to stop asking how we can get more people into college and start asking why it matters.

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

OK, I’m Calling It: The Democratic Nominee Will Run on Medicare for All Who Want It

Unless it’s Bernie and that’s just not going to happen. Check out the Quinnipiac Poll results below. Notice any difference between voter reaction to single payer Medicare for All and public option Medicare for All Who Want It? Yup, pretty drastic including absolutely massive swings among both white college and white noncollege between the two questions.

I just don’t think any nominee, including Warren who’s already backtracking, can ignore these data and associated political trends.

The Times has run two useful articles in the last few days highlighting these political trends. The first was on how the public option is drawing in voters who aren’t sure about Medicare for All/single payer.

“Polls suggest that some voters have become unnerved by the price tags of the Warren and Sanders’ “Medicare for all” plans and the fact that they would abolish private health insurance. Support for such an approach has narrowed in recent months, as people have begun to understand what it would involve. A new Kaiser Family Foundation poll of voters in four battleground states — Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — found that 62 percent of those who are undecided or are still persuadable believe that “a national Medicare-for-all plan that would eliminate private health insurance” is a bad idea….

If Ms. Warren was hoping for a second look from Democrats alarmed by her single-payer plan, she found one in Betsy Loughran, 79, of Tamworth, N.H. Ms. Loughran, who used to run a nonprofit social services agency, said she found Ms. Warren’s proposal for an interim public option “much more palatable, frankly” — so much so that she would now consider donating to her campaign.

“It would be no slam dunk even to get a public option through Congress,” said Ms. Loughran, adding that Ms. Warren’s full-throated support of “Medicare for all” had made her more interested in centrist candidates like Mr. Buttigieg and Ms. Klobuchar. “But if Elizabeth backs off and has a transition plan that would allow people to keep their private health insurance, that makes much more sense.”

The other Times article covered the many Democratic politicians and leaders who are running hard toward the public option and see Medicare for All/single payer as politically unviable in the 2020 election.

“Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who has said it would be a “terrible mistake” for the party nominee to support Medicare for all, is urging Democrats to embrace a more unified message against Mr. Trump. That feels unlikely in the midst of a heated primary campaign where health care has emerged as a significant difference between the candidates.

“Democrats need to start talking about the contrast with Trump on this,” said Mr. Brown, who has not endorsed a candidate in the primary race. “The conversation should not be Democrats fighting over the path to universal coverage.”

Congressional candidates are frequently asked whether they agree with the policy; candidates in all 10 of the most competitive Senate races have said they do not support it, preferring to keep their health care message focused on expanding Medicaid, protecting the Affordable Care Act and slamming repeal efforts by Republicans.”

When Sherrod Brown talks, I listen! Anyway, I think the wind is blowing pretty hard toward Medicare for All Who Want It. I expect it to carry the day.