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 Diverse White Working Class

By which I mean: this vast demographic contains multitudes. Far from a seething cauldron of nativist sentiment, there is a wide array of political sensibilities among this group and plenty of room for Democrats to make–and keep–gains. Tom Edsall’s recent column lays out some interesting data that makes this point.

How to make these gains? Hint: not by decriminalizing the border, not through Medicare for All that abolishes private health care plans; not by providing health coverage to undocumented immigrants and other similar–and similarly unpopular-ideas. The obvious answer is programs that are popular both with Democrats’ base voters and with significant sectors of the white working class. As Edsall notes, channeling the views of many Democratic leaders, both black and white:

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

I don’t know how many are familiar with Rachel Bitecofer of Christopher Newport University and her forecasting models. I did feature them in some posts in the runup to the 2018 election. To Bitecofer’s credit, her model, which is based on the predictive value of negative partisanship in the current environment, did perform very well indeed in 2018, predicting both the number and location of the seats flipped very accurately.

Well, she’s out early with a prediction for the 2020 general election and it’s worth checking out. Of course, any one model should be treated with caution, no matter how accurate it has recently been. And I have some questions about her analysis, which comes perilously close to saying it doesn’t really matter whom the Democrats nominate. But here’s her bottom line:

“Barring a shock to the system, Democrats recapture the presidency. The leaking of the Trump campaign’s internal polling has somewhat softened the blow of this forecast, as that polling reaffirms what my model already knew: Trump’s 2016 path to the White House, which was the political equivalent of getting dealt a Royal Flush in poker, is probably not replicable in 2020 with an agitated Democratic electorate. And that is really bad news for Donald Trump because the Blue Wall of the Midwest was then, and is now, the ONLY viable path for Trump to win the White House.”

In terms of the map, her model predicts that the Rustbelt three of MI, PA and WI will all move back to the Democrats. AZ, FL, IA and NC are seen as toss-ups. All states Democrats took in 2016 remain Democratic.

Could be. These new data from Morning Consult certainly suggest the model predictions are plausible.

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

Well, the first Democratic debates are now in the rear-view mirror, so I suppose I should write a few words about What It All Means.

First, on the Democratic horse race, which preoccupies many of us. It’s clear Kamala Harris helped herself quite a bit in terms of visibility and has seen an uptick in the polls. In the Morning Consult (MC) post-debate poll, she is on 12 percent as a first choice for Democratic voters, tied for third place with Elizabeth Warren.

But the basic structure of the race has not decisively changed (though of course it may down the line). Biden is on 33 percent, far in the lead, albeit down 5 points from pre-debate levels, while Harris is up 5 points to the aforementioned 12 percent. Sanders and Warren basically held steady. It’s also worth mentioning that Biden’s very high favorability rating barely budged as a result of the debate.

Harris is already experiencing a bit of blowback, including from some black politicians, for her premeditated hit on an incredibly divisive issue that left politicians like Biden struggling for political survival. The idea that Biden’s actions reveal him as some kind of racist is a hard sell. On the other hand, the idea that Biden isn’t ready for the kind of brutal attacks that Republicans and Trump will launch at him, should he be the Democratic candidate, is a much easier sell. That in the end could be the most important result of Harris’ successful rhetorical strike.

The more consequential result of the debates may not be its effect on the race for the nomination but rather its effect on Democrats’ ability to beat Trump. Here the news is fairly grim I think. Trump is an unpopular President and quite beatable. But that requires you keep the election a referendum on him and not unpopular Democratic ideas.

I had a post awhile ago where I listed the “four don’ts” of the 2020 Democratic campaign. To refresh your memory, here they are:

1. Reparations for the descendants of slaves. Preferred: social programs that disproportionately benefit blacks because of their income, education or geographic attributes.
2. Abolish ICE. Preferred: Reforming ICE + a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants + an actual immigration policy that includes border security and policies about future immigration levels.
3. Medicare for All that eliminates private insurance. Preferred: Medicare for Anyone or Medicare for All (Who Want It). Currently embodied in the DeLauro-Schakowsky Medicare for America bill.
4. A Green New Deal that commits to 100 percent renewable energy within 10 years. Preferred: A Green New Deal that focuses on jobs, infrastructure, research and promoting clean energy in all forms.

In the Democratic debates, several candidates besides the expected Sanders screwed up on the second don’t on how to handle Medicare for All, most notably Warren, who had previously been fairly cagey in how she handled the issue. But she aggressively put herself on the side of abolishing private health insurance, an unpopular position which could weaponize the health care issue for Trump and sink a Democratic candidate. Harris also declared her support for this approach but then, hilariously, claimed the next day she had misunderstood the question. Nice try.

On the third don’t, abolishing ICE, technically no one called for it, but they did aggressively compete with one another on how leniently to deal with border issues. In their zeal to show how much they opposed Trump’s cruelty on the issue, many candidates signed onto the idea that illegal border crossing should be decriminalized. Like abolishing ICE, this will sound to many voters like open borders, which is a terrible position for Democrats to be in. Americans want their borders to be controlled, with limits on the amount of immigration and asylum-seeking. If Democrats have a humane and workable way to deal with these issues, voters need to hear this, rather than proposals that sound like calls for a much looser border.

On the first don’t, reparations, there wasn’t much talk about it. Possibly Harris might have talked about the issue but she had other plans. However, by bringing up the busing controversies of the 1970’s, it potentially injects another divisive racial issue into the campaign. There is nothing in public opinion that indicates re-litigating this controversy would be particularly helpful for the Democrats. Quite the opposite; the country has moved on from this approach to dealing with de facto school segregation, which was and is quite unpopular.

Now, I get that this is the nomination process and a candidate can conceivably tack back to the center in the general and recant or “clarify” their unpopular issue positions But that’s easier said than done. It is wiser to give your enemy as little ammunition as possible. I fear many Democratic candidates, including some of the most plausible nominees, are ignoring this stricture.

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

Our new State of Change report is out, covering demographic evolution of the parities at both the national and state level from 1980-2036! Among our findings:

“The parties were more compositionally different in 2016 than at any point in the prior 36 years. This election was the first presidential election white noncollege voters did not make up a plurality of both parties’ coalitions, with white college voters exceeding the share of white noncollege voters in the Democratic coalition.

At The New Yorker, Jonathan Blitzer’s “ICE Agents Are Losing Patience with Trump’s Chaotic Immigration Policy” includes some embarrasing revelations, including:

Last Monday, when President Trump tweeted that his Administration would stage nationwide immigration raids the following week, with the goal of deporting “millions of illegal aliens,” agents at Immigration and Customs Enforcement were suddenly forced to scramble. The agency was not ready to carry out such a large operation. Preparations that would typically take field officers six to eight weeks were compressed into a few days, and, because of Trump’s tweet, the officers would be entering communities that now knew they were coming. “It was a dumb-shit political move that will only hurt the agents,” John Amaya, a former deputy chief of staff at ice, told me. On Saturday, hours before the operation was supposed to start in ten major cities across the country, the President changed course, delaying it for another two weeks.

And that’s just the opening paragraph of Blitzer’s report. He continues:

On Sunday, I spoke to an ice officer about the week’s events. “Almost nobody was looking forward to this operation,” the officer said. “It was a boondoggle, a nightmare.” Even on the eve of the operation, many of the most important details remained unresolved. “This was a family op. So where are we going to put the families? There’s no room to detain them, so are we going to put them in hotels?”…

That’s exactly where they put them, Blitzer reveals, courtesy of the American taxpayer. “That, in turn, raised other questions. “So the families are in hotels, but who’s going to watch them?” the officer continued. “What happens if the person we arrest has a U.S.-citizen child? What do we do with the children? Do we need to get booster seats for the vans?”

Blitzer adds that “Trump’s tweet broadcasting the operation had also created a safety issue for the officers involved. “No police agency goes out and says, ‘Tomorrow, between four and eight, we’re going to be in these neighborhoods,’ ” the officer said.” This ill-conceived project would be spearheaded by “an official named Mark Morgan—who’s already been fired once by Trump and regained the President’s support after making a series of appearances on Fox News.”

The Police Academy/Keystone Kops act continued over the weekend, when Trump agreed to stop the chaotic operation. Then,

…Officials in the White House authorized ice to issue a press release insinuating that someone had leaked important details about the operation and therefore compromised it. “Any leak telegraphing sensitive law-enforcement operations is egregious and puts our officers’ safety in danger,” an ice spokesperson said late Saturday afternoon. This was a puzzling statement given that it was Trump who first publicized the information about the operation.

Blitzer notes that last year Homan “resigned as acting head of ice after the Senate refused to confirm him to the post. Earlier this month, Trump announced, on Fox News, that Homan would be returning to the Administration as the President’s new border tsar, but Homan, who hadn’t been informed of the decision, has remained noncommittal.” All of which would be amusing, if not for the fact that children are suffering because of it, as Blitzer explains:

At the same time, his Administration was under fire for holding immigrant children at a Border Patrol facility in Clint, Texas. Two hundred and fifty infants, children, and teen-agers have spent weeks in squalid conditions; they have been denied food, water, soap, and toothbrushes, and there’s limited access to medicine in the wake of flu and lice outbreaks…last week, when an Administration lawyer appeared before the Ninth Circuit to answer for the conditions at the facility, which were in clear violation of a federal agreement on the treatment of children in detention, she said that addressing them was not the government’s responsibility.

And that’s just at one detention center. Blitzer concludes, quoting an an unnamed ICE officer:

Since the creation of ice, in 2003, enforcement was premised on the idea that officers would primarily go after criminals for deportation; Trump, who views ice as a political tool to showcase his toughness, has abandoned that framework entirely. “I don’t even know what we’re doing now,” the officer said. “A lot of us see the photos of the kids at the border, and we’re wondering, ‘What the hell is going on?’”

Child abuse, mismanagement and irresponsible squandering of hard-earned taxpayer dollars, while Republicans cower in the shadows, is one answer.

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

What Do Black Voters Want?

One thing’s for sure, it’s better to look at the actual data rather than the expressed views of leaders, self-appointed and otherwise, because the two can diverge very sharply.

In this regard, the recent poll of black voters conducted for the Black Economic Alliance by Hart Research is illuminating. As well summarized by David Leonhardt:

“In the poll, people were given a list of 14 economic policies and asked how much they thought each would help the black community. The list was full of progressive ideas: paid leave and better workplace benefits; a higher minimum wage; a federal jobs guarantee; stronger laws against discrimination; reparations for descendants of slaves; and more.

On a straight up-or-down basis, a majority of black Americans favored every one of the 14 policies. But there was a fairly wide gap in how much they thought each would help. At the top of the list were a higher minimum wage, stronger discrimination laws and better workplace benefits and training. About 70 percent of respondents said each of those would help “a great deal.”

At the bottom of the list: Slavery reparations. Second to last: a federal jobs guarantee. Only about half of respondents said each would help a great deal.

What’s going on here? To me, it’s a reminder that black Americans, as a group, don’t have the same political opinions as the most liberal parts of the Democratic coalition. On many issues, black Americans are more moderate — or perhaps more pragmatic.”

Of course, that’s not the impression you’d get from listening to Ta-Nehisi Coates, who recently testified before Congress on the issue of reparations. But then, Coates is probably pretty far away from the views of the median black voter. Closer perhaps is Coleman Hughes, a brilliant young (he’s still an undergraduate at Columbia) black intellectual, who also testified at that Congressional hearing.

“In 2008 the House of Representatives formally apologized for slavery and Jim Crow. In 2009, the Senate did the same. Black people don’t need another apology. We need safer neighborhoods and better schools. We need a less punitive criminal justice system. We need affordable healthcare. And none of these things can be achieved through reparations for slavery…

If we were to pay reparations today, we would only divide the country further – making it harder to build the political coalitions required to solve the problems facing black people today. We would insult many black Americans by putting a price on the suffering of their ancestors, and turn the relationship between black Americans and white Americans from a coalition into a transaction, from a union between citizens into a lawsuit between plaintiffs and defendants.”

This point–about the divergence between the median black voter and the views of certain liberal elites, both black and white–is also relevant to understanding the kerfuffles around Joe Biden’s various missteps around racially-inflected issues and how much they are likely to hurt him with black voters. Perry Bacon, Jr. addressed this question recently in a 538 column and gets it exactly right, I  think. While acknowledging that it’s certainly possible Biden’s statements will hurt him seriously, he thinks it’s quite possible that:

“[these statements] could alternatively not really damage him much at all — even among black voters. Poll after poll has found that Biden has very, very high approval ratings among black voters. For example, a survey conducted last month on behalf of the Black Economic Alliance found that 76 percent of black Democrats are either enthusiastic or comfortable with Biden’s candidacy, compared to just 16 percent who are uncomfortable or have some reservations. This was the best favorable/unfavorable of any of the candidates that respondents were asked about. And according to data from Morning Consult, which is conducting weekly polls of the 2020 race with large sample sizes — giving us more resolution on results for subgroups — older black voters really, really like Biden: He is getting more than 55 percent of the Democratic primary vote among blacks age 45 and over, compared to 34 percent among blacks under age 45.

So I’m skeptical that this controversy will substantially erode that support, particularly among older black voters who have such positive feelings about Biden. In the early stages of this race, he has already weathered another issue that involves race: his treatment of Anita Hill during the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas in 1991, when Biden was the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.”

He concludes:

“It’s hard to predict what will happen to Biden’s standing in the wake of this week’s news. But I think it’s increasingly clear that the way we think about racial controversies (with the implication that minorities are particularly triggered by them) and the black vote (assuming it is fairly monolithic) are off. Biden’s positive mentions of his work with segregationist senators may have annoyed nonblack Democrats as much or more than black ones. And the biggest question is not whether it pulls all black people from Biden — the younger ones are already kind of ambivalent about him — but whether it breaks his bond with older black people.”

People like, well, Whoopi Goldberg, who said on the program, The View:

“After introducing Hot Topic with clips of Biden, Booker, and Harris, Goldberg launched into a passionate monologue defending Biden from his critics. “You have to work with people you don’t like,” she said of segregationists like Thurmond, Richard Russell Jr., and Sam Ervin. “Beat Biden in the debates. If you can beat him, beat him. Don’t try to make him out a racist.” Goldberg went on to say that Biden can’t possibly be “a racist” because “he sat for eight years with a black guy” in the White House. “What, did he have a noose in the background?” she asked, earning her a massive round of applause from the audience.”

So we shall see how all this works out. But above all, I recommend close attention to actual data about the views of black voters and–I’m looking at you white liberals–rather than making assumptions that the views of these voters match your own views.

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

This article by Robert Shapiro that just got released by Democracy journal is worth a look. Shapiro looks at employment data by race-ethnicity and education since the Great Recession and finds strong evidence of white working class decline. In Shapiro’s view, progressives’ failure to recognize the salience of these economic trends–and respond to them–is undermining their ability to reach these voters and provides a clear lane for right-wing populists like Trump.

The campaign of Jamie Harrison, Sen. Lindsey Graham’s Democratic opponent, has aired an impressive new ad, blasting the flip-flopping Republican Senator for his weathervane hypocrisy — and using Graham’s own statements to show it. Here’s the ad with some commentary by The Young Turks (TYT):

According to Wikipedia, ‘jiu jitsu’ involves “manipulating the opponent’s force against themselves,” so this ad provides an excellent example of political jiu jitsu. Not only does the ad use Graham’s recorded words about Trump against him. He makes it worse by literally reversing exactly what he was recorded saying —  assertively rejecting his own words — stunning hypocrisy caught in the headlights.

Of course, attacking an opponent isn’t enough to win. A candidate also has to have a narrative, significant accomplishments and some positive, creative ideas. Fortunately, Harrison has the chops.

At ozy.com, Daniel Malloy has a political pofile of Harrison, who has “an aspirational message that can appeal both to downtrodden white Donald Trump voters and Black men whose turnout rate dropped because they weren’t inspired by Hillary Clinton.” However,  “before you get to the message, you have to have the vehicle by which the message is delivered,” Harrison says. “And that is state parties.”

More from Malloy’s profile of Harrison:

“The 41-year-old son of Orangeburg, South Carolina, is a powerful messenger. His mother dropped out of 10th grade to give birth to him; his father was not much of a presence. They relied on welfare and food stamps at times, with a side of political constituent service…A star student whose love of reading was sparked by comic books, Harrison graduated from Yale and then Georgetown law. He rose quickly on Capitol Hill with his hometown congressman, Democrat Jim Clyburn, who named Harrison the House’s first ever Black floor director when Clyburn claimed the No. 3–ranking post…He returned to South Carolina, he says, because he was disappointed in what Republican rule had done to the state, and he became the state Democratic Party’s first ever Black chairman in 2013.

Pledging to build up an atrophied grassroots network, he launched a fellowship for young political talent and an “issues conference” to train Democrats on policy around the state. He became pals with his Republican counterpart, Matt Moore, and the two joined forces to help remove the Confederate battle flag at the state capitol in 2015…Clyburn signals Harrison could be his successor, telling OZY: “I see him as a potential congressman.”

Harrison will face an uphill struggle against incumbent Graham, who has reportedly amassed a $3.2 million war chest for the 2020 campaign. Those so inclined can help to reduce the imbalance at  Harrison’s ActBlue page.

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

Let’s Face It, Nancy Pelosi Is Pretty Smart

I know a lot of people are annoyed that Pelosi is not leading the charge to impeach Trump….but really any sober consideration of the evidence would lead one to conclude she is doing the right thing. Instead. she had concentrated on uniting her caucus to pass progressive bills that, for sure, will not become law but do force GOP members to cast potentially costly votes against the bills.

Perry Bacon, Jr. has the goods on 538:

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

With Trump kicking off his re-election campaign with a boffo rally in Orlando, FL, it’s a good time to check in on how the Prez is doing in the Sunshine State. Felicitously, Quinnipiac has just released a new Florida poll that allows us to assess this.

According to the poll, Trump is doing rather poorly. In a matchup with possible Democratic nominee Joe Biden, he is behind by 9 points, 50-41. Lest this be deemed too much of an outlier, Trump was behind by a similar margin in Florida in the leaked Trump campaign polls (which he claims don’t exist; maybe he’ll claim Quinnipiac doesn’t exist either).