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).

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

The Danish social democrats ran in the recent Denmark national elections on a left, anti-austerity program on economics and a fairly tough stance on immigration–described by the party’s leader, Mette Frederiksen, as both “realistic and fair”. The result: her center-left “red bloc” took the majority of the seats in the Danish parliament, meaning that Frederiksen should be the next prime minister. The far right populists, on the other hand, lost badly.

This excellent result contrasts rather starkly with the dreadful performance of many other European social democratic parties recently. This is generating considerable debate in European social democratic circles about whether Denmark is demonstrating a road forward out of the current mire. And well it should; the situation of European social democracy is dire and in urgent need of correction.

Paul Collier argues the case for the relevance of the Denmark social democratic path in a challenging piece in the New Statesman. His concern is to show that Frederiksen and her party are trying to recapture something vital about social democracy that has been lost in recent times. Their stance on immigration is not just political expediency but about re-establishing something very fundamental about social democracy’s commitment to the common good and common purpose.

“Following her success in the Danish elections, Mette Frederiksen is set to return the Social Democrats to power. This contrasts starkly with such parties’ fate elsewhere in Europe: the long melancholy roar of an ebb tide. Mette’s explanation for that decline, pitched at working class voters, has been “you didn’t leave us; we left you”. She has won not by ditching core values but by returning to them. To grasp that, we need a larger picture than post-millennium Denmark….

The essence of social democracy was to recognise both the value and the grim limitations of market capitalism, building a belief system among citizens whereby the anxieties that it kept generating could be addressed. Political leaders communicated a sense of common purpose to achieve a forward-looking agenda, matched by inculcating a sense of mutual obligations to deliver it. People learnt that they had duties to each other: not just to their families, but to the entire society. Gradually, the society wove a dense web of reciprocal obligations: trapping people in it by the gentle pressure of self-respect and peer esteem. The economy grew, and the benefits were shared…..

Like other social democratic parties, that in Denmark had always been based on an alliance between the provincial working class and the young metropolitan educated. But the change in the belief system of the metropolitans faced the party with a choice. The metropolitans held the advantage: unions were in decline, while they were on the rise. As they took over the party, the working class gradually drifted off, and disdainful metropolitans accused them of being “deplorable”, by which they meant “fascist”….

Depicting [shared identity and reciprocal obligations] as quasi-fascist was the theatrical conceit of those keen to ditch their obligations. The domain of reciprocity has to be national for the simple reason that the nation is the entity within which the tax revenues needed to meet those obligations can be raised. First and foremost, the key obligations are on skilled metropolitans to hand over more of the high productivity now generated by agglomeration, and which they wrongly attribute entirely to their own abilities.

Mette Frederiksen recognized the need for shared belonging. She is rebuilding common purpose around a forward-looking pragmatic agenda of addressing the new anxieties that global capitalism has thrust on the working class. But after years of neglect, working class voters no longer trusted the party. To re-establish credibility, she needed a “signalling action”: something that, had she been a metropolitan trying to bullshit them, she would not have done….

In tandem with her core focus on returning to the party’s roots in addressing the anxieties faced by working people, Frederiksen is paying serious attention to how integration can best be achieved. All citizens need to absorb the belief system of reciprocal obligations and mutual regard that underpins Denmark’s social miracle: that is the condition under which immigration from different cultures is sustainable. The acceptance of shared identity by immigrants does not preclude retaining some other identities. But it has to be sufficiently manifest to generate the common knowledge that they have embraced the identity, the common purpose, and the obligations that come with them….

Frederiksen is pioneering the renewal of European social democracy: at its core is the rebuilding of shared identity, common purpose, and mutual obligations that eludes the metropolitans.”

Very interesting analysis. We shall see how the debate within European social democracy evolves from here.

The following article by Jack Metzgar, author of Striking Steel: Solidarity Remembered and former president of the Working-Class Studies Association, is cross-posted from Working-Class perspectives:

Most progressive policies have the potential of unifying people around class interests, but a convention in talking about these things often seems to purposely lean against pointing that out. Cory Booker’s baby bonds, all versions of Medicare for All, and the $15 minimum wage, for example, would all disproportionately benefit blacks and Latinxs, a point often highlighted by politicians and in the press, especially the advocacy press.  What they usually don’t say, however, is that though lower percentages of whites will benefit from these policies, very large numbers of them will. What would be wrong with uniformly mentioning that while people of color are disproportionately affected, the largest groups of poor, uninsured, and negative-wealth Americans are white folks?

Maybe candidates and reporters assume that everybody knows this, but I’m pretty sure they do not.  Though I have only anecdotal evidence, I suspect large numbers of white people don’t realize how substantially they would benefit from these policies.  Every time a politician or advocate says proudly that their policy would “especially benefit people of color,” to white folks it can sound like the policy is geared mostly toward people unlike them.  Because whites are still a large majority of the population (67%) and an even larger proportion of voters (72%), this should be seen as political malpractice.  But beyond political pragmatism, there’s a moral and truth deficit to mentioning one but not the other.

Almost any policy, existing or proposed, that aims to improve the economic circumstances of the bottom half of the population by income will end up benefiting larger percentages of people of color (what is meant by “disproportionately”), while the largest group of beneficiaries will be white people.  While whites are under-represented among the bottom half, they are still the largest group as we define our races and ethnicities.  A $15 minimum wage, for example, would benefit the majorities of blacks and Hispanics and only a little more than a third of whites, but of the 60 million people who would benefit, 33 million would be white.

To take a more complicated example, consider this headline from Vox, “Study: Cory Booker’s baby bonds nearly closes the racial wealth gap for young adults.”  The black-white racial wealth gap is huge, and it is clearly tied to a centuries-long history of structural racism that continues today in many forms, including education, housing, and lending practices.  The mean average wealth of white households is nearly 9 times higher that of black households.  What’s more, about 20% of black households have zero or negative net wealth versus only 10% of white households.  But while it may seem paradoxical, more than twice the number of white households have zero or negative net wealth than black households – 7.7 million white households compared to 3.3 million black households. This is simple arithmetic – lower percentages of much larger groups mean more actual people, but most of us can’t and don’t do this arithmetic in our heads.  And, unless it is pointed out, we don’t often infer it as a background fact.

So if Cory Booker says his baby bonds would “especially benefit people of color” in building wealth, is that actually true?  If we look at just those with negative net wealth who would benefit the most from Booker’s means-tested proposal, more than 7 million white households would benefit while only about 3 million black households would.  What is “especially” about that?  Booker assumes that people only go by percentages, and his proposal would indeed substantially reduce the black-white wealth gap in median incomes, but the largest group of beneficiaries will still be white. Booker’s baby bonds scheme reduces not only the racial wealth gap but also the class wealth gap.  Families of color will benefit disproportionately, but white ones will “especially” benefit too.  Wouldn’t being explicit about that make the proposal more attractive, not less, to a big chunk of the two-thirds of the electorate that is white?

Would that be appealing to “white” self-interest?  Yes, in part it would, but it would not appeal uniformly across white income classes, 20% of whom would likely see their benefit from baby bonds as insignificant.  But this is also true of people of color.  By mentioning that a policy “disproportionately benefits people of color,” we might think we’re appealing to the interests of all people of color, but we’re undoubtedly appealing most to those for whom baby bonds could be a generational game changer – a group defined by class, not by race.  Baby bonds benefit almost everybody (up to $126,000 in annual income), but they make the most difference for people of little or negative wealth regardless of race or ethnicity.  Calling out not just how a policy benefits almost everybody, but specifically how it benefits larger numbers of white people at the same time as it benefits larger percentages of people of color is to talk about race and class at the same time – and we need to do more of that.

It feels awkward, because calling white people white can seem provocative.   But if we’re going to divide ourselves into racial groups as we do – white, black, Hispanic, Asian, and other – then we need to stop talking as if all poor people are people of color and all white people have the full array of privileges that come with whiteness.  Though nearly everybody would get it right on a true-false test, well-educated journalists and politicians routinely use “poor” as if it were a racial category and “working class” as if it were wall-to-wall white (and often just blue-collar white men).  This implicit usage not only makes building class unity more difficult, it makes it nearly impossible even to envision.

It also encourages politicians and pundits to pose false dilemmas pitting Trump’s working-class white base against the Democrats’ rainbow coalition, as in suggesting that the Party must choose to “Win Back Trump Voters or Rally the Base?”  It makes it impossible to see that 33 percent of the rainbow are whites without bachelor degrees – the reigning definition of the white working class and the largest single group in the Democratic base.  Dems need class-based policies that appeal across our racial categories, and candidates running for the Democratic nomination have a potpourri of such policies on offer.  But they need to learn how to talk about class and race at the same time.

In his New York Times column, “When It Comes to the Senate, the Democrats Have Their Work Cut Out for Them: Regaining control of the upper chamber may lie just outside the party’s grasp, but it is not out of reach,” Thomas B. Edsall provides a source-rich exploration of Democratic prospects for winning a Senate majority in 2020. Edsall checks in with several of the most perceptive political analysts, and concludes,

Leah Gose and Theda Skocpol, sociologists at Harvard, have been tracking on-the-ground mobilization efforts by over 100 resistance groups in Pennsylvania and they are more optimistic about Democratic prospects in 2020.

In “Resist, Persist, and Transform: The Emergence and Impact of Grassroots Resistance Groups in the Early Trump presidency” Gose and Skocpol argue that anti-Trump efforts “have remade American civic life and politics since 2016.”

The two observe that the anti-Trump mobilization has not been “restricted to liberal states or to ‘blue enclave’ areas where voters mostly support Democrats” but extends into “places where Democrats or liberals are a beleaguered minority.”

Skocpol sees little or no letup on the part of local resistance groups. In an email, she wrote:

“Almost all groups plan to be very active going into 2020. The national media obsesses with the presidential horse race and the impeachment argument, but local groups are keeping at the fundamentals in many places.”

Democrats who have been frustrated by Republican control of the Senate — from 1995 to the present Congress, Republicans will have been in the majority for 19 years to the Democrats’ nine — had better hope that Gose and Skocpol are right.

If not, Democrats can bank on more years of staring at what Will Bunch, a Philadelphia Inquirer columnist, described as “Mitch McConnell’s democracy-crushing smirk” while McConnell presides over a Republican majority that has become the fervent ally of a president determined to embrace and embolden a white America hostile to immigrants, committed to an immoral racial hierarchy and eager to eviscerate the social progress of the past 60 years.

We encourage TDS readers to take the time to read the entire Gos/Skocpol paper, including their appendices, references and other notes. Their research not only provides a hopeful guide to successful progressive organizing projects in current context; they also shed light on how new groups can form and add to this all important coalition. In the paper’s abstract, the authors explain:

The November 2016 election sparked the creation of thousands of local groups committed to resisting the new Trump administration and Republican Congress. Our paper uses online surveys and interviews as well as evidence from fieldwork and web searches to analyze the development, demographics, and activities of such groups operating since late 2016 in eight non-metropolitan counties in four states as well as in dozens of cities, towns, and suburbs spread across the state of Pennsylvania. Local groups were founded through friendships and social media contacts and most of their members and leaders are middle-class white women. Often networked across states and regions, grassroots resistance groups have reached out to surrounding communities and generated and supported new candidates for local, state, and national offices. During the 2018 midterms and beyond, they are challenging and often remaking the Democratic Party at the local level.

Skocpol and Gos note that “Describing and analyzing the characteristics and activities of these widespread grassroots resistance efforts has been a challenge for scholars, because they are not part of any one big national organization, their participants are not flagged in national surveys, and their leaders and activities are only sporadically featured in the national media.”

Focusing on key swing states, the authors used “innovative forms of data collection – via fieldwork in multiple states, interviews, online surveys, and tracking of the Facebook pages of local groups – to offer the first comprehensive description and analysis of grassroots resistance organizations formed from late 2016 in four states and dozens of communities across North Carolina, Ohio, Wisconsin, and (most extensively) Pennsylvania. Specifically, we ask: how did anti-Trump resistance groups form, grow, and sustain themselves at the local level from November 2016 to early 2019? Who formed and joined these groups and what have they done?” Among their insightful observations:

…Research concentrated on street demonstrations and other mass public protests cannot not get at the heart of what makes recent electorally sparked popular upsurges in the United States so consequential…Grassroots resistance groups were built by citizens who found other like-minded people nearby. For those who set up and went to resistance meetings, attendance was about more than political engagement because it provided emotional support and community-based opportunities to connect, organize, and act at what they felt was a shocking moment for America.

in a section entitled, “The Social Characteristics of Grassroots Resisters,” Gose and Skocpol note,

According to responses to our online individual questionnaires (see Appendix D) – and what we see with our own eyes when attending local meetings around the country – most participants in resistance groups are middle-aged or older white college-educated women. Our largest set of individual responses comes from participants in the pro-Trump counties who fit a consistent profile. Nine of every ten are women, and our field observations suggest that male members of local groups are often husbands or partners of the female members. Furthermore, the leadership teams for groups found in the eight counties are either all-female or (in two instances) include a woman teamed up with one or two men.

Nine of ten respondents report their race as white (compared to 8% who identified as nonwhite and two percent who do not indicate a category); and the respondents are even whiter than the surrounding populations in these overwhelmingly white non-big city areas. As for age, these resisters are mostly older adults ranging upward from their 30s into their retirement years (plus one 19-year old). The overall median age is 55 years. And they are highly educated people, with 37% reporting college degrees and another 46% holding advanced post-graduate degrees. Some of these participants are retired. Among both retirees and those still at work, the most frequent occupations cited are school teacher or university professor; health care positions; work in retail or human services jobs; and business management positions.

In addition to the demographic portrait, a sense of interpersonal conection and community is clearly a leading factor in activist participation:

Many resisters also placed high value on camaraderie and joint action with other local people who share their views and want to join forces to create “strength in numbers.” Social ties formed in local resistance groups and projects are crucial, as we have learned. Leaders and participants who did not previously know one another told us they have become close friends while working together in these groups. This dynamic can have a downside, of course; if one friend pulls back, that can reduce the other’s motivation. Yet at the same time, as the months have passed, people often tell us that they are remaining involved despite feelings of burnout, precisely because they value the fellowship. As one female co-leader in North Carolina put it in an email to the authors explaining why she is sticking with her group while another exhausted leader pulled back, “Working with our community makes me happy. I grow appreciative of the interconnectedness we share. I learn about myself and my world. Indivisible members have been a great blessing to me.” Attachments to fellow participants were apparent in many questionnaire responses. As we suggested earlier, the grassroots resistance has created and reinforced interpersonal social ties in the course of drawing volunteer citizens into new levels of activism.

In one of the most hopeful observations, Skocpol and Gose write, “we wondered at the onset of this research whether local resistance groups would tend to cluster in the most liberal states and in the more liberal cities and college towns of conservative “red” states. But that is not what we find. Similar grassroots groups have emerged all over the United States, in and across every state…Indeed, we find many indications in our field visits, interviews, and questionnaire responses that centrist and liberal residents of conservative counties may have felt an even stronger need to come together than their counterparts in liberal-leaning areas.”

As for issues of particular concern to the activists,

Virtually all were horrified at threats they perceived from the Trump administration and the GOP Congress; and most wanted to fight to try to save the Affordable Care Act from repeal once Trump and the Congressional leadership made this a top 2017 priority. But beyond that, various subgroups of resisters cared most about the environment, or were especially determined to push for gerrymandering reforms, or were worried about education spending cutbacks at the local and state as well as national levels.

Almost every one of the several dozen groups we have followed devoted a lot of participant energy to the early year-long fight to save the Affordable Care Act. That fight was ideal for a combination of local organizing and national purpose, because it involved repeated critical junctures as each house of Congress took steps toward repealing or eviscerating the landmark 2010 law that extended health insurance coverage to millions of Americans. Resistance efforts on this front were especially intense and relentless during the spring and summer of 2017 – when local groups used tactics like letter writing and “post card parties,” calls or visits to elected officials and their staffs at district offices, writing opinion pieces, and holding public demonstrations and “die-ins” (for accounts, see Griffin 2017, Weigel 2017, Zremski 2017). Defending health reform was a common challenge around which disparate local resisters could organize, build ties, and hone skills. Members of grassroots resistance groups were engaged at all levels and quite intensely; and even as efforts across many places were nationally attuned, local networks of resisters could take steps to inform their neighbors and local news outlets about what the Affordable Care Act does and what would be lost if it were repealed. Because this “all hands on deck” struggle went on for quite some time, it taught local members and regional networks ways to engage the media and press their representatives on other issues.

Finally, the fight to block health reform repeal boosted the widespread resistance because it ended up “winning” in two important ways. Congressional votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act ultimately fell just short in the Senate, and grassroots efforts at least contributed to this outcome. Those efforts prodded the GOP Congress to keep trying different variants of repeal over many months. And they pushed Maine Senator Susan Collins to become one of three Republican senators who blocked repeal (Cassidy 2017; Levin, Greenberg, and Padilla 2017b). What is more, in a larger sense, during 2017 U.S. public support for the Affordable Care Act shifted from net negative to net positive (Kaiser Family Foundation 2018). Whether or not widespread local resistance agitation directly caused either the Congressional repeal failure or the shift toward more favorable public views of health reform, these coincidences were encouraging to resistance members. Vital lessons were learned about how to act locally to affect national outcomes.

Gose and Skocpol also provide some cogent insights about burnout, attrition and ‘group persistence’ and note the important role of social media, particularly Facebook, in sustaining the activist projects. They also explore the sometimes problematic relationships between the groups and the local Democratic party and Democratic campaigns. They conclude,

Whatever unfolds, our research so far suggests that movement sparked by the Trump election will not push U.S. liberal politics toward the uncompromising far left. The kinds of grassroots resistance groups we have discovered and studied do not espouse the sorts of purist ideological stances sometimes taken by professionally run progressive advocacy groups. Grassroots groups have strong local connections, and their participants are closely engaged with candidates and officeholders with varied backgrounds and views. If these female-led voluntary groups persist as an important part of center-left politics in the United States, they are unlikely to further uncompromising ideological polarization. As before throughout American history, women’s civic activism may revitalize democratic engagement and promote a new birth of responsive government in communities across the land.

The research of Skocpol and Gose provides hope that the new ‘resistance’ activist groups can indeed help steer America in a more progressive direction. How effectively Democrats support and interact with these groups may also help the party win the presidency, secure working majorities in Washington and in state legislatures across the nation.

From “Rumblings from Trump’s base could shape Democrats’ choice for 2020” by Ronald Browstein at CNN Politics:

Detailed new research by the Democratic voter-targeting firm Catalist found that the party’s big gains in the 2018 congressional election were fueled not only by unusually high turnout among voters sympathetic to the party, but also by larger-than-expected defections from the GOP among voters who had backed Trump two years earlier.

Those findings offer potentially critical evidence as Democrats are debating the best approach to beating Trump in 2020. On one side are progressive activists who say the party should prioritize mobilizing nonvoters, particularly young people and minorities, with an unabashedly liberal agenda. On the other are centrists who say Democrats can’t tilt so far left on issues such as single-payer health care and the Green New Deal that they alienate swing voters who backed Trump in 2016 but may be open to reconsidering now.

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

Were We Just a Bit Early?

I mean about the emerging Democratic majority. David Brooks seems to think that could be the case. In his latest column, he writes about something I’ve written about quite a few times recently (you always see it here first!): generational turnover in the American electorate and the potentially dire implications of this for the GOP.

“In 2002, John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira wrote a book called “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” which predicted electoral doom for the G.O.P. based on demographic data. That prediction turned out to be wrong, or at least wildly premature….

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

Surround the Countryside from the Cities!

The Maoist dictum is to surround the cities from the countryside. Democrats need to reverse that dictum and push into the countryside from the cities because, as Will Wilkinson notes in a good piece in the Times, Donald Trump’s policies are leaving huge openings for the Democrats in rural areas. This idea is consistent, of course, with the Catalist findings on the 2018 election (reviewed yesterday) that showed Democrats making their largest vote gains in rural areas, essentially due to vote-switching by 2016 Trump voters.

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 touted the Catalist estimates released previously as the best estimates we have of voter turnout and preferences by demographic group for the 2018 election and previous elections–and therefore the best tool for helping us understand what really drove the 2018 election results.

So send up the balloons! Yair Ghitza and the good folks at Catalist have just released their final data for 2018, incorporating final precinct-level elections and, critically, individual-level vote history records from voter files around the country. These are some tasty data and as close as we are ever likely to get to a definitive portrait of the 2018 election.