The following article, by Robert Kuttner, co-editor of the American Prospect and author of Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism?, is cross-posted from HuffPo:

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

Sure Democrats Are Ahead Nationally, But How Are Democrats Doing in Competitive House Districts?

A good question; there is a veritable fire hose of national polls that test the generic Congressional ballot (where the Democrats are doing very well). But what about in the competitive districts that really count, where the race to control the House will actually be won or lost? Such polls are harder to find but Latino Decisions has just released a poll of the 61 most competitive House districts as defined by the Cook Political Report, CNN and Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball site.

As a bonus they did oversamples of individual minority groups so they could report reliable findings for those groups. The overall +13 in these districts for the Democrats looks excellent, the minority Democratic margins are solid and the anemic +7 for the Republicans among whites (roughly two-thirds of registered voters across these districts) is quite poor by contemporary GOP standards.

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

A common view these days, particularly on the left, is that swing voters have disappeared. This is comforting for those who see slogans like “Abolish ICE!” as having no real downside, since there are no persuadable swing voters out there to alienate. Just need to get those juices flowing among the Democratic base!

That would make life easier, wouldn’t it? Unfortunately, in the real world of politics, this is not remotely true. Matt Yglesias does a good job of demonstrating this in a lengthy article just published on Vox.. Some of his main points:

“Swing voters have gotten rarer over time, but there are definitely swing voters, and their decision to swing one way or the other makes a difference in politics…..The 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study conducted a large sample poll and found that 6.7 million Trump voters said they voted for Barack Obama in 2012 and 2.7 million Clinton voters said they voted for Mitt Romney in 2016. In other words, about 11 percent of Trump voters say they were Obama voters four years earlier and about 4 percent of Clinton voters say they were Romney voters four years earlier….The switchers are also important because they are not evenly distributed around the country. Obama lost whites with no college degree by a very large margin in 2012, but Clinton did even worse — especially losing the support of the kind of Northern, relatively secular noncollege whites who had not already defected from the GOP. This kind of vote is disproportionately common in the three crucial swing states that delivered Trump his Electoral College victory….

Swing voters themselves are very real, concern about alienating them with unpopular positions is valid, and nothing about Trump’s election win should be seen as debunking the basic conventional wisdom about all of this. Even more importantly, there’s relatively little reason to believe that chasing swing voters requires sharp trade-offs with other electoral strategies.

Probably the biggest fallacy in the dialogue about swing voters is the widely stated — but rarely examined — notion that a political party could try to focus on “mobilizing the base” instead of persuading swing voters.

This is, however, both a conceptual and empirical confusion. For starters, the actual base of a political party is almost by definition the people you don’t need to work on mobilizing — the party regulars who are habituated to voting and loyal to the party as an institution. The people you would want to mobilize are people you have reason to believe would vote for you if forced to vote, but who for one reason or other are disinclined to actually show up…..

There’s nothing wrong with taking a stand on something you think is important, even if it’s unpopular — though a wise candidate might prefer to emphasize her popular views and reduce the salience of her less popular ones. But whatever it is that causes people to vote, the important point is that swing voters really do exist. A small but incredibly important group of Americans regularly switch their partisan allegiances, and many people are willing to vote differently down-ballot from how they vote in presidential races.

Appealing to these swing voters isn’t the only way to win elections, but it’s a pretty good strategy, and there’s no reason to believe that using it involves a hard trade-off with trying to mobilize marginal voters or anything else.”

Read more…

The following article by Michel Tomasky, editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, is cross-posted from The Daily Beast:

New developments on the #demsindisarray front as The New York Times ran a long story over the weekend under the dramatic headline “Democrats Brace as Storm Brews Far to Their Left… Fiercely Liberal Voices… Young Voters Urge Party to ‘Wake Up and Pay Attention.’”

“Storm”? “Far” to their left? I’d like to interview that headline writer. Also, “brace,” for that matter, because the article itself doesn’t really quote anybody doing any bracing, in the sense of preparing themselves for arduous battle. It quotes a couple people—Martin O’Malley, oddly, and the state party chairman in Michigan—reminding Times readers that the party still has moderate voices, and voters, too. But it doesn’t have anyone screaming to the heavens that this is suicide.

And it doesn’t have anyone screaming that because I don’t think many people really think that. Democrats disagree, and in some cases strongly, on how far left they believe the party ought to go, but the ones I talk to accept that this is happening and understand why it’s happening.

The Times article refers mostly to young people, and it’s mostly young people who are pulling the party left. And it’s easy to see why. If you’re 27 and not right wing or rich or both, you’ve grown up in a country that in most fundamental ways has gotten worse and worse since you were of an age to start paying attention to things. Inequality is worse. Opportunity is worse. Wage growth is worse. Benefit structures are worse. Job stability is far worse. If you live in a small town, your town is probably dying, and half the people you know are on drugs.

If you’re around that age and you call yourself a socialist, well, who can blame you? The capitalism that we’ve been practicing in this country for certainly the last 18 years has failed everyone except the top 10 or so percent. Barack Obama softened some of this around the edges, and with Obamacare, he did more than that. But for most people—for eight or nine out of 10 Americans—our right-wing version of capitalism has narrowed their opportunities instead of expanding them. It’s been a criminal failure (in some cases literally, even though Obama chose not to prosecute anybody).

So I think everybody understands why this is happening. And I don’t think I know a single Democrat who believes ’90s-style centrism is the answer. It’s not. Even the centrists are moving left.

Read more…

The following article by Stan Greenberg, Greenberg Research, Page Gardner, Women’s Voices Women Vote Action Fund and Nancy Zdunkewicz, Democracy Corps, is cross-posted from democracycorps.com

Pundits built a new conventional wisdom that included higher job approval ratings for President Donald Trump due to the tax cuts and strong economy that could shrink the enthusiasm ad- vantage and midterm vote for Democrats. But they are wrong about the political trends, the econ- omy, and what motivates Democrats. They miss how the GOP strategy branded Trump and the GOP as only out for themselves and the rich.

This is according to the second of three waves of WVWVAF’s battleground research program conducted by Democracy Corps. This program consists of phone polling among registered voters and an on-going web-panel of 1,813 target voters – the Rising American Electorate of minorities, millennials, and unmarried women, plus white working class women – in 12 states with competi- tive races for governor, Senate, and Congress, including 42 Cook competitive seats.1 The same web-panel respondents were interviewed in April and late June, so these reported trends we know to be true.

Here are the key findings:

• The off-year trends that favor Democrats have solidified and grown. In fact, Trump’s base strategy is pushing up Democrats and anti-Trump voters’ intention to vote in this off-year and is widening the enthusiasm gap.
• Over the past three months, a nationalized Democratic advantage has emerged across the Senate, congressional and governors’ battlegrounds as Democrats have made gains in the Cook battleground districts and in the governors’ races.1
• Despite perceptions of a strong macro-economy, Donald Trump’s poor job approval rat- ings barely budged from April; nor did the intense disapproval of his presidency dimin- ish, thereby fueling and sustaining the enthusiasm gap between Democrats and Republi- cans.
• Trump and the GOP have a strategy, but it is not working: they did not make gains on handling taxes, the economy or immigration.
• Pundits are missing how frustrated ordinary citizens are with politicians who put govern- ment to work for their big donors and corporations, and don’t get how much ordinary people are struggling with wages that don’t keep up with higher costs, health care above all.
• The passage of the Republicans’ tax scam for the rich has created a shared brand for Trump and the GOP as out for themselves and the rich.
• Yes, voters know there are more jobs and they are feeling more financially secure, but that has nothing to do with their wages and the cost of living. Two-thirds of the base say the growing economy is not helping them and a big majority says wages aren’t keeping up with rising costs. Dominating their economic pain are health care costs.
• When asked what issues are impacting their vote, Democrats and the Rising American Electorate point first to the cost of health care, followed by guns.
• Democrats have powerful messages that drive higher turnout. Each begins with attacks on corrupt work for wealthy donors and corporations, highlights the corrupt tax deal for corporations and accuses Trump and the GOP of governing for the rich and themselves while voters struggle. The voters know which politicians are in charge and who they are working for, and they reward Democrats who embrace these messages.
• The strongest Democratic message platform: politicians in Washington divide the country so they can cut corrupt deals for big donors, corporations, and themselves which hurt working people and the middle class. The reckless increase in the deficit means less in- vestment, less help with health care, and puts Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid at risk.
• A millennial-directed message on this platform has real power and drives up turnout among Democratic voters.

(On behalf of Women’s Voices. Women Vote Action Fund, Democracy Corps conducted the second in a series of three phone surveys with accompanying web-surveys among an on-going panel of minorities, millennials, unmarried women and white non-college educated women (the RAE+) in 12 states with Governor races (10 Senate race states): Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Wisconsin. The phone survey of 1,000 registered voters with 66 percent cell-rate was conducted June 11-14, 2018. The voter-file matched web-panel of 1,813 “RAE+” registered voters was conducted June 13-28, 2018.)

MORE

Daniel Marans reports that “Top Liberal Groups Plan Get-Out-The-Vote Blitz On Weekend Before Midterm Election” at HuffPo Politics:

Swing Left and 22 other progressive organizations announced a joint effort Tuesday aimed at mobilizing volunteers to get out the vote for Democratic candidates in the days leading up to the Nov. 6 elections.

The Last Weekend, as the groups are calling the initiative, would serve as a national call to action from Saturday, Nov. 3 until Election Day ― a period when get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts are most effective. Swing Left, a post-2016 upstart that aims to help Democrats retake control of the U.S. House, believes the campaign is unprecedented in its scope and scale.

The goal of The Last Weekend is not only to maximize Democratic turnout in a midterm year, when Democratic turnout has historically been lower, but also to provide a central coordinating arm for veteran party activists and political newcomers who want to take action but are not always sure how.

This comes as welcome news to Democrats, who may be wondering why it took this excellent idea so long. “The weekend blitz’s organizers hope to create a veritable army of volunteers with formal commitments of over 1 million hours from the Saturday before the election until the election itself,” notes Marans. “Volunteers will be able to sign up for shifts at thelastweekend.org, or by texting WEEKEND to 50409.” Marans adds,

The groups behind The Last Weekend vary considerably in terms of their ideology, relationship to the official Democratic Party and area of electoral focus. The participating organizations are Swing Left, March On, MoveOn, Indivisible, Organizing for Action, the Democratic Attorneys General Association, Flippable, the Arena, Center for Popular Democracy Action, National Domestic Workers Alliance, the Latino Victory Fund, the Progressive Turnout Project, NewFounders, Mobilize America, Sister District, Wall of US, Working Families Party, Resist Bot, Stand Up America, Democrats.com, #VoteProChoice, United We Dream and the Collective PAC.

The coalition has “no single message, policy focus or script,” and the component groups have both overlapping and separate agendas. But they are all focused on working together to increase voter turnout for Democatic candidates. “What is uniting a pretty broad swath of America right now is the existential urgency of stopping the Trump agenda and ending the Republican control of Congress and state legislatures,” notes Joe Dinkin of the Working Families Party.

And not a minute too soon, given the critical importance of the 2018 midterm elections for America’s future. It would be even better if the coalition sinks long-term roots — as a permanent force for Democratic success.

Here is the first of an upcomming series of promotional videos for ‘The Last Weekend’:

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

Blue Arizona?

There were actually a few important places in 2016 where Democrats did better than they did in 2012. Arizona was one such place. Obama lost the state by 9 points, Hillary Clinton by only 3.5 points. Democrats improved their margins among Latinos, Asians/others, white noncollege voters and especially white college graduates (the latter group split almost evenly between Trump and Clinton).

Could these trends continue and, combined with the ongoing shift toward a more Latino electorate, finally tip Arizona into blue territory? It is certainly possible. If so, we may the first manifestations of this shift in 2018 election results. Politico magazine has a lengthy article by Ethan Epstein out about this year’s races in Arizona, accompanied by a revealing poll of the state’s voters.

From Neil Irwin’s article, “Two Words That Could Shape the Politics of the Trade War: Loss Aversion — The pain of a loss tends to be greater than the enjoyment of a win. That has big implications for trade, and also helps explain the politics of health care and taxes” at The Upshot:

Even some workers directly helped by globalization have focused on loss. Consider, for example, a worker in a B.M.W. factory in South Carolina who told The Wall Street Journal in 2016 that she was skeptical of international trade because her uncles had lost their jobs at a cotton mill 30 years earlier.

Now, with his willingness to upend trade relationships that have been decades in the making, Mr. Trump faces the risk that he has spun things around. Suddenly, loss aversion may work in a pro-trade direction.

In a trade war, it is the companies, and workers, that benefit the most from globalization that find their incomes at risk. As China, Canada and the European Union retaliate against American tariffs, the winners from trade are the ones at risk of becoming the losers.

The ‘loss aversion’ takeaway effect apparently overshadows benefits of a given policy. As Irwin notes,

If loss aversion holds, the winners of a trade war — domestic producers of steel and aluminum, for example — could turn out to be as complacent about those gains as globalization’s winners have been for decades.

“The evidence says that a loss hurts about twice as much as a gain of the same size, so there is a large asymmetry,” said Patricia Tovar Rodriguez, author of the 2009 paper on loss aversion and trade and now a professor at Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. “Losers may therefore have a much larger incentive to lobby, and to lobby harder, for the removal of those trade barriers.”

And it applies to all kinds of policies, not just trade:

President Obama’s health care law experienced miserable polling numbers in the initial years after its 2010 passage, with more people disapproving of the Affordable Care Act than approving of it, according to the Kaiser Health Tracking Poll. But those lines crossed in late 2016 as Republicans gained more power to repeal the law, and now the A.C.A. is favored by a six-percentage-point margin.

There are many ways to interpret that, but one of them is through the prism of loss avoidance. Perhaps in the rollout of Obamacare, the people who had something to lose — either through higher taxes or the risk of losing a health plan they were happy with — were most engaged.

Then, once the law was fully enacted and there was a president seeking to undermine it, the politics of loss aversion shifted, with people who had gained insurance more likely to be energized. That certainly lines up with the ferocity of the protests against legislative efforts to repeal the A.C.A. in early 2017 — and with the comparison to the energy of anti-Obamacare forces in earlier years.

Ditto, even, for tax policy, argues Irwin, noting the failure of the GOP to get much of a bump from their loudly-trumpeted tax cut, which provided very little for anyone but the wealthy. “The logic of loss aversion would imply that those who are paying more in tax — largely people in high-tax jurisdictions losing out on some deductions they previously enjoyed — might have stronger (negative) opinions about the legislation than the many who benefit.”

Democratic candidates generally do a good job of noting the take-aways of Republican policies. But Irwin’s article and the findings he cites indicate that an even sharper focus on the losses incurred by the middle class as a result of Republican trade policies and undermining the Affordable Care Act could win additional votes for Democratic candidates. Perhaps characterizing the relentless GOP push for deregulation as taking away health and safety protections for American families and children could help Democrats take away some Republican seats in the House, Senate and state legislatures.