From Greg Sargent’s “Memo to Democrats: Don’t wring your hands about investigating Trump” at The Plum Line: “So here is our contribution to this debate: Shut up and stop wringing your hands, “cautious Democrats.” This whole fear appears to be based on the notion that Democrats face some sort of zero-sum choice between investigating Trump on the one hand, and focusing investigative authority on policy and governing on the other…If Democrats focus their oversight authority on serious abuses of power, governing fiascoes and corruption — and stick to where the facts lead — they’ll be, yes, investigating Trump, while also standing for a restoration of transparency, accountability, legitimate governance and the rule of law. There’s no need to allow this to get hyped into a false choice or a cause for hand-wringing, Democrats.”

Joan McCarter writes at Daily Kos that “Threats to health care helped swing older voters to the Democrats in the midterms.” McCarter explains, “According to exit polling for this midterm, Republicans had just a 51-49 advantage with the 50-64 group, and 50-48 among the over 65s. That was enough of a shift, along with higher-than-normal turnout among younger voters, to offset the advantage Republicans have had…But the threat to health care for people with pre-existing conditions, as well as Medicare and Medicaid, and the Democrats’ full-on embrace of the issue appears to have made all the difference. From mid-September to mid-October, analysis of House and Senate campaign ads by the Wesleyan Media Project found that 54.5 percent of all the ads from Democrats talked about health care, whereas just 31.5 percent from Republicans did. Go back to 2010, and from then until this cycle no more than 10 percent of ads from Democrats talked about the issue. That’s in all four elections before this one. Republicans owned it, being four times more likely to advertise against Obamacare than Democrats to defend it. It dominated issue ads this cycle, comprising more than a third of all the election ads. And three-fourths of those 1.2 million ads were from Democrats and organizations backing them.”

Katrina vanden Heuval, editor of The Nation and Washington Post columnist writes,”House Democrats won a majority in the midterms with a focus on health care and other kitchen-table issues. When the next Congress begins in January, though, Republican control of the Senate means that Democrats will have little ability to advance the policies they campaigned on. But even with a divided government and a president who is more interested in sowing division than developing legislation, Democrats can lay out markers for a bold alternative to Trumpism….With members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus in line to chair 13 committees, the incoming majority can also connect much-needed oversight to a bold policy vision that frames a clear choice for voters heading into 2020…Midterm voters sent a loud message by electing a new generation of progressive activists to Congress. Party leaders would be wise to amplify their voices and the ideas that made them so compelling to voters and movement activists across the country.”

“A study published in the journal Political Psychology in 2017 found that children’s political views do tend to be similar to those of their parents at age 18, but then diverge rapidly,” notes Sandra Newman at Post Everything Perspective. “By the time a person reached age 35, the political attitudes of the county the person lived in were twice as likely to predict their political beliefs as the politics of their parents. By age 50, parental influence had almost entirely disappeared.”

In suspicious statistics news, The Washington Post’s Vanessa Williams notes at The Fix that, according to CNN exit polling following the miderm elections, 11 percent of African American men voted for Georgia gubernatorical candidate Brian Kemp — despite the same poll showing 97 percent of Black women voting for Democrat Stacy Abrams. The poll also says 75 percent of Georgia white female voters chose Kemp. An AP poll found only 8 percent of Black men voting for Kemp.

If you want to “Meet the Democrats Who Want Pelosi to Step Aside,” read Julie Hirschfield Davis’s New York Times profile, which observes that “Their ideological leanings and political profiles are diffuse…What the group shares is a determination to shake up the top echelons of the House Democratic Caucus, whose leaders have remained unchanged for more than a decade, with Ms. Pelosi, 78, at the helm; Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, 79, as the No. 2, and Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, 78, as the third ranking… the list of signatories to the letter is limited, representing fewer than 10 percent of House Democrats. In fact, their ranks may be shrinking as Ms. Pelosi pulls them to her one at a time.” Davis provides capsule introductions to each of the advocates of Dems having a different Speaker for the upcoming session.

WaPo Columnist Dana Milbank suggests a middle-ground appoach to the debate about whether Nancy Pelosi should be the  next House Speaker: “…she should be that transitional figure — now. By announcing that this will be her last term, she would deflate the insurgency against her, give new members a reason to feel good about voting for her, lead Democrats with discipline in 2019 and preside over an orderly transition…now is the time to make herself a lame duck (and coax Hoyer and Clyburn into that pond, too). Pelosi allies fear she would lose her fundraising clout if she announced this to be her last term. But Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), who announced his retirement in April, did fine as a lame-duck fundraiser, even during a bad year for Republicans. His Congressional Leadership Fund raised nearly $144 million this cycle, and his Team Ryan joint fundraising committee raised an additional $64 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics…By announcing that this will be her last term, Pelosi would make herself the kingmaker (or queenmaker), while remaining the disciplinarian Democrats urgently need. This is the time to begin a departure on her terms.”

NYT columnist Paul Krugman explains “How Democrats Can Deliver on Health Care: New Jersey shows the way. You got a problem with that?” Krugman observes, “The most dramatic example of how this can be done is New Jersey, where Democrats gained full control at the end of 2017 and promptly created state-level versions of both the mandate and reinsurance. The results were impressive: New Jersey’s premiums for 2019 are 9.3 percent lower than for 2018, and are now well below the national average. Undoing Trumpian sabotage seems to have saved the average buyer around $1,500 a year…Now that Democrats have won control of multiple states, they can and should emulate New Jersey’s example, and move beyond it if they can. Why not, for example, introduce state-level public options — actuarially sound government plans — as alternatives to private insurance?”

“Big Business Is Stealing From Their Own Workers. Will Democrats Stop Them?” By Michael Tomasky at The Daily Beast suggests more Democratic focus on a neglected issue: “If the Democrats’ job number one heading into 2020 is to win back some of those white working-class voters who deserted them in 2016, this general problem of wage theft seems like an awfully good place to start. It affects many millions of Americans of all races and in all places. Yet I don’t hear many Democrats talk about it. No one in the broader public even knows what “wage theft” means. Somebody stole your pay packet as you walked home from work? No. It’s what employers extract from employees in not paying them what they’ve earned…And Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who is a Democrat, has legislation that would similarly tax companies (though at a lower rate than Sanders) whose employees need public assistance and would offer some tax credits to companies that did the right thing and raised wages. So, stick and carrot, in other words. The Senate actually voted on it during the farm bill debate last June, and while it lost, it got the support of every Democrat. Note, every Democrat: Joe Manchin, Heidi Heitkamp, Jon Tester, everyone. Democrats are and will be divided on some cultural issues, but on something like this, they can be 100 percent united.” Sounds like a winner.

The following article by U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, is cross-posted from The Washington Post:

As a result of the recent midterm elections, Democrats flipped nearly 40 congressional seats and will control the House of Representatives. Impressively, nearly 6 million more Americans voted for a Democrat to represent them in the House than who did for a Republican. Further, Democrats took over seven governor’s seats and won hundreds of legislative races in statehouses across the country. To a significant degree, the American people rejected President Trump’s agenda benefiting the wealthy and the powerful, as well as his racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia and religious bigotry.

But let me be clear: It is not good enough for Democrats to just be the anti-Trump party. If they want to keep and expand their majority in the House, take back the Senate and win the White House, Democrats must show the American people that they will aggressively stand up and fight for the working families of this country — black, white, Latino, Asian American or Native American, men and women, gay or straight. This means addressing the crisis of a broken criminal-justice system and reforming inhumane immigration policies. But it also means fighting to expand a middle class that has been disappearing for more than 40 years, reducing inequality in both income and wealth — which has disproportionately hurt African Americans and Hispanics — and aggressively combating climate change, the most urgent threat facing our planet.

Twenty-three years ago, after the Republicans took control of Congress for the first time in four decades, House Republicans led by Speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.) passed a series of bills through the House that had been on their wish list for years. Their guide was the so-called Contract with America, a radical right-wing agenda full of tax breaks for the wealthy, massive cuts to programs vital to working families, and racist and cruel bills to “reform” welfare and our criminal-justice system.

While I strongly disagree with Gingrich on virtually every issue, the House Democratic leadership should take a page from his playbook by passing a bold agenda through the House. Starting on the first day of the new Congress, the Democratic leadership in the House, supported by their colleagues in the Senate, should be just as bold in passing an agenda that reflects the needs of working Americans — centered on economic, political, social, racial and environmental justice.

Specifically, during the first 100 days, Congress must pass a legislative agenda that includes:

Increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour and indexing it to median wage growth thereafter. The current federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour is a starvation wage that must be increased to a living wage — at least $15 an hour. This would give more than 40 million Americans a raise and would generate more than $100 billion in higher wages throughout the country.

A path toward Medicare-for-all. The Medicare-for-all bill widely supported in the Senate has a four-year phase-in period on the way to guaranteeing health care for every man, woman and child. Over the first year, it would lower the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 55, cover dental, hearing and vision care for seniors, provide health care to every young person in the United States and lower the cost of prescription drugs.

Bold action to combat climate change. The report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has made it clear we have just 12 years to substantially cut the amount of carbon in our atmosphere, or our planet will suffer irreversible damage. Congress must pass legislation that shifts our energy system away from fossil fuels and toward energy efficiency and renewable energy. We can lead the planet in combating climate change and, in the process, create millions of good paying jobs.

Fixing our broken criminal-justice system. We must end the absurdity of the United States having more people in jail than any other country on Earth. We must invest in jobs and education for our young people, not more jails and incarceration.

Comprehensive immigration reform. The American people want to protect the young people in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and to move toward comprehensive immigration reform for the more than 11 million people in our country who are undocumented. And that’s exactly what we should do.

Progressive tax reform. At a time of massive and growing inequality in both income and wealth, Congress must pass legislation which requires wealthy people and large corporations to begin paying their fair share of taxes. It is unacceptable that there are large, extremely profitable corporations in this country that do not pay a nickel in federal income taxes.

A $1 trillion infrastructure plan. Every day, Americans drive to work on potholed roads and crumbling bridges, and ride in overcrowded buses and subways. Children struggle to concentrate in overcrowded classrooms. Workers are unable to find affordable housing. The structures that most Americans don’t see are also in disrepair — from spotty broadband and an outdated electric grid, to toxic drinking water and dilapidated levees and dams. Congress should pass a $1 trillion infrastructure plan to address these needs while creating up to 15 million good-paying jobs in the process.

Lowering the price of prescription drugs. Americans pay, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs because, unlike other countries, the United States doesn’t directly regulate the price of medicine. The House should pass legislation to require Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices and allow patients, pharmacists and wholesalers to purchase low-cost prescription drugs from Canada and other countries. It should also pass legislation to make sure that Americans don’t pay more for prescription drugs than citizens do in other major countries.

Making public colleges and universities tuition-free and substantially reducing student debt. In a highly competitive global economy, we must have the best-educated workers in the world. Every young person in America, regardless of income, must have the opportunity to receive the education they need to get a decent job and make it into the middle class. The House should pass the College for All Act to make public colleges and universities tuition-free and substantially reduce student debt.

Expanding Social Security. When 1 out of 5 seniors is trying to get by on less than $13,500 a year, we must expand Social Security so that every American can retire with dignity and security. The House should pass legislation to expand Social Security benefits and extend its solvency for the next 60 years by requiring that the wealthiest Americans — those making more than $250,000 a year — pay their fair share of Social Security taxes.

Here is the bottom line: Instead of us having a Congress that listens to wealthy campaign contributors, it is about time we had a Congress fighting to create an economy and a government that works for all of us, not just those on top.

Many midterm polls indicated that the strongest issue favoring Democrats was health care reform. But how ready for congressional approval are the various Democratic proposals? In her aritlcle, “On ‘Medicare-for-All,’ Democrats Tread Lightly: It polls well. But Dems say the proposal isn’t ready for floor action,” Mary Ellen McIntire explores the question at Roll Call.

“Progressives in the House are calling for a vote on a single-payer “Medicare-for-all” bill in the next Congress,” writes McIntire, “but the expected chairmen who will set the agenda for next year say they have other health priorities.” Further,

A handful of potential presidential candidates expected to declare interest have already co-sponsored “Medicare-for-all” legislation, an issue that was also a flashpoint in Democratic primaries over the past year.

Most Democrats say the proposal, which polls show enjoys significant public support, hasn’t been fully fleshed out and isn’t ready for floor consideration. The drawbacks, like a major tax increase, the type of changes that would be needed to the Medicare program and the reality that millions of Americans would lose their current coverage plan, could become politically dangerous, they say.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal, founder of the Medicare-for-All Caucus sees it a little differently:

“We should continue to try to shore up health care as we have it, but we really have to be pushing to a complete transformation of our health care system and not just trying to do little fixes here or there because we’re still leaving out too many Americans who are literally cutting their pharmaceuticals into half because they can’t afford it, or getting off of health care because it’s not a choice to pay another $300 a month,” she said.

The debate is important for securing the public image of the Democrats as the only party which is serious about health care reform, while their GOP adversaries are still floundering without a coherent response to popular reforms of the Affordable Care Act, such as protection for those with prior conditions.

However, “Until they do a better job of selling this thing, I don’t want to see this become a litmus issue for 2020,” argues Jim Manley, a Democratic operative who worked for former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Texas Democratic Rep. Lloyd Doggett adds, “We’ve not fully explored cost, transition, the effect of on people who have — such as many union workers — strong policies now…There’s so many aspects of it, so I wouldn’t envision that there would be any early vote.”

Rep. Jayapal counters that “We have to change our notion of what wins in swing districts.” McIntire notes that “Progressive Change Campaign Committee co-founder Adam Green said lawmakers should vote on a “Medicare-for-all” bill next year even if it would fail…Let’s pass things that will pass the House but are almost certain to die in the Senate so there’s a bright north star the sky for 2020 voters signaling what Democrats would do if given more power.”

Meanwhile, other Democrats are already moving forward with both piecemeal and comprehensive proposals that poll well, McIntire explains:

In the Senate, Democrats have offered at least six bills ranging from a Medicare buy-in proposal from Sen. Debbie Stabenow of Michigan to a “Medicare-for-all” single-payer plan from independent Sen. Bernie Sanders. Several senators seen as likely presidential candidates have either offered their own plan or signed on to one or more proposals.

Take Sen. Cory Booker, who is expected to enter the primary fray. He has co-sponsored six bills that would expand on the health law. Sen. Kamala Harris has signed on to five, while Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand co-sponsored four of the measures.

So, it’s likely that both the ‘Medicare for all’ proponents and the advocates for more incremental reforms are going to push health reform legislation in the next congress, despite the likelihood that all such Democratic proposals will be blocked in the Senate. If the two camps work together, they can reinforce each other’s efforts — and strengthen the Democratic brand regarding the top concern of American voters.

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

Paul Starr has an excellent article up on The American Prospect website running down how the Democrats are now winning on health care. Starr notes:

“It took a long time, but the Affordable Care Act finally paid off politically for Democrats in the 2018 election. According to exit polls, voters rated health care the top issue, and they trusted Democrats on it more than Republicans….

In 2018, unlike the other elections since the ACA’s passage in 2010, voters had seen what Republicans were actually proposing to do about health insurance….[T]he legislation passed by Republicans in the House and endorsed by Trump would have resulted in millions of people losing coverage and sharply increased costs for others, especially for older people buying insurance in the individual market. Unable to pass that bill in the Senate, Republicans saw the whole repeal-and-replace effort collapse.

Seizing on the Republicans’ failed rollback, Democratic congressional candidates and the groups supporting them highlighted health care more than any other issue. According to an analysis by Wesleyan Media Project, 54.5 percent of all Democratic ads from September 18 to October 15 discussed health care; those ads focused overwhelmingly on protecting people with preexisting conditions and on Republican efforts to undo the progress under the ACA….

Not only do the election results put an end, at least for the next two years, to Republican congressional efforts to undo the ACA; the voters also chose to extend coverage. Five states are now likely to expand Medicaid—three (Idaho, Nebraska, and Utah) where voters passed referenda in favor of expansion, and two (Kansas and Maine) where a shift from a Republican to a Democratic governor removes the last obstacle to expansion.”

Starr advocates that Democrats now move to extending and improving the ACA, particularly in the context of the 2020 election campaign. I agree completely. Starr in particular advocates what he calls “Midlife Medicare”, making Medicare available to those 50-64. I am fine with that though there is a lot to be said for “Medicare for All”, especially in a campaign context. Even if such an approach is difficult to implement all at once, it can serve as both a rallying cry and an identifying principle for various, more specific reforms.

I would broaden Starr’s argument about the ACA and left strategy as follows. Over time, the left has accomplished many things, from building out the social safety net to cleaning up the environment to protecting public health to securing equal rights for women, black people, and gay people. These and many other gains of the left have a very important thing in common: They are “sticky.” That’s a term borrowed from economics that means, simply, they will be hard to reverse. They provide benefits that people do not want to lose — and, what’s more, they shift norms of what is right and wrong.

Social Security and Medicare are great examples of policies that once seemed radical and now are simply a part of life. The Affordable Care Act’s core innovations may turn out that way, as well, despite the controversy that has dogged the program from its inception — and the declared intent of the current administration to eliminate it.

The ACA has provided benefits to millions who don’t want them taken away, and helped to establish the principle that every American has a right to health care, guaranteed by the government. That’s why the Republican attempt to radically downsize the program hit a buzzsaw. To be sure, Republicans will keep trying. But, in the end, they will not be able to “repeal and replace” with a fundamentally less generous program.

Instead, it’s more likely that the ACA, either under that name or another, will get more generous over time. As the late conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer noted during the initial ACA repeal fight: “A broad national consensus is developing that health care is indeed a right. This is historically new. And it carries immense implications for the future. It suggests that we may be heading inexorably to a government-run, single-payer system.”

Krauthammer was despairing, but the left should be heartened by the observation. Indeed, at this point, Trump and the GOP have been reduced to hoping that if they neglect the ACA, it will collapse on its own — yet that doesn’t seem to be happening The very desperation of this “strategy” is a sign that Krauthammer may have been prescient about where American health care policy is headed.

So it has turned out. Repealing the ACA turned out to be way, way, way harder than Trump and the GOP anticipated and ultimately it failed. This emphasizes a basic characteristic of American public opinion that Trump and the GOP failed to understand and the left would do well to remember.

The dominant ideology in America combines what political scientists Christopher Ellis and James Stimson refer to as “symbolic conservatism” (honoring tradition, distrusting novelty, embracing the conservative label) with “operational liberalism” (wanting government to do more and spend more in a wide variety of areas). In their definitive book, Ideology in America, they characterize symbolic conservatism as:

“…fundamentally different from culturally conservative politics as defined by the religious right. It is respect for basic values: hard work, striving, caution, prudence, family, tradition, God, citizenship and the American flag….[I]t is the mainstream culture….It is woven into the fabric of how ordinary Americans live their lives.”

And on operational liberalism they note:

“Social Security is…no exception. Most Americans like most government programs. Most of the time, on average, we want government to do more and spend more. It is no accident we have created the programs of the welfare state. They were created—and are sustained—by massive public support.”

Thus, there was no insuperable ideological obstacle to the ACA and, indeed, there is no insuperable ideological obstacle to a substantially expanded role for government in health and other areas in the future. Indeed, such an expansion would be fully in accord with Americans’ durable commitment to operational liberalism.

Of course these expanded government programs will not happen all at once. Far from it. Like the programs of the past, they will be phased in gradually over time, in fits and starts, frequently in inefficient and suboptimal forms (like the ACA!). That’s the messy business of politics in a democracy. But happen they will and once enacted they will be hard to get rid of; instead, just as in the past, the programs will be modified, improved and even expanded. The reason is simple: people like programs that make their lives better and are far more likely to respond to program defects by demanding they be fixed than by demanding programs be eliminated.

Just like with the ACA.

Peter Dreier points out that “The Nine New Democratic Black Congress Members Come From Heavily White Districts” at The American Prospect. As Dreier explains:

The blue wave had some black riders. Every African American Democrat in the House running for re-election in this year’s midterms won his or her race.  In addition, voters sent nine new black members, all Democrats, to Congress. As a result, the number of black House members will grow to an all-time peak of 55, even if, as appears possible, both black Republicans(Utah’s Mia Love and Texas’ Will Hurt) lose their seats.

What’s unusual about the nine new members is that all of them prevailed in predominantly white and mostly suburban districts. Five of the nine are women.

That raises an interesting question for Democrats. Is the route to future electoral success for Democrats running more African American candidates, who are good at building multi-racial coalitions? The trendline suggests that is a good possibility, as Dreier elaborates,

Despite the white racism that President Trump has both fostered and uncovered, it is also clear that a growing number of white Americans will support black candidates. In 1958, when the Gallup poll asked Americans if they would vote for a black person for president, only 38 percent said yes. That number grew to 77 percent in 1978 and 96 percent in 1997. Of course, telling that to a pollster is not the same thing as pulling a voting lever for a black candidate. But evidence indicates that more and more white voters are walking the walk, not just talking the talk.

Dreier spotlights a few races, including Democrats Lucy Mcbath’s upset in GA-6, Lauren Underwood’s win in IL-14 and Antonio Delgado’s victory in NY-19. Dreier also notes the winning Democratic campaign’s of Colin Allred in TX-32, llhan Omar in MN-5, Jahana Hayes in CT-5, Ayanna Presley in MA-7, Joseph Neguse in CO-2 and Steve Horsford in NV-4.

Dreier notes that “These nine victories reflect the political dynamics that helped the Democrats gain a significant majority in the House this year. Three (McBath, Underwood, and Allred) flipped traditionally GOP districts, two (Delgado and Horsford) won in swing districts, and four (Omar, Hayes, Pressley, and Neguse) prevailed in safe Democratic districts.”

Also, look at how well Stacy Abrams and Andrew Gillum did in Georgia and Florida, respectively. It may be that, if no votes were wrongly suppressed, both of them would be the governors-elect of their states, perhaps by comfortable margins. Both candidates demonstrated exceptional prowess in coalition-building.

Perhaps the pivotal fact behind these nine Democratic victories is that African Americans tend to vote Democratic roughly nine times out of ten in recent congressional elections. Nominating Black candidates will naturally increase African American voter interest in specific races. And, if those Black candidates are skilled at reaching out to voters of other races and building multiracial coalitions, so much the better for Democrats.

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

Et Tu, Rural Areas?

One week on from the November election, it’s become quite clear that the Democrats had an excellent election–better than it initially appeared on election night. But what of rural areas? The conventional wisdom seems to be that Democrats kicked ass in urban and suburban areas while losing ground in rural America.

Just one problem: It’s not true! While Democrats certainly didn’t “win” rural areas, they didn’t lose ground either. In fact, they gained ground. Consider the following.

1. Yair Ghitza of Catalist has showed that Republican candidates at all levels systematically did worse in rural areas than Trump did in 2016.

2. Researchers at the Atlantic found that Democrats gained more ground (relative to 2016) in pro-Trump manufacturing counties and Obama-Trump counties than they did in majority-minority counties. In fact, Democrats flat-out carried the vote in Obama-Trump counties and were basically back to 2012 levels of support in these counties.

3. Daniel Block on the Washington Monthly site notes that:

“On the whole, Democrats performed better in rural areas during these midterms than in 2016, which helped the party win some of its most consequential victories….

Among Wisconsin counties with fewer than 55,000 residents (a larger number for a much bigger state), Evers lost with 43 percent to Walker’s 55.8 percent. But he would have lost the entire election had he performed as poorly as Clinton, who was defeated in these counties 37.8 percent to 56.5 percent. Matching Clinton’s vote share would have cost him 29,537 votes. If even five percent of these lost votes went to Walker, Evers would have been defeated. If Walker had matched Trump’s 2016 Wisconsin rural showing, he would have won reelection by 2,307 votes.”

So progress was made in rural areas in 2018. Democrats should seek to continue that progress in 2020 and avoid the temptation to write these areas off because that’s the other side’s territory. That didn’t work in 2016 and it won’t work in 2020 either.

An excerpt from E. J. Dionne, Jr.’s column “What House Democrats need to do” in the Washington Post: “Expanding health coverage, reforming our democracy, restoring upward mobility with well-paying jobs, curbing gun violence and moving to repair our immigration system. Oh, yes, and protecting our constitutional republic from President Trump while rooting out corruption…This should be the agenda of Democrats in the House of Representatives. Already, some pundits are warning that the new majority will “overreach.” But overreach is not the problem for a party that controls only one chamber of Congress…The bigger threat is underachievement. Democrats will squander their victory — their largest gain in House seats since 1974 — if they fail to use their power to show what the alternative to Trumpism looks like…Democrats are also being counseled against becoming the all-investigations-all-the-time party…Committee chairmen should carefully time the inquiries so that scandals don’t push each other aside and thereby fail to penetrate the public consciousness.” The rest of the column merits a thoughtful read by all Democrats.

So how does an African American woman advocate of gun control, Medicaid expansion and other liberal causes get elected in a deep south suburban congressional district that is more than two-thirds white? Daniel Marans and Sarah Ruiz-Grossman explore some answers in their article, “How Lucy McBath Won The Same Georgia District That Jon Ossoff Lost” at HuffPo. Among their observations: “Ossoff’s defeat was not a total loss for area Democrats. His candidacy prompted the creation of a sophisticated Democratic voter turnout operation driven by a base of enthusiastic volunteers that did not go away…The infrastructure was there for McBath, a 58-year-old African-American woman and former Delta Airlines flight attendant, to take advantage of a year later.“…She ran on a platform of tougher gun safety regulations, affordable health care, ensuring women’s reproductive rights and preserving middle-class tax cuts…McBath could point to an ongoing, deep presence in the community. McBath had a compelling personal story…She was first thrust into the national spotlight in 2012 when her teen son, Jordan Davis, was shot dead by a white man at a Florida gas station angry about the volume of the music Davis was playing in his car. Her tragic loss spurred her into activism, as a spokesperson for gun safety group Moms Demand Action, and now into political office…McBath is also a two-time survivor of breast cancer. She invoked her experience when making the case for defending the Affordable Care Act’s protections for people with pre-existing conditions…Notwithstanding Georgia’s pro-gun conservatism, the proliferation of mass shootings has nudged many suburban women with conservative fiscal tendencies to embrace stricter gun laws.” McBath, the daughter of Lucien Holman, a former president of the NAACP’s Illinois state chapter, put together an exceptionally diverse and energetic campaign, more like a social change movement than the average election team.

For a revealing look at the activist army that powered the progressive victories of the 2018 midterm elections, read Micah L. Sifry’s “The Outsider Democrats Who Built the Blue Wave: Grassroots activists have organized a movement stronger than Obama’s, and the midterm elections were just the beginning” at The New Republic. Sifry decribes the ‘wave’ of volunteers, who knocked on 115,000 doors to help first-time Democratic candidate Antonio Delgado secure an upset win against Republican incumbent in NY-19 and adds, “The wave crested in formerly Republican-leaning House districts all over the country, lifting first-time candidates like Abigail Spanberger in Virginia, Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey, and Kendra Horn in Oklahoma, and ultimately delivering the House to Democrats for the first time since 2010…There will be many explanations for these victories, but the sheer size of the volunteerism was clearly a deciding factor. The mobilization was not merely unprecedented for a midterm; it reached levels typically seen only in a presidential year. More important, activists developed new and different approaches to mobilizing the volunteers who were phone banking and knocking on doors this fall…liberal organizing has now spread out to dozens of independent national groups and thousands of local ones, most of them completely new and not directly connected to the party.”

Sifry notes that the Obama campaign’s higly-effective Organizing for America was absorbed into the DNC, which Safry calls “a choice that sapped grassroots energy” and “contributed to its losing 968 state legislative seats over the next eight years” and the 2016 disaster. However, “Into that vacuum came a new cohort of activists. To begin with, older women and younger but more experienced Democratic campaign staffers launched Indivisible. From a Google Doc started by a group of young congressional aides, it spawned 6,000 local chapters (at least two in everycongressional district). The Women’s March prompted the launch of thousands of local huddles. And soon, a long list of new groups emerged to direct campaign knowledge, data, and resources wherever they were most needed…The most notable aspect of Democratic midterm organizing in 2018 was that it operated without any central command. It was more like a swarm than an army, surging to places that traditional Democratic consultants never bothered to go.” Sifry also notes the role of grass-roots fund-raising groups, including ActBlue, Data for Progress and the Movement Voter Project, which multiplied contributions to progressive candidates over previous levels. He cites the work of Mobilize America and the Action Network, which helped produce 2 million pro-Democratic volunteers over the last 18 months of the midterm campaign. Sifry concludess that “That most of these new groups stand outside the main party structures is significant. No politician or campaign operative can control or dismantle them.” With maintenance and care, these groups can thrive and “That can only bode well for 2020.”

In his article, “Tuesday Showed the Drawbacks of Trump’s Electoral Bargain: Important segments of his coalition stood by him, but Democrats made inroads with urban and suburban white voters uncomfortable with his style and values” at The Atlantic, Ronald Brownstein notes that “the defining trend of the night—as throughout the Trump presidency—was the substantial gap between white voters with and without a four-year college education. That gap helps explain both the Democratic suburban gains in the House and the strong GOP performance in the Senate…In both the 2010 and 2014 midterm elections under Obama, House Democrats won only about one-third of non-college whites and about two-fifths of whites with a college degree. In 2010, Democrats ran six points better among college whites than non-college whites; in 2014, the gap was seven points. But in 2016, with Trump on the ballot, the gap roughly doubled to 13 percentage points, as House Republicans improved further with non-college whites and lost ground among college-educated whites…”

Brownstein continues, “On Tuesday, the gap between the two groups expanded further. Democrats carried only 37 percent of white voters without a college education (compared with 61 percent for Republicans). But Democrats won a 53 percent majority of college-educated white voters (compared with 45 percent for Republicans). Tuesday’s Democratic performance among white voters without a college degree improved just slightly from their weak showings in the 2010 and 2014midterms, when they carried only about one-third of them each time. But their showing with college-educated whites on Tuesday represented a big improvement from those two previous midterms, when they carried about two-fifths of them in each election, according to exit polls. This week, Democrats not only carried 59 percent of college-educated white women, an unprecedented number, but reached 47 percent among college-educated white men; they hadn’t reached even 40 percent among those men nationally in any House election since 2008.

Regarding the Texas, Georgia and Florida elections, Brownstein writes, “Conversely, the Democratic performance among college-educated whites in the South—who tend toward more conservative positions than their counterparts elsewhere, particularly on social issues—continued to lag. O’Rourke did capture just over two in five college-educated whites, which was a notable improvement over earlier Democrats in Texas (who have often struggled to win more than 30 percent of those voters), but it wasn’t enough to overcome Cruz’s distinct advantage among non-college whites, who gave him about three-fourths of their votes, according to the exit poll. Abrams, even more strikingly, lost over four-fifths of whites without a college degree, while attracting just a little over one-third of those with one. That was also better than Georgia Democrats had done in the past, but—pending the final ballot counting—not enough to win. The key to Gillum’s loss, a big letdown for Democrats, may have been his inability to win more than about one-third of college-educated white men (even as he won nearly three-fifths of white women with a college degree).

Liz Mair writes In her Daily Beast article, “Don’t Look Now, but the Mountain West Is Turning Blue,” that “Republicans have a problem…on Tuesday they got hammered in the Mountain West…It’s the continuation of a trend that’s been going on for more than a decade…In the next Congress, Arizona will have more Democratic representatives than Republican ones…President Trump flying into Montana to whip up his base didn’t work; Democratic Sen. Jon Tester hung onto his Senate seat (Montana still has a Democratic governor, too, by the way)…Democrats again won the Colorado gubernatorial race (they’ve now had three governorships back-to-back-to-back). Republican Rep. Mike Coffman lost his race so Colorado, too, will have more Democratic congressmen than Republicans as of January 2019…In Nevada, voters will in January have a Democratic governor for the first time in 20 years, and two Democratic senators to boot. Nevada also elected a Democratic Lieutenant Governor and Attorney General. Three out of four of the state’s congressmen next year will be Democrats…New Mexico’s governorship moved back into Democratic hands…In the next Congress, New Mexico will have an entirely Democratic congressional delegation…In Utah, it looks like the Democrat won in the 4th district.”

“There will be at least 42 Latinos in Congress next year, a record,” notes James Hohman at The Daily 202, and “exit polling showed that 11 percent of the electorate nationally this year was Latino — the same percentage as African Americans. That was up from 8 percent in the 2006, 2010 and 2014 midterms…“About 64 percent of Latinos voted for Democratic congressional candidates and 33 percent voted for Republicans.”…Lisa Garcia Bedolla, a political scientist at University of California at Berkeley, estimates that there was a nearly 120 percent increase in absentee and early ballots cast by Latinos in 2018 compared with 2014, based on her analysis of data from the research firm Catalist. Of those, 76 percent came from “strong” Democrats: “In Texas, Latinos requested 365 percent more early and absentee ballots than in 2014,” Bedolla writes. “Florida saw a 129 percent increase. In contrast, in California — which this year had a handful of highly competitive congressional races but no competitive statewide races — early and absentee ballots requested by Latinos still were up almost 50 percent over 2014.”

The following article by John Halpin and Ruy Teixeira, senior fellows at the Center for American Progress, is cross-posted from americanprogress.org:

Americans took to the polls in record numbers in the 2018 midterms, shifting party control of the House of Representatives and sending a clear message of disapproval to President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans. Although the president and his party gained ground in the U.S. Senate, primarily in states Trump won handily, they failed to capitalize on the low unemployment rate or overall positive sentiments about the economy. The signature GOP legislative achievement of the first two years—the $1.5 trillion tax cut that passed last year —failed to boost Republicans’ chances overall and hurt candidates in several seats.

Subsequently, they lost in major suburban and urban districts across the country and also lost ground in some rural areas. The president’s gamble of nationalizing the election around his personality and his administration’s harsh immigration policies ultimately cost Republicans their House majority and failed to persuade voters outside of already conservative or rural counties and states to stick with the GOP. Likewise, health care dominated voters’ minds this year according to both pre-election and Election Day polls, with Democrats benefitting from their commitment to protect and expand Americans’ health care and House Republicans suffering for their repeated attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

Democrats are on pace for around a 34-seat gain in the House (outstanding races are still to be called in a few places), with a record number of women candidates winning overall. This is slightly above historical average gains for opposition parties in midterm elections but below the massive 2010 shift of 63 seats during the Obama presidency. Democrats gained seven governors’ seats, including in important presidential battleground states such as Michigan and Wisconsin and flipped six state legislative bodies, with about 330 state legislative seats gained across the country. Ballot initiatives to expand Medicaid won in three red states, while several measures to increase the minimum wage, legalize marijuana, and expand voting rights also emerged victorious. And, although definitive turnout data will not be available for a while, preliminary estimates suggest a massive increase in voter participation, with likely more than 110 million votes cast for the House—far above 2014 levels.

Midterm elections typically unfold on fleeting political terms and local issues that cannot be applied easily to future elections. But, given the highly polarized nature of U.S. politics under President Trump and the partisan divisions in control of the House and Senate and in key states, a few trends should be noted. The first two favor Democrats going into 2020, and the second two favor Republicans.

• First, President Trump has not expanded his support in any significant manner and his policy agenda has dragged down his popularity, particularly with independents. The president’s disapproval ratings have been higher than his approval ratings for his entire tenure. Strong disapproval of Trump has hovered around 40 percent for the past two years, with less than one-quarter of voters strongly approving of his presidency. This is unlikely to shift, particularly since the president could not improve his numbers even with strong economic indicators. President Trump’s signature policy achievement, the 2017 tax bill, failed to produce gains, and in fact served as a liability for some Republicans, as most Americans concluded that it did little to help them while primarily benefitting corporations and the wealthy. Likewise, Trump’s immigration agenda remains potent among his base supporters, but it is not moving the needle his way in large swaths of suburban and urban America. The repeated attempt to undermine national health care policy remains a significant drag on his support among independents and moderates across the nation. Unless the president changes course toward a more popular national agenda, it is unclear how he plans to both secure and expand his 2016 vote base. Exit polls indicate that Republicans lost significant ground with independents in 2018, relative to Trump’s decent showing among them in 2016.
• Second, Trump’s standing in the Electoral College is uncertain. Outside of Florida and Ohio, where Republicans appear to have held off an opposition surge this year, Democrats made substantial statewide gains in key states in the 2018 midterms, controlling the governorships of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin and picking up Obama-Trump districts in the state of Iowa. Trump’s hold on the Electoral College, which was weak in 2016 with only a narrow victory of around 80,000 votes in three states, is therefore tenuous—at best. Democrats only need to add Pennsylvania and Michigan back to their column plus either Wisconsin or Iowa to win in 2020. This assumes Florida and Ohio remain for Trump and no changes occur in emerging battlegrounds such as North Carolina, Arizona, or Georgia, neither of which are given.
• Third, Democrats have demographic and geographic challenges in relation to both the Senate and some key Electoral College states. Despite advantages that emerged in the 2018 midterms and overall favorable demographic trends, the Democratic Party base of support is still shaky in terms of potential turnout and support rates going into 2020, relative to the geographic structure of the Electoral College and the Senate. Youth turnout and turnout from voters of color looks very strong for 2018, but even minor dips in key Electoral College states can shift the terrain toward Trump. Likewise, the concentration of Democratic support in metropolitan areas diffuses overall demographic advantages and increases the chances that large turnout and support from Trump’s base, primarily white noncollege-educated voters in more rural and working class states, can once again lead to a narrow victory.
• Fourth, Democrats need to develop a strong and popular vision to counter Trump’s nationalist message. Despite Trump’s manifest political deficiencies, he does benefit from very strong support and fervent backing from most Republicans. In contrast, the Democrats successful, mostly nonideological “big tent” strategy for 2018 will not hold for 2020. In order to ensure strong Democratic base turnout, encourage new voters, and persuade Obama-Trump and more white noncollege voters to return to the party, Democrats will need a very clear and compelling vision that convinces voters that they are on their side on economics and social policy and are willing to make significant changes to a political system that is viewed as corrupt and often unresponsive to voter needs.

With this overall context, here is a concise overview of what we know so far about who voted and how they voted in 2018 and what it may mean going forward.

Who voted in 2018?

Perhaps the shortest answer to this question is “everyone.” This was an exceptionally high turnout for a midterm election. It would therefore be surprising if the turnout of most demographic groups did not go up. However, that does not mean that the share of voters attributable to these various groups necessarily went up. That would only be true if turnout of a given group went up more than the average among eligible voters and/or if the eligible voter share of a given group went up.

With that in mind, some patterns can provisionally be seen in the results currently available. We emphasize provisional since the exit polls are typically an unreliable guide to turnout patterns and need to be supplemented with other survey data and modeling that integrates actual election returns. Those supplementary resources are not yet available.

The National Election Pool (NEP) exit polls, compiled by Edison Research for a consortium of news organizations, indicate that the share of white voters fell from 75 percent in 2014 to 72 percent this election. Note that this does not necessarily tell us much about the turnout of white voters, since some of this declining vote share (if real) was attributable to the declining white share of eligible voters.

The same could be said about the rising share of nonwhite (black, Hispanic, Asian, and other race) voters, which increased from 25 percent in 2014 to 28 percent in the 2018 NEP exit polls. Some of this increased vote share, if real, was due to the increasing nonwhite share of eligible voters, rather than unusually high nonwhite turnout.

Within the broad group of nonwhite voters, these exit polls indicate that Hispanic vote share went up from 8 percent in 2014 to 11 percent in 2018, while black vote share declined slightly from 12 to 11 percent over the same time period. (The AP-NORC VoteCast voter survey, which is new and has a different methodology than the NEP exit polls, reports the Hispanic share as 9 percent and the black share at 12 percent; since the survey is new, there are no comparisons available to 2014.)

Within the overall group of white voters, it has become important to look at education divisions. However, while it seems likely that both white college graduate and white noncollege voters increased their turnout levels this election, it is impossible to say how much their vote shares really changed. Because the NEP exit polls changed their methodology around education, they now show a much more realistic distribution of voters between white college and white noncollege: 31 percent white college and 41 percent white noncollege. But this methodology change invalidates any comparison to their previous exit poll voter shares among this demographic.

Voter share among 18- to 29-year-olds remained stable at 13 percent between the 2014 and 2018 elections, according to these exit polls. This implies that young voter turnout did indeed go up in this election but by no more than the average turnout increase.

How did they vote?

The most interesting changes in this election, in comparison to 2014, took place in the realm of voter preference. As we might expect, there were big shifts toward the Democrats among many voter groups, given that the overall House popular vote shifted from +6 Republican in 2014 to the current estimate of +7 for the Democrats this election.

Notably, women went heavily for Democrats, with a +19 margin in the NEP exit polls, while Republicans had a +4 margin among men. Comparable figures for 2014 were +4 for Democrats among women and +16 for Republicans among men. The gender gap is alive and well.

Turning to the white vote, these exit polls indicate that Democrats lost the white congressional vote by 10 points this election, a substantial improvement over their 22-point loss in 2014. Among nonwhites, Democrats improved their margin among Hispanics from +26 to +40 across the two elections, from +79 to +81 among blacks overall (with black women at +85 in 2018), and from a mere +1 among Asians to +54 this election. Again, we await further data to evaluate these changes, but this is the story told by the NEP exit polls.

While possibly affected by changes in methodology, these exit polls indicate a very strong pro-Democratic shift among white college voters, improving from a 16-point deficit in 2014 to an 8-point advantage in this election. Democratic performance also improved among white noncollege voters but only modestly, moving from a 30-point deficit in 2014 to 24 points in 2018. Other data indicate that Democrats did particularly poorly among white noncollege voters in the South.

White college women were particularly good for the Democrats, supporting their candidates by a 20-point margin; white college men gave Republicans a 4-point advantage. White noncollege men were the worst for the Democrats—they lost this group by a whopping 34 points. Democrats did better among white noncollege women, losing them by a comparatively modest 14 points.

Young voters may not have increased their share of voters but, according to the NEP exit polls, they were very pro-Democratic this year, increasing their support for Democratic candidates from +11 in 2014 to +35 this year. Notably, the 18- to 24-year-old group, which now includes a healthy share of post-Millennials—the pro-Democratic Millennials’ successor generation—actually voted more Democratic (+37) than the 25- to 29-year-old group (+33).

What does this mean for 2020?

America remains a deeply divided nation in its politics and partisan preferences. The 2018 midterms clearly did not settle these divisions. If anything, it appears to have solidified them. Republicans under Trump maintain a strong hold on white noncollege voters in more rural and exurban counties and states across the country. However, they are rapidly losing support among college educated whites in many suburban and metropolitan areas and face particular challenges with women and voters of color.

Democrats, on the other hand, have broader but less intense support that can manifest itself in strong majorities with the right leadership, as in 2008 and 2012 under former President Barack Obama, or fall just short when facing intense partisan support from Trump and his base. Democrats lack both intense bases of support and the ability to reach into voting blocs that are deeply upset with the political status quo. These challenges may be amplified by Trump’s geographic advantages in some key Electoral College states, as seen in 2016.

President Trump appears committed to his strategy of base mobilization built on maximizing conflict on cultural and racial grounds. If he wants to succeed in 2020, he will need to broaden his outreach, adopt a more accommodating style, and focus on the economy more or else risk serious blowback across his narrow Electoral College pathway. Democrats, in turn, must quickly solidify an inclusive and forward-looking vision and agenda that offers voters turned off by Trump’s style, corruption, and ethno-nationalism a real reason to vote for their party. They cannot afford to remain in constant locked-horn battle with Trump on his terms and must stay focused on building consensus behind principled and pragmatic progressive policies on jobs, wages, health care, and democratic participation.

Whichever side figures out how to both maximize its partisan advantages and make inroads with voters who do not fit their ideological profile will most likely emerge victorious in 2020.