Andrew Gillum’s upset victory in the Florida gubernatorial primary is being hailed by progressives as a win for the Democratic left, complete with Bernie Sanders endorsement. Although there are no available exit polls that pinpoint his level of support with various demographic groups, there are some clues worth considering. In Isaac Stanley-Becker’s “‘The young people will win’: Post-Parkland vote in Florida tests youth power” in the Washington Post, he observes:

Gillum’s pitch to African Americans and young people was at the center of his primary campaign, spokesman Geoff Burgan told the Tampa Bay Times, saying these groups represent “people who have typically dropped off.”

In fact, his youth has long been a focal point of his political career. Born in Miami to a school bus driver and a construction worker, Gillum, at 23, became the youngest person ever elected to Tallahassee’s city commission. He went on to help found the Young Elected Officials Network, part of the liberal advocacy group People For The American Way. He became the group’s director, working to support politicians 35 and under.

Though vastly outspent by his primary opponents, Gillum did net the endorsement of billionaire Tom Steyer, whose political action committee, NextGen America, ran a digital advertising campaign targeting young voters on social media. The 30-second spot, emphasizing progressive issues such as corporate taxes and a “Medicare-for-all” health-care system, advised, “For anyone who’s been told to quiet down, to wait their turn, that it’s not their time, Gillum is our guy.”

Put together Gillum’s evident appeal to young voters with some recent statistics noting an uptick in young voter registration and in Florida, and the case for young voters having a pivotal influence on the primary outcome becomes stronger. Noting also that a “ruling from a federal judge last month invalidated a Republican-imposed ban on early voting on college campuses,” Stanley-Becker writes,

Data suggests that the deadly shooting in the South Florida suburb was politically energizing. An analysis released last month by TargetSmart, a Democratic data firm, revealed that registration rates for people under 30 increased significantly in swing states during the last seven months. In the several months before the Valentine’s Day shooting, voters between the ages of 18 and 29 accounted for more than 26 percent of new voter registration in Florida, according to TargetSmart. The data showed an increase close to eight percentage points in the months after the shooting.

Despite these clues, we don’t have enough hard data to firmly attribute Gillum’s victory to young voters and those who want stronger gun safety measures. And African American turnout and support of Gillum could well have been pivotal in the largest swing state.

What is certain, is that the GOP is going to go all out to defeat Gillum. Democrats should prepare for record level donations from Republican sugar-daddies to Gillum’s opponent, Ron Desantis, and, given Florida’s history, aggressive voter suppression.

Most of the media attention will stay focused on the battle for a House of Representatives Majority. But Andrew Gillum’s victory in the Florida Democratic primary sets up what is likely to be the marquee governor’s race. Slide up the sound icon and get acquainted:

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

Vanessa Williamson of Brookings has a good piece out on their website about the political effects (or lack thereof) of Trump’s tax cut. This is a solid article which, in passing, concisely and fairly summarizes a lot of the political science research relevant to this issue. Recommended, though I guess I’m less sure Democrats could make a big issue of this even if they wanted to. Perhaps they should be satisfied with the fail of the issue for the GOP.

At Bloomberg, Margaret Newkirk has a post that outs the GOP’s phony “get tough” on undocumented workers policy. As Newkirk writes in “E-Verify Laws Across Southern Red States Are Barely Enforced“:

In 2011 states across the Southeast passed laws that threatened private employers with dire consequences—including losing their license to do business—if they didn’t enroll with a federal data service called E-Verify to check the legal status of new hires. Modeled after 2008 measures in Arizona and Mississippi and billed as a rebuke to a do-nothing Obama administration, the laws went further than those in the 13 states that required checks for new hires only by state agencies or their contractors.

Seven years later, those laws appear to have been more political bark than bite. None of the Southern states that extended E-Verify to the private sector have canceled a single business license, and only one, Tennessee, has assessed any fines. Most businesses caught violating the laws have gotten a pass.

In Georgia the department charged with auditing compliance with the E-Verify law has never been given money to do so. In Louisiana, where the law against hiring unverified employees can lead to cancellation of public contracts or loss of business licenses, no contract has been canceled, no licenses have been suspended, and the state reports zero “actionable” complaints since the mandate went into effect in 2012. In Mississippi no one seems to know who enforces the E-Verify law. The mandate appears to give that job to its Department of Employment Security, which knows nothing about it and referred questions to the attorney general’s office, which says it doesn’t know who’s responsible.

The same is true in Alabama, where the state labor department points to the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency, which neither enforces the law nor knows who does. District attorneys, who field complaints under the mandate, say enforcement falls to the state attorney general’s office, which hadn’t heard that. “What is it we’re supposed to be doing?” spokeswoman Joy Patterson asks. “I’m not aware of anything like that.”

No doubt many Republican voters in these states are unaware that they have been hustled by their state legislators and governors, especially from those who bellow the loudest about “getting tough” on undocumented workers. As the conservative Cato Institute’s analyst, Alex Nowrasteh puts it “These are states that very much want to enforce immigration laws, where the electorate is solidly behind it and the politics is behind it, and even there they don’t want to enforce it.”

Advocates of The Legal Workforce Act, a bill that would institute a national E-Verify system know this to be the case. Still, they hope to put on a big show about it, when the bill comes up for debate in September, and reap support from voters who have been deluded that undocumented workers are a threat to their jobs.

Federal contractors have been required to E-Verify since 2009. Newkirk points out that, while “knowingly” hiring undocumented workers has been against the law since 1986, employers have finagled their way around the law in various ways:

The “knowingly” language spawned a cottage industry of fake documents, layered hiring—subcontractors who hire subcontractors who hire subcontractors—and the use of temp agencies and independent contractors, all shielding employers from knowledge of a worker’s status. Critics say E-Verify encourages discrimination and is filled with loopholes. It failed to flag the illegal status of Cristhian Rivera, who was accused in the recent death of Iowa college student Mollie Tibbetts.

E-Verify enforcement is largely a missing issue in the midterm campaigns. Newkirk notes that:

…the E-Verify laws were absent from Georgia’s recent GOP gubernatorial primary. Despite campaigning on how tough they would be on immigrants, neither candidate referred to the laws. The winner, Brian Kemp, ran ads saying he’d haul illegals away in his pickup. “They talked about sanctuary cities and rounding up criminal aliens in a truck, all these distractions,” [president of the Dustin Inman Society D. A. ] King says. “The root cause of illegal immigration is illegal employment. And none of our candidates made a peep about that.”

Obviously, the Republicans want to have it both ways — strut around as tough on undocumented workers, while giving employers, who are the key to E-Verify, the old wink-wink free pass. Kemp is probably the poster-boy for the two-faced scam. His bet is that the media will let him get away with it. We’ll know if that has been the case on November 6th.

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

Yes, I know, many of these ideas poll well when asked in a standard “here’s an idea, what do you think of it?” format. But life, politics and people are not so simple. There are many reasons to be cautious that a given program is–or will be–very popular simply from the results of few poll questions. My old comrade-in-arms Andy Levison usefully reminds of this in his new essay for the Democratic Strategist site.

With all of the bad rap Facebook and Twitter have received in recent months, should Dems use more social media to amplify their messaging? In that regard, Dems should read “Trump Knows Digital Ads Work. Why Don’t Democrats?: The party’s campaigns are ignoring obvious opportunities to engage with voters” a NYT op-ed by Kendall Collins, board member of Tech for Campaigns, which has 7,500 volunteers and played a key role in the 2017 Democratic victories in the Virginia election. Collins writes,

“President Trump may not be up for re-election until 2020, but since May 31, the Trump Make America Great Again Committee — his re-election campaign — has spent $629,500 on advertising on Google platforms alone, making it the top spender on political ads on Google platforms. That’s nearly $200,000 more than the No. 2 spender, One Nation, a right-wing organization focused on influencing Senate elections…The average nonpresidential Democratic campaign spends only 10 percent to 15 percent of its budget on digital channels while pouring 60 percent to 70 percent of its budget into television ads and direct mail. That is shocking, especially because people now spend an average of 5.9 hours online every single day, with 3.3 of those hours on mobile devices…Democrats should take a cue and double down on digital: It empowers them to reach more people with less money, engage in back-and-forth conversations with voters and test what messaging is resonating in real time. It should also prove critical in turning out a younger voting population, which often sits out midterm elections.”

Bottom line is that the influence of social media isn’t fading away, despite its many problems. For Dems, not using it more effectively would be political malpractice.

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

It’s Election Forecasting Time!

Election forecasting season is heating up with the release of 538’s spiffy new House forecasting model. For those who have not yet seen it, their standard model (they have two alternate versions) gives the Democrats a 3 in 4 chance (75.3 percent) of taking the House. The average Democratic gain is projected to be 35 seats. As a nice bonus you can look up the chances that Democrats will take any particular seat both through maps and lists.

While the 538 forecast is the new and shiny, there are several other credible models that get much the same results with less complicated methodologies. The Economist model, which has been running since late spring, gives the Democrats a 70 percent chance of taking the House. They project an average Democratic gain of 29 seats.

G. Elliott Morris’ Crosstab site has also been running a model for quite awhile. He gives Democrats a 76 percent chance of taking the House (no specific seat gain projected).

So everybody seems to singing from the same hymnal which is reassuring. It hardly needs emphasizing that these models generate probabilities not certainties and that the improbable sometimes does happen. But the agreement among models and the fairly high probabilities assigned to Democratic takeover simply reflect the fact that almost all of the data we have right now is telling a story favorable to the Democrats.

Just how favorable the story is was emphasized in some interesting remarks by Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman–as astute and careful an analyst of House elections as you can find–in an interview with Jonathan Swan of Axios:

“Dave Wasserman, the Cook Political Report’s House analyst, says the most under-covered aspect of 2018 is that “a blue wave is obscuring a red exodus.” Republican House members are retiring at a startling clip — a trend that senior White House adviser Kellyanne Conway told me earlier this year was worrying her more than any other trend affecting the midterms.

There are 43 Republican seats now without an incumbent on the ballot. That’s more than one out of every six Republicans in the House — a record in at least a century, Wasserman says.

Just in the past eight months, the number of vulnerable Republican seats has almost doubled, according to Wasserman. Democrats need to win 23 seats to claim control of the House. Today, the Cook Political Report rates 37 Republican-held seats as toss-ups or worse. At the beginning of the year, it was only 20.

Wasserman says the most important sign that 2018 will be a “wave” year — with Democrats winning control of the House — is the intensity gap between the two parties. In polls, Democrats consistently rate their interest in voting as significantly higher than Republicans. And Democrats have voted in extraordinary numbers in the special elections held the past year, despite Republicans holding on to win almost all of these races.

“There’s a bit of over-caution, perhaps, on the part of the punditocracy, after what happened in 2016,” Wasserman told Axios. “But if anything most media could be under-rating Democrats’ potential to gain a lot of seats. They could be caught being cautious in the wrong direction.”

So it looks pretty good. But it ain’t over ’til it’s over.

Timothy Egan has a New York Times column on “The Coming Green Wave,” which offers an optimistic outlook for rising environmental awareness, which is good news, particularly for Democrats. As Egan writes,

Egan notes, further, that “if just one unorganized voting segment, the 60 million bird-watchers of America, sent a unified political message this fall, you’d have a political block with more than 10 times the membership of the National Rifle Association.” Egan faults Trump for “drafting rules to make it easier for major polluters to drive up the earth’s temperature,” weakne rules protecting endangered species and “while lovers of the outdoors break visitation records at national parks and forests, Trump is removing land from protection.”

Egan believes that “144 million Americans who participated in an outdoor activity last year” and the 344 million visitors to national parks are getting ready to “flex some muscle in the upcoming midterm elections.” He notes also that,

Only one in 10 voters think Americans should use more coal. And more than 80 percent of millennials, soon to be the largest cohort of voters (if they ever turn out), believe there’s solid evidence behind these freakish manifestations of an overheated earth…hese people are now ready to “put aside our differences and stand together for the places we love,” as Tawney and Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, wrote in The Denver Post.

You will see it in Minnesota, where the 140,000 people who work in outdoor recreation are furious at Trump’s attempt to open a sulfide-ore copper mine near Boundary Waters Wilderness. You will see it in a half-dozen tossup congressional races in California, where the administration is mounting the biggest assault yet on public health, with its attack on emission rules.

Whether or not Egan’s predictions materialize in the midterm elections, there is surely a lot of room for improvement in Democratic outreach to voters who are alarmed about the environment. It may be that, with a little more effort, Democrats could win some new voters who are concerned about quickening environmental deterioration, a broad-based constituency that is bound to grow in the months and years ahead.

Egan concludes with a hopeful observation that “the silent green majority has had enough.” If there isn’t yet a “silent green majority,” Democrats should be be about the business of organizing one.

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

I often hear laments that, despite all the other things going wrong for the GOP, Trump himself has an unshakable base of support that will ultimately save him and his party.

This is a myth. Yes, Trump has a strong base of support, but it is not extraordinary and is subject to attrition among voters who have questions about him, his behavior and/or his policies. Trump has not invented a new form of politics where he is invulnerable to voter defection.

First point, his approval rating among Republicans. This is high but hardly unprecedented by historical standards. According to Politifact:

“The most recent publicly available data from Gallup’s weekly tracking poll at the time of Trump’s tweet showed him with 85 percent approval from Republicans.

So how does that 85 percent rating compare with his Republican predecessors? We looked at Gallup historical data for Republican presidents going back to Eisenhower. We looked for the closest polling data for July 29 of their second year in office (the day of Trump’s claim). We used the equivalent period after the inauguration of Gerald Ford, who unlike the others was not sworn in on Jan. 20.

So…not only did George W. Bush have a higher approval rating among Republicans, but so did Dwight Eisenhower and, arguably, George H.W. Bush.

Two other points of comparison make Trump’s achievement less impressive.

One is to compare Trump’s highest approval rating of his tenure so far — 90 percent as recently as mid-July — to the record-high rating for his predecessors through July 29 of their second year in office.

By this measure, Trump actually ties for the second-worst of any post-World War II Republican president, surpassing only Ford.

Another approach is to compare each president on the highest approval rating of their tenure. (Trump has only been in office for a year and a half, but he opened the door to this analysis by claiming the “highest poll numbers in the history of the Republican Party.”)

Once again, by this measure, Trump fares the second worst of any post-war Republican president, only surpassing Ford.

By historical standards, Trump has had “solid, but not extraordinary in-party approval,” said Kathleen Joyce Weldon, director of data operations and communications at the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at Cornell University.”

Second point: Support for Trump is relatively weak among large and important groups of Republicans. According to a study by political scientists Peter K. Enns, Jonathon P. Schuldt and Adrienne Scott:

“During the first two weeks of July, we fielded a nationally representative survey of 1,379 likely voters. Conducted online and on the phone by the National Opinion Research Center, we included only respondents who reported a high likelihood of voting in this year’s midterms. The survey was funded by Cornell’s Center for the Study of Inequality.

In our survey, Trump’s approval rating was 85 percent among Republicans. That’s consistent with other polls. On the surface, the president’s support among his fellow Republicans is overwhelming.

But the key to our analysis was to divide Republicans into three groups: those who say they identify strongly with the Republican Party; those who identify as Republicans but not strongly; and those who call themselves independents but say they lean toward the Republican Party. These distinctions, often obscured in media coverage, are important because research shows that the strength of a voter’s partisan identity has an important effect on their political attitudes.

Among strong Republicans, Trump’s overall approval rating is 93 percent, with 78 percent “strongly” approving of the president. The problem for Trump, however, is that these voters make up less than half of the Republican electorate — and 18 percent of likely voters.

Among the larger number of Republicans who identify less strongly with their party, Trump is much less popular. For example, Trump’s overall approval rating among not-so-strong Republicans is 72 percent, with 38 percent saying they strongly approve. Thirty-four percent say they only “somewhat” approve of Trump. Those numbers are similar among independent-leaning Republicans.”

Third point: Not everyone who voted for Trump is very happy with him. That matters. Nate Cohn on newly-released Pew data:

“There has been little change in President Trump’s approval rating in the last 18 months, and so it’s often assumed that nothing can erode his base of support. The Pew data suggests it’s not so simple.

Yes, nearly half of Mr. Trump’s voters have exceptionally warm views toward him: 45 percent rated their feeling toward him as a 90 or higher out of 100, a figure that is virtually unchanged since his election. But a meaningful number of his voters had reservations about him in November 2016, and even more Trump voters held a neutral or negative view of him in March.

Over all, 18 percent of Mr. Trump’s voters gave him a rating of 50 or less, on a scale of 0 (coldest) to 100 (warmest), up from 13 percent in November 2016.

It is worth noting that the November 2016 Pew survey was taken after Mr. Trump won the presidency, at the height of his post-election honeymoon. But even when you consider the slightly lower ratings voters gave him in the months before the election, the big picture is the same: A modest number of Mr. Trump’s voters didn’t like him that much then, and don’t like him much now.

Women, and especially college-educated women, are the likeliest Trump voters to have serious reservations about him in 2018: A striking 14 percent of the college-educated women who voted for him hold a very cold impression of him, up from just 1 percent in November 2016.”

So don’t believe the hype. Trump’s support is plenty shakable. And it’s being shaken.