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

On Marx’s 200th Birthday: Farewell to the Proletariat

Paul Mason, my favorite radical left writer, has another great piece out in his series on Open Democracy. He asks:

“We can only move forward if we can answer the…question: who wants to change the world, and who has the agency to do it?”

He answers:

“After reporting on the 2011 revolts, and observing the similarities between the people in the streets and squares of Cairo, Athens and New York City, I became convinced that a new kind of person had emerged, which sociologists labelled the “networked individual”.

Networked technology, combined with high levels of education and personal freedom have created a new historical subject across most countries and cultures which will supplant the industrial working class in the progressive project, just as they replaced the cottage weavers and artisans of the 18th century.

Orthodox Marxists are appalled by this proposal, and for good reason. If the classic proletariat, owning no substantial property and destined to spontaneously solidaristic ways of life, is not in fact destined to overthrow class society, then a key tenet of Marxism is disproved.

This, as I argued in ‘Postcapitalism’, is the inevitable conclusion we have to draw from 200+ years of working class history. The working class always wanted to go beyond the piecemeal reforms offered by parliamentary socialists like Beatrice Webb, but never – outside extreme circumstances – wanted to impose the proletarian dictatorship proposed by Marx. Nor during the rare times that workers’ council-type bodies gained power were the working class able to secure these institutions against the influence of outside parties and bureaucracies.

The actual 200 year record of the proletariat is heroic: it wanted control and cultural space within capitalism and would fight to the death for this, even against parties claiming to be communist. But it persistently refused to play the role of capitalism’s gravedigger.”

I think this is exactly right. In this light the political configurations of today make sense. Conversely seeing the industrial working class as the leader of the progressive parade is at best confusing, at worst utterly depressing.

I would add to Mason’s analysis something he touches on only briefly: the inescapable demographic/structural facts of our situation.

Broadly speaking, the progressive coalition for perhaps 150 years—but most robustly for the hundred years between 1870 and 1970—was primarily based in the industrial working class (though of course additional support, especially for the non-socialist left, came from reformist elements of the white collar middle class and the agrarian sector). This coalition led by the industrial working class ebbed and flowed in this period but reached its peak of power and influence in the 30 years after World War II, resulting in the progressive welfare state that dominated the Western world. But this dominance did not last and one of the key reasons is very simple: the industrial working class had typically peaked in size by 1970 (in some countries somewhat earlier) and after 1970 experienced a precipitous decline. The general pattern has been a decline from 40-50 percent of the workforce to only around a quarter in a very short historical time span.

For example, in Germany the proportion of blue collar workers in the workforce has been cut in half since the late 1950’s to just over one-quarter of the workforce today, while the proportion of white collar workers has nearly tripled to 57 percent . Similarly, in Sweden the proportion of blue collar workers has been cut in half to one quarter of the workforce just since the mid-1970’s .

Closely related to this trend, employment in the industrial sector has dropped rapidly across countries, replaced by employment in the service sector. In Germany, the industrial sector has declined from 55 percent of employment in 1950 to just 26 percent today . Similarly, in the Netherlands industrial employment dropped from 40 to 20 percent of the workforce between 1950 and 2003 and in the UK from 47 to 24 percent over the same period .

In the United States, these changes have, if anything, been even stronger. The blue collar workforce is now down to just 21 percent of workers and industrial employment is down to just 16 percent .

To put these changes in perspective, consider that industrial employment in the United States, after rising for around 150 years, is now back roughly back to the level it was in 1820, when 70 percent of employment was agricultural . And now services are well over three-quarters of employment, so agriculture and services have essentially swapped places since 1820, while industry over this nearly 200 year time span has wound up back in the same place as a share of employment.

The profound significance of this remarkable change has yet to be fully absorbed by the left. Surely it is of earth-shaking significance that the class upon which progressive coalitions were built for so long has subsided back to its level of the early 1800’s.

And there are related changes that deepen the significance of this shift in the class structure. For example, union membership, a traditional driver of left voting, has been steadily dropping across countries, as well as shifting its composition toward public sector employees. In the United States, union membership peaked at 35 percent of the non-agricultural workforce in the mid-1950’s and is now down to about 11 percent and even lower (7 percent) in the private sector .

Similarly, in the Netherlands, union membership has dropped from 37 to 21 percent of the workforce between 1979 and 2007. In Germany over the same period, unionization dropped from 35 to 20 percent. In the UK, the decline was from 52 to 29 percent; in Spain, from 43 to 15 percent . Only the Nordic countries have been able to maintain their high union membership rates at close to their historic levels.

But even more significant is the glaring fact that, as the industrial working class has declined in numbers, it has become less supportive of traditional left parties. In Sweden, the social democrats’ share of the LO (blue collar workers union) vote has declined by 20 points from 1982 to 2010. In Denmark, social democrats’ share of the traditional working class vote declined by 17 points from the 1960’s to the 1990’s, in the UK by 18 points from the 1960’s to the 2000’s and in France (second round Presidential) by 19 points from 1974 to 2007. And in the United States, the white sector of the working class is now more likely to vote Republican than Democratic in most elections.

Outside of the US, there is also considerable variation in where the lost support from blue collar workers is going. Some of it is going to the traditional right but in countries with strong multi-party systems much of that lost support has been finding its way to parties of the populist right (e.g., the Freedom Party in Netherlands, the National Front in France, the Sweden Democrats in Sweden, the Danish People’s Party in Denmark, JOBBIK in Hungary) A much smaller portion has typically migrated to parties of the populist left (e.g., the Socialist Party in Netherlands, the Left Party in Germany, the Socialist People’s Party in Denmark). However, the recent emergence of new left populist parties like Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece indicates that the situation may be more fluid in Southern Europe.

In short, the old progressive coalition is dead; by dint of declining numbers and attenuating support, the industrial working class can no longer play a leading role in the broad left. The ongoing (indeed, never-ending) struggle to reform capitalism will have to be waged on a new basis.

The left in the US is probably the farthest along in absorbing the implications of this change and building a new progressive coalition. Partially this reflects the fact that modernizing structural change is somewhat farther along in the US, creating new left constituencies at a particularly rapid rate. But if also reflects the advantage the US left gains from the simple two party nature of the US political system—the Democratic Party is the natural, indeed only viable, vehicle for progressive constituencies, new and old. By contrast, in Europe, to a greater or less degree, the multiparty nature of political systems has brought to the fore a variety of left socialist, ecological (green) and social liberal parties to compete with social democrats, the traditional parties of the industrial working class. To make things even more complicated, these alternative left parties typically do disproportionately well among new constituencies, a development social democrats have had a hard time accepting. This has made it even harder in these countries to fully harness the political power of emerging constituencies.

These emerging constituencies reflect the broad structural shift away from manufacturing and toward a postindustrial, knowledge-based society embedded in a global economy. Accompanying this shift have been changes in family and values norms—lowered fertility, diversity in family forms, rise of postmaterial values, decline of traditional religion—sometimes referred to as the Second Demographic Transition . Together these changes have given rise to an explosion of left-leaning groups that is making up for the decline of the traditional working class and powering the emergence of new left coalitions across the advanced Western world. Conservatives, in contrast, are relying ever more heavily on declining social sectors—very much including the traditional working class–to buoy their electoral fortunes.

So there we are. On Marx’s 200th birthday, let us finally discard the proletariat as the historical subject in the progressive project and accept that we are playing in a different ballgame. The goal of social justice remains but the players have fundamentally changed.

The following article by Stanley B. Greenberg of Greenberg Research and Nancy Zdunkewicz of Democracy Corps, is cross-posted from Democracy Corps:

In recent weeks policies to create a “Job Guarantee” or “Full Employment” have quite suddenly assumed a central position in the discussion of the Democratic economic agenda.

These proposals raise a series of important questions that must be carefully analyzed and evaluated regarding their economic feasibility and potential electoral appeal.

The following set of articles provide an introduction to the economic and political aspects of job guarantees and full employment. We believe it is important for all Democrats to familiarize themselves with this subject and understand the issues it raises. The articles are arranged into the following categories: (1) major proposals, (2) articles supporting the approach, (3) progressive cautions about potential difficulties and (4) historical background.

Four Major Proposals for a Jobs Guarantee/Full Employment

1. Center for American Progress
Toward a Marshall Plan for America
By Neera Tanden, Carmel Martin, Marc Jarsulic, Brendan Duke, Ben Olinsky, Melissa Boteach, John Halpin, Ruy Teixeira, and Rob Griffin

2. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
The Federal Job Guarantee–A Policy to Achieve Permanent Full Employment
By Mark Paul, William Darity, Jr., and Darrick Hamilton

3. Levy Economics Institute of Bard College
Public Service Employment: A Path to Full Employment
By L. Randall Wray, Flavia Dantas, Scott Fullwiler, Pavlina R. Tcherneva and Stephanie A. Kelton

4. Economic Policy Institute
Recommendations for Creating Jobs and Economic Security in the U.S.>
By Josh Bivens

Articles Supporting the Approach

1. The Nation
Why Democrats Should Embrace a Federal Jobs Guarantee
By Sean McElwee, Colin McAuliffe and Jon Green

2. The New Republic
Back to Work: How Democrats can win over Americans left behind in the new economy.
By Bryce Covert

3. The American Prospect
Why the Cause of Full Employment Is Back from the Dead
By Harold Meyerson

4. Vox
What America would look like if it guaranteed everyone a job
By Dylan Matthews

5. The Washington Post
Q & A; on the Democrat’ big idea: A job creation program
By Jared Bernstein

6. The New York Times
Why the U.S. Needs a Federal Jobs Program, Not Payouts
By Robert E. Rubin

7. The Nation
Why Democrats Should Fight for the Right to a Good Job
By Katrina vanden Heuvel

8. The Democratic Strategist
Minority and White Workers Need the Same Help
Harry J. Holzer, former Chief Economist at the US Department of Labor.

Progressive cautions about potential problems

1. The Daily Beast
Dems’ Job Guarantee Isn’t Nearly as Easy as It Sounds
By Dean Baker

2. New York Magazine
Democrats Are Rushing Into a Job Guarantee. It Could Be a Huge Mistake.
By Jonathan Chait

Historical background

1. Boston Review
Why Coretta Scott King Fought for a Job Guarantee
By David Stein

2. Center for economic and policy research
The Full Employment Mandate of the Federal Reserve: Its Origins and Importance
By Dean Baker, Sarah Rawlins and David Stein

3.  The Full Employment Alternative (1980)
By Andrew Levison
Coward, McCann & Geoghegan

From Louis Jacobson’s update, “Democrats Poised to Eat Into GOP’s Lead in State Legislatures” at Governing:

According to our first handicapping of state legislatures this cycle, Republicans currently have more chambers at risk, 10, than the Democrats’ seven. Connecticut’s tied Senate is also at risk of a party switch…That adds up to 18 competitive chambers at this point — identical to the number of competitive chambers in 2014, which was the most recent election cycle to feature a strong partisan wave. It was the Democrats who were on the run back then, with 11 Democratic-held chambers rated competitive compared to just seven for the Republicans.

During past wave elections, we’ve tended to see additional chambers become vulnerable to a party switch as time goes on, almost always for the party facing the wave. So unless the political environment changes significantly, expect the number of competitive Republican chambers to rise as November approaches.

However, Jacobson also notes,

Currently, the GOP holds more than two-thirds of the nation’s legislative chambers — 66 in all, compared to 31 for the Democrats. For housekeeping’s sake, this tally counts New York’s Senate as Republican and Alaska’s House as Democratic; both states are led by bipartisan coalitions. Meanwhile, Nebraska’s unicameral legislature, which is nonpartisan, isn’t included in our count.

A mere wave election won’t do it for Democrats. It will take a blue tsunami to flip, or even level those numbers.

Governing’s “assessment is based on interviews with dozens of state and national political sources.” As Jacobson observes,

All told, we rate five Republican-held chambers as tossups: the Colorado Senate, the Maine Senate, the New Hampshire Senate and House, and the New York Senate.

We rate an additional five GOP-held chambers as lean Republican — not yet as vulnerable as the tossup chambers, but worrisome for the GOP nonetheless. Those chambers are the Arizona Senate, the Florida Senate, the Iowa House, the Michigan House and the Wisconsin Senate.

We don’t rate any Democratic-held chambers as tossups for now, but we do consider seven of them to be in the lean Democratic category: the Alaska House, the Colorado House, the Connecticut House, the Delaware Senate, the Maine House, and the Washington Senate and House.

Further,

We see seven chambers currently rated likely Republican that are worth watching for possible movement toward the Democrats. They are: the Arizona House, the Iowa Senate, the Michigan Senate, the Minnesota House, the North Carolina Senate, and the Pennsylvania Senate and House.

All in all, Democrats have reason to feel optimistic about gains at this point. Still, it’s worth injecting a note of caution. Even a net switch of 14 chambers toward the Democrats — the absolute maximum shift we can envision at this stage of the campaign — would still leave Republicans with a national edge in chambers of 52-46. So don’t expect the Democrats to seize a majority of state legislative chambers in 2018 alone.

Jacobson gets down to state by state cases with some relevant details. But Democrats can take some encouragement from recent state legislative special elections. In his Politico post, “‘Let the blue wave continue’: Democrats notch 4th Florida bellwether win,” Marc Caputo writes,

On Tuesday, in Florida’s 114th House District in Miami, Javier Fernandez beat Republican Andrew Vargas by about 4.1 percentage points, despite being outspent by at least 2-1 in a swing seat where voters split their tickets between both parties in the 2016 elections.

…Fernandez’s win follows a shocking February victory by Democrat Margaret Good in Florida’s 72nd House District, which voted for President Donald Trump. Democrats also won Florida’s 40th Senate District in Miami-Dade and St. Petersburg’s mayoral race. Those last two elections had Democratic-leaning electorates with significant minority populations, unlike the 72nd in Sarasota and, to a lesser degree, the 114th District.

The win was also big for Florida Democrats because they finally started to build a bench by electing their second Cuban-American Democrat from Miami-Dade County to the Florida Legislature, where the 42-year-old Fernandez will join state Sen. José Javier Rodríguez.

“While the Florida House is likely to stay Republican for years,” Caputo writes, “Fernandez’s win bolstered hopes that Democrats could be closer to taking back the Florida Senate if they can flip five seats in the 40-member chamber.”

Florida’s state legislative races may well provide an instructive test of just how fed up Florida parents are with gun violence in their state, and who they want to hold accountable. At The Monitor, Patrick Jonsson notes that 91 percent of Florida’s Republican lawmakers have an “A” rating from the NRA.

Florida did enact a statewide measure that raised the minimum age for buying guns from 18 to 21, set a three-day waiting period, and banned bump stocks. However, opinion polls show strong nation-wide support for a ban on sale of assault-style weapons, and the Florida election will see if the modest reforms are enough in a state that has experienced two massacres in recent years.

At The American Prospect, Harold Meyerson explains why “Why the Cause of Full Employment Is Back from the Dead,” despite a relatively low official unemployment rate, 4.1 percent (which incudes jobs that don’t pay a living wage). “The rise of precarious and poorly paid work, chiefly in but not confined to the service sector; the wage stagnation affecting most of the workforce (which Jared Bernstein documented in a piece for the Prospect earlier this week; the declining level of labor force participation in those parts of the country where work, particularly remunerative work, has largely disappeared; the chronic economic insecurity of millennials, and the political left turn they’ve executed in response; the opening to more radical economic reforms unleashed by Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign—all these have led to a new economic radicalism bleeding its way into the Democratic mainstream.”

Full employment still polls well for Democrats. As Sean McElwee, Colin McAuliffe and Jon Green recently write in their article, “Why Democrats Should Embrace a Federal Jobs Guarantee” in The Nation: “To explore the possibility of Democrats’ running on a guaranteed-job plan, we asked the respected data analytics firm Civis Analytics to not only poll guaranteed jobs, but poll it in the way that would be most likely to gain opposition from voters. They asked respondents: “Democrats in congress are proposing a bill which would guarantee a job to every American adult, with the government providing jobs for people who can’t find employment in the private sector. This would be paid for by a 5 percent income tax increase on those making over $200,000 per year. Would you be for or against this policy?”…We expected that in a generic scenario, people would support guaranteed jobs, but before urging Democrats to embrace it, we wanted to see if the policy might take a hit when Republicans made the issue partisan and talked about tax hikes…The results of the Civis polling were nothing short of stunning, showing large net support for a job guarantee: 52 percent in support, 29 percent opposed, and the rest don’t know. “Even with explicit partisan framing and the inclusion of revenue in the wording, this is one of the most popular issues we’ve ever polled,” said David Shor, a senior data scientist at Civis Analytics.”

Another finding revealed from The Nation article: “…Our think tank Data for Progress modeled state-level support for guaranteed jobs using data provided to us by the Center for American Progress, with the help of Senior Adviser Austin Rochford. We find that the job guarantee polls stunningly well in all 50 states. Even in the state with the lowest modeled support, Utah, support is still 57 percent. Deep-red states like West Virginia (62 percent support), Indiana (61 percent), and Kansas (67 percent) all boast strong support for a job guarantee. Indeed, the places where the job guarantee is most popular might be surprising: DC (84 percent), Mississippi (72 percent), North Carolina (72 percent), Hawaii (72 percent), and Georgia (71 percent) have the highest estimates, though support is also high in solid-blue states like California and New York (both 71 percent)…“The results of this research were just staggering. Americans not only overwhelmingly oppose cuts to programs like Medicaid and nutrition assistance. They also support really bold progressive alternatives—including a jobs guarantee,” said Jeremy Slevin, the director of advocacy for the Poverty team at CAP. “If there was any doubt as to whether progressives should champion far-reaching proposals to help people find good-paying jobs, I hope this erases it,” he said.

Meyerson notes that Sen. Bernie Sanders has introduced a comprehensive “guaranteed full employment bill” and “the [Democratic] party now embraces the $15 minimum wage; the cause of single-payer is taken up by a surprising number of elected officials. In addition to the Sanders bill, “New Jersey Senator Cory Booker has proposed setting up pilot full employment programs in 15 urban and rural areas with persistently high levels of unemployment…And Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin—up for re-election in a state where working class whites forsook their Democratic allegiances to vote for Donald Trump in 2016—has authored a bill that requires corporations to have their workers elect one-third of their corporation’s board of directors—a feature, somewhat modified, of German social democracy, and one reason why Germany’s workers are, on the whole, doing better than ours.”

The Sanders jobs bill would require the “federal government to guarantee a job paying $15 an hour and health-care benefits to every American worker “who wants or needs one,” embracing the kind of large-scale government works project that Democrats have shied away from in recent decades,” reports Jeff Stein at The Washington Post. Sanders’s public sector jobs program “would fund hundreds of projects throughout the United States aimed at addressing priorities such as infrastructure, care giving, the environment, education and other goals…”A dozen regional centers would develop proposals for needed public works projects. Current jobs proposals trend away from President Obama’s “public-private partnerships or government incentives to reshape private markets and toward an unambiguous embrace of direct government intervention, adds Stein. “The goal is to eliminate working poverty and involuntary unemployment altogether,” said Darrick Hamilton, an economist at the New School who has advocated for a jobs guarantee program along with Stony Brook University’s Stephanie Kelton and a group of left-leaning economists at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College. “This is an opportunity for something transformative, beyond the tinkering we’ve been doing for the last 40 years, where all the productivity gains have gone to the elite of society.”

Jane Sanders interviews Stephanie Kelton, former senior economist on the Senate Budget Committee and economic advisor to Sen. Sanders, on the need for a natinal jobs guarantee:

In their Article, “The Full Employment Solution,” also in The American Prospect, Professors Mark Paul, William Darity Jr. and Darrick Hamilton, make a case that the time is right for Democrats to make full employment a priority: “These conditions warrant the resurrection of a bold idea, an Economic Bill of Rights for all Americans, tailored to the conditions of the 21st century.” The authors cite “the first article of a new Economic Bill of Rights—a federal job guarantee…First, we invariably have major economic crises that drive people out of work; the most recent episode is the Great Recession. Second, even in “good” economic times, the United States has more people seeking employment than the private sector is willing to employ. And third, not only do we generally have an inadequate number of jobs, but we have a tier of jobs that feature low pay, uncertain hours, and few or no benefits…What the nation needs is federal legislation that would guarantee employment to every American at non-poverty wages.”

In early March, Democratic leaders shared the broad strokes of an ambitious infrastructure upgrade program, which would provide millions of new jobs at a living wage As Mike Debonis reported at Powerpost, “As the White House struggles to finance an ambitious infrastructure plan, Senate Democrats are proposing one alternative — albeit one unlikely to pass muster with President Trump: rolling back the recently passed Republican tax overhaul…The proposal unveiled by Democratic leaders Wednesday would plow just over $1 trillion into a wide range of infrastructure needs, including $140 billion for roads and bridges, $115 billion for water and sewer infrastructure and $50 billion to rebuild schools.”…The spending would be offset by clawing back two-thirds of the revenue lost in the Republican tax bill by reinstating a top income tax rate of 39.6 percent, restoring the individual alternative minimum tax, reversing cuts to the estate tax, and raising the corporate income tax from 21 percent to 25 percent…Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in an interview Tuesday that the plan sets up a stark contrast for voters ahead of the midterm elections.”’…“We believe overwhelmingly the American people will prefer building infrastructure and creating close to 15 million middle-class jobs than giving tax breaks for the wealthy,” he said.” Although much of the Democratic plan would send money to traditional infrastructure priorities like highways, transit and waterways, Schumer highlighted less conventional spending priorities, including $40 billion to build high-speed Internet connections in rural areas and $80 billion to upgrade the country’s energy grid.”

Will centrist and more conservative Democrats also support a party agenda that puts full employment as a unifying priority? In their article, “Get to Work, Democrats: Become the Jobs Party,” about findings of their focus groups on jobs at thirdway.org, Lanae Erickson Hatalsky and Ryan Pougiales conclude, “The lesson that stands out from this research is clear: the Party needs to actively and impassionedly seek out the title of “the jobs party.” In House and Senate Democrats’ new Better Deal agenda , the focus on and promise of Better Jobs is essential. Hopefully, this shows that Democrats are coming to grips with the jobs tension that they have failed to reconcile in recent years. Even as the economy approaches full employment, there remains real economic anxiety, and people will always aspire to new and better job opportunities. Trump spoke to this—and voters responded. To rebuild the Party and regain the power to enact their priorities, Democrats need to craft a broad path that’s inclusive of a diverse coalition and sustainable across election cycles. Reclaiming its status as the party of jobs is a unifying way to do just that.”

The Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman identifies 7 key “risk factors” for Republican House candidates in the Midterm elections, including:

1. Sits in a district with a Cook PVI score of R+5 or less Republican.
2. Sits in a district that Hillary Clinton carried in 2016.
3. Received 55 percent of the vote or less in the 2016 election (or a 2017 special election).
4. Voted in favor of the American Health Care Act in the May 4 roll call vote.
5. Voted in favor of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in the December 19 roll call vote.
6. Raised less money than at least one Democratic opponent in the first quarter of 2018.
7. Has a Democratic opponent with at least $200,000 in cash on hand as of March 31.

Wasserman notes, further, “Only one incumbent, Rep. Steve Knight (CA-25), has all seven risk factors. Eight incumbents have six risk factors, 23 incumbents have five, 23 incumbents have four and 32 have three. This is not a hard and fast list, and over the next quarter, many incumbents will add or subtract factors based on their own and their opponents’ progress. ”

In addition, Wasserman adds that “Democrats have a donor enthusiasm edge: in the first quarter of 2018, at least 43 sitting Republicans were out-raised by at least one Democratic opponent.”

According to Wasserman, “Our latest ratings point to 56 vulnerable GOP-held seats, versus six vulnerable Democratic seats,” along with 18 Republicans in “toss-up” territory.

One of the interesting things about the “risk factors” is that they aren’t linked to opinion polling, which may appeal to (ahem) armchair analysts. The names with the risk factors will change somewhat over the next six months, and it would be instructive to compare predictive value of this template to the opinion polls, and also how well it performs together with polls, compared to polls alone.

Now that the pundits and political activists are more focused than ever before in the post-war period on the importance to Democrats of winning a larger share of white working-class voters (thanks in some measure to TDS efforts), the “how” question arises and demands some answers. Brookings Senior Fellow for Economic Studies Harry J. Holzer offers some policy ideas for increasing compensation of non-college workers of all races in his article, “Jobs for the working class: Raising earnings among non-college graduates,” which may prove helpful to Democraic campaigns. As Holzer writes,

Federal and state efforts to improve earnings among non-college educated Americans should focus on: 1) Improving education and skills programs at community colleges while incentivizing employers to create better jobs; 2) Raising job availability in depressed geographic regions; 3) Reducing barriers to work associated with opioids and criminal records; and 4) Strengthening work incentives by “making work pay“ in low-wage jobs and reforming income support programs like SSDI.

Holzer concedes that such an agenda would certainly require “significant new expenditures at both the federal and state levels.” He believes that “some actions, like efforts to spur employment in distressed regions, should grow slowly until more evidence is generated about their cost-effectiveness,” but “the overall package of policies outlined above should be implemented robustly.”

Regarding the degree of difficulty in implementing his agenda, he notes that “the federal fiscal outlook has been severely damaged in the past few months by the passage of reckless tax cuts as well as spending increases.” He leaves no doubt about the need to correct the GOP’s “extremely regressive” tax policy and  “rescinding some if not all tax cuts to allow new spending of the type outlined here…”

With the unemployment rate relatively low, it is important for Democrats to get out front on the need to reduce income inequality and boost the real wages of working-class voters of all races. Democratic candidates and campaign directors should give a thoughtful read to Holzer’s entire Brookings essay for starters.

In Stan Greenberg’s article, “How the US mid-terms could kickstart a new era of progressive reform” at Prospect, he provides an optimistic scenario for Democrats: “November’s vote will almost certainly kick off a new progressive era of reform, much like the cluster of elections, starting with the 1910 mid-terms, which launched America’s first progressive era.” Further,

A new American majority has been growing now for some time. It is composed of black people, Hispanics and Asians, unmarried women and millennials. Already by the 2012 election, these Americans collectively comprised 53 per cent of the electorate, rising to 54 per cent by 2016, and by 2020 this majority should reach 56 per cent. What I labelled the “rising American electorate” was poised in 2016 to form part of a progressive coalition with the growing number of well-educated suburban voter and college-educated women, while also running respectably with white working class women. That coalition should have readily defeated Trump and put Democrats in power.

Yet, as Greenberg has noted eslewhere, Hillary Clinton’s failure to campaign energetically in white working class communities in Pennsylvania, Florida and the midwestern rustbelt proved a pivotal mistake, as Trump got enough votes in those areas to win the Electoral College. Greenberg believes both Clinton and Obama failed to “understand what was happening in America and the deep, persistent resentments caused by the financial crisis after 2008.”

With benefit of hindsight, Obama could have been tougher on the financial elites and helped to strengthen the Democrats’s brand as the party of working people. He was able to get re-elected anyway, thanks to his strong appeal to African American voters and his ability to win a larger share of white working-class voters than did Clinton, who had lost credibility with this consituency as a result of her associations with wealthy elites and decades of hammering GOP’s attacks on her character. As Greenberg explains,

Their own constituency of voters—and the US public more broadly—was incensed by the continued corporate dominance of American life. They were disgusted by over-paid CEOs who had betrayed their employees and their country, and by the corruption of Wall Street and Washington that rigged the political game, even as wages and wealth had crashed for most Americans. Obama bailed out the banks and auto industry and guaranteed the bosses’ bonuses, but did nothing for homeowners. Nobody went to jail.

Despite all of the impressive achievements of President Obama, including saving the economy from an all-out depression and the most significant health care reform since President Johnson, Obama was unable to provide the leadership needed to adequately strengthen Democratic credibility with the white working-class. To be fair, he faced the most intransigent Republican leadership in a generation, who refused all compromises, with their stated purpose of limiting his accomplishments. As a result,

Democrats lost among white working class voters in 2010 by 64 to 34 per cent, and by a similar margin among white seniors. They also failed to dominate sections of the vote where they should have cleaned up. Republicans won over 40 per cent of votes among millennials and unmarried women. Critically, turnout in these groups dropped or stayed flat in comparison to previous mid-term years.

In 2018, however, Greenberg argues that Democrats have a unique opportunity, because “All the ingredients that gave the Republicans a 2010 Tea Party wave are poised to produce a Democratic 2018 wave, with similar implications for Congress and state and local offices. These are the building blocks of a durable majority.” Greenberg notes further,

In the 2017 special elections, as well as in our most recent national polls, support for Democrats has reached over 90 per cent with African Americans, 65 per cent with Hispanics, 67 per cent with unmarried women and 75 per cent with millennial women. For all of them, the battle with Trump and Tea Party Republicans has made clear what they believe, what values are at stake and how much politics matters.

It sounds like a winning formula is shaping up nicely for Democrats. Assuming the “resistance” energy can be mobilized into turning out the voters who now see the Republicans as the party of wealthy elites who are ripping off working families, Greenberg’s informed analysis looks like a very good bet: “The coming wave could wipe away the Tea Party wave and counter-revolution. And that will mark the beginning of a new era of reform.”

James Hohman’s Daily 202 post, “New coalition aims to improve Democratic messaging against Trump,” focuses more broadly than the title would suggest on developing better Democraric messaging against Republican policies, beginning with the economy and corruption. As Hohman explains,

Many Democratic talking heads make weak arguments on television that fail to move voters. To address this, several groups and top pollsters on the left are teaming up to launch a new project that will conduct surveys and convene focus groups to produce monthly guidance with the most politically potent lines of attack against President Trump and congressional Republicans.

This new initiative, which has not been previously reported, will be called Navigator Research. The debut report, shared first with The Daily 202, offers original polling and talking points related to the economy, political corruption and disruption.

Key players in the new coalition include Jefrey Pollock, the president of Global Strategy Group, Pollock’s partner Nick Gourevitch and Margie Omero from GBA Strategies, along with veterans of the Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders campaigns. Members of the group’s advisory council include AFL-CIO political director Mike Podhorzer, the Center for American Progress Action Fund’s Navin Nayak, Emily’s List’s Christina Reynolds, the Latino Victory Project’s Stephanie Valencia and the Roosevelt Institute’s Felicia Wong. Also on the board are Arkadi Gerney from The Hub Project, Delvone Michael from Working Families and Ron Klain, former chief of staff to Vice Presidents Biden and Gore and Gore’s lawyer during the Florida recount.

Boiling down the group’s mission, Pollock said, “For years, Republican politicians have been better at paying attention to language cues. We’re trying to do a progressive version of that.”

Navigator’s inaugural edition features findings from a national online survey of 1,009 registered voters conducted April 3-5, 2018. It also includes findings from an online discussion board of 25 voters who are not strong partisans, conducted March 22-23, 2018. Among the conclusions of the first study, 67 percent, or about 2 out of 3 respondents agreed that “The economy may be growing but wealthy people at the top are getting somuch more of the benefit than middleclass and working people,” vs. only 33 percent who said “Things are generally going well economically – the national economy is booming, the stock market is hitting record highs, and business- es are creating new jobs all the time.” Only 37 percent agreed that “The economy might be better in the country as a whole, but in my community, many people are still struggling to pay their bills and keep up a decent standard of living,” while 63 percent preferred “The economy may be growing but wealthy people at the top are getting allthe benefit, while the middle class andworking people are falling further behind.” Further, “This research finds more Americans are worried and uncertain (61%) than are confident and optimistic (39%) about the future of the economy.”

With respect to corruption, the survey indicated that 49 percent agreed that Republicans in congress are “more likely to use government to personally enrich themselves,” compared to 34 percent who said the same about Democrats in Congress and 17 percent who said ‘nether’ — almost exactly the same breakdown when the question  was “Which is more likely to use government to personally enrich their biggest campaign donors?”

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

The big report on American’s Electoral Future is out!

Just released! Here’s a key bit from the report but please check out the whole thing. There’s a lot of grist for your mill, no matter what kind of mill you’re working with.

“The wide range of scenarios considered here mostly have Democrats in 2020 maintaining and, in many cases, strengthening their popular vote victory from 2016. Indeed, in only two cases do the authors actually see a Republican popular vote victory in 2020: a 10-point pro-GOP margin swing white noncollege-educated voters and a 10-point pro-GOP margin swing among white college graduates—and, in the latter case, only if the third-party vote is reallocated.