The following article by Matt Morrison, executive director of Working America is cross-posted from a Working America e-blast:

A couple of weeks ago, we reported on field interviews showing Virginia voters’ overwhelming support for increasing teacher pay. These voters — even Republicans — were willing to pay an average of $19-$25 more per month in taxes to give teachers raises.

There are many proposals under debate to address income inequality through taxation on the wealthy, an indicator of the political importance of tax policy.

We took a long view of the importance of tax policy to voters, including different economic and demographic segments. Overall, while there was some uptick in interest in 2016, the share of voters focused on taxation has been relatively modest over the last seven years.

Unsurprisingly, Republican-leaning and higher-income voters are consistently the most focused on taxes, while people of color and Democratic-leaning voters are consistently the least likely to focus on these issues. Swing voters and white voters have had the greatest fluctuation in focus. Interestingly, following the 2017 Trump tax cuts, comparatively fewer voters are concerned about tax policy, an indication that the biggest GOP accomplishment has limited political appeal.

What if we could shift the debate to make fair and adequate taxation a strength for progressives?

We know from experience and experimentation that Working America canvassers alter the frame through which voters consider the issue of taxes. Instead of focusing on limited government, they shift the focus to equitable investment in society.

1. Unexpected support. We know that we can find support, sometimes in many of the most unexpected places. A 47-year-old woman in Gainesville, Virginia, recently told our canvasser that she felt we have “the right person in the White House” and supported vouchers. Yet, she was willing to pay $30 more each month in taxes to improve public schools.

2. Make it local. Connecting taxes to local investment priorities instead of distant politicians can build dramatic support. In a clinical test targeting conservative voters in California’s Central Valley, we increased support for Proposition 6, the state’s infamous gas tax that funds infrastructure, by a whopping 14 percentage points in one conversation. By centering the conversation on local bridges and roads rather than statewide politics, voter opinion moved dramatically.

3. Tax fairness matters to working-class voters. In the Chicago suburbs — an area filled with tax-sensitive voters — we engaged voters on the issue of worker misclassification. Most of the voters, who were employed in traditional, full-time jobs with benefits, could not relate to the importance of workers being wrongly treated as independent contractors. But when we presented the issue as businesses shifting the tax burden to the voters because they skipped paying millions in employment taxes, that message resonated. As a result, hundreds of voters signed a digital petition to the state attorney general demanding enforcement.

Conservatives have strategically pushed austerity, disinvestment and public subsidies for the wealthy.

Rather than fighting for scraps under austerity, we go door-to-door and shift the framework entirely to investment in matters that affect people in their day-to-day lives.

Our experience says that we have a critical window to shift to a tax equity and investment paradigm if we can connect the dots for enough people in key battlegrounds. The more voters understand, the more they demand justice.

Democrats should get ready for the intensive campaign of demonization Republicans are planning for them. I wrote about this again at New York this week.

Perhaps he was just stating the obvious, but it did have the ring of an official announcement when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell suggested a GOP-wide message for 2020, as the Hill reports:

“We need to have a referendum on socialism,’ McConnell told a group of reporters when asked for his assessment of next year’s elections, when Senate Republicans will have to defend 22 seats, compared with 12 for Democrats.”

In case reporters somehow didn’t get it, McConnell restated the proposition:

“’I’m going to be arguing, and I’m encouraging my colleagues to argue, that we are the firewall against socialism in this country,’ McConnell added …

“’We’ve got five credible candidates for president in the Senate signed up for the Green New Deal and Medicare for none. If we can’t make that case, we ought to go into another line of work,’ he said.

“McConnell argues that will be the key to reversing the drop in support among women and college graduates that hurt Republicans in the 2018 midterm elections, when Democrats won back the House and captured GOP-held Senate seats in Arizona and Nevada.”

So there you have it: Red Scare 2020 is going to be a big and abiding thing. This clearly syncs Senate Republicans with the Trump reelection bid. It’s long been clear that his 2020 strategy will be what you’d expect from an abidingly unpopular president leading an unpopular party with unpopular policy positions: a relentlessly negative attack on his Democratic opponent using every weapon available. There’s some irony involved in a Trump-led party accusing its opponents of “extremism,” but it’s an age-old tactic: When you cannot credibly occupy the “political center,” you can always try to push your opponents even further from the center than you are.

And “socialism” is a time-tested epithet for left-of-center politicians and parties. With older voters, of course, it connotes not just big government but the “scientific socialism” of Marxism-Leninism, along with the Soviet imperialism that formed so large a part of the experience of Americans in and before the baby boom. But it’s a big target generally, as David Graham has explained:

“Though it feels like a Cold War throwback, the socialism epithet might be effective. It could resonate with a wider swath of the public than some of Trump’s other signature lines. The border wall, for example, is unpopular with Americans overall, though very popular with the president’s core supporters. By contrast, voter antipathy toward socialism is much broader: In a February Fox News poll, 59 percent of Americans held an unfavorable view. As of 2015, half of Americans said they wouldn’t vote for a socialist (though only 38 percent of Democrats held that view).”

The “socialism” label for Democratic policy proposals could also help expose divisions in the Donkey Party’s ranks over significant variations in how to define the Green New Deal and how to implement Medicare for All, as candidates not named Bernie Sanders (the only self-identified “socialist” in the presidential field, so far at least) try to distinguish their approaches from his.

On the other hand, conservatives have been calling liberals “socialists” for eons, and it’s no automatic magic bullet. Most notoriously, Barack Obama was relentlessly (if ridiculously) called a “socialist” by Republican-aligned media types going into the 2012 election, and it didn’t appear to work. For that matter, Trump himself deployed the “socialist” epithet toward Democrats going into the 2018 midterms, to no discernible effect.

But when you can’t say much about your own party’s record other than pointing at economic indicators and hooting “Mine! Mine!” then creating and burnishing negative associations for the other side may be the only available strategy.

Elaine Kamarck shares some numbers to help explain “Why there will be a woman on the 2020 Democratic ticket” at Brookings: “Women have led the opposition to Trump from Election Day 2016 on—54 percent of women voted for Hillary and 53 percent of men voted for Trump. The day after he was inaugurated, thousands of women assembled in Washington and in cities around the country in protest. Things haven’t gotten better as the Trump presidency has matured. Trump’s approval/disapproval rating among men is equal as of this spring, with 47 percent approving of the job he’s doing and 47 percent disapproving. But among women only 32 percent approve of Trump’s performance while 63 percent disapprove…From 1980 (when turnout for men and women was about equal) to 2000, the gap was around 2 percent. It gradually widened to 3 percent and grew to 4 percent in 2016, contributing, no doubt, to Hillary’s large popular vote victory…Nowhere did women’s general antipathy to Trump show up more clearly than in the 2018 midterm elections. In that election women maintained their edge in turnout, voting at a 4 percent higher rate than men. But they also skewed even more Democratic than they did in 2016, voting for Democratic candidates at a rate of 59 percent, while men skewed Republican at a rate of 51 percent.”

At New York magazine, Ed Kilgore provides some nuanced analysis on the electability of a Democratic woman presidential nominee: “The reality is that Clinton comfortably won the popular vote and lost the election due to an improbable Electoral College inside straight that Trump likely cannot pull off twice. And her loss was certainly close enough that factors other than her gender — her failure to invest resources in key states she lost, the Comey letter, a general lassitude among liberal voters who had no idea Trump could win — may have been decisive…At a minimum progressive activists and media observers should fight the sexist assumptions afflicting candidates like Elizabeth Warren instead of promoting or surrendering to them…With a less defeatist attitude, progressives and particularly feminists might invest in building a frontlash — pride among women about Warren’s brains and accomplishments — that can outweigh any sexist backlash. The “nevertheless, she persisted” tagline that followed Warren around in 2017 after Mitch McConnell tried to silence her on the Senate floor might become relevant again as she and other women in the presidential field refuse to give up on the proposition that they are electable as they actually happen to be…Until such time as voters cast their ballots in caucuses and primaries, it’s premature to decide Democrats can’t “risk” running a woman again. See how they run, and maybe the myth of an incorrigibly sexist electorate will shatter, too.”

This Gallup Poll data is from 2015 (chart via FiveThirtyEight). More recent polls indicate the public is not quite so alienated by the “sociailist” brand or so opposed to a candidate based on sexual orientation. Since Democrats now have 2020 presidential candidates that fit into several of these categories, now would be a good time for pollsters to ask the question again.

“Clearly concerned that more insurgents like New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could unseat established House members in party primaries (as AOC did last year to Speaker-in-Waiting Joe Crowley), the DCCC has announced it will not give work to any consultant or pollster who dares to work for candidates challenging congressional incumbents in Democratic primaries…Democrats should remember that it’s not just Obama who once had the chutzpah to challenge a Democratic incumbent. In many ways, the Democratic Party of the last 50 years emerged from Democrats’ challenges to an incumbent Democratic president. The campaigns that Sens. Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy waged against President Lyndon Johnson in 1968 redefined the Democrats for decades going forward, and produced a generation of political operatives who subsequently steered numerous Democratic leaders to electoral victory. Those challenges, of course, grew out of the deep divisions over Johnson’s handling of the Vietnam War. Today, the Democrats are redefining themselves again, and, now as then, not always to the party establishment’s liking…In 1968, however, while the party establishment strongly opposed those challenges, it didn’t enact any new rules — much less blacklists — to suppress them. That was the right decision then. It would be the right decision now. — From Harold Meyerson’s “Democrats are playing dirty to shut out progressive new voices. They should rethink that strategy” in the Los Angeles Times.

Activists interested in exploring direct democracy possibilities in the states will find a useful resource in Wikipedia’s entry on “Initiatives and Refenda in the United States,” which notes “Between 1904 and 2007, some 2231 statewide referendums initiated by citizens were held in the USA. 909 of these initiatives have been approved. Perhaps even greater is the number of such referendums that have been called by state legislatures or mandatory—600 compared to 311 civic initiatives in 2000-2007.” Ballotpedia adds, “In 2018, Ballotpedia tracked 203 proposals in 34 states. Of those, 34 were approved, 140 were rejected or abandoned, and nine were carried over to the next session.” Vox’s Stavros Agorakis has a  round-up of ballot measures that passed in 2018, addressing Medicaid expansion, liberalization of pot laws, ex-felon enfranchisement, minimuim wage increase, same-day and automatic voter registration and redistricting and others. This map shows each state’s current rules for initiative, referenda and recall, color-coded key right here.

In “House Democrats’ net neutrality win likely DOA in Senate but poised to become 2020 issue,” John Hendel notes at Politico that “The House voted 232-190 Wednesday to revive Obama-era net neutrality regulations in what likely amounts to a short-lived legislative victory — but one that may give Democrats fresh momentum on an issue they hope will feature prominently in the 2020 presidential election…A united Democratic front getting it passed represents a rebuke of the Trump-era FCC’s 2017 repeal of the open internet rules. But the near-total absence of bipartisan buy-in also means it’s likely a non-starter in the Senate…Still, House passage alone could help Democrats keep net neutrality a high-profile messaging and fundraising issue on the 2020 campaign trail. Democrats argue net neutrality sways voters, especially tech-savvy younger voters, and tried to make it a centerpiece going into the 2018 congressional elections…”It polls in the 90s amongst millennials. It’s a top-of-the-mind issue for them. So I just feel that people who vote against it vote so at their own political peril,” Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), lead sponsor on the Senate version of Save the Internet, told Politico Tuesday.”

Also at Politico, Nancy Scola reports on the growing influence of digital wizards in Democratic campaigns: “Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker and Beto O’Rourke are among the White House hopefuls replicating Trump’s approach by giving senior campaign leadership roles to data and social media mavens. It’s a recognition of how central the online space — from raising breathtaking gobs of money via email to winning the minute-by-minute messaging wars on social media — has become to any candidate for the White House…Sanders in February named Faiz Shakir, the onetime director of new media for Nancy Pelosi, to run his campaign. Booker hired Jenna Lowenstein, the digital director for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 White House run, as deputy campaign manager. And O’Rourke picked political data expert Jen O’Malley Dillon as campaign manager and is relying on Becky Bond, a long-time digital organizer, for strategy advice…Warren, meanwhile, tapped Joe Rospars, chief digital strategist for Obama’s successful 2008 presidential bid, to serve as a senior strategist…“One of the underlying frustrations was…feeling that digital wasn’t allowed to sit at the adults’ table,” said Catherine Algeri, former digital director for both the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and three Senate campaigns. For many years, Algeri said, the sense was, “‘You guys just sit over there and raise money.’”…“Now it’s just so clear that if you don’t have a senior leadership team that really understands how to dominate social media and the ways that news travels around the web, you’re just at a huge disadvantage,” said Laura Olin, a Democratic digital strategist who led social media strategy for Obama’s 2012 reelection.”

“The Democratic Party should offer a vision of citizenship that contrasts with Trump’s celebration of hedonistic consumerism,” Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel writes in his article, “The Need That Democrats Aren’t Addressing” at The Atlantic. “We should call on the nation’s sense of deep-seated patriotism to rebut his ugly nationalism. We must champion a spirit of unity and purpose that counteracts his self-serving schemes to pit one community against the next…We can begin by issuing a simple but powerful call: a policy that requires all 18-year-olds to give at least six months of their life to national service. People from different walks of life, with different backgrounds, would serve with one another as a rite of passage. Once young adults graduate high school or reach college age, they would join the military, the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, or some other service-oriented organization…a universal national-service program will tap into younger Americans’ desire to serve the greater good…against the backdrop of Trump’s call to consumerism, nationalism, and divisiveness, the third and potentially most powerful leg of the Democratic message should tap into America’s deep-seated patriotism and selfless citizenship. Nothing would stir that underlying sense of common purpose more powerfully than a call to universal national service. Nothing else would so fundamentally challenge Trump’s divisiveness.”

An important new study of “The Battleground: Democratic Perspective,” featuring strategic analysis by Celinda Lake, Daniel Gotoff and Corey Teter, reveals key vulnerabilities and opportunities for Dems as the 2020 campaign begins.

The Lake Research Partners study finds widespread “economic anxiety” and an “ever-deepening sense of frustration toward the status quo in Washington,” along with a “sense of alienation among voters,” which “appears unlikely to improve without serious and bold economic initiatives from the Democrats.” Further,

Democrats’ strong showing in the 2018 midterms was a solid step toward rehabilitation from the disastrous 2016 elections, though it would be a mistake to treat those results as a necessary predictor of success moving forward. In fact, despite the President’s historic levels of unpopularity, voters continue to profess favorable opinions of his stewardship over the economy and job creation (a qualified assessment, to be sure, given their expectations of yet another significant downturn); moreover, they tend to side with Republicans over Democrats on these issues,as well. Overall, this data continues to illustrate Democrats’ inherent weakness to respond on the economy, and if the Party does not rectify this soon,it will find itself in serious jeopardy for the 2020 election.

Indeed, Democrats still face the challenge of articulating a bold, compelling economic vision that rises above the safety of platitudes, or that seeks to convince voters that a reprise of the economy of the 1990s or the early 2010s is sufficient to address the scale of the economy’s persistent failings—a perilous gambit that cedes the dimension of change to the opposition and ignores voters’ fears and their aspirations for the future. Democrats have major advantages on healthcare and education which contributed largely to their success in 2018. The challenge facing the Party ahead is to translate those advantages into a bigger economic frame…Democrats stand to profit immensely by capitalizing on the President’s and his Party’s glaring vulnerabilities regarding their ties to the same powerful special interests that dominate American politics and government and are at the root of voters’ desire to chart a decidedly new course. Pursuing these strategies will require more than just highlighting the President’s flaws ;they will require some measure of risk from Democrats as they offer a bold new trajectory and true security – economically, domestically, and internationally – for the American people.

In addition, “fully 59% of voters say they are either “very” or “somewhat” worried about the country suffering an economic downturn in the near future.” Also, “majorities of voters who identify as middle class (58% very/somewhat worried) and as working class (63% very/somewhat worried) are more fearful than not about the prospects of an impending recession.”

Although 54 percent of voters have a positive view of their members of congress, “Overall, 24% of voters say their member of Congress is not supportive enough of Trump compared to 18% who say they are too supportive.” But Trump’s popularity numbers are highly problematic for Republicans:

Only four-in-ten(40%) voters currently have a favorable opinion of the Presiden tcompared to 55% who view him unfavorably. The intensity of the animosity towards Trump is also quite stunning, as 48% of voters have a “strongly” unfavorable opinion of the President compared to only 27% who have a“strongly” favorable opinion of Trump. The President’s personal profile is also heavily underwater amongindependents, with 57% viewing him unfavorably, including 43% who feel that way “strongly.”

The President’s job approval ratings largely mirror those of his personal image, with 43% of voters currently approving the job he is doing as President, compared to 52% who disapprove. And while the President continuesto enjoy near-universal levels of approval among his Republican base (92% approve), his support among independents is solidly net-negative (32% approve, 51% disapprove), with independent women (30% approve, 57% disapprove) in particular holding very negative views about his tenure to date. Trump’s low ratings among these voters represents a significant obstacle for his administration moving forward as he tries to broaden his base of support. To no one’s surprise, Democrats display almost universal displeasure with the President (93% disapprov e), including a staggering 85% who say they disapprove “strongly.”

As has been the trend since he was elected, African Americans (83% disapprove, incl. 69% “strongly”disapprove) and Latinx voters (69% disapprove, incl. 59% “strongly” disapprove) continue to be amongthe President’s strongest detractors. There is also a very large gender gap with men —of whom 50% approve and 46% disapprove—and women—of whom 37% approve and 60% disapprove. And while thePresident’s rating among seniors is somewhat mixed (45% approve, 50% disapprove) his ratings amongmillennials (34% approve, 58% disapprove) is an ominous sign for the Republican Party’s future, and highlights the complexity of the GOP’s challenge, which continues to be not just racial , ethnic, and along gender lines, but generational too.

With respect to leading issues, the study notes that “a majority of voters disapprove of Trump’s handling of health care(33% approve, 58% disapprove), immigration (41% approve, 56% disapprove), and foreign affairs (41% approve, 54% disapprove).” There appears to be a split verdict on his “handling of taxes,” with 45 percent approving and 47 percent disapproving.

The study finds that Trump’s “trust-deficit” on health care provides “one of the Democrats’ strongest advantages going forward—though Democrats will need to offer a strong alternative in order to leverage this advantage in the context of a presidential election, which is much more a choice between two competing visions than a referendum on a president’s first term.” The study also finds a 9-point edge for Democrats on immigration, which the authors call “quite remarkable,” considering Trump’s incessant flogging of the issue.

However, Trump has a significant advantage at present on one of the most most important issues — the economy. As the Lake study observes, “Since the last Battleground Poll, the President has increased his economic job performance numbers by 6-points (51% approve in previous battleground poll), with a 57% majority of voters now saying they approve of his economic stewardship compared to 38% who disapprove. Equally as important, a similar majority (57%) also says it approves of his work on job creation, a 5-point increase from the previous poll (52% approve in the previous Battleground Poll).” Also, 72 percent of white blue-collar workers expressed approval of his job on the economy, a big red flag for Dems in key swing states. Also,

As a result of his strong numbers, voters also currently trust the President more than Democrats on moving the economy forward (52% trust Trump vs. 40% trust Democrats) and future job creation (50% trust Trump vs. 39% trust Democrats). In a troubling sign for Democrats, Trump is trusted more on these two vital issues by a number of important swing constituencies, including independents (+35oneconomy, +37 on jobs), white women (+8 on economy, +8 on jobs), and self -described moderate voters (+19 on economy, +20 on jobs). Voters place more modest levels of trust in Trump over Democrats on the issue of National Security(47%to43%), but it is his advantage on the economy and jobs that poses the greatest challenge for Democrats, particularly as Democrats have never won the White House when trailing on this central front.

As for the image of the Democratic Party, “Currently, more voters have a negative view…(43% favorable, 46% unfavorable), including pluralities of independents (21% favorable, 44% unfavorable) and self-described moderate voters (29% favorable, 41% unfavorable).” In terms of the generic congressional ballot,

Currently, the Democrats hold a five-point advantage in a 2020 generic congressional ballot (Dem 42%, GOP 37%), which is down slightly from the eight-point lead they held before the 2018 midterms. The gender gap seen in previous Battleground Polls also remains alive and well, with women supporting the Democrats by an 18-point margin (Dem 48%, GOP 30%), and men the Republicans by a 9-point margin (Dem 35%, GOP 44%). The marital gap is perhaps even more stunning: marriedmen are voting Republican by a 16-point margin (Dem 34%, GOP 50%), while married women are split (Dem 39%, GOP 38%). Single women are voting Democratic by an enormous 54-point margin (Dem 65%, GOP 11%), and single men by 10 points (Dem 43%, GOP 33%). Independents, meanwhile, appear completely up for grabs, with a whopping 68% of these voters fully undecided. And while self-described moderate voters currentlyprefer Democrats by a 13-point margin (Dem 30%, GOP 17%), a 52% majority of these voters are also uncommitted.

Democrats continue to lead among their traditional base targets such as millennials (Dem 45%, GOP 32%), African Americans (Dem 67%, GOP 7%) and Latinx voters (Dem 58% to GOP 27%). Continuing the trend from recent Battleground Polls, Democrats also remain the preferred choice of voters with a college education (Dem 46%, GOP 30%), including a staggering 23-point lead among college-educated women (Dem 50%, GOP 27%). Democrats also hold a 9-point advantage among college-educated whites (Dem 44%, GOP 35%), the same margin we saw in the previous Battleground Poll…

Regarding the white working-class, “Republicans continue to hold a double-digit advantage among non-college educated whites (Dem 26%, GOP 54%), with this group showing no signs of a shift since the last Battleground Poll (Dem 32%, GOP 54% in March 2018).”

Going forward, Lake, Gotoff and Teter recommend that Democrats can improve their position on the economy and jobs by “exposing how Republicans’ economic policies have focused more on appeasing wealthy special interests at the expense of most American people—a point bolstered by the findings that voters trust Democrats more than Republicans when it comes to dealing with special interests (42% trust Dems vs. 28% trust GOP)…it is imperative that Democrats develop a strong economic platform that employs a clear anti-special interest frame, contrasts with Republicans, and appeals to and energizes voters to show up in record numbers next November.” They conclude:

Given the high levels of dissatisfaction with the direction of the country and the country’s political leaders, the American electorate remains fundamentally change-oriented. And while the President’s unpopularity certainly continues to present opportunities for the Democratic Party moving forward, attacking Trump will not be enough, particularly with a significant number of voters seemingly able to reconcile their misgivings about Trump with positive ratings of his handling of the economy. As 2020 continues to come closer into focus, Democrats will be best served by advancing an audacious, forward-thinking agenda that takes on the powerful special interests and delivers real change for the American people, exploiting the dimensions where the Party already enjoys advantages (though has failed to capitalize with proposals that tinker around the edge of real reform) and advancing on terrain where they continue to trail (i.e. the economy).

Although the economy and jobs remains a potentialy-pivotal wild card leading up to the 2020 elections, Democrats would be well-served to focus on the Lake Research recommendations, which can strengthen the Party’s “brand” in any case.

One of the most tiresomely mendacious memes out there arose this week in congressional testimony, so I tried to blow it up one more time at New York.

There is a revisionist historical theory you hear now and then among conservatives — particularly African-American conservatives who are understandably a mite defensive about their position as a minority of a minority — holding that everything we think we know about the partisan politics of the post–civil-rights era is untrue. And it was enunciated again by the recently famous African-American pro-Trump activist Candace Owens, who was brought in by House Republicans to mock and disrupt a hearing Democrats convened on white nationalism, as the Washington Post reports:

“Owens, who tried to diminish the rise of white nationalism as an invention by Democrats to ‘scare black people,’ said there had never been a Republican effort to use racism to the party’s political advantage.

“‘Black conservatives are criticized for having ‘the audacity to think for themselves and become educated about our history and the myth of things like the Southern switch, the Southern strategy, which never happened,’ she told lawmakers.

I do not know if Owens subscribes to the fully developed right-wing theorythat white racist Lyndon Johnson concocted the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts and the Great Society program as part of a white racist conspiracy to ensnare African-Americans in the “plantation” of dependency on government. But I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s hard otherwise to deny the basic facts that southern white racists steadily moved, from the early 1960s to the 1980s, from their old stronghold in the Democratic Party to their new home in the GOP — the “southern switch” — or that Republican pols in and beyond the South pursued this development as a “strategy.”

And of course Republican pols, racist or not, promoted this development as a strategic masterstroke. In a 1970 interview with the New York Times, Kevin Phillips, the prophet of The Emerging Republican Majority and wonder-boy Nixon strategist, put it this way:

“From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 per cent of the Negro vote and they don’t need any more than that … but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are.”

Nixon himself was famously in thrall to old-school southern segregationists like Strom Thurmond, who was given a veto over the 1968 vice-presidential nomination and over the administration’s Supreme Court appointments. His landslide reelection in 1972 was in no small part attributable to the capture of the entire 1968 George Wallace vote. Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter in 1980 in part by convincing conservative white southerners finally to abandon Democrats once and for all. And the southern strategy was avidly pursued by later GOP strategists from Lee Atwater to Karl Rove.

Now a lot of people don’t know much about political history, and followers of a president who doesn’t read and routinely disregards facts probably can’t be expected to document their own myths very carefully. But they need to be challenged regularly.

Democrats have a bumper crop of presidential candidates for 2020 already. But many progressives still lament that Sen Sherrod Brown decided not to run for  President in 2020. At salon.com, Matthew Rosza has a short interview with Sen. Brown, an Ohio progressive who actually wins state-wide elections with strong support from white working-class voters. Brown shares some of his insights regarding how Democrats can win in 2020 in this excerpt:

First of all, I don’t see the divide as great as the media wants to make it out to be. I’ll start with that. I think the big D issue is the Republicans moving further and further to the right and following Donald Trump off a cliff with his divisive, racist rhetoric. I mean, that’s the issue or the story of the two parties. But I’ll still answer the question directly.

I think there’s a false choice between “you speak to your progressive base” or “you talk to working-class voters of all races, some of whom don’t think of themselves as progressive.” I think it’s a false choice. I think you talk to both.

I’ll use an example: If I go to Zanesville, Ohio, and I don’t win, it’s an industrial city. There are ten Zanesvilles in Ohio. There’s Mansfield, Zanesville, Springfield, Chillicothe, Portsmouth, Lima, Ravenna, cities that are working class cities, racially pretty diverse, some more than others. Globalization has been unkind to all of them, I’ll just put it that way. But I do okay in those communities, even though they may not like my position on guns, they may not like my position on choice, and they may not like my ‘F’ from the NRA, my lifetime ‘F,’ they may not like it that I’ve always been pro-choice, they may not like it that I’ve supported marriage equality for 20 years. But enough of them vote for me because I talk about their kids going to Eastern Gateway or Stark State or Rhodes State. I talk to them about the cost of prescription drugs and how I fought the drug companies. I talk to them about getting access to healthcare and pre-existing … and protecting them if they have a pre-existing condition.

…Some won’t vote for me. Some will never vote for me because of my ‘F’ in the NRA. I can live with that. Some of them still won’t want me to be their senator. I’ll still work hard to help them with their Social Security check or with a problem they have with pollution coming from a local river or something. But you talk to them as a progressive on economic issues. You don’t compromise on civil rights, you don’t compromise on women’s rights. But you can win in those communities…The people I talk about in Lima or Zanesville or Mansfield, many, many of them understand that I fight for them against a utility company or against a drug company or when their job has been outsourced because of bad trade policy.

…I mean, elections are about contrasts and he’s [Trump] really had nothing improve. All that he’s done, all that he’s said in trade has been mostly pretty good. All that he’s done in trade, in trying to address trade issues has been muddled and bungled, in how he’s done it.

For more information about Senator Brown’s policies, click here.

The following article by Christopher R. Martin, author of the forthcoming No Longer Newsworthy: How the Mainstream Media Abandoned the Working Class (Cornell University Press) and professor of Digital Journalism at the University of Northern Iowa, is cross-posted from Working-Class Perspectives.

It should be easy to run against Trump’s rural America record. Aside from his made-for-Fox News rallies, he has little to show for in rural policy except for self-inflicted wounds that risk returning rural America back to the farm crisis of the 1980s.

Trump’s misguided tariff wars and scuttling of NAFTA have exacerbated crop prices that were already slumping, especially corn, soybeans, and wheat. This year, farm loan delinquencies have hit a nine-year high. Since land is the basis for farm loans, another disturbing trend is the fifth straight year of decline in Midwestern farmland values, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, which represents a region of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, and Wisconsin, all states (except for Illinois) that Trump won in 2016. According to the Chicago Fed, this is “the longest downturn since the 1980s” in farmland valuations. And, although unemployment is low in the Midwest, it masks the long-term disinvestment and depopulation of rural locations in the region.

And Democrats should have learned from 2016 that ignoring rural Midwestern states, or assuming their support, is a proven bad approach. As Pulitzer Prize-winning, editorial writer Art Cullen of Iowa’s Storm Lake Times recently noted, “The main problem with Democrats is not showing up in flyover country, and they paid for it with the election of Donald Trump.”

A huge group of Democrats are already showing up in Iowa to compete for the nation’s first caucus next February. On March 29, five of those Democratic presidential hopefuls appeared in Storm Lake for the Heartland Presidential Forum to address their vision for rural America. Julián Castro of Texas, John Delaney of Maryland, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and Tim Ryan of Ohio took questions from Cullen, two reporters from HuffPost, and audience members at the more than two-hour event. Of course, showing up is just part of being a candidate. The bigger test is what ideas they have for rural America, including Iowa, which turned to Trump in 2016.

All of the politicians were adept enough to endorse rapid federal aid to the region’s communities ravaged by flooding rivers this spring. They all also suggested some long-term policies to confront the economic malaise of rural areas. Both Warren and Klobuchar proposed confronting big agribusiness. “A generation ago, 37 cents out of every food dollar went into a farmer’s pocket,” Warren said. “Today, it’s 15 cents. And one of the principal reasons for that has been concentration in agribusiness…I want to see the enforcement of our antitrust laws.” Klobuchar hit a similar note about the handful of multinational corporations that control agribusiness. “I think we are now entering what is essentially a new gilded age, and we need to take on the power of these monopolies,” she said.

Delaney, who was the first to announce his run (in July 2017!) and whose commercials have been staples of Iowa television, introduced his “Heartland New Deal,” with proposals for health care, infrastructure (including the popular idea of broadband for rural areas), agriculture policy reform, and especially investments. “I believe in the power of investment,” said Delaney, who made his fortune running investment companies and offered the least imaginative vision.

Castro, like all of the speakers, advocated for local schools and community health care, but most strongly emphasized his support of immigration, which brings badly needed workers to agriculture and slumping rural towns. “We can have a secure border and also be compassionate and recognize the value of our immigrant community.” Castro’s comment was followed by substantial applause from an audience right in the middle of Republican U.S. Rep. Steve King’s district, demonstrating that rural voters aren’t monolithic in support of anti-immigrant politicians like King and Trump.

Ryan, who hails from Youngstown, Ohio, tried to make the urban-rural connection. “How do we get these manufacturing centers and some of these urban centers who have been hollowed out in the last 30 or 40 years, tied together politically with rural American. Same issues – hospitals closing down, children leaving – kids leaving our communities, opiate epidemic, failure to be able to fund our local public services, our local schools,” he said.

Ryan has a point. Some of the answers to the question, “What does it take to enable rural America to survive?” also apply to those hollowed-out industrial centers. Yet all of the candidates at the conference ignored three important issues where federal policy can make a significant difference in both places.

First, an often-overlooked component to small-town health is a post office. In a digital economy, package delivery is essential. Having a local post office literally puts a town on the map. One post office advocacy group counted nearly 1,600 post offices closed from 2008 to 2017, estimating that three-quarters of those padlocked locations are rural. But blighted urban neighborhoods have lost post offices, too.

Aside from deliveries, post offices can offer another function to help working-class towns and urban neighborhoods flourish. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York (who missed an opportunity in her absence from the Heartland Forum) has introduced legislation to require U.S. Postal Service offices to offer basic financial services to customers, an idea supported by both Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. This would expand financial services into rural towns that may have none, providing services like free checking accounts and debit cards to those who cannot afford the fees of commercial banks. Most important for working people is the proposal that postal banks could make small loans of up to $500 at low interest rates, undercutting the exploitative payday lender business and helping the 11 percent of adults who have had to resort to payday loans. This system works in 87 other countries, including Great Britain, France, Switzerland, Canada, Australia, Japan, and Singapore. The whole idea may sound un-American to some, but it’s worth remembering that the U.S. had its own post office banking system 1911 to 1966.

Second, the federal government can also help sustain small-town schools, another essential institution for rural towns in Iowa and urban neighborhoods like those in Chicago. In Iowa, school consolidation has meant downsizing from 458 school districts in 1965 to 374 in 2000 to 330 last year and closing many school buildings. The Cedar Rapids Gazette reported that “Losing a school often spells the end for its town, too. The idea of losing an entire community — a hometown, a childhood, an identity for many — has brewed fear and anger.” A parent from Chicago’s South Side noted a similar effect when her schools closed. “The community was just one family and when the school closed and the building shut down, it shut down our family,” she told WBEZ in Chicago.

Finally, while nearly all of the candidates observed that economy has increasingly left workers behind, none talked about empowering workers with a significant bump in the minimum wage and restoring collective bargaining rights (both important issues in Iowa). Instead, they offered disappointing economic visions like Tim Ryan’s: “embrace” artificial intelligence and additive manufacturing, infuse it into existing industry, “and cut the American worker in on the deal.”

It’s good that Democratic candidates are showing up early in flyover America. But judging from their presentations in Storm Lake, they have a lot of work to do in honing their message for the rural (and urban) working class. Midwestern voters in a faltering economy are going to want more than vague assurances that government and business leaders will “cut the American worker in on the deal.”

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

Why Aren’t Hispanics an 80-20 or 90-10 Democratic Group?

That’s the question Tom Edsall asks in his latest New York Times column. Well, the answer to that is pretty simple: they aren’t black and black voters are so overwhelmingly loyal to the Democrats for very specific and well-known historical reasons.

So, not a big mystery there. That said, Edsall seems to be implying that Democrats are significantly underperforming among this group relative to what one would reasonably expect from how awful Trump is, etc.

Grace Sparks explains why “The majority of Americans tend to agree with Democrats on top issues, polling shows” at CNN Politics: “In reality, the polling shows the majority of the public usually backs policy positions preferred by the Democratic Party…A new Gallup poll released Thursday showed that two-thirds of Americans said protecting the environment should be a higher priority than economic growth and only three-in-10 who said economic growth should be given priority, even if the environment suffers to some extent. This is the highest prioritizing of the environment since spring 2000…Eight-in-10 Democrats and 71% of independents prioritize environmental protection, versus 35% of Republicans who said the same…Another poll out this week by Pew Research Center found that Americans’ biggest frustration regarding the country’s tax system isn’t the amount they pay, but that corporations and the wealthy don’t pay their fair share…Overall, 62% said that the feeling that some corporations don’t pay their fair share bothers them a lot and 60% said the same of wealthy people. Those are both made up of huge majorities of Democrats — 79% of Democrats who said those bother them a lot (on both). Independents were in a majority, as well, 62% who were bothered by corporations not paying their fair share, and 60% wealthy people, while 42% and 37% of Republicans said the same, respectively.”

Sparks continues: “Those are two examples but there are many other issues that fit under this umbrella, including immigration, gun control and abortion…- Guns, Quinnipiac University poll (March 1-4, 2019): 60% of registered voters support stricter gun laws in the US…87% of Democrats support stricter gun control laws…The border wall with Mexico, CNN poll conducted by SSRS (January 10-11): 56% oppose building a wall along the entire border with Mexico…89% of Democrats oppose building a wall along the whole of the southern border…A national “Medicare-for-all” plan, Kaiser Family Foundation (March 13-18): 56% have a favorable view…78% of Democrats have a favorable view of a potential national Medicare-for-all program…Abortion, Fox News poll (February 10-12): 57% of Americans said the Supreme Court should let Roe v Wade stand, 21% overturn…73% of Democrats don’t want Roe v. Wade overturned…Same-sex marriage, Gallup (May 1-10, 2018): 67% of Americans thought marriages between same-sex couples should be recognized by the law as valid…83% of Democrats want marriages between same-sex couples to be recognized by law.”

On immigration-related issues, Sparks notes that “There are some areas where the positions held by Democrats in Congress are also matters of bipartisan agreement among all voters….DACA, CNN poll conducted by SSRS (February 20-23, 2018): 83% of Americans said they want to continue the policy and allow immigrants who meet the qualifications to remain in the US.” A “Quinnipiac University poll (January 25-28, 2019): 75% of registered voters thought immigration is overall good for the country…There are issues where Republicans are a majority, but they are few and far between (for example, crime and justice, especially the death penalty). Importantly, the issues where the Republican position is the more popular opinion aren’t the ones that Republicans focus vote on when voting.”

John Harwood reports at cnbc.com that “As the annual IRS filing deadline of April 15 approaches, just 17% believe their own taxes will go down, the NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll shows. By contrast, 28% believe they’ll pay more, another 27% expect to pay about the same and 28% don’t know enough to say…In the NBC/WSJ poll, that sense of missing out is nonpartisan. Just 33% of Republicans believe they’re getting a tax cut, while an even punier 10% of independents and 7% of Democrats do…Among core Trump supporters, 36% believe they’re getting a tax cut. But another 36% say their taxes are staying the same, while 6% say they’re paying more to the IRS.”

The polls are looking pretty good for Democrats at this stage, but Nathaniel Rakich sounds a cautionary note at FiveThirtyEight: “By our count, nine pollsters have polled either the same state or the entire nation more than once since the 2018 midterm elections, which is when we started collecting 2020 primary polls. But none of these pollsters have kept the same list of candidates for every poll — although some have been more consistent than others. This means great care must be taken in declaring a candidate is surging — or struggling — even when comparing his numbers in polls from the same pollster.^1…The good news is that, in most polls, the candidates who are rotated in or out are polling poorly, so it doesn’t make a huge difference whether they’re included or excluded. Plus, there can be good reasons for a pollster to update the roster of candidates it asks about; it’s important that a poll reflect the most up-to-date state of the race (e.g., Bloomberg looks like less of a factor now than he did in December, and Buttigieg looks like more of one)…This is especially true since getting at least 1 percent support in three national polls is one of two ways a candidate can qualify for the first two Democratic primary debates (the other is through fundraising).”

Oliver Willis notes at shareblue.com that “Trump approval tanks in 5 swing states he won in 2016,” and he writes: “In Morning Consult’s most recent survey, Trump is down in the following swing states: Florida (-24 points), Ohio (-20), Michigan (-19), Wisconsin (-18), and Pennsylvania (-17)…In 2016, Trump won all of those states, which together represent 93 electoral votes. Trump’s electoral vote margin of victory was 74 points that year…”

At New York Magazine, Ed Kilgore shares a positive sign of growing Democratic solidarity around working-class issues: “The good news for labor folk is that the Democratic Party as a whole seems more in sync with union interests and policy positions than at any time in recent memory. Candidates with a history of coziness toward Wall Street, Silicon Valley, or big donors are for the most part repenting, and on issues ranging from the minimum wage to trade to labor law are expressing an unusual degree of solidarity…Any “heartland strategy” for Democrats in 2020 will most definitely include a major effort to convince union members and their families that Trump has broken his promises to them. Perhaps this time labor won’t be licking wounds from internal divisions over the primaries.”

The New Republic’s Alex Shepard has some thoughts on whether Democratic candidates should go on Fox News: “The debate over whether Democrats should engage with Fox is a microcosm of the broader debate within the Democratic Party about engaging with Trump voters. Just as many Democrats believe that appearing anywhere on Fox legitimizes the network’s most offensive bloviators, many believe that courting Trump voters will require legitimizing the president’s views. Both fears are understandable, but quite overblown. If Democrats want to win back white voters—and that’s a big “if”—they need to meet those voters where they are…The argument against Democrats appearing on Fox News is that it would only serve to legitimize a network whose existential purpose is to excite Republican voters…The argument for Democrats appearing on Fox News is that winning back the older white rural voters is important if the party wants to win back the White House in 2020, something that has obsessed some in the party since the midwestern “blue wall” crumbled in 2016—and how can you do that without engaging with those voters?”

On the other hand, Shepard writes, “Fox is in essence a retirement community,” New York magazine’s Frank Rich wrote in an astute piece about Fox published back in 2014. “The million or so viewers who remain fiercely loyal to the network are not, for the most part, and as some liberals still imagine, naïve swing voters who stumble onto Fox News under the delusion it’s a bona fide news channel and then are brainwashed by Ailes’s talking points into becoming climate-change deniers…Letting Fox News host a Democratic debate doesn’t make sense for the DNC, given the network’s antipathy toward the party. But there’s no reason for candidates to cower, either.”

An old debate among Democrats has been revived, and I wrote about it at New York:

Political writers have understandably tried to make sense of the large 2020 Democratic field of presidential candidates by sorting them out ideologically (“left” or “center”) or by indicators of policy audacity (“bold” progressives versus “cautious” or “incremantalist” moderates). And part of the reason for the general belief that the party is “moving to the left” is the clustering of presidential candidates around policy positions (e.g., single-payer health care or a Green New Deal) that were considered “radical” not that long ago.

But as Ezra Klein observes after interviewing Pete Buttigieg, the most important differences may have less to do with what the candidates want to do and more with how they plan to do it — their theory of change:

“The central lesson of Obama’s presidency, Buttigieg argues, is that ‘any decisions that are based on an assumption of good faith by Republicans in the Senate will be defeated.’ The hope that you can pass laws through bipartisan compromise is dead. And that means governance is consistently, reliably failing to solve people’s problems, which is in turn radicalizing them against government itself.”

Which is, of course, precisely the way obstructionist Republicans led by Mitch McConnell planned it.

“Buttigieg’s response — one that you also hear from 2020 hopefuls Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Gov. Jay Inslee — is to restructure government so popular majorities translate more cleanly into governing majorities. He’s discussed eliminating the Electoral College, scrapping the filibuster, and remaking the Supreme Court so each party nominates the same number of justices and vacancies become less ‘apocalyptic.'”

There is not, however, any easy equivalence between the audacity of policy proposals and the willingness of candidates to consider the “process” changes that could make achieving these policies possible, as shown by Bernie Sanders, the “radical” who wants to preserve the filibuster and the current system for selecting Supreme Court justices. And indeed, you could imagine that a newly elected president who’s on fire to enact Medicare for All might not be initially inclined to spend political capital on boring process issues. As Klein says: “It’s easier to run for reelection bragging about a tax cut than about weakening the Electoral College.”

Klein points to a very useful 2007 essay by Mark Schmitt urging Democrats with very similar policy goals to focus on ways and means of achieving them:

“[Schmitt] argued that the contest between Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards was ‘not a primary about ideological differences, or electability, but rather one about a difference in candidates’ implicit assumptions about the current circumstance and how the levers of power can be used to get the country back on track.’ It was, he said, the ‘theory of change primary.'”

You can look back and say (as I just did) that Obama’s “theory of change” turned out to be significantly wrong. But in the circumstances of 2009, it’s unlikely that either Hillary Clinton’s claim of hard work being the answer, or John Edwards’s appeal to pure confrontation, would have done much better. So now, given the enduring reality of Republican obstruction, and their reliance on institutional barriers to democracy and change, having a clear-eyed understanding of the prerequisites to policy achievements is an absolute must for the 46th president. And this should not be a topic confined to elites; Schmitt’s proposed “theory of change primary” can and should be held in the early televised debates and on the campaign trail.

To put it another way, Donald Trump should be the last U.S. president to take office with no clue about how to implement his campaign promises.