You would think that, by now, Republicans would have come up with some sort of “program” that would provide them at least a fig leaf of cover for their real-world indifference to the health care crisis millions of working people face. Yet, Trump and his fellow Republicans in congress have never offered anything resembling a coherent plan to improve health security for Americans. Even The Editorial Board of the Wall St. Journal agrees that Trump has likely set up a disaster for his party in arguing that “the Administration decided this week to elevate a legal fight over health care that it is almost sure to lose.” When pressed, Republicans have to admit that their only ‘alternative’ boils down to a return to the status quo ante the Affordable Care Act. I can’t remember a time when one of the major political parties had so little of substance to say about the leading issue of the day, a stunning admission of  intellectual bankruptsy and political ineptitude.

“Candidate Donald Trump wanted to make sure you have health insurance. President Donald Trump is committed to taking it away,” Sarah Kliff writes at vox.com. “During his presidential campaign, Trump told 60 Minutes, “I am going to take care of everybody.” On the campaign trail in 2018, he sounded similar. “We will always protect Americans with preexisting conditions,” he said at an event in Philadelphia just before the midterm elections…But in office, Trump has attempted to implement an agenda that does the opposite. He’s backed legislation, regulations, and lawsuits that would make it harder for sick people to get health insurance, allow insurance companies to discriminate against patients with preexisting conditions, and kick millions of Americans off the Medicaid program…This week, his Justice Department filed a legal brief arguing that a judge should find Obamacare unconstitutional — a decision that would turn the insurance markets back into the Wild West and eliminate Medicaid coverage for millions of Americans. By at least one estimate, a full repeal could cost 20 million Americans their health care coverage.”

Dylan Scott elaborates, also at Vox: “President Trump just guaranteed health care will remain a dominant issue through the 2020 presidential campaign, opening up a massive vulnerability in his reelection bid…In a legal brief filed this week, the Trump Justice Department argued to a federal court that the entire Affordable Care Act should be found unconstitutional. That would mean an end to the private markets where 15 million Americans buy their coverage, an end to the expansion of Medicaid that covers 15 millions more, and an end to protections for people with preexisting conditions. According to the Urban Institute, if the entire law were eliminated, as the Trump administration is now advocating for, nearly 20 million fewer Americans would have health insurance…The Justice Department’s move is stunning, considering the price House Republicans paid in the 2018 midterms for attempting to repeal the law in Congress. Health care was the top issue for voters, beating out the economy, immigration, and guns. The voters who named health care as their top issue overwhelmingly supported Democratic candidates — helping flip control of the House from Republicans to Democrats…Polling shows Americans strongly disapprove of how Trump has handled health care as president. And now his record on health care heading into his reelection campaign is even more unambiguous: He and his administration have fought to strip health coverage from millions of Americans and to erode protections for people with preexisting conditions — and their new move in the courts shows they are keeping it up.”

At Fortune, Erik Sherman reports that “U.S. Voters Prefer Expanding Medicare Over New Single-Payer Health Care, Says New Poll.” According to the latest national poll from Quinnipiac University, Sherman writes, “People were in favor 55% to 32% of improving the current health care system instead of replacing it with something new. But when asked whether to remove the current system and replace it with single-payer through an expansion of Medicare to cover all citizens, 43% called it a “good idea” while 45% said it was a “bad idea.” By political party, 69% of Democrats and 42% of independents supported it while only 14% of Republicans did…When asked instead whether to keep the current system and then allow any adult who wanted to buy into Medicare, 51% were in favor overall, with 30% opposed. Supporting the concept were 61% of Democrats, 49% of independents, and 43% of Republicans.”

MSNBC’s Katy Tur put it well in her interview of a Trump Administration spokesman: “We are two years into his presidency. We still have not seen a plan from the White House,” she said on “MTP Daily,” repeatedly pressing Marc Short, chief of staff to Vice President Pence and former White House legislative director. “When are we going to see this plan?..”If everything that you say is true and if it goes to the Supreme Court and is not upheld again by Chief Justice [John] Roberts … what is the plan you guys have to replace it?” Tur asked Short…”This law has been in place since 2010,” Tur said. “Republicans have campaigned consistently on repealing and replacing it. They tried again to do it 70 times. The president … talked about repealing and replacing ObamaCare. He’d come up with something beautiful and fantastic and everybody would be covered.”…”We will be coming forward with a plan in the next coming months,” Short said, noting that the Department of Health and Human Services would be working on one.” Don’t hold your breath.

Any Democratic candidates looking for fresh health care statistics that reveal the moral bankruptsy of the private health insurance industry could use this excerpt from Roqayah Chamseddine’s article, “A Healthcare Industry Built on Premature Death: On the cruelty of private healthcare corporations” at In These Times: “The industry is an architecture of misery, extracting profits from suffering. According to a report published in 2017 by The Doctor-Patient Rights Project, insurance companies “denied treatment coverage to one-in-four (24 percent) patients with a chronic or persistent illness or condition; 41 percent of the patients denied coverage were denied once, while 59 percent were denied multiple times.” Thirty-four percent of patients who had been denied coverage were forced to put off treatment, despite having a chronic illness. An astounding 70 percent of treatments for a chronic illness denied by insurers were for conditions referred to as “serious.” The grim reaper disguises himself in many forms, in this case that of an insurance agent.”

For some revealing numbers about the cost-effectiveness of Democratic health care, check out Ezekiel J. Emanuel’s “Name the much-criticized federal program that has saved the U.S. $2.3 trillion. Hint: it starts with Affordable” at statnews.com, which notes:  “One month after the ACA had passed, the Office of the Actuary of the Department of Health and Human Services projected its financial impact in a report entitled “Estimated Financial Effects of the ‘Patient Protections and Affordable Care Act’, as Amended.” The government’s official record-keeper estimated that health care costs under the ACA would reach $4.14 trillion per year in 2017 and constitute 20.2 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP)…Fast forward to December 2018, when that same office released the official tabulation of health care spending in 2017. The bottom line: cumulatively from 2010 to 2017 the ACA reduced health care spending a total of $2.3 trillion…In 2017 alone, health expenditures were $650 billion lower than projected, and kept health care spending under 18 percent of GDP — basically a tad over where it was in 2010 when the ACA was passed.

“It did all of this while expanding health coverage to more than 20 million previously uninsured Americans,” Emanuel continues, “Compared to the 2010 projections, the government’s Medicare bill in 2017 was 10 percent ($70 billion) less, and spending for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program was a whopping $250 billion below expectations (partially — but only partially — due to the failure of some states to expand the program). The actuary had predicted in 2010 that employer-sponsored insurance would cost $1.21 trillion in 2017, but it came in at $1.04 trillion, a difference of $170 billion for that year…Put another way, health care spending in 2017 was $2,000 less per person than it was projected to be. And for the 176 million Americans who have private employer-sponsored insurance, their lower premiums averaged just under $1,000 per person…Barack Obama pledged on the campaign trail and as president that he would sign a health care bill that lowered family health insurance premiums by $2,500. Conservative politicians and pundits roundly mocked him. Yet the ACA has more than delivered on that promise, saving about $4,000 per family. And these lower health care premiums probably contribute to the recent rise in workers’ wages.” It’s a good article for De,ms to cite. Emanuel also suggests some specific improvements to make the ACA even more cost-effective.”

Some closing notes on health insurance industry economics from Bob Herman’s “The latest on health care executive pay” at Axios: “The CEOs of 23 prominent health care companies earned more than $632 million in 2018, based on the actual value of cashed-out stock, according Axios’ most recent tally of federal securities documents…The highest-paid pharmaceutical executive so far for 2018 was Pfizer’s outgoing CEO, Ian Read, who made $47 million…The two CEOs with the highest overall pay were still HCA Healthcare’s R. Milton Johnson($109 million) and Intuitive Surgical’s Gary Guthart ($99 million)…Flying under the radar as one of the highest-paid health care executives was Ari Bousbib, who heads the pharmaceutical data and consulting company IQVIA. He made $77 million in 2018 and has made $137 million since 2016, when Quintiles and IMS Health merged to form IQVIA…When Express Scripts CEO Tim Wentworth joined Cigna last year, he took home $9 million in retention pay and agreed to “perpetual” agreements to never divulge anything about the company.”

The intersection of religion and politics is one of my favorite subjects, and I have a good opportunity to write about it this week at New York:

it’s important now and then to challenge the conservative assertion — often shared in ignorance by secular media — that religiosity, and particularly Christian religiosity, dictates reactionary positions on culture and politics. So I found it interesting and provocative that 2020 presidential candidate Cory Booker goes out of his way to talk about his own religious faith:

“[Booker] bids fair to become the most overtly Christian Democratic presidential candidate since Jesse Jackson and perhaps even Jimmy Carter, at a time when his party is trending irreligious and the opposition claims a monopoly on all things biblical. What makes Booker different from many left-of-center figures who are “personally” religious is that he purports to be progressive because of his faith, not despite it or incidentally alongside it (e.g., the way John F. Kennedy referred to his own faith as an ‘accident of birth’). If this becomes central to his identity as a presidential wannabe, it will be provocative to both the Christian right and to secular Democrats. And that could be both a benefit and a handicap for Booker ’20.”

As E.J. Dionne observes, there is another 2020 Democratic presidential candidate who’s conspicuously talking about his faith, the fast-rising dark horse Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana.

“During an appearance on MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’ last week, the 37-year-old from South Bend, Ind., made a modest plea: ‘I do think it’s important for candidates to at least have the option to talk about our faith,’ he said. He specifically targeted the idea that ‘the only way a religious person could enter politics is through the prism of the religious right.’

“An Episcopalian and a married gay man, Buttigieg pointed to the core Christian concept that ‘the first shall be last; the last shall be first.’

“He added: ‘What could be more different than what we’re being shown in Washington right now — often with some people who view themselves as religious on the right, cheering it on? . . . Here we have this totally warped idea of what Christianity should be like when it comes into the public sphere, and it’s mostly about exclusion. Which is the last thing that I imbibe when I take in scripture in church.'”

Dionne notes that Booker and Elizabeth Warren share Buttigieg’s willingness to talk about Christian faith. But what makes Mayor Pete especially interesting is that he challenges the idea that Christianity is inherently homophobic in a direct and personal manner. To him, LGBTQ folk aren’t third parties who are the subject of some argument between Christians and progressives: He’s Christian, progressive, and gay. So conservative Christians who like to imply that their more accepting co-religionists aren’t “real” or “orthodox” because they don’t exclude gay people need to be willing to tell Buttigieg he’s taking the Lord’s name in vain. And that may be — and certainly should be — uncomfortable for them.

The Episcopal Church of America accepts gay parishioners, priests, and bishops in churches that recite the Nicene Creed every Sunday and have as authentic a claim to “orthodoxy” as any other church and more than many. So, too, do such solid elements of the American and global religious landscape as the United Church of Christ (a.k.a. Congregationalists), the Presbyterian Church (USA) (the largest gathering in that faith tradition), the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ditto), the Unitarian-Universalist Association, and many congregations and whole regions of the United Methodists and my own Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) that embrace gay people as equals in every way. There are many smaller denominations and nondenominational gatherings that do the same. And that’s aside from the millions of individual Catholics, Evangelicals, and Pentecostals who reject, quietly or openly, the homophobia of their own denominations.

Any Democratic presidential nominee who can authentically talk about his or her faith would be well advised to do so if only to confound Christian-right leaders and followers who have cast their own lots with the heathenish warlord in the White House. But Pete Buttigieg offers a particularly interesting contrast with the 45th president. Would anyone be confident in accusing this married, churchgoing, Afghanistan veteran of being ethically inferior to Donald Trump? Not without risking hellfire.

The following article by John Russo, visiting researcher at the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University, co-author of Steeltown U.S.A.: Work and Memory in Youngstown, and co-editor with Sherry Linkon of the blog Working-Class Perspectives, is cross-posted from New Geography:

While Ohio has been trending Republican for more than two decades, electing mostly Republican governors and state legislators, it is not yet fully a red state. If not quite color blind, Ohio remains purple.

In November, Ohio voters overwhelmingly supported Republicans for statewide offices, but they also re-elected Democrat Sherrod Brown. In 2008 and 2012, Ohio’s electoral votes went to Barack Obama, but in 2016, they went to Donald Trump. In 2010, John Kasich won the governor’s race, but a year later, voters “overwhelmingly” supported a public referendum overturning Kasich’s attempt to dismantle public sector bargaining in Ohio.

I’ve been among those noting that Democratic strategists and superpacs should not be too quick to write off the state in 2020. This is especially true given the state’s economic woes. Many Ohio workers are paying the costs of Trump’s “false promises” and the failures of former Governor Kasich’s economic programs.

Trump promised to bring manufacturing back to Ohio, insisting that “companies would not be leaving anymore.” He told his supporters in economically devastated Youngstown not to sell their homes because “all those lost jobs are coming back.” The reality is quite different: last week, one of the community’s major employers, the GM Lordstown plant, closed – a loss of some 4500 jobs. Many of those displaced workers supported Trump. Will they remain loyal? There is growing doubt and Trump knows it.

When Fox News suggested that Trump was losing support in the rustbelt and replayed his past comments about Youngstown, Trump almost immediately began tweeting that Lordstown’s UAW Local president, David Green, was not doing his job and demanded that GM president Mary Barra should either “open the plant or sell it to a company that will open it up fast!”

It’s hard to imagine that Trump’s Northeast Ohio base will be able to keep believing that he is making their region great again. The Center for Economic Development at Cleveland State University estimates that the Lordstown closure cut the region’s economic output by $3 billion, including $270 million in wages and another $600 million in added value. The report also estimates a loss of more than $12 million in state and local tax revenue.

A columnist for the Youngstown Vindicator was quick to remind its readers of the difference between Trump’s rhetoric and his policies. In a commentary headed “Thank you, Prez Obama*,” Bertram DeSouza reminded readers that Trump had advocated that GM should be allowed to go bankrupt during the “Great Recession,” criticizing Democrats and President Obama for bailing out the company – a move that kept the Lordstown plant open for another decade.

Trump’s economic failures are echoed on the state level in Kasich’s so-called “Ohio Miracle.” His supply side economics, tax cuts, and austerity measures since 2010 did not jumpstart the state’s economy. Instead, they led to budget shortfalls and spending cuts to programs that helped working families, contributed to income inequality, defunded public education, and shifted tax burdens to local governments. At the same time, Kasich largely ignored the opioid crisis and the state’s deteriorating infrastructure, which is now so bad that new Governor Michael DeWine has had to ask the Republican dominated legislature to increase the gas tax. DeWine hopes to solve budget shortfalls due to tax cuts to the wealthy with a regressive tax that disproportionately impacts working and rural families. Will that draw continued support for Republicans from working-class and rural voters, or will they rebel?

Even if Ohio residents voted with their pocketbooks, Democrats there face real challenges. In 2018, registered Republicans in Ohio outnumbered Democrats by 600,000. Unlike Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, which seem to be returning to the Democratic fold after trending to the right in 2016, Ohio is much whiter, older, less educated, and rural. While urban areas have become increasingly blue, the Republicans dominated elsewhere. So any political transformation will not be easy.

As the 2018 midterms make clear, even without Trump on the ballot, Democrats will need to work hard to regain working-class and moderate Republican voters. They need to mobilize, but they also need to appeal to these voters with something more than Trump-bashing. Democrats have to offer a strong economic message with diverse appeal.

They should not simply rely on instrumental or ideological policy considerations as did the Clinton campaign. As Gene Sperling has suggested, political debates should revolve around principles like economic dignity such as “the capacity to care for family,” the “pursuit of potential and purpose,” “economic participation without domination or humiliation.”

If Ohio Democrats want to win back voters who’ve moved to the right in recent years, they can not only draw attention to Republicans’ false promises and economic failures, they can also offer a strong message of economic justice, one that will appeal to voters across the working class. As Sherrod Brown has suggested, the Democrats cannot make the same mistake that they have in the past by not talking to the “working class Americans of all races.”

John Russo is a visiting researcher at the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University, co-author of Steeltown U.S.A.: Work and Memory in Youngstown, and co-editor with Sherry Linkon of the blog Working-Class Perspectives.

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

Hey Kids–Independents Are Not Independent!

At least the great majority of them. There are a ton of people who will say they’re independent at first blush–more than admit to identifying with the Democrats or Republicans. But, as political scientists established long ago, this large group of independents in deceptive. Overwhelmingly, independents admit they lean toward one party or another and by and large these “leaners” act a great deal like those who admit they are partisans. The truly independent it turns out are a tiny group (see the graphic).

Pew’s new report on this is detailed and up to date. To the points just made:

“An overwhelming majority of independents (81%) continue to “lean” toward either the Republican Party or the Democratic Party. Among the public overall, 17% are Democratic-leaning independents, while 13% lean toward the Republican Party. Just 7% of Americans decline to lean toward a party, a share that has changed little in recent years. This is a long-standing dynamic that has been the subject of past analyses, both by Pew Research Center and others….

Those who do not lean toward a party – a group that consistently expresses less interest in politics than partisan leaners – were less likely to say they had registered to vote and much less likely to say they voted. In fact, just a third said they voted in the midterms.”

As the Republicans peddle blaming Democrats for hyping the ‘collusion’ meme about Trump and the Russians, at The Nation, Joshua Holland provides a sobering reminder: “We should also acknowledge that no human being on Earth has done more to keep the Trump-Russia narrative in the news than Donald Trump. Not only does he have a compulsive tendency to randomly blurt out “no collusion, no collusion”–a claim he’s made 231 times since mid-2017, according to The Washington Post—he’s also kept Russia front and center by refusing to implement sanctions that Congress passed against Russian actors, repeatedly meeting with Vladimir Putin with no advisers or note-takers present, and arguing that Russia was within its rights to annex Crimea. When the president of the United States tells reporters that the president of Russia has “probably” ordered assassinations and poisonings, “but I rely on them; it’s not in our country,” that’s objectively newsworthy.”

Sean Illing’s “Does AG Barr’s summary of the Mueller report “exonerate” Trump? I asked 15 legal experts” at vox.com includes this observation from Notrte Dame law proff Jimmy Gurule about whether or not Mueller actually did his job: “The order appointing Mueller to investigate whether Trump or members of his presidential campaign colluded with the Russians to interfere with the 2016 presidential election also authorized Mueller to investigate any crimes arising from the Russia investigation, which includes whether Trump engaged in obstruction of justice…By failing to reach a conclusion on that matter, Mueller failed to fulfill his mandate. Furthermore, referring the obstruction of justice issue to Barr, who had decided that Trumphad not obstructed justice prior to being appointed to serve as attorney general, was a serious mistake and undermines the public’s confidence in the outcome.”

Also at The Nation, John Nichols shares a couple of the better quotes so far about the Mueller report, which could be useful soundbites for Democrats: “Attorney General William Barr’s four-page summary of special counsel Robert Mueller’s 22-month investigation into allegations of wrongdoing by the president and those around him was summed up by House Judiciary Committee member Jamie Raskin. “I don’t want to read the Cliff notes version of Macbeth,” observed Raskin. “I want to read Macbeth itself.”…Barr’s assessment is suspect. Indeed, as former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams observed Monday, relying on Barr’s summary is “like having your brother summarize your report card to your parents.”

As for the significant political fallout of Barr’s letter, Nate Silver opines at FiveThirtyEight that, “where this will help Trump the most is not with traditional swing voters but with Trump-skeptical Republicans. Even Republicans who don’t love Trump tend to be critical of the news media, and they’d already thought that the media was devoting too much attention to Russia-related matters. If the investigation now looks to them like a wild goose chase — or a “WITCH HUNT,” to use Trump’s preferred term — it will create greater solidarity between them and the rest of the Republican Party. While this isn’t a huge group of voters, every little bit helps in an election that could shape up as another 50-50 affair.”

Ed Kilgore adds at New York Magazine that “You could also argue that Democrats will now find it easier to stress policy differences with the president and his party. Even if Trump was (to consider a laughable hypothetical) a model of probity, his own policy agenda, his hostility to deeply held national values, his party’s deeply unpopular long-range goals, and his sheer recklessness would all make him vulnerable to a reelection defeat…It should also not be forgotten that all the exultant raging from Trump and his supporters right now will free Democrats of any illusion that 2020 will be a cakewalk. With a Trump reelection now looking significantly more feasible than it did just last week, Democrats may begin considering in painful detail the catastrophic consequences of a second Trump term, and adjust the tone and conduct of their own nomination contest accordingly. The wolf is now most definitely at the door, howling in anticipation of a rich feast that his intended victims can no longer risk serving up via damaging internecine conflict.”

According to the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC), “A few months ago, Republicans effectively stole the elections for 16 seats in Congress and 7 state legislative chambers….That’s the startling conclusion of a brand new analysis by the Associated Press, which found that Republican gerrymandering allowed Republicans to win 16 more congressional seats and 7 more state legislative majorities than they should have based on their vote share…In state House elections…as many as seven chambers otherwise could have flipped to Democrats.” The DLCC urges contributions to help take back the stolen seats via actblue.com.

From an Abstract of “Laboratories of Democracy Reform: State Constitutions and Partisan Gerrymandering” by Samuel Wang, Richad Ober and Ben Williams at The Social Science Research Networ (SSRN): “Here we argue that the Court has successfully laid out several intellectual paths toward effective regulation – but that the best route for applying such reasoning goes not through federal law, but state constitutions…We argue that such a federalist approach offers the most promising route to remedying partisan gerrymandering in America. All fifty state constitutions contain rights and protections which could be used to bring a partisan gerrymandering claim. These include analogues of the First and Fourteenth Amendments, guarantees of pure, free, and fair elections, and redistricting-specific guarantees such as geographic compactness. Because each of these protections involves either individualized or associational harms, the Roberts and Kagan opinions offer state courts persuasive guidance for how to analyze their own constitutional provisions to a partisan gerrymandering claim. Advancing such claims on a state by state basis allows courts to adapt the reasoning to local circumstances. Taken together, our arguments describe a federalist approach for eliminating partisan gerrymandering, a major bug in American democracy.”

In addition to legal battles against gerrymandering, “Another approach that reformers could take is to turn away from the courts altogether and engage with partisan gerrymandering in the system that made it: electoral politics,” writes Amelia Thomson-Deveaux at FiveThirtuyEight. “In the 2018 midterms, voters in four states approved ballot measures creating independent redistricting commissions, which can make elections more competitive…However, not all states permit voters to put initiatives directly on the ballot. And as Tokaji told me, a well-funded opposition can be deadly to a ballot initiative campaign, which means that bipartisan support is key. “If voters are confused about a ballot initiative, they tend to vote no,” he said. “And it’s not hard to confuse people if you have a lot of money.”

Here’s some interesting insights from “The progressive base is more pragmatic than you might think: Door knockers know that on the issues, Democratic voters are far from uniform. They’re working with that” by Lara Putnam at vox.com: “The actual activist base that made these and hundreds of similar campaigns nationwidehappen has little overlap with the metropolitan millennial socialists getting all the press. The people doing the work on the ground are disproportionately middle-aged or older, female, and unlikely to tweet. What they do use their smartphones for is canvassing: individual users of the miniVAN app, which gives campaign field operations access to the shared Democratic voter database, tripled from 150,000 in 2016 to 460,000 in 2018. Field directors’ estimates of the portion of their canvassers who were women range from 60 to 80 percent. (Several noted a surge of younger and more male volunteers in the final days, joining the older women who had been there from the start.)…That’s quite a different perspective than assuming the nation is full of swing voters just waiting for the low-tax, low-ambition centrist of their dreams. But it’s also far distant from the claim that America is full of passionate Leftist non-voters who have waited years for the revolutionary platform that will pull them to the polls…The actually-door-knocking Democratic base knows better. Unlike the political hobbyists burning up the internet with hot takes, they have a hard-won and deeply pragmatic understanding of the regional electorates around them, in all their messy contradictions.”

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

These’s been a couple of interesting articles lately on Trump’s generic chances–that is, his re-elect probability against an averagely good Democratic candidate. The 538 chat on this is a good one to go over to get a sense of all the reasons why he may (or may not) be in a good position to be re-elected. In the end, I think the assembled 538’ers are not quite sure how to call it. One participant avers that they seem to be putting Trump ‘s re-elect probability at between 47-53 percent. Leaving aside the faux precision, it sounds like they just don’t have a strong view one way or the other.

There’s been a lot written about the Democratic House’s new voting rights push. But as I argued at New York, much of the discussion doesn’t quite capture its scope and historical significance.

The remarkable partisan polarization over HR1 — House Democrats’ ambitious but hardly novel package of “pro-democracy” reforms, centered on voting rights — shows that this issue, once a matter of bipartisan do-gooder sentiment, has now become a deadly serious point of contention in our politics. This has happened rather quickly as the two parties each came to recognize their future might depend on expanding or restricting ballot access.

All 234 House Democrats present voted for HR1 while all 193 Republicans present voted against it. That’s remarkable given the bipartisan support voting rights (and even other features of the bill like campaign finance reform) had until very recently. To be sure, politicians in both parties still think ballot access is critically important. But Republicans, having placed their bets on an electoral base that is overwhelmingly white and significantly upscale, are becoming deeply invested in suppression of voting opportunities for those who are unlikely to join their coalition.

A recent study showed that of 20 states identified as making it most difficult to vote, Trump carried 17. Hillary Clinton carried 12 of the 20 states where it is easiest to vote.

The homeland of Republican voter suppression is in the South, where keeping African-Americans from the ballot box is an ancient tradition practiced mostly by Democrats in the long period from the emancipation of slaves until the end of Jim Crow. Now across the region the Republicans who control every state legislature in the former Confederacy are pursuing an ensemble of measures to restrict the franchise, from cutbacks in early voting, to aggressive voter purges, to voter-ID requirements, to reductions in polling places. This trend rapidly proliferated after the 2013 Supreme Court decision (supported by all five Republican-appointed Justices, with all four Democratic-appointed Justices dissenting) that killed the chief enforcement mechanism of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Without the requirement that states with a history of racial discrimination submit election system changes to the U.S. Justice Department for “preclearance,” it’s been open season on ballot access, particularly as racial polarization in partisan preferences has intensified.

As veteran political journalist Ron Brownstein has observed, the current split in Congress over HR 1 is just the beginning of an era in which one party supports and the other opposes voting rights: it’s a struggle that may determine political dominance in many states and nationally for years to come:

“Particularly in states across the Sun Belt — from North Carolina, Florida and Georgia to Texas and Arizona — the electoral competition is shaped by a stark demographic divide. In all of those states, Democrats are increasingly reliant on growing populations of younger and nonwhite voters. But in each of those states and others demographically similar to them, a Republican coalition almost entirely dependent on white voters — especially older, blue-collar and non-urban whites — still has the advantage, particularly in state elections.

“In each state the Republican majorities have used that power to approve either restrictions on voting — such as tougher voter identification laws — partisan gerrymanders or both, making it more difficult for that emerging nonwhite electorate to overturn their dominance.”

As in the Reconstruction era after the Civil War, one party is committed to the use of federal power to vindicate voting rights, and the other is opposed. Today’s Republicans don’t openly tout white racial supremacy rationales the way many Democrats of the 19th century did, but they do similarly claim they are simply defending states’ rights to control elections, and warn of electoral fraud and corruption, and less vocally, of a partisan conspiracy whereby minority voters will use their political power to redistribute the wealth of virtuous tax-paying white folks. Southern opponents of the first Reconstruction resorted to terrorism along with less violent forms of intimidation aimed at black would-be voters and officeholders. But formal disenfranchisement was accomplished throughout the region by 1900, aided by Supreme Court rulings sharply limiting federal jurisdiction over elections. Now strategies for disenfranchisement are covert and partial. But like yesterday’s Democrats, today’s Republicans are acutely aware that their local and national power depends on holding back a tide of minority voting power than might submerge their party.

These partisan dynamics are what separate today’s climate from that of what many have called the Second Reconstruction, the civil-rights era that culminated with the successful implementation of school desegregation, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The battle lines then were mostly regional rather than partisan, though the prominence of Democratic president Lyndon B. Johnson in the key landmark legislation initiated a partisan realignment of the South that led formerly Democratic white conservatives overwhelmingly into the GOP. That party was slowly but surely transformed into a militantly conservative bastion of support for states rights and property rights, and opposition to the kind of public spending that might disproportionately help minorities.

The white conservative backlash to the First Reconstruction succeeded almost totally in the disenfranchisement of African-Americans and the imposition of a virtual apartheid regime at the end of the 19th century. The Second Reconstruction’s accomplishments have been undermined more subtly, via voter suppression measures in the states and recent illustrations of residual racism from redlining to efforts to drain public schools of resources to police misconduct aimed at minority citizens and undocumented immigrants.

And so, arguably, we are seeing the first stages of a Third Reconstruction, again focused on (but not limited to) the South, with the goal of finally realizing the promise of equality extended in the so-called Reconstruction Amendments (the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, which abolished slavery, mandated equal protection for all citizens, and banned discrimination in voting) enacted after the Civil War. Because the bipartisanship of the Second Reconstruction has been lost, the Third Reconstruction may be as bitterly divisive as the First, and could quickly grow to overshadow other political issues. And while this Third Reconstruction may extend to multiple issues touching on equality, it will almost certainly be rooted in the fight for voting rights, which will determine the balance of power in many states and nationally.

Reverend William Barber II, the North Carolina pastor who founded that state’s Moral Mondays movement in opposition to a conservative takeover that made voter suppression prominent and explicit, titled his 2016 memoir/manifesto The Third Reconstruction. In it he accentuated the importance of voting rights as a threshold issue:

“Because political power is a democracy’s chief safeguard against injustice, we must continue to engage the voting rights issue after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which removed protections against voter suppression in southern states that had been in place for half a century. This fight is, in many ways, bigger than Selma and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That expansion of voting rights fifty years ago was a concession to the civil rights movement. We didn’t get all we were asking for. Now, fifty years later, we’re fighting to hold on to the compromise. What we really need is a constitutional amendment to guarantee the same voting rights in every state. This must be the cornerstone of the Third Reconstruction.”

Constitutional amendments in our system are very difficult to secure. But HR1 and Sewell’s legislation restoring the VRA together represent an effort to nationalize voting rights as much as the Constitution allows, as both its supporters and opponents acknowledge. HR1 takes a chainsaw to the thicket of voter-suppression techniques Republican-controlled states have contrived, which in intent echo the formal disenfranchisement the first Reconstruction fought and the poll taxes and literacy tests targeted by the second. And the restored voting rights enforcement mechanism in the Justice Department that Sewell’s bill would provide is aimed at rebuilding the federal government’s oversight of state and local electoral procedures, giving the victims of voters suppression an ally as powerful as the Freedmen’s Bureau of the first Reconstruction.

As in the first two Reconstructions, action in Washington will depend on the success of local grassroots pressure in the states where the battle against voter suppression rages. And that means today’s voting rights push must become not merely an issue among issues, but a social movement with a sense of moral urgency.

In marking “the highest voter turnout in a midterm in 100 years,” the just-released “America Goes to the Polls” report by Nonprofit VOTE and the U.S. Elections Project examines the differences in voter turnout between states in relation to various voting policies. It’s a good read for Democrats interested in voting reforms.

“The report also ranks all 50 states by turnout, with the top ten states averaging 61% turnout of eligible voters. By comparison, the bottom ten states averaged only 43% – a gap of almost 20%.” In addition,

Seven of the top 10 states had Same Day Registration (SDR) which allows a voter to register or update their voter registration when they go to the polls. By comparison, eight of the bottom 10 states required voters to register four weeks before the election. “If I could implement only one election reform to increase voter participation, it would be Same Day Registration,” says Michael McDonald, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida. “Year-after-year, states with Same Day Registration have a turnout advantage over states without the policy, including a seven-point advantage in the 2018 elections.

It’s a point made by political scientists repeatedly over the years, but it’s worth reiterating with fresh evidence, as I did at New York.

Pew has a new report out looking at self-identified political independents. It doesn’t break any new ground, but it should be waved in the face of Howard Schultz and others who look at the high percentage of Americans who prefer to call themselves independents and see a huge constituency for some centrist “third force.” It’s largely a mirage.

According to Pew’s numbers, while 38 percent of Americans identify as indies, only 7 percent “decline to lean towards a party.” Party “leaners” are a lot like self-identified partisans. For example, 70 percent of GOP-leaning indies give Donald Trump a positive job rating; 75 percent of them favor an expanded border wall; and 78 percent would prefer a smaller government providing fewer services. And far from being “plague on both your houses” nonpartisans with disdain for elephants and donkeys, independent leaners like one party and really dislike the other:

“Currently, 87% of those who identify with the Republican Party view the Democratic Party unfavorably. Republican-leaning independents are almost as likely to view the Democratic Party negatively (81% unfavorable). Opinions among Democrats and Democratic leaners are nearly the mirror image: 88% of Democrats and 84% of Democratic leaners view the GOP unfavorably. In both parties, the shares of partisan identifiers and leaners with unfavorable impressions of the opposition party are at or near all-time highs.”

The idea that independents are mostly “moderates” is increasingly out of whack with reality, too. A majority of GOP-leaning indies self-identify as conservative now, and while “moderates” still outnumber “liberals” among Democratic leaners (by a 45-39 margin), the latter category is steadily growing, as is the case with self-identified Democrats.

One implication of the report that’s worth internalizing is that polls and other opinion indicators that don’t break out leaners from true indies create an impression of the whole category as being in the middle on issues and candidates alike. In truth, much of what you read about independents reflects the dynamics of partisan leaners canceling each other out. So that big, potentially irresistible force poised between the two parties is mostly a figment of the imagination. And the partisan polarization so many self-identified pundits love to deplore extends well into the ranks of the technically unaffiliated.

 

Mark Joseph Stern explains how “Florida Republicans Are Sabotaging a Constitutional Amendment That Gave Felons the Right to Vote” at slate.com: “In November, a supermajority of Florida voters approved a constitutional amendment restoring voting rights to former felons who’ve completed their sentences. On Tuesday, Florida Republicans advanced a bill that will strip hundreds of thousands of these individuals of the franchise once again….That measure, which GOP lawmakers voted out of committee along party lines, is a direct assault on Amendment 4, which altered the state constitution to reinstate felons’ right to vote. It is an astonishing rejection of Floridians’ overwhelming support for the amendment and a flagrant power-grab designed to suppress potential Democratic votes. And because the Florida Legislature, governorship, and Supreme Court are dominated by Republicans, the bill stands an excellent chance of becoming law, reversing the biggest voting rights victory of the 21^st century so far…Shortly after the 2018 election, it became clear that Republican lawmakers would attempt to undermine Amendment 4. By its own terms, the law is self-executing; it requires no implementation by the Legislature. Floridians who have completed a sentence for a felony conviction should now be permitted to vote, so long as they did not commit homicide or a sex offense. Yet GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis (who opposed the amendment) and his allies in the Legislature quickly asserted that it is not self-executing and requires “implementing language.” That’s not true, but it allowed Republicans to curtail the amendment’s impact under the guise of “implementing” it. Since November, the key question was how brazenly GOP lawmakers would seek to subvert the amendment: Would they tinker around the edges, or gut the law entirely?”

The good news is that Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum, narrowly defeated in the contest for Florida’s governorship in November, has launched a major voter registration campaign, “Bring it Home Florida,” named after his campaign slogan. Gary Fineout reports at Politico: “There are currently 4.96 million registered Democrats in the state compared to 4.7 million Republicans and nearly 3.6 million voters with no party affiliation…Gillum, whose political committee Forward Florida still has nearly $3.9 million available, hinted at his plans earlier in the year…“In this period of time, whatever resources that I raise and time and energy I spend in this state is going to be around voter registration and deep-level engagement, so that when we have a nominee, we have an apparatus we can turn on,” Gillum said in January…Trump’s campaign is heavily focused on Florida, the biggest swing state in the nation, with 29 of the 270 electoral college votes needed to win. Without the Sunshine State, Trump’s path to victory narrows significantly…Steve Schale, a Florida political consultant who worked for President Barack Obama, said that Democrats need to do a better job of registering voters in Florida. On his blog this week, he said that the voter registration advantage held by Democrats has fallen by 400,000 voters over the last 10 years…Democrats say they have identified as many as four million Floridians eligible to vote who are not registered. Florida party officials say they plan to partner with data science firms and hire dozens of full-time organizers as part of the new $2 million effort.”

Should Democrats raise more hell about dental care not being included in Medicare? Read Darla Mercado’s “Medicare won’t cover this key expense, and it’s eating into retirees’ wallets” at cnbc.com, and you will be left with the impression that it could, indeed be a popular issue, especially with many high-turnout senior voters. Mercado notes that “Nearly 7 out of 10 Medicare beneficiaries have no dental coverage at all, according to data from the Kaiser Family Foundation. Half go without seeing a dentist.” Also, “the average Medicare enrollee spent an average $922 in out-of-pocket dental costs…In all, 65 percent of Medicare beneficiaries, or 37 million people, have no dental coverage, according to recent data from the Kaiser Family Foundation.” Comprehensive health security means every health need, as well as everybody.

At FiveThirtyEight, Perry Bacon, Jr.’s “What The Big Sanders And O’Rourke Fundraising Numbers Don’t Capture” provides a good read for Democrats interested in campaign fund-raising strategies. Bacon notes that the early fund-raising totals of the Sanders and O’Rourke campaigns don’t show a lot of donor diversity. But Bacon also provides some stats that could be helpful to Democratic campaigns in targeting possible donors. Here’s just one excerpt “When asked by the Pew Research Center in the fall of 2016 if they had donated to a political campaign over the previous year, 24 percent of Democrats with incomes between $75,000 and $150,000 said they had, compared to 8 percent of those with incomes below $30,000. Donating to campaigns was also more common among people with more education (33 percent of Democrats with postgraduate degrees had donated, compared to 6 percent who did not attend college), older people (32 percent among those over 65, 11 percent of those ages 18-29) and white people (21 percent of white Democrats, 7 percent of Latinos.²)”

“Support for impeaching President Donald Trump has fallen 7 points since December, a CNN Poll conducted by SSRS finds, following Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi calling impeachment “so divisive to the country,” Jennifer Agiesta reports at CNN Politics. “The decline — from 43% in favor in December to 36% now — stems largely from a change in Democratic views on impeaching the President. In December, 80% of self-identified Democrats said they were in favor of impeachment — that now stands at 68%, a 12-point dip. Among independents and Republicans, support for impeachment has fallen 3 points over the same time…The only major subgroup among which the decline was larger than among Democrats is college graduates: 50% backed impeachment in December, 35% do so now. Combining the two to look at Democrats with college degrees, support for impeachment fell 17 points from 79% in December to 62% now. RELATED: Full poll results.

Some intriguing stats from Kyle Kondik’s “This Century’s Electoral College Trends” at Sabato’s Crystal Ball: “The most dramatic recent shift in Virginia came from 2004 to 2008, when the Old Dominion moved from giving Democrat John Kerry just 45.9% of the two-party vote to giving Democrat Barack Obama 53.2%, a 7.3-point jump in vote share (and a 14.6-point jump in margin). Of course, the nation as a whole moved from 48.8% for Kerry in 2004 to 53.7% for Obama in 2008, an increase of 4.9 points. Part of the Virginia story is that it shifted more dramatically from 2004 to 2008 toward the Democrats than the nation as a whole did…Some broad patterns emerge. “Generally speaking, the Sun Belt and West are trending Democratic. The Midwest and North more broadly, along with Greater Appalachia, are trending Republican…Generally speaking, much of the West and parts of the South were more Democratic relative to the national voting in 2016 than they were in 2000, while much of the Midwest, Greater Appalachia, and New England were more Republican relative to the nation in 2016 than they were in 2000.” Kondik also shares some revealing graphs showing regional trends in party voting.

Alex Shephard writes at the New Rerpublic that “the Democratic Party is moving left, whether they like it or not. Forty-six percent of Democrats and Democrat-leaning voters now identify as “liberal,” up from just 28 percent a decade ago. At the same time, the percentage of people identifying as “moderates” has fallen from 44 to 37. When Obama was elected, one could accurately describe the Democratic base as being moderate, but that’s no longer true anymore. As The Atlantic’s David Graham wrote last year, registered Democrats have become more liberal on immigration, economics, and race over the same period. Increasing taxes on the rich, Medicare for All, and a jobs guarantee all poll well today.”

In “Removing Barriers to Voting Improves Turnout” at The Washington Monthly, Nancy LeTourneau presents some voter turnout data and graphs, including: According to a report from Nonprofit Vote and the U.S. Elections Project, voter turnout in the 2018 midterms was the highest its been in over 100 years…Seven of the 15 states with same day registration (SDR) were among the top ten states in voter turnout…Eight of the ten lowest turnout states have registration deadlines four weeks before the election…Three of the four vote at home (VAH) states ranked in the top seven of 2018 voter turnout…Registration growth was nearly four times higher in the five states reporting automatic voter registration (AVR) data in 2018.”