Former federal prosecutor Ken White explains why “Republicans Committed the Classic Cross-Examination Blunder” at The Atlantic: “Republicans committed the classic cross-examination blunder: They gave the witness the opportunity to further explain his harmful direct testimony. They provided Cohen with one slow pitch up the middle after another, letting him repeat the cooperating witness’s go-to explanation like a mantra: I did these bad things so often and so long because that’s what it took to work for your guy. I have seldom seen a cross-examination go worse.” White also faults Democrats for failing to support Cohen’s credibility and seize the “opportunity to build the outline of a case against Trump.” But White undervalues the inspiring closing comments of House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairman, Rep. Elijah Cummings, which put Cohen’s testimony in clear moral perspective — the kind of leadership that impresses voters more than legal score-keeping.

It kind of got lost amid the coverage of the Cohen testimony and Trump’s fake N. Korea summit. But Speaker Pelosi and the Democrats scored another victory by passing “a universal background check bill — which, if the Senate were interested in passing it, would be the most significant gun control legislation in a generation,” according to German Lopez, writing at vox.com. Lopez notes further, “Under current federal law, licensed dealers are required to run a background check to make sure a buyer doesn’t have a criminal record, history of mental illness, or any other factor that legally bars him from purchasing a gun…But the law has a big loophole: Private sellers — meaning unlicensed sellers — don’t have to run a background check. So someone who doesn’t run a licensed gun shop can sell or gift a firearm at a gun show, over the internet, or to friends and family without verifying through a background check that the buyer isn’t legally prohibited from purchasing the weapon…The new bill, HR 8, would close this loophole, although it would leave some exemptions for gun transfers among family and temporary transfers (like lending a gun) while hunting.” True, the bill is limited in scope and it’s not going to pass under Trump and McConnell. But it shows that a Democratic majority means passing legislation that can save lives, a big plus with voters who want something done about gun violence.

“To avoid watching in horror as the Senate slips away forever while the Electoral College map becomes ever more daunting, liberals need a long-term strategy to combat the decline of heartland cities—to turn Clevelands into Denvers,” writes Daniel Block in his article, “To Take Back the Map, Democrats Need a Plan to Revive Heartland Cities” in The Washington Monthly. “To do so, they need to first recognize that geographic inequality did not come out of nowhere. It is not the inevitable product of free market forces clustering new skill and innovation around where all the old skill and innovation are found—nothing makes people in St. Louis or Milwaukee any less talented than people in San Francisco or Washington, D.C. Instead, it’s the result of nearly four decades of policy choices in Washington—such as giving large banks and other corporations in elite coastal cities free rein to acquire rival firms headquartered in cities in America’s interior. This has stripped those interior cities of what were once their economic engines, even as it has enriched the already wealthy coastal megalopolises…Fixing America’s regional inequality would be a good idea irrespective of its political implications. It would increase innovation and GDP across the country. With economies, as with professional sports leagues, having more cities that can compete ups everyone’s game. It would help curb the broader scourge of income inequality. And it would improve our quality of life by making it easier for talented people to stay with family and friends in the communities where they grew up, or to move wherever else they might like to go, rather than being channeled to a handful of overly expensive, traffic-choked megacities.”

Umair Irfan’s “How Trump’s EPA is letting environmental criminals off the hook, in one chart” at vox.com provides a sharable graphic for voters concerned about climate change:

Some notes from a westernpriorities.org study, “Winning the West,” which analyses polling of different groups, including: ticket-splitters; millenial parents; empty-nesters; anglers/hunters; CORE; Cable-news-watchers; and social media users (hover over icon for stats): “The Casual Outdoor Recreation Enthusiast (CORE), makes up about two-thirds of the western electorate. If you like to take nature walks, hike, camp or bird watch you are a CORE voter too. This group is important because they actively participate in outdoor activities that any of us can do. They are passionate about the outdoors and public lands too….87% say public lands, parks and wildlife issues are important factors in how they decide on which candidate to vote for…76% oppose significantly reducing the size of national monuments, including shrinking Utah’s Bears Ears by more than 80 percent and Grand Staircase-Escalante by 50 percent….86% say the outdoor recreation economy is important.”

Eliza Newlin Carney writes at The American Prospect that “Republicans are quietly scrambling to catch up with Democrats in low-dollar fundraising, which was pivotal to the 40-seat pickup that put Democrats back in control in the House, and is increasingly becoming the holy grail of modern campaign financing…The small-donor craze is playing out both on Capitol Hill, and on the presidential campaign trail, where raising large sums via low-dollar contributions—anywhere from $3 to $200 apiece—has become a leading measure of viability in the sprawling Democratic field. In the House, more than three dozen freshman Democrats who swore of corporate PAC contributions on the campaign trail are also test-driving a new “subscription” model of fundraising built around small, recurring, monthly donations…New York Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has likened the monthly, low-dollar gifts that make up the bulk of her campaign receipts to “Netflix, but for unbought members of Congress.” Ocasio-Cortez raised more from small donors in the midterm than any other incoming freshman—close to 62 percent of her $2 million war chest. She has touted the “Netflix” model as a means to free her from the ‘round-the-clock fundraising that has become the scourge of life on Capitol Hill, and that helped drive a near-record 52 House members to retire instead of seeking re-election in 2018.”

Writing at Sabato’s Crystal Ball, Kyle Kodik finds that “Our initial Electoral College ratings reflect a 2020 presidential election that starts as a Toss-up…We start with 248 electoral votes at least leaning Republican, 244 at least leaning Democratic, and 46 votes in the Toss-up category…The omissions from the initial Toss-up category that readers may find most surprising are Florida and Michigan…Much of the electoral map is easy to allocate far in advance: About 70% of the total electoral votes come from states and districts that have voted for the same party in at least the last five presidential elections.” Kondik ads that “We close with the final 46 electoral votes, the Toss-ups. They come from four states — Arizona, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — as well as one congressional district, Nebraska’s Second, which is based in Omaha…Arizona, to us, is the best target for Democrats among the usually Republican Sun Belt states that have been becoming more competitive (a group that also includes Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas). Arizona’s voting is dominated by Phoenix’s Maricopa County, one of the nation’s only very populous counties that is gettable for a Republican presidential candidate. But the trendlines for Republicans in such counties are generally poor, a factor that can’t be discounted in a country where local political eccentricities are increasingly being overtaken by one-size-fits-all trends.”

At Politico, Burgess Everett and James Arkin take a peak “Inside Schumer’s plot to be majority leader” and note, “Schumer said he’s not giving a hard sell to prospective candidates, but that he is laying out the advantages of joining his dogged pursuit of the majority: A chance to control the agenda, potentially with unified Democratic control of Washington in 2021….“We’re finding that people are stepping up to the plate,” he explained. “What I tell anybody who I think would be a good candidate [is] that the Senate is a very good job. I don’t try to dissuade them from running for something else.”…Regardless of the number of headaches ahead for the famous political micromanager, Schumer is in a far better position than he was in 2018 when he was defending 10 seats in Trump country with a narrow path to the majority. Now, he’s on offense — yet how wide his party’s campaign will extend is yet to be determined…Schumer and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chair Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) are working to get candidates who can transform races that Republicans might otherwise be easily favored to win. Schumer is aiming to persuade ex-fighter pilot Amy McGrath to take on McConnell in Kentucky, as well as Stacey Abrams to challenge Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.)…Schumer doesn’t want to appear too bullish — already eyeing 2022 even as he firms up his candidates in 2020. “It’s better than last time,” Schumer said of his prospects in 2020. “It’s not as good as two years from now. But it’s good.”

In her article, “The Missing Black Millennial” at The New Republic, Reniqua Allen writes, “Black millennials, like others in their generation, are frustrated with the current system. Participation among black millennials in presidential elections dropped between 2012 and 2016, according to Pew, with turnout at 55 percent and 51 percent, respectively. That could partly be attributed to Obama no longer leading the Democratic ticket. But black millennials also supported Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary, while their parents went for Hillary Clinton, an indication that young blacks are disillusioned with the establishment and hungry for the kind of economic freedom promised in Sanders’s more far-reaching platform…Perhaps young blacks are guilty of being that most unforgivable of millennial sins: entitled. But our sense of entitlement does not revolve around avocado toast and CBD lattes. Our sense of entitlement, or at least mine specifically, comes from the notion that the richest nation on earth can provide all of its citizens with basic necessities.” Allen goes on to explain the developing  sense of betrayal of hope shared by young people of her generation and race and how it gets buried in MSM coverage and misunderstood by the public. Her article is a good read for Democratic campaigns.

Seeing a few straws in the wind, I wrote up for New York some concerns about the likely Trump/Republicans demagoguery about racial reparations.

Some 2020 Democratic presidential candidates in discussing anti-inequality measures have mentioned the moral rationale for a particular effort on behalf of African-Americans who were enslaved and then (under Jim Crow) semi-enslaved, and are suffering from systemic racism even now. Elizabeth Warren, for example, has made the obvious point that the legacy of slavery and its successor regimes has had a negative impact on the ability of black families to accumulate wealth over generations. Her proposed remedies, especially universal child care, are not actually “race conscious,” and aren’t similar to the cash compensation to descendants of slaves that is usually connoted by the term “reparations.” But there are signs that Republicans looking for a fresh way to appeal to white voters worried about alleged redistribution of resources from themselves to minorities may use the r-word to describe any and all race-conscious rationales for public initiatives. Fox News’ highly influential Tucker Carlson devoted an entire segment to the subject last week based on the premise that Democrats are stampeding in the direction of reparations.

Tucker Carlson agrees with his guest after he goes on a rant about how African Americans just need to get over slavery pic.twitter.com/8riQIlUr2I

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 22, 2019

Carlson and his guest are probably canaries in the coal mine in terms of the likely interest of Republicans in adding “No Reparations!” to their “No Socialism!” battle cry for 2020. At FiveThirtyEight, Perry Bacon Jr. explains that relatively strong public awareness of past and present racism does not translate into support for anything like reparations.

But when it comes to acting on these beliefs, notes Bacon, public opinion is significantly more mixed. And sizable majorities reject the idea of “reparations” as they are commonly understood:

“A July 2018 survey from the left-leaning Data for Progress found that 26 percent of Americans supported some kind of compensation or cash benefits for the descendants of slaves. A May 2016 Marist survey also found that 26 percent of Americans said the U.S. should pay reparations as ‘a way to make up for the harm caused by slavery and other forms of racial discrimination.'”

That Marist poll showed 68 percent of respondents, and 81 percent of white respondents, opposing reparations, defined as “money [paid] to African-Americans who are descendents of slaves.”

Now it should be noted immediately that an idea’s unpopularity is not an inherent reason for Democrats rejecting it (as Bacon puts it, “That’s kind of the point of bold ideas — they wouldn’t be bold if everyone already agreed with them.”) And Lord knows Republicans insist on promoting very unpopular ideas, from total opposition to gun regulation to supply-side economics to a ban on all abortions.

But being attacked for a position you do not actually hold is another thing altogether. So far, no 2020 Democratic candidate has embraced “reparations” as the public understands the term (cash payments to all descendants of slaves). But it appears some candidates, led by Warren and Kamala Harris (who called for “reparations” in the form of “investing in historically black colleges, improving maternal mortality rates for black women, and reducing racial disparities in the criminal justice system”) may finally begin to entertain the broader question of America’s moral and material debts to those it not only oppressed but robbed.

In his landmark 2014 essay, “The Case for Reparations,” Ta-Nehisi Coates sought to document those debts in some detail, but concluded that the most important step white America needed to take was simply to acknowledge its falsified history and come to grips with what that means today:

“Reparations — by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences — is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely …

“What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices — more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling ‘patriotism’ while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.”

This idea may not be as controversial as cash reparations, but even if stated honestly, it will become a target for fury among the MAGA folk who believe the abolition of slavery discharged all obligations to African-Americans, and that the falsified past Coates speaks of was one long reign of glory endangered by political correctness and the demands of the previously marginalized. One of the most pervasive ideas of contemporary conservatism (championed, for example, by one of its leading lights, former House Speaker Paul Ryan), in fact, is that liberating impoverished people is best accomplished by denying them any government assistance at all, so as to spur them on the road to self-sufficiency.

So Democrats and the media need to set the record straight on what “reparations” actually mean when discussed by Warren, Harris, and others. But they shouldn’t run away from the inevitable conflicts over what they domean and do propose. They owe a reckoning over racism’s legacy not just to the descendants of slaves and sharecroppers and victims of official and unofficial discrimination; they owe it to their country and its willingness to live up to its purported values.

If that offers Donald Trump another demagogic talking point for 2020, so be it. He’s not going to start telling the truth simply because Democrats tell less of the truth than they should.

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

I wouldn’t say we should be slaves to public opinion data but I think it’s still true that a serious left politics takes these data seriously. And that should be true of reparations and other race-related issues, just as in other areas of concern to progressives.

I therefore applaud the excellent Perry Bacon Jr. at 538 for rounding up the latest public opinion data on a wide range of these issues so we can see what Americans really do think about them. Bacon divides up his survey into three categories: popular, mixed opinions and unpopular. In regard to the latter category he notes:

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

The odds are long that Financial Times columnist Wolfgang Munchau has read or even heard of my book, The Optimistic Leftist. But there are some interesting overlaps in his latest column with arguments I developed in the book and have elaborated since.

Munchau’s critique of contemporary (neo)liberalism is spot on:

“Liberal democracy is in decline for a reason. Liberal regimes have proved incapable of solving problems that arose directly from liberal policies like tax cuts, fiscal consolidation and deregulation: persistent financial instability and its economic consequences; a rise in insecurity among lower income earners, aggravated by technological change and open immigration policies; and policy co-ordination failures, for example in the crackdown on global tax avoidance.

When the financial crisis struck, continental European governments did not take full control of their banking systems, crack down hard enough on bonuses, or impose financial transaction taxes. They did not raise income and corporate taxes to counter-balance cuts in public sector spending. They did not tighten immigration policies.”

He sees European and Trump-style right wing populism not as the beginning of the end but rather a transitional stage:

“I expect the pushback against liberalism to come in stages. We are in stage one — the Trumpian anti-immigration phase. Immigration carries net economic benefits, especially over the long term. But there are losers from it, too, both actual and imagined…..Liberal democracy has been successful at breaking down trade barriers, protecting human rights and fostering open societies. But the inability to manage the social and economic consequences of such policies has rendered liberal regimes inherently unstable.”

And here we get to the crux of it:

“For now, the right is thriving on the anti-immigration backlash. But its rise is self-limiting for two reasons. First, rightwing policies are not succeeding even on their own narrow terms. A wall along the border with Mexico will not stem US immigration flows any more than the re-nationalisation of immigration policies would in Europe. And second, I suspect that immigration will soon be superseded by other issues — such as the impact of artificial intelligence on middle-class livelihoods; rising levels of poverty; and economic dislocation stemming from climate change.

This is a political environment that favours the radical left over the radical right. The right is not interested in poverty and its parties are full of climate-change deniers. Some of the rightwing populists may speak the language of the working classes, but the left is more likely to deliver.

The killer policy of the left will be the 70 per cent tax rate proposed by freshman US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It is not the number that matters, but the determination to reverse a 30-year trend towards lower taxation of very high incomes and profits. There would be collateral damage from such a policy for sure. But from the perspective of the radical left, collateral damage is a promise, not a threat…..

We have entered an age that will favour radicalism over moderation, and the left over the right. It is not going to be the age of Donald Trump.”

I agree, however scary Trump and his ilk look at the present time. The left should have the courage of their convictions that they have a better way that that way is salable in a rapidly changing environment. Trump certainly exploited voter anger and, yes, racism to get elected. But he also promised to solve people’s problems — with their health care, with their jobs, with their living standards, with their communities, with their children’s prospects. He won’t succeed. That’s a huge opening for the left, including among white non-college voters.

Nowhere is that opening greater than on the issue of growth that leads to better jobs and higher living standards. The Democratic Party is more or less united around a programmatic approach to the economy that could actually produce such growth — an approach some of us call “equitable growth.” It pushes back on inequality, seeing current high levels as an active detriment to growth, and seeks to combine support and opportunity for the broad middle class with investments to make the economy more productive.

This includes truly universal health care, universal pre-K, free access to two years and some four-year colleges, paid family leave, subsidized child care, higher minimum wages, a commitment to full employment, and robust investments in infrastructure and scientific research, especially around clean energy. In one form or another, all of this is working its way into the policy discourse of Democrats, especially candidates for the Democratic Presidential nomination.

The GOP, in contrast, now harbors a cacophony of different economic approaches, from pure libertarianism to Trump’s incoherent economic nationalism. Astonishingly, the one point of agreement of these approaches appears to be that inequality should be pushed even higher by increasing the flow of benefits to the rich. The idea that ratcheting up inequality will somehow lead to strong growth, better jobs, and higher living standards is substantively ludicrous — and not at all what Trump’s working-class supporters had in mind. When it doesn’t work, they will be upset.

In sum, the left can deliver and the Trumpian populists can’t. In the end, that will matter.

Harry Enten explains why “Donald Trump still shows some strength in the Midwest heading into 2020” at CNN Politics: “…Trump may be able to do exactly what he did in 2016: win the Electoral College, despite losing the popular vote…There were four states where Barack Obama performed better than he did nationally in 2012 that Hillary Clinton then lost in 2016: Iowa, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. If Clinton had won Michigan, Pennsylvania and either Iowa or Wisconsin, she would have won the Electoral College…Iowa and Wisconsin are the most likely to continue to cause heartache for the Democrats in 2020. A loss in both of these states would cause the Democratic nominee to fall short in 2020, if she or he carries all the states Clinton won, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Enten cites polls and evidence showing that “The midterm results from Iowa and Wisconsin generally back up the idea that they are to right of the nation…If the Democratic nominee does, in fact, lose Iowa and Wisconsin, she or he will have to win in a state that hasn’t voted to the left of the nation in the past few cycles in order to win the Electoral College. That may not be such an easy task.”

David S. Bernstein has a different warning for Democrats in his Politico article, “Trump’s Secret to Victory in 2020: Hispanic Voters: Yes, it’s true: The man who wants to build a wall to keep out immigrants is winning over just enough Latinos to get re-elected. Unless Democrats figure out how to stop him.” Bernstein writes, “When President Donald Trump tweeted, on January 20, that he had reached 50 percent approval among Hispanic-Americans, most fair-minded observers reacted with skepticism, if not outright disbelief…So, when even the pollsters responsible for the data Trump was touting—Marist Institute for Public Opinion, for NPR and “PBS NewsHour”—cautioned of the high margin of error for that subset, and a possible over-sampling of Republicans, many on the left promptly dismissed it as an anomaly…In theory, the rosy predictions that once gave rise to chest-beating liberal books like “The Emerging Democratic Majority” are proving true: 2020 will be the first U.S. election in which Hispanics make up the largest racial or ethnic minority in the electorate, according to the Pew Research Center. Pew estimates that 32 million Hispanics will be eligible to vote—a full 2 million more than eligible black voters and more than 13 percent of the electorate. Hispanics figure to constitute at least 11 percent of the national vote, as they did in 2016 and 2018.”

Bernstein continues, “Many expected Hispanics to vote overwhelmingly against Trump in 2016. A Latino Decisions poll conducted just before the 2016 presidential election found Trump had the support of just 18 percent of Hispanics. But the actual figure was 28 percent, which—given Trump’s incendiary rhetoric about immigrants—some analysts and pundits refused to believe from exit polls until further studies confirmed it. That was just as good as Mitt Romney, as the 2012 Republican nominee, did with Hispanics—and it was enough to help Trump squeak an Electoral College victory…Now, here’s the brutal truth for Democrats: If Hispanic Americans are in fact showing surging approval of Trump, he could be on his way to matching or exceeding the 40 percent won by George W. Bush in his 2004. If Trump does 12 percentage points better than his 2016 numbers with the growing Hispanic vote, it pretty much takes Florida, Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina off the table for Democrats, who would need to sweep Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to reach the 270 electoral college votes needed to win the White House…the eventual Democratic nominee can’t simply assume that Hispanic voters will flock to the polls to prevent Trump’s second term. If anything, the challenge for the party looks tougher than in 2016—when it arguably cost them the White House.”

Ruy Teixeira’s post, “Trump Approval Ratings in 2020 Swing States” at the Optimistic Leftist notes that “Gallup has issued its average approval ratings by state for 2018, based on their very large sample tracking poll. It’s definitely worth a look. Short story: in states that are likely to matter in 2020, Trump’s approval ratings are pretty bad. Doesn’t mean he can’t win of course, but approval ratings are a pretty good guide to potential support, so it definitely suggests a challenge for the incumbent President…Caveats: these are average 2018 ratings; Trump may be higher across the board by November, 2020 (or not, his approval have varied within a very narrow band throughout his Presidency). He is already a bit higher this year than he was at the end of 2018. Also, Gallup approval ratings are of all adults not registered or likely voters. This may be of particular significance in a state where there are large numbers of adult noncitizen Latinos or Asians.” Teixeira shares ratings for  “swing states from low to high Trump approval,” including: Colorado, Minnesota 39; Nevada, Virginia 40; Texas 41; Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin 42; Arizona, Florida 43: Georgia 44; Iowa, North Carolina 45; and Ohio 48. Teixeira says he “was particularly struck by the “Rustbelt 3″–Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin–who put Trump over the top in 2016, all being at exactly 42 percent.”

If you’re interested in what the public thinks about taxes on wealth, check out ‘Other Polling Nuggets’ at FiveThirtyEight, in which Perry Bacon, Jr. notes: “More than 60 percent of Americans said that the government should pursue policies to reduce the wealth gap and that they support a 2 percent tax on wealth above $50 million, according to a survey conducted by SurveyMonkey that was published by The New York Times this week. Opinion is more divided (51 percent support, 45 percent oppose) on a marginal tax rate of 70 percent on income above $10 million a year.”

Paul Waldman writes at The American Prospect, “Democrats are already changing the entire political conversation around the economy even capitalism itself. Not only are they proposing significant tax increases on the wealthy, whether it’s higher marginal rates or a wealth tax, they’re also arguing for a fundamental reorientation of federal policy to get at the roots of inequality. Their proposals include traditional Democratic ideas like raising the minimum wage, along with a broad expansion of social supports in areas like health care and child care, and even some revision to the nature of the modern corporation to give workers a greater voice…Every one of those proposals has wide appeal to voters, and every one gives Republicans the vapors. But let’s not forget that in 2016, Donald Trump correctly surmised that despite the fact that unemployment was low and the economy was on a steady path of recovery from the Great Recession, something was fundamentally wrong. The fact that nearly anyone can get a job isn’t much to celebrate if the only jobs available where you live are at Walmart or in an Amazon fulfilment center. When Trump told voters that the system was rigged against them, he tapped into a genuine and justifiable desire for something different…Of course, what he delivered was more wealth for the wealthy and more powerful for the powerful. If Democrats can’t turn that into an effective argument for change, they ought to be in a different business.”

Looking towards 2020, Social Security reform is an issue of concern for high-turnout senior voters. “Now in control of the House, Democrats have thrown their weight behind a measure that would extend and expand the program — largely by asking high earners to pony up, along with a gradual increase in the Social Security tax rate that applies to workers’ income,” reports Sarah O’Brien at cnbc.com. “More than 200 lawmakers, all Democrats, have signed onto the Social Security 2100 Act in the House. Introduced by Rep. John Larson, D-Connecticut, the bill would require that earnings above $400,000 be subject to the payroll tax that funds the program…Currently, earnings above a certain level — $132,900 for 2019 — are not subject to Social Security taxation. This means someone who makes $132,900 pays the same amount into the program as someone earning, say, $1 million…A recent poll conducted by The Senior Citizens League of its members explored what they thought the new Congress should focus on. Boosting Social Security benefits was cited by 42 percent, followed by reducing taxation of those benefits at 31 percent (reducing prescription drug prices came in third, at 18 percent).”

Bacon also flags new Gallup poll stats on political leanings of Democrats, which finds that “An average of 54 percent of white Democrats identified as politically “liberal” during the six-year period from 2013 to 2018, according to data released by Gallup this week. That compares with 38 percent of Latino Democrats and 33 percent of black Democrats. There was also variation by education level — Democrats with postgraduate degrees were the most likely to describe themselves as liberal (65 percent), followed by Democrats with undergraduate degrees (58 percent), those who attended college but don’t have degrees (45 percent) and those with high school educations or less (32 percent).”

No matter how well Sen. Bernie Sanders does in the Democratic presidential primaries ahead, he has  shaped the debate in his Party more than anyone else. At The Atlantic, Ronald Brownstein considers the strengths and weaknesses Sen. Bernie Sanders brings to the contest for the Democratic nomination in 2020, and writes “The biggest question for Sanders is whether he can expand the coalition that he mobilized in 2016—or even, in this enormous field, maintain the advantages he displayed last time. Sanders ran extremely well in 2016 with three groups. Young people topped the list: Sanders won most voters age 30 and younger in 25 of the 27 states with exit polls. Looking across the entire contest, he carried fully 71 percent of younger voters, according to a cumulative analysis of all 27 exit polls by CNN polling director Jennifer Agiesta. That was an even higher percentage than Barack Obama carried among younger voters in 2008…Sanders was also extremely strong with primary voters who identified as independents rather than partisan Democrats. He carried them in 24 of the 27 states with exit polls (losing them only in three southern states), and won nearly two-thirds of them overall in Agiesta’s cumulative analysis. He also ran very well among white men without a college degree—carrying slightly more than three-fifths of them overall—while posting a more modest advantage among their college-educated counterparts.” Brownstein also provides a detailed account of Sanders’s weaknesses.

It hasn’t made headlines because it’s a complicated story, but gradual changes in how the Democratic presidential nominating process is going to work were in my opinion worth an analysis at New York:

From the beginning of the modern era of popular control of the presidential nominating process (basically inaugurated in 1972) to very recently, the unrepresentative nature of the first two stops on the road to the presidency, the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses and the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary, was a chronic complaint. This was especially true for an increasingly diverse Democratic Party that nonetheless gave two small and very white states (as of the 2000 census, Iowa was 94 percent white and New Hampshire was 96 percent white) protected status as dominant factors in the nominating process.

After the 2004 cycle, Democrats (followed eventually by Republicans) got serious about this problem, and introduced calendar reforms that added two more diverse states — Latino-heavy Nevada and African-American–heavy South Carolina — to the early mix. Super-honkified Iowa and New Hampshire still got to go first, but nonwhite voters got to have a say before the whole deal was done. Indeed, Barack Obama’s successful nomination strategy combined an Iowa win with a dominant performance in southern states with large African-American voting populations, beginning with South Carolina. Hillary Clinton followed the same pattern in overcoming a terrible New Hampshire performance in 2016 by wins over Bernie Sanders in Nevada and South Carolina that put her ahead for good.

The 2020 nominating contest will represent a big leap forward in the development of a more diverse early calendar for Democrats, as Ron Brownstein explains:

“As in every recent Democrat primary race, the 2020 contest will begin in two virtually all-white states, with the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary in early February. But after that the next month of the primary calendar is dominated by states across the Sun Belt where non-white voters comprise a large share, and often an absolute majority, of the electorate.

“This decisive turn toward diversity, reinforced by California’s decision to move up its primary to Super Tuesday, represents a potentially critical new wrinkle in the nomination process. The pivot begins with Nevada and South Carolina, where contests will be held in the second half of February. The tilt toward diversity then explodes in early March when big Sun Belt states from Florida, North Carolina and Virginia in the southeast to Arizona and Texas along with California across the southwest will all crowd together on the calendar.”

This shift may actually be intensified by the fact that while Iowa and New Hampshire have never embraced early voting, their new competitors emphatically have, as my colleague Gabriel Debenedetti has pointed out:

“[S]trategists aligned with potential contenders’ teams are already starting to plan for 2020 by operating under the assumption that early voting in California — the state with the most delegates up for grabs — will start the very morning of Iowa’s evening caucuses, the traditional kickoff. (Vermont’s primary voting will have already begun by that point, if the current expected schedule holds.)

“Usually, all the attention then shifts to New Hampshire directly after Iowa. This time, though, Ohio and Illinois could both begin their own early voting before the Granite State’s day in the spotlight, and Georgia and North Carolina could start the day of New Hampshire’s primary. Then the windows could open in Tennessee, Texas, Arizona, and Louisiana before Nevada’s caucuses, let alone South Carolina’s primary.”

All these wrinkles are likely to reinforce nonwhite voting power, notes Brownstein:

“Through March 17, the Democratic candidates will face significant Latino populations in Texas and California on Super Tuesday and then Florida and Arizona on March 17 …

“Starting on Super Tuesday [March 3], large black populations will vote through mid-March in Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida and Illinois. In all of these states, minorities comprised at least about two-fifths of the 2018 vote, and they reached majority status in several of them, including Alabama, Mississippi, Florida and Texas. Given the overall trends in the party, Democratic strategists consider it likely that the nonwhite share of the vote in virtually all of these states will be higher in 2020 than it was in 2016.”

If that’s not enough diversity, New York may move its primary to March as well.

These dynamics will likely help candidates who really do well among nonwhite voters while hurting those who don’t. It could, as in 2008, put a minority candidate in the driver’s seat, though the fact that there are at this point a Latino (Julian Castro) and two African-American (Cory Booker and Kamala Harris) candidates could keep the nonwhite vote split up for a good while.

[T]he former longtime duopoly of Iowa and New Hampshire will still matter in 2020. But they’d do well to elevate candidates who are prepared to excel in the next very difference phase of the nominating process.

 

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

The story, as told by actual research, rather than the wishes of Republican operatives or the fears of Democratic activists, is simple: these laws just don’t have much effect. They don’t deter voter fraud, a minuscule problem to begin with, but they also don’t depress turnout, including among minority voters. This has been the great worry among Democrats, but it appears that, whatever the malign intent of GOP politicians–and it is certainly true that the drive for these laws has been highly partisan–depressed Democratic-leaning turnout has not been the result.

This means that if Republicans are attempting to shield themselves from the effects of demographic change and unpopular policies through voter ID laws, they are failing and will continue to fail. It also means that Democrats who blame election defeats on these laws are also probably kidding themselves. Their defeats, by and large, are due to other factors. If Democrats want to alter turnout patterns in their favor, it is likely far more important to concentrate on things like automatic voter registration than worrying about voter ID laws.

If you’re still skeptical, I invite you to read this lengthy piece on Vox that alludes to the latest study by Cantoni and Pons, as well as summarizes the previous literature. Vox, which tends to be exquisitely sensitive to issues around race, can hardly be accused of being predisposed to ignore racially-biased policy effects. In this case, to their credit, they have apparently decided that the data are the data.

“The study, from Enrico Cantoni at the University of Bologna and Vincent Pons at Harvard Business School, found that voter ID laws don’t decrease voter turnout, including that of minority voters. Nor do they have a detectable effect on voter fraud — which is extremely rare in the US, anyway.

The implication: Despite the legal and political battles over voter ID laws, they don’t really seem to do much of anything….[T]he findings join a growing body of research that suggests voter ID laws have a much smaller effect than critics feared and proponents hoped….

The researchers…looked at how the voter ID laws affected turnout and compared trends to states without voter ID laws from 2008 to 2016.

The results: Voter ID laws do not seem to decrease turnout, even when the data is broken down by race. This held when the data was analyzed in different ways, like evaluating only the effect of stricter laws that require an ID with a photo….

It’s good to be skeptical of single studies with surprising findings, but previous reviews of the research on voter ID laws are in line with what Cantoni and Pons’s study found.

In 2017, Benjamin Highton, a political scientist at UC Davis, conducted the most thorough review of the research yet on voter ID laws. He tried to filter out the studies with weaker methodologies, putting more emphasis on those that were more rigorous. His conclusion: The better studies “generally find modest, if any, turnout effects of voter identification laws.”

So, if you want higher turnout, including among poor and minority voters, get AVR passed and implemented in as many places as possible. Oh, and if you want Democrats to win, run smart, inspiring campaigns.

The following article by Jared Bernstein, senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and author of ‘The Reconnection Agenda: Reuniting Growth and Prosperity‘, provides important strategic thinking for Democrats. It is cross-posted from The Washington Post:

It is the nature of media, especially social media, to magnify differences. Articles and tweets that feature heated, internal squabbles capture many more eyeballs than those that sing some version of “Kumbaya.” And nuanced policy debates are way less sexy than political fights, anyway.

As the field of Democratic contenders for president grows, the relevance of these truths is coming into view. There’s a narrative forming that the candidates are too far to the left, given the centrism of the American electorate. The party is vulnerable, according to this rap, to the very accusations of socialism that Trump has been spouting. Related to this critique is the view that as more moderates enter the race, the major Democratic contenders will form a circular firing squad and benefit Trump.

Most of this narrative — though not all — is wrong.

Democrats are poised to have the very debates we need to have in this country. If they play this right, they will be doing the electorate and the nation a great service, one that can ultimately get the United States back on track. That’s no mean feat, given how far off the rails we’ve flown.

The best way to understand this debate is through the concept of a continuum, a line of options, going from moderate to very progressive. Consider, for example, health care, climate, jobs and taxes. In every case, the Democratic candidates are pointed in the same direction. Their broad, united themes are: (a) to vanquish Trump and Trumpism, including his culture of lies and corruption; (b) to restore a functional, amply funded federal government; and (c) to leverage that newly functioning government to meet the major challenges we face.

The most important insight about this dynamic, one that risks getting buried if the Democrats aren’t careful, is that you would need a high-powered electron microscope to see the difference among the Democrats, compared with the difference between them and the Republicans.

Look at each issue to see how this plays out.

Health care: Here, the Democratic field is uniformly in favor of increasing the role of government in providing access to affordable, quality health care. Republicans, conversely, want the reverse: to increase the market’s footprint and reduce the government’s role.

The differences among the Democrats boils down to whether to take an incremental approach that slowly winds toward universal coverage or one that gets there a lot faster. Candidates on the moderate end of the continuum (e.g., Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota) favor undoing the Trump administration’s sabotage of the Affordable Care Act, expanding Medicaid to more states and holding down private premiums through subsidies to insurers and purchasers in the exchanges. Moving toward the left, some candidates favor Medicare-for-more — say, through lowering the eligibility age or offering a public insurance option to many more people — or Medicare-for-all (a longtime goal of Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont).

Climate: The continuum here ranges from indirect incentives on the moderate end — raising the price of carbon through taxing it — to large, direct investments in green technology and the people and communities most vulnerable to the costs of climate change. One can find Republicans interested in carbon taxes, but the party is too financed by the fossil-fuel industry to go after climate change. GOP leadership remains in denial about the problem, actively undermining even the insufficient steps we’ve taken.

Jobs: At one end of the continuum are emerging proposals to provide time-limited, government-subsidized employment for narrowly targeted groups such as those with significant skill deficits or victims of discrimination (e.g., people with criminal records). At the other end is a guaranteed jobs program, providing gainful, permanent public-sector employment with decent wages and benefits to all comers (Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey has proposed such a pilot program). To my knowledge, there are no job programs of any type from Republicans. The most you’ll see is some hand-waving about jobs from an infrastructure plan — but there is no infrastructure plan.

Taxes: Once again, the differences between the parties could not be starker, and the commonalities between Democrats are strong: They all want to roll back some aspects of the Trump tax cuts and raise more revenue to support their initiatives. Though it’s still early, of course, a useful way to view the differences among Democrats is to note the distinction between broadening the tax base by closing loopholes vs. raising tax rates, including on income and wealth that goes untaxed. For example, expect more moderate Democrats to propose getting rid of the pass-through loophole that keeps tax rates low for hedge fund employees and expanding the share of families subject to the estate tax. The more progressive candidates will start there, but they’ll also go further, such as the tax Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) want sot impose the ultrawealthy.

Republicans, of course, want to preserve tax cuts for the wealthy, paid for by benefit cuts for the poor and middle class (usually rendered euphemistically as “entitlement reform”).

No one can reliably tell you where actual voters will line up on these within-group differences among Democrats. There clearly exists a lot of great energy around big, progressive changes, leavened by a lot of disenchantment with the old Republican-lite center-left. But whether more voters go for incrementalism or leapfrogging is to be seen.

Forthcoming debates must answer this question, but that won’t happen if Democratic primary candidates throw each other under the bus, or, more specifically, under Trump’s airplane.

I asked my friend Ron Klain, a veteran of many campaigns (and a Washington Post contributing columnist), about this potential pothole, and he summed it up well: “A debate about ideas is healthy, a debate about motives is not. The Democrats should hash out their differences in 2020 without slashing up one another — not casting aspirations on each other’s integrity, motivation or intentions. It is that latter path that creates an opening for Trump’s reelection in 2020.”

So let the debate about ideas begin. And let the social media hate-fest wither on the vine.

In “How Democrats Can Avoid Turning Their Presidential Primaries into a Circular Firing Squad” at The American Prospect, Steve Rosenthal offers four “Political Rules of Engagement,” which can help insure victory for Dems in 2020, including: Rule 1: Don’t try to stifle new ideas, new opinions, or new plans (“Trump, Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and some in the media are painting new ideas from the Democratic camp as “socialist” and “fringe.” They will suggest that the views of every single elected Democrat represents the views of the entire party. This will only work if Democrats take the bait, turn on each other, and, so to speak, eat their young.”); Rule 2: Democrats need a robust debate on the issues instead of misleading or attack ads aimed at tearing each other down (“any debate or opposition should be primarily about the issues, not about attacking each other’s character or running misleading ads to score political points. It’s unhelpful, its counterproductive, and voters see right through it.”); Rule 3: “The Two-for-One-Rule” (“If a candidate spoke negatively about an opponent, people in the audience could remind her or him of the “Two-for-One Rule,” thus compelling the candidate to then say two positive things about their opponent”); and Rule 4: Every Democratic candidate should sign a pledge that they will give their wholehearted support to whoever eventually wins the party’s nomination (“Every Democratic candidate who doesn’t win the nomination should campaign full-time for the party ticket in the fall, as if they were the nominee.”)

At FiveThirtyEight, Perry Bacon Jr. explains why “Elizabeth Warren’s Ideas Could Win The Democratic Primary — Even If She Doesn’t.” Bacon writes that “Warren is likely to be at the forefront of the “policy primary,”– the one-time Harvard professor is perhaps the wonkiest person in the field. And Warren knows how to push her ideas onto the national agenda quite well…The Massachusetts senator appears poised to serve as a progressive policy anchor in the 2020 Democratic field, pushing the field — and the eventual nominee — toward aggressively liberal policy stands…How might Warren have such influence? Because the Massachusetts senator is planning to release detailed and decidedly liberal policy proposals on issue after issue. Her rivals, if past primary campaigns are any guide, will feel pressure to either “match” her on policy by coming up with their own proposals, say that they agree with Warren, or convince the party’s increasingly left-leaning electorate that Warren’s proposals are too liberal.”

At CNN Politics, Grace Sparks reports that “New research from Gallup released Tuesday reveals the party is getting less white, more educated, less religious and progressively more liberal since 2001. Notably, the party’s liberal shift is mostly driven by white Democrats, while nonwhite Democrats make up a larger share of the moderate and conservative wings of the party…In the last six years, more than half of white Democrats, 54%, identified themselves as “liberal.” That’s a 20-point jump from the average in 2001-2006. By comparison, the percentage of Hispanic Democrats and black Democrats identifying as liberal grew 9 points and 8 points, respectively, in that same time frame…College-educated Democrats have long been more likely to identify as liberal than those without college degrees, and the percentage of Democrats who reported having a college education grew 17 points from 2001-2006 to 2013-2018…Those educated groups have grown increasingly liberal over lime, with the percentage of Democrats with college degrees who identify as liberal jumping 16 points from 2001-2006 to 2013-2018. The percentage of Democrats with post-graduate degrees identifying as liberal also jumped 13 points in that time frame, outpacing the growth among people with some college education (12 points) and no college education (10 points).”

“The nascent 2020 campaign is shaping up to be all about radical ideas on the left, with candidates looking toward a populist, progressive agenda that’s distinct from the centrist politics of previous election cycles,” reports Lydia DePillis at CNN Politics. “Already, Democratic presidential contenders have proposed everything from requiring worker representation on corporate boards to strongly discouraging stock buybacks, along with almost uniformly agreeing with the need to provide some kind of public option for healthcare and invest in a “Green New Deal” to fight climate change. Free college, which Sanders floated in 2016, has become a litmus test; and this week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren proposed introducing free childcare starting from birth…That means that, all of a sudden, the academics who’ve been quietly working on those ideas for years now are finding an eager audience. Take University of Georgia law professor Mehrsa Baradaran, who has long advocated for allowing the US Postal Service to function as a bank in order to create a public option for financial services — an idea USPS has indicated it would be open to pursuing.”

John Nichols writes at The Nation: “Just as there was in the 1930s, and in the 1960s, there is now an opening for the Democratic Party to fill a void in our politics and policy-making. But to fill that void, the party must be willing to embrace at least some ideas that have been labeled as “socialist”—and to maintain the embrace even when a Herbert Hoover or a Barry Goldwater or a Donald Trump attacks. Social Security was described as a “socialist” program, but FDR fought for and implemented it. Medicare was attacked as a “socialist” program, but LBJ fought for and implemented it. Major strides on behalf of racial justice, gender equity, disability rights, and environmental protection, to implement fair taxation and to provide a safety net, were often decried by the right as “socialist” initiatives—as backers of a Green New Deal are now learning—but, as these policies have been advanced, society has come to the point even centrists and some conservatives recognize their value.”

New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait has a salient comment on the Republicans’s resurrected Socialist Bogeyman: “Possible Democratic presidential nominees Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Beto O’Rourke have all explicitly disavowed the socialist label. Last year, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi bluntly told one questioner that the Democratic Party is capitalist…I am old enough to remember when Pelosi was the prototype of the far-left ideology that would make Democrats radioactive in swing districts. (That was less than three months ago.) It is actually a form of progress that the liberal bogeyman has been replaced by the socialist bogeyman. For one thing, it’s much easier for Democrats to triangulate against socialism than it was for them to triangulate against liberalism. Trump’s campaign has given Democrats an easy way to position themselves in the center. All they need to do is say they believe in a role for free markets and reject socialism.”

Also at New York, Ed Kilgore weighs in on the socialism vs. capitalism hoo-ha with another sobering observation: “No, the term “socialism” doesn’t strike fear into the hearts of Americans the way it did during the Cold War, and that’s a good thing for anyone who believes the promise of this country requires a less neurotically intense allergy to government activism in the national interest. But Democrats are making it clear that support for social democratic staples like single-payer health care or aggressive bank regulation are drawn from the practical needs of the citizenry, not perusal of dusty pamphlets from the early-20-century British Fabian Society or any other ideological template. Perhaps Sanders and AOC will yet make American politics safe for socialism writ large. But in the meantime, a progressive take on democratic capitalism is likely to prevail in the marketplace of ideas.”

Even as a kid growing up in Washington, D.C. in the wake of McCarthyism, I became aware that the Socialist Bogeyman was weaponized to bash liberals, smother free speech and destroy lives. Back then, many Republicans preferred to trot out the Communist Bogeyman, but today’s Republicans are mostly content to conflate the terms. My hunch is that most voters who would be receptive to such smear campaigns in 2020 are going to vote Republican anyway. One swing constituency I would worry some about is the estimated 120 million small business operators and their employees, some of whom may associate the term with high taxes and burdensome regulations. Small businessmen and women have much to gain from being relieved of health insurance headaches by a more accessible government alternative, and that’s a net plus for Democrats. But it might help if Dems offered them some additional tax incentives and relief from over-regulation. It can’t hurt to make the Democractic ‘brand’ more small business-friendly in any case.

Kevin Drum reports that “North Carolina Vote Fraud Case Takes a Dramatic Turn Against Republican Candidate” at Mother Jones. Drum notes that “Mark Harris, the Republican candidate in North Carolina’s 9th district, has a son. And that son, John Harris, is an attorney. Not just any attorney, either: he’s an assistant US attorney in the Eastern District of North Carolina. Today he testified about McCrae Dowless, the campaign operative hired by his father to get out the Republican vote: …First in a phone call and then in subsequent emails, the younger Harris warned his father of both political and legal ramifications of hiring Dowless….He spoke to his parents on April 7, 2017, a day after the candidate met with Dowless. “I told him that collecting absentee ballots was a felony,” John Harris said, “and I would send him the statute that collecting ballots was a felony.”…This certainly seems to change things from “poor Mark Harris was duped by McRae Dowless” to “Mark Harris knowingly hired a guy to perform ballot harvesting.” Stay tuned.”

I’ve written about this issue before, but with the presidential field now forming, it’s time to get serious about it, as I argued at New York:

With Bernie Sanders’s announcement of a 2020 presidential candidacy, we know for sure that there will be at least one aspirant for the job who would turn 80 during his first term in office. He’s the second septuagenarian to enter the race, counting the 72-year-old incumbent, though Elizabeth Warren will turn 70 this summer. And the field could soon include another candidate who would have an 80-candle birthday cake in the White House, Joe Biden (a little over a year younger than Sanders).

Will our budding gerontocracy be an issue during the nominating or general election stages of the 2020 campaign?

[F]ans of Biden and Sanders tend to brush off questions about their heroes’ ages by denouncing ageism, touting their vigor as compared to the junk-food-loving and sedentary Trump, or pointing at each other (if Biden can run, so can Bernie, and vice versa). But it was an issue in the presidential campaigns of the two nonincumbent septuagenarian major-party nominees before Trump (Bob Dole in 1996 and John McCain in 2008 — both younger than Biden and Sanders will be in 2020), whose other unusual features overshadowed his age. So it cannot just be waved away as somehow irrelevant.

Presumably the younger Democratic rivals of Biden and Sanders will bring up the age issue indirectly by drawing attention to their own relative youth and/or their appeal to younger voters (though it will be tough for any of them to do better among younger voters than Sanders did in 2016). But the most destructive way it could arise, especially in the general election campaign in which no vulnerability will go unexploited, would be via a negative health event or some incident suggesting a “senior moment” or some more serious cognitive issue.

Do Democrats really want to take that chance given the existential threat of a second Trump term? And conversely, could they find significant value in a situation where it’s Trump and Trump alone who is vulnerable to age-related voter concerns? Is that a potential advantage that should be casually tossed away?

These are certainly factors that ought to be taken into consideration along with current horse-race polling and other candidate assessments that don’t take terrifying if marginally likely possibilities into account. Democrats have the luxury in 2020 of a vast field of qualified candidates with platforms ranging across the ideological spectrum; it’s doubtful there’s any one candidate who is indispensable. Perhaps testing the upward limit of an intangible maximum age for running for president is worth the risk in order to beat Trump soundly or reward Biden or Sanders for past service. But dismissing the risk involved is plain foolish.