Andrew Levison Memo: Modern-day “Class Consciousness” and “Class Resentment”

Warning Democrats: Some Campaign Tactics Actually Lose Votes

Democrats’ Critical Challenge: Seeing the World Through Red State Eyes

Candidates: Start Planning Now For The Day After Elections.

The following article by Christopher R. Martin, author of the forthcoming “The Invisible Worker: How the News Media Lost Sight of the American Working Class” and professor of Communication Studies and Digital Journalism at the University of Northern Iowa, is cross-posted from Working-Class Perspectives:

My home state of Iowa famously gave Barack Obama a convincing victory in the Democratic caucuses in 2008, the first triumph that launched a young U.S. senator from Illinois to become the first African-American president. Obama ultimately won two terms, and each time Iowans favored him by considerable margins. Iowa was also one of several Midwestern states that famously flipped to support Donald Trump in 2016.

Hillary Clinton won just six of Iowa’s 99 counties in 2016. Trump won the remaining 93, including 31 counties that had backed Obama in the two previous elections. Nationwide, 206 counties in 34 states voted for Obama in both 2008 and 2012 and then flipped for Trump in 2016. Iowa had more than any other state, with 31 pivot counties out of 99. This makes Iowa a useful microcosm to analyze the nature of Trump’s victory. Did Trump win,  as the New York Times’s Nate Cohn reported, because of  “an enormous wave of support among white working-class voters”? Or were there other factors in play?

Cohn’s claim doesn’t seem to apply for Iowa. Only 17 of Iowa’s 31 pivot counties had higher turnout compared to 2012. In 14, turnout declined.  In addition, most of the increases were small — less than one percentage point. Overall – and this must bring him great angst – Trump won Iowa with fewer statewide votes than Obama had in either of his election victories. So, if there was “an enormous wave of support among white working-class voters,” then the wave was not caused by a mass of new people jumping in the pool. It was more like most of the same people wading from one side of the pool to the other.

But Trump did win support in more working-class rural counties. As in the national election, Clinton did much better than Trump in large metropolitan areas, winning just six counties, all among the state’s most populous. All but one of the pivot counties were rural, with populations of 87,000 or less and not among the top 10 of Iowa’s largest counties. It’s clear that the urban-rural divide was a salient element in the Iowa campaign, a pattern similar to what political scientist Katherine Cramer discovered in the adjacent state of Wisconsin (see  her 2016 book The Politics of Resentment).

The urban-rural divide is also a class divide, reflected in income and education. Iowa’s estimated per capita income in 2016 was $28,872, but per capita income is less than that in 77 counties, and Trump won in 75 of them, 28 of which were pivot counties. Clinton won in four of the six urban Iowa counties with higher per capita income. The pattern is similar for education.  25.7 percent of Iowans have a bachelor’s degree or higher, and only 11 of Iowa’s 99 counties have higher rates of citizens with a bachelor’s degree. Hillary Clinton won five of those counties. Of the 31 pivot counties, 27 have lower rates of higher education. In other words,  Clinton’s only successes in Iowa were in six major metro counties with higher levels of income and education. Trump won every other county in the state.

Considering the urban-rural status, income, and college education rates of the counties that pivoted to Trump in 2016, Cramer’s idea of rural consciousness seems apt, with its “strong identity as a rural resident, resentment toward the cities, and a belief that rural communities are not given their fair share of resources or respect.” Resources and development in Iowa are increasingly unequal, with most affluence located in Iowa’s two large multi-county metropolitan areas. In the center of the state, Polk and Story Counties run along the I-35 corridor, creating a large metro area that stretches from Ames and Iowa State University in the north to Des Moines and its many suburbs in the south. Similarly, in the eastern part of the state, Linn and Johnson Counties along the I-380 corridor form a district that stretches from Cedar Rapids and its suburbs in the north to Iowa City and the University of Iowa in the south. These “corridors” (and they do market themselves that way) are the wealthiest, most populous, and fastest growing regions of the state, with plenty of government-funded institutions and research, headquarters of the largest corporations, excellent hospitals, and the state’s best sports, recreation, and shopping. These are the areas where Clinton won the most support.

Life can be quite different in Iowa’s more rural counties, where population is falling, school districts get consolidated (so towns may no longer have local schools), access to doctors and quality hospitals lags, new investment is rare, and young adults often move to places like Des Moines or Iowa City to find better jobs. Away from the corridors, the lived experience of personal income, higher education, and the long-term hope for opportunity and prosperity for the majority of Iowa’s rural counties is on a much more feeble trajectory.

These areas, where Trump won, were primed to embrace the rhetoric of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements, which  called for drastic change to the economic status quo. If a very unlikely presidential candidate – one made famous by playing the role of super-successful billionaire in a network reality television show and countless movie cameos – shows up and said says to the “forgotten men and women of our country” that “I AM YOUR VOICE,” residents of these areas might well listen to him, despite (or in some cases because) of his lack of experience and subtle racism and misogyny. Trump went all in on the Tea Party discourse and wore the mantle of change.

In comparison,  Clinton’s words about the economy were vague, spare, and unremarkable. In her victory speech late on the night of the Iowa caucus, she said “I know what we are capable of doing, I know we can create more good-paying jobs and raise incomes for hard-working Americans again.” Although Clinton narrowly won the Democratic nomination in 2016, her message of incremental reforms did not give her resounding victories in Iowa and other important states. On caucus night, Bernie Sanders, the change candidate (like Obama before him) spoke directly to those who felt alienated by politics-as-usual: “What Iowa has begun tonight is a political revolution.” Sanders’s rhetoric might have attracted more of Iowa’s rural voters, but he wasn’t on the general election ballot November.

Of course, rhetoric might win elections, but results matter afterward. So far, Trump’s appointment of Supreme Court justices may thrill conservative Iowans, but his trade war is already hurting Iowa’s agricultural exports, and he continues to undermine other things Iowa voters care about, including health care coverage, funding for education, infrastructure development, and well-paying jobs. Iowa may pivot again in 2018 and 2020. Recent Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Polls have found that Iowans favor Democrats for Congress in 2018, and that 68 percent of Iowans will “definitely vote for another candidate” or consider doing so in the 2020 presidential election. To win back the pivot county voters, Democratic candidates will need to connect with issues to rural voters. It is a message already received by the six Democratic candidates for Iowa governor, who made rural outreach a priority. Democratic Congressional and presidential candidates should take note.

E. J. Dionne, Jr.’s syndicated column, “The centrist heavenly chorus is off-key”  notes, “Among the myths that can steer us off course in the Trump era, three are particularly popular. First, that political polarization is primarily a product of how elites behave and not the result of real divisions in our country. Second, that a vast group of party-loathing independents can be mobilized by anti-partisan messages. Third, that Republicans and Democrats are becoming increasingly and equally extreme, so they should be scolded equally…All these pious wishes are false, as Alan I. Abramowitz’s latest book, “The Great Alignment: Race, Party Transformation, and the Rise of Donald Trump,” makes clear. He provides a wealth of data in a compact package…As Abramowitz shows, most people who identify as independents lean toward one party or the other…Factoring out independents who tilt toward a party, “only about 12 percent of Americans have fallen into the ‘pure independent’ category, and these people are much less interested in politics and much less likely to vote than independent leaners.” Independents are plainly not some magical force that will call into being that centrist third party that looms so large in the imaginations of many pundits and fundraisers…Abramowitz’s data make clear that the two sides are not equivalent. Republicans have moved significantly further to the right than Democrats have moved to the left.”

From “Midterm Election Winners Could Determine Medicaid’s Future” at aarp.org: “For 53 years, Medicaid has served as a safety net for millions of people who needed assistance as their ability to care for themselves declined. In 2010, Medicaid’s health care role grew with the passage of the Affordable Care Act, which called for the expansion of health coverage to more low-income families. So far, 33 states and Washington, D.C., have expanded the program…Seventy-four percent of Americans have a favorable view of Medicaid, according to a February tracking poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF). That may be due to Medicaid’s long reach. For example, the program covers 6 in 10 nursing home residents in America, a KFF report shows…Several states (including Utah, Nebraska and Idaho) may have proposals for Medicaid expansion on their ballots this fall…Whoever is elected as governor or to the state legislature could well determine whether a state revisits the issue.”

Jeffrey Peck’s op-ed, “No more softball, Senate. Ask Trump’s Supreme Court pick these questions” at The Washington Post provides a pretty good checklist of questions. Peck, a former general counsel and staff director of the Senate Judiciary Committee, writes: “The Bork, Kennedy and Souter hearings tell us that questions such as the following can and should be asked — and answered:…Do you believe the Constitution recognizes a right to privacy under the due process clause of the 14th Amendment? Is Griswold v. Connecticut, in which the court embraced this right, settled law?…Do you agree with Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. — whose seat Kennedy took — who wrote in Moore v. East Cleveland, “Freedom of personal choice in matters of marriage and family life is one of the liberties protected by the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment”? Do you consider it a “fundamental” liberty such that the government may interfere only for extraordinary reasons?…What factors would you weigh in determining whether a prior decision by the Supreme Court is settled law? Is Brown v. Board of Education settled law? How would you determine whether Roe v. Wade is settled law?…What is your understanding of “one person, one vote” under the 14th Amendment and its relation to state gerrymandering practices?…What examples would you cite of proper limits on the assertion of executive power by the president?” Feel free to add a couple of questions clarifying the nominee’s views on Citizens United and the right to join and organize labor unions. “Let’s have real hearings with enlightening discussion, not fake ones with vapid cliches,” concludes Peck. “The American people are entitled to know whether fundamental rights and liberties will be maintained, constrained or eviscerated.”

Don’t get too swayed by media drama about tonight’s hyped-up reveal of Trump’s SCOTUS nominee, advises Ed Kilgore: “You’d be wise to tell yourself “Don’t believe the hype.” The most convincing indications are that Trump is determined to keep the world in suspense about this fateful decision before revealing it Monday night on live TV in an approximation of the reality-show format he mastered long before running for president. It is, after all, what he did in naming his first SCOTUS nominee, Neil Gorsuch, in 2017, a process that avoided the usual chronic Trump White House leaks and involved some deliberate misdirection..it’s not just a matter of Trump repeating last year’s PR success: the less lead time media folk have to obsess about the actual nominee, the more the focus stays on Trump himself. And that’s how the 45th president likes it.”

“Globalization is an omelet that cannot be unscrambled,” writes Jared Bernstein at Post Everything Perspective. “That doesn’t mean that it’s all sunny-side up. Many people and communities have been hurt by exposure to trade, especially American-style, unbalanced trade, with little social policy to offset the losses of those thrown into competition with workers earning much lower wages. In fact, the denial of trade-induced wage and job losses by center-left-to-right-wing politicians was something Trump skillfully tapped during the 2016 campaign, enabling him to vanquish opponents who implicitly argued that Rust Belt voters simply weren’t smart enough to realize how much “free trade” has helped them…But the globalization omelet means that Trump’s tariffs won’t work. Why not? Because they target so many inputs into American production (“intermediate” and capital goods) and threaten, through retaliatory actions, lucrative international supply chains tapped by American exporters (follow the money soybeans). They will hurt more Americans than they will help, and, in most cases, the economics of replacing imported goods with domestic content won’t make economic sense. As Paul Krugman put it, “What’s notable about the Trump tariffs … is that they’re so self-destructive.”..It’s bad enough that team Trump doesn’t do anything to help those hurt by trade. Now, it is enacting policies that will hurt those helped by trade. They promised win-win; they’re delivering lose-lose.”

Instead, Bernstein recommends, “Two straightforward policies would help our exporters: Fight back against exchange rate manipulation and seriously beef up the Manufacturing Extension Partnership. The former levels the playing field by taking action against countries that buy dollars to make our exports expensive in their currency and their exports to us cheaper in dollars. The MEP, which Trump zeroes out in his budget, is a Commerce Department agency that can help small manufacturers get a regional foothold and even find their way into global supply chains…To help the people and communities hurt by trade, we must invest some of the benefits of expanded trade into places where our persistent trade deficits and job outsourcing have undermined opportunities. In fact, this is entirely consistent with the rationale for expanded trade, even if it is largely forgotten by its contemporary proponents. These investments should take the form of direct job creation, significant wage subsidies, training for new jobs, infrastructure investment, and what economist Tim Bartik describes as “life-cycle skill development, including high-quality child care, high-quality preschool, K-12 education, college scholarships, and adult job training.” As he puts it: “better skills for local workers help attract and grow higher-wage jobs.”

At The Monkey Cage, “This might be the way to prove partisan gerrymandering, according to the new Supreme Court standard” by Bernard Grofman sheds light on the “successful challenges will not mean a whole state’s map must be redrawn. Rather, they will affect only a relative handful of districts — with some spillover effects, as adjacent districts will need to be redrawn…Partisan gerrymandering opponents will have to come up with different types of evidence than they presented in these two cases. In these cases, expert evidence on partisan gerrymandering has involved statistical evidence about the effects of the plan as a whole, especially as compared with a politically neutral districting process. However, in two other states, Maryland and Michigan, partisan gerrymandering challenges are already being considered that involve allegations of packing or cracking in particular districts ..Packing means concentrating one party’s backers in just a few districts, so they win by overwhelming margins. Cracking means dividing a party’s supporters among several districts so that party has a harder time winning a majority in each one. There are other tools, such as separating minority-party incumbents from their previous supporters…Here’s the problem: If evidence about gerrymandering must be district-specific, it will be necessary to identify exactly which districts were (unconstitutionally) cracked and which were (unconstitutionally) packed. That is not easy.”

For a deeper dive into the politics of partisan gerrymandering, check out at The Princeton Election Consortium’s research project on the problem. “We are engaged in nonpartisan analysis to help understand the causes of partisan gerrymandering, and develop tools to fix it through court action and through citizen-led reform efforts. For example, our amicus brief in one of this year’s Supreme Court cases was used by the Court in their decision in Gill v. Whitford. To learn more about that analysis, which can be applied on a state-by-state basis, watch our great explainer video. For a deep dive into why partisan gerrymandering has soared, see our piece in The American Prospect…We’re also taking the analysis to a local level. State supreme courts, citizen initiatives, and new laws can establish procedures and limits in ways that are specific to a state’s special circumstances. Understanding the connection between proposed laws and actual outcomes will require careful analysis and a major data-gathering effort.”

Karen Nussbaum’s article, “Rebuilding the Working Class” at Dissent magazine provides some important insights Democrats ought to take into account in shaping both short and long-term strategy.

Nussbaum, a founder and board member of Working America, AFL-CIO, argues that “two generations of a falling standard of living and quality of life for most working people have led them to believe that politicians just aren’t that into them. These voters are dropping out of the political process or swinging erratically between the parties in elections as they try to find someone who will “shake things up.” Democrats who are giddy at the prospect of a wave election will be disappointed if they fail to understand what happened in 2016 and the need to do things differently this year.” Further,

Unless Democrats promote real solutions to the economic problems faced by working families and communities, they won’t win in states where a significant number of white working-class voters are needed for a majority. Even the highest projections for Democratic turnout in the key battleground states of Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan can only be achieved by persuading swing voters that Democrats have at least credible, and at best, inspiring solutions to their problems. The challenge for Democrats is not just winning the 2018 election—it is radically changing how voters perceive government, politics, and the priorities of parties in order to win them over in the long run. This can only be done by addressing their real concerns and opening dialogue across the divisions of race and immigrant status.

I believe such a realignment is possible. This belief is based on the last fifteen years of organizing in working-class communities by Working America, the community affiliate of the AFL-CIO that I helped found in 2003. Our door-to-door organizers have had more than 12 million conversations, 80 percent of which have been with white working-class moderates across the country. Our three million members are not in unions, and 90 percent of our email subscribers don’t show up on the list of any other progressive organization.

For Democrats to win these voters over is not a simple task. Working America’s organizers have encountered racism, sexism, and anti-immigrant bias that is more overt and pointed today than we have ever seen. But by focusing on economic issues, organizers have been able to establish common ground and can help bridge social divides through ongoing engagement with voters.

Since the 2016 election, we’ve talked with 300,000 voters to understand their attitudes, concerns, sources of information, and what approaches and arguments they find persuasive…

Nussbaum shares a number of revealing insights gleaned from interviews with working-class voters of all races in the study. She notes also that “The Democratic Party, over the last two generations, failed to make a priority of addressing the forces that were destroying working-class communities, such as outsourcing, privatization, assaults on union rights, and the collapse of good, stable jobs.” In addition,

We heard the fear and frustration in the fall of 2015, and understood then that Trump was a real threat. At the time, half of the likely swing voters in Ohio and Pennsylvania we talked with hadn’t yet chosen a candidate. But of those who had, a startling 38 percent supported Trump, more than the total for Clinton and Sanders combined. And one out of four Democrats preferred Trump too.

When asked why they supported him, only one out of ten voters named an issue; the rest cited a personal characteristic, with nearly half saying “he speaks his mind.” A strong core of Trump’s support came from Republicans—after all, a third of voters in this country are conservative. But he also attracted fed-up voters who were ready to burn the house down. One male voter from Beaver County, Pennsylvania, said, “They’re all crooks and liars. Can’t trust any of them.” This undertow withstood all the ripples of the Trump campaign—Russia, the Access Hollywood tape, his conflicts of interest. His narrow victory in 2016 was the result.

However, Nussbaum writes, “Simply defeating Trump in 2018 won’t fix what’s broken. The country may be highly polarized around Trump himself, but that doesn’t necessarily mean these voters care much for Democrats. Our field leaders report a strong shift away from party identification both in Trump country and in urban communities.” However,

But the ideological chaos Trump has sown allows Wall Street and corporate elites to obscure their outsized role in shaping the U.S. economy. As a result, almost 70 percent of people across racial lines say that politicians, not corporations, are responsible for the state of the economy. Only 10 percent of the people we talked to blamed Wall Street and corporations. About the same number blamed lazy people or society for the economy. The mutually reinforcing relationship between political power and the distribution of wealth remains hidden in plain sight.

Nussbaum notes that, “But about half of the swing voters we spoke to were willing to support politicians who took their economic problems seriously…As David Leonhardt recently wrote in the New York Times, “The best debate for Democrats is one that keeps reminding white working-class voters that they’re working class. It’s a debate about Medicare, Medicaid, tax, or Wall Street. The worst debate is one that keeps reminding these voters that they’re white.”

Nussbaum offers some hope for a restoration of the labor movement, noting that “class is making a comeback. Union favorability is the highest it’s been in fifteen years, at 61 percent according to Gallup.” But bold leadership is required:

To reach swing voters, the solution is to go left. Our conversations reveal that working-class voters across racial lines, including Trump supporters, endorse an economic agenda that benefits working people and are looking for politicians who show up and fight for it.

We talked with likely midterm voters about eleven public policies designed to address economic and public health concerns. Trump voters supported most of the policies. Two-thirds or more supported policies on outsourcing, the opioid crisis, paid family leave. A majority supported expanding overtime, paid sick days, and ending employee misclassification, and nearly half supported making it easier to unionize.

…We compared priorities and concerns across race, talking with black, white, and Hispanic voters and found surprising agreement on their priorities. All three groups identify jobs/economy and healthcare as their top two issues. But they don’t see convincing champions. Some respond to the economic stresses they face by not voting at all, while others split their votes or switch parties.

However, “A laundry list of policies isn’t good enough. A higher minimum wage and paid leave have been thrillingly successful fights, but they don’t reach the depths of the problems faced by so many…People want politicians to address the enormity of the jobs crisis or at least look like they’re really trying, with policies such as massive public investment in infrastructure tied to community-based training and hiring programs, economic development plans for stressed rural and inner-city communities, living wages and benefits for all public and publicly supported jobs, and the like.”

Nussbaum shares heartfelt testimony of workers who want to see passionate commitment from candidates who are genuinely comitted to better living standards for working people, and who deeply appreciate those who take the trouble to com to their communities and talk about their concerns.

See sees unions as the institutions that are best-positioned to address the critical priorities of working families, and adds:

That role used to be played by people you knew in civic organizations, your church, or most importantly, a union. Unions bear some responsibility for their loss of membership and power and many are making important internal changes to address these problems, such as undertaking comprehensive member education and engagement efforts, developing new approaches to organizing and representation, and cultivating an independent political voice. But the attack on unions and their decline hurts workers, progressives, and Democrats grievously.

Unions remain the backbone of a class-based progressive movement. In 2016, they contributed $150 million to elections and reaching voters, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

They have an unparalleled infrastructure, with 40,000 local organizations around the country, lobbyists at every level of government, and tens of millions of dollars in direct grants to nonprofit worker-advocacy and research organizations every year. “Even in their diminished state, unions still provide a significant amount of the money, organization, political power, and stability that fuel progressive life,” writes long-time unionist Kim Fellner. “That’s why the right hates them. But they also don’t get much love from the left, which demands a level of ideological purity that unions, with a much broader constituency, can seldom attain.” Weaker unions lead to fewer votes for Democrats. A recent analysis finds that right-to-work laws decreased Democratic presidential vote share by 3.5 percent. Turnout is also 2 to 3 percentage points lower in right-to-work counties after those laws pass.

“Perhaps the most important consequence of union decline,” writes Nussbaum, “is that fewer Americans have direct experience with collective power.” Nussbaum sees “trusted messengers” as a pivotal element of political success for Democrats. “It’s those trusted messengers—co-workers, neighbors, and organizers—who can also begin to tackle our frightening social divisions today. Our diverse team of canvas organizers has encountered racism, sexism, and xenophobia at the door.”

Nussbaum shares her and her co-worker’s revealing experience canvassing in Virginia’s recent elections, and how they leveraged Medicaid expansion in their canvassing, as a shared priority of diverse working-class voters, which helped build solidarity. Their pivotal  efforts were credited by independent analysts with increasing the Democratic vote and contributing to Northam’s impressive victory in the Governor’s race. They have also had a positive impact in Conor Lamb’s congressional victory in PA and steate legislative races.

Do read Nussbaum’s Dissent article for a more detailed account of the impressive leadership of Working America in raising class consciousness to win elections. Democratic campaigns that learn their lessons and apply their strategies should be able to improve their support among diverse communities of working-class voters.

After hearing and reading many Republican efforts to lower the stakes involved in the choice of a replacement for Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court, I offered this cautionary analysis at New York:

As Washington, D.C., girds its loins for the biggest Supreme Court confirmation fight since 1991 (when the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill saga riveted the country), conservatives are already working overtime to lull progressives to sleep by claiming fears a Kennedy replacement would help form a five-justice bloc ready to unravel abortion rights are exaggerated. The Wall Street Journal editorial board is offering the template for other “nothing to see here” takes:

“[T]he predictions of doom for abortion … rights began within minutes of Anthony Kennedy’s resignation last week. These predictions are almost certainly wrong.

“[T]his is what Democrats and their media allies always say. They said it in 1987 when Justice Kennedy was nominated. They said it in 1990 about David Souter, again about Clarence Thomas in 1991, John Roberts and Samuel Alito in 2005, and Neil Gorsuch in 2017. They even claimed the Chief Justice might overturn Roe because his wife is a Roman Catholic. Mrs. Roberts is still waiting to write her first opinion.”

Actually, “they” didn’t say that about Roberts or Alito or Gorsuch. Yes, the likelihood that these nominees would someday take advantage of the opportunity to overturn or greatly modify Roe v. Wade were factors in the debates over their confirmation, but nobody argued abortion rights were in imminent danger from placing any of them individually on the Court. During the period when Kennedy and Souter and Thomas joined the Court, there was every reason to fear that abortion rights were fragile, until Souter and Kennedy (along with Reagan nominee Sandra Day O’Connor) formed a new if narrow majority in the 1992 decision in Casey v. Planned Parenthood.

It is no exaggeration to say that the current era of conservative judicial politics really began with backlash against the “perfidy” of Republican-appointed justices like Souter and Kennedy and O’Connor in reinforcing abortion rights. That is why Donald Trump won so much conservative street cred by creating an official, exclusive list of SCOTUS prospects that would be vetted by the fiercely anti-Roe legal activists of the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation. Here’s how legal journalist Jeffrey Toobin described the views of chief Trump judge-vetter Leonard Leo, who is on leave from the Federalist Society:

“According to Leo, the vast majority of abortions are a consequence of voluntary, consensual sexual encounters, an opinion that influences his view of the procedure.’We can have a debate about abortion,” he told me. “It’s a very simple one for me. It’s an act of force. It’s a threat to human life. It’s just that simple …’

“As Edward Whelan, a prominent conservative legal activist and blogger, wrote recently, ‘No one has been more dedicated to the enterprise of building a Supreme Court that will overturn Roe v. Wade than the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo.'”

The odds of a secret supporter of abortion rights sneaking through a process that leads from Leo to Trump (who promised explicitly to produce a Court that would overturn Roe) are more than zero, but they are extremely low.

Like some other naysayers about the threat to Roe, the Journal editorial places a lot of stock in conservative respect for judicial precedents:

“The liberal line is always that Roe hangs by a judicial thread, and one more conservative Justice will doom it. Yet Roe still stands after nearly five decades. Our guess is that this will be true even if President Trump nominates another Justice Gorsuch. The reason is the power of stare decisis (or precedent), and how conservatives view the role of the Court in supporting the credibility of the law.”

Roe’s survival has in fact become steadily less, not more, certain, for the very simple reason that over the years one of America’s two national political parties has been completely taken over by politicians who want to see it reversed. The once-robust tribe of pro-choice Republicans is about to become extinct in the U.S. House, and is limited to two senators. The official position of the GOP as expressed in its national party platform goes far, far beyond reversing Roe and embraces enshrining fetal personhood in the U.S. Constitution. Now we have a Republican president whose relationship with conservative activists and particularly to white conservative Evangelicals depends heavily on an agreement to conduct a counter-revolution on the Court, a Republican Senate, and a judicial selection system created to root out constitutional heresy. Yet the Journal would have us believe it just won’t happen because it hasn’t happened yet.

Yes, it’s true the post-Kennedy Court with a second Trump justice might not overturn Roe and Casey immediately. They certainly don’t have to go the whole hog in order to significantly restrict abortion rights. The truth is that the Court experienced another key inflection point in 2016 in the Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt case in which Kennedy was one of five justices who headed off a massive wave of TRAP (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers) laws being enacted by Republican-controlled state legislatures. A new justice replacing Kennedy could instantly form a majority ready to give a green light to state laws that could make the theoretical right to an abortion a dead letter in many red states with abortion clinics being run out of business. To look at it another way, runaway TRAP laws (justified by spurious health requirements) could create a practical situation much like the pre-Roe environment, when women needed the means to travel to more liberal states to secure an abortion.

Still, the possibility of a full reversal of Roe — at once or in stages — should not be underestimated. Yes, stare decisis (the judicial principle of respect for Supreme Court precedents) will complicate the process, but it’s hardly a straitjacket once a majority decides to overturn a precedent believed to be wrongly decided. As even the Journal notes, the Court just got through overturning a 40-year precedent in the Janus v. AFSCME labor case. Conservative justices, moreover, have in recent years arguably transformed constitutional law on a host of subjects ranging from campaign finance to voting rights to regulation of businesses. Even the Roberts Court’s most famous decision that disappointed conservatives, the NFIB v. Sebelius case on Obamacare, reversed decades of Commerce Clause precedents.

The reality is that conservatives have grown used to hiding the ball on Roe v. Wade and abortion policy — a habit that parallels the old (and still enduring) claim of Confederate apologists that the Lost Cause was about states’ rights rather than slavery. Democrats shouldn’t buy one any more than the other.

Addressing the SCOTUS fight, Eric Levitz notes at New York Magazine that “Fortunately for Democrats, the arguments that could ostensibly sway Collins and Murkowski are roughly the same as those that the party wishes to disseminate to female swing voters in suburban congressional districts this fall: Supporting the Republican Party is a threat to your health, and every woman’s reproductive autonomy….Whether that message will do more for the Democrats than a high-profile fight over Kennedy’s replacement will do for GOP turnout is unknowable…The Democratic Party’s initial turnout advantage derived from its base’s eagerness to rectify a traumatic loss — and the Republican base’s complacency, in the face of triumph. In all likelihood, Kennedy’s replacement will be confirmed more than a month before the midterms. Conservatives will have locked in a far-right majority; liberals will be reeling from nightmare visions of Roe’s imminent demise. It isn’t hard to see how such circumstances could exacerbate the GOP’s turnout problem, rather than mitigating it….In the first generic ballot poll taken after Kennedy’s retirement, Quinnipiac University puts the Democratic lead at nine percentage points — three points higher than it was in early June.”

Although Democrats failed to prevent the enactment of one of the largest transfers of wealth from working Americans to the already-rich in history, a.k.a. the Republican tax bill, Dems do have an opportunity to make it a potent election issue.  As Seth Hanlon writes in “How the Tax Act Embodies the Republican Culture of Corruption” at The American Prospect, “Last year, Gallup found that 63 percent of Americans believed that upper-income Americans pay too little in taxes, and 67 percent believed that corporations pay too little. Last fall, as the tax push began to heat up, more than twice as many Americans wanted to raise tax rates on large businesses and corporations as Americans who wanted to lower them. Even most Republicans wanted to either raise corporate tax rates or keep them where they were. These preferences are not terribly surprising at a time when both after-tax corporate profits and inequality are at record highs…The end result was a tax law that, by slashing corporate taxes, imposing a broad-based tax increase on individuals, and sabotaging the health-care system, produces shocking results in the long term: By 2027, 83 percent of the benefits flow to the top 1 percent, while most households actually see their taxes go up. Only a political system deeply corrupted by corporate political spending could have produced such a result.”

Medicaid expansion is a leading midterm issue in Georgia and other states where Republicans have obstructed it. At The Upshot, Aaron E. Carroll, a professor of pediatrics at Indiana University School of Medicine who blogs on health research and policy at The Incidental Economist, provides an update, “Finally, Some Answers on the Effects of Medicaid Expansion,”which Democratic campaigns in these states may find of interest: “Since the start of Medicaid expansion, 77 studies, most of them quasi-experimental in design, have been published. They include 440 distinct analyses. More than 60 percent of them found a significant effect of the Medicaid expansion that was consistent with the goals of the Affordable Care Act…Only 4 percent reported findings that showed the Medicaid expansion had a negative effect, and 35 percent reported no significant findings…After the Medicaid expansion, insurance coverage improved and the use of health services increased…The evidence to date is — if anything — positive. As Olena Mazurenko, the lead author of the systematic review, wrote to me, “With dozens of scientific analyses spanning multiple years, the best evidence we currently have suggests that Medicaid expansion greatly improved access to care, generally improved quality of care, and to a lesser degree, positively affected people’s health.”

I agree with the argument that the Democratic midterm elections strategy can’t be all about Trump. At the same time, however, it can’t not be about Trump to some extent, given the congressional Republicans support of his worst policies and the statistical relationship between presidential approval rates and midterm election outcomes. All of which makes Pulitzer Prize winner David K. Johnston’s New York Times article, “How to Make Trump’s Tax Returns Public” of extra interest. Johnston writes of obtaining Trump’s tax returns, “The attorney general could, however, easily gain that authority. All that’s needed is for Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the New York State Police or the state Department of Taxation and Finance to make a request, and the authority would be granted to her…A state or county criminal investigation that begins with abuse of the Donald J. Trump Foundation need not be limited to violations of charity and election law. It can also examine his personal and business tax filings and, in the process, lawfully put his tax returns in the public record.”

Among the longer-term strategic considerations Democrats should be thinking about is adding a little sunshine to the ways ballots are counted across the nation. In his NYT letter to the editor, Jonathan D. Simon, author of “CODE RED: Computerized Elections and the War on American Democracy,” makes a frequently-overlooked point that merits consideration, regarding the way we count votes in American elections: “If we want our democracy back — if we want to ensure that it is the people, not the programmers or hackers, setting our national direction — we must insist not just on the right to vote but also on the right (and the duty) to count those votes in public.”

Amanda Marcotte shines a light on the destructive distortions about immigrants that many Americans still embrace. As Marcotte writes at Salon (via Alternet), “…native-born citizens drastically overestimated how many immigrants there are. Native-born Americans estimated that 36 percent of the population were legal immigrants, when the reality is around 10 percent…less than 1 percent of immigrants to the United States are from North Africa, but respondents estimated it was closer to 8.5 percent. About 4 percent of come from the Middle East, but survey respondents put the number closer to 12 percent. Only about 10 percent of immigrants are Muslim, but Americans guessed it was over 22 percent. And while more than 60 percent of immigrants are Christian, respondents estimated the number to be less than 40 percent…Only 5.5 percent of immigrants are unemployed and 13.6 percent live in poverty, but native-born Americans put the numbers at 26 percent and 35 percent, respectively…Conservatives, unsurprisingly, had more distorted views than liberals. Low-skilled workers who work in industries that employ a large number of immigrants also had more distorted views. Interestingly, however, high-skilled workers who also had a large share of immigrant colleagues — such as computer programmers — while still off in their estimates, were closer to the mark.”

At npr.org Kelsey Snell and Scott Detrow see a healthy mix of both progressives and moderates invigorating the Democratic party, “Looking back at the party’s key electoral victories over the past year, many Democratic leaders see a theme: Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, Alabama Sen. Doug Jones, and Pennsylvania Rep. Conor Lamb are all low-key centrists who campaigned on local issues and an overall message of competence and outreach…Joe Trippi, a top strategist on the Jones campaign, sees that approach as the best way for Democrats to take back the House. “When you get that confrontational tone, what you do is drive people to their corners,” he said…But while moderates are advancing in this year’s most critical House districts and Senate races, there’s no question that Democratic energy overall is shifting to the left…”We have had real success in moving the ideology of the Democratic Party to be a pro-worker party to stand up to the billionaire class,” Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said. Surveying the political landscape, the independent senator and his political advisers see a much different party than the one whose nomination Sanders ran for in 2016.”

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

I posted about this a while ago but the release of new and interesting data by Pew is a good reason to revisit the topic.

Here are three things we know about the American public and immigration.

1. The American public is becoming more favorable, not less favorable, toward immigration. In fact, the public is not only more favorable but it is now at historically high levels of favorability toward immigration and immigrants. New Pew data tell us:

* The percent saying legal immigration should be decreased has gone down fairly steadily from 53 percent in 2001 to 24 percent today, while the percent saying it should be increased has gone from 10 to 32 percent. Even among Republicans there’s been a 10 point fall in the “decreased” percentage and a 7 point rise in the “increased” percentage.

* 69 percent of the public says they are “sympathetic” toward undocumented immigrants who are in the US illegally. This includes a 48 percent sympathetic/49 percent unsympathetic view among Republicans.

* Overall, by 71 to 20 percent, the public believes immigrants mostly fill jobs US citizens don’t want and by 65 to 26 percent, they say undocumented immigrants are no more likely to commit crimes than US citizens. The analogous figures among Republicans are 57-30 and 46-42.

* The public overwhelmingly believes (67 percent) that giving people who come to the US illegally a way to gain legal status does not constitute a “reward” for wrongdoing. Just 27 percent endorse the reward for wrongdoing perspective. Even among Republicans, the split on this question is very close to even (46/47).

* Finally, fewer and fewer people say they are bothered by encountering immigrants who speak little English. Currently, the not bothered/bothered split is 73-26. And 59 percent of Republicans put themselves in the not bothered category.

2. The places with the most immigration tend to be the ones least supportive of Trump and a hard line on immigration. Conversely, of course, if the exposure to immigrants is limited, that tends to correlate with high support for Trump and being hostile to immigration. And yet…despite a public that’s trending favorable toward immigrants, especially in areas where they are common, we have the third thing we know about the public and immigration:

3. Anti-immigrant feelings now have more political salience than they have had a very long time and that is hurting the Democrats. It is clearly the case that for an important minority of–primarily white noncollege–voters, they feel intensely enough about this issue to respond positively to anti-immigrant messages and candidates. Trump would not be President if this were not true. And Trump and the GOP–as their conduct this election cycle underscores–clearly hope they can continue to use this issue to keep these voters away from the Democratic party, a strategy that has worked to perfection in Rustbelt and other declining areas of the country.

Can the Democrats resolve this immigration paradox so they do not suffer politically for being pro-immigrant in country that is increasingly pro-immigrant? We shall see. But it would appear they need to think carefully about how to reach voters outside of blue America who do not start with the presumption that all immigration is completely beneficial. They may have concerns about it, both cultural and economic, despite holding at least some positive feelings about immigrants and immigration (as the Pew data on Republican immigration views suggests). It would be wise for Democrats to take these concerns seriously and not reflexively tar such people as “racist”, which, as Thomas Edsall noted in his most recent New York Times column, simply drives them into Trump’s hands .

Otherwise,the immigration paradox is likely to continue, and continue to hurt the Democrats.

The recent craziness in the U.S. House, and the horrible images of kids in cages from the border, have not been good for the GOP. But as I explained at New York, there could be a lot more trouble where that came from.

With the dismal failure of two House Republican immigration bills in the last couple of weeks (bills that were doomed in the Senate in any event), there’s a sense that the Great Immigration Debate of 2018 in the GOP is over. After all, a lot of the recent agitation on the issue in the House was motivated by the desire of two different factions of Republican lawmakers — the moderates led by Representatives Jeff Denham of California and Carlos Curbelo of Florida, and the hard-liners centered in the House Freedom Caucus — to get their views on record before the November midterms. Everybody got to vote on the hard-core Goodlatte bill and the slightly less draconian compromise proposal — nicknamed Goodlatte II — so that’s all that had to happen, right?

Maybe, but maybe not. There are several future developments that could force the issue back into the limelight:

(1) A renewed bipartisan push to vote on Dreamers and more. The latest flurry of failed legislative activity in the House was successful in one limited respect: it did indeed head off a discharge petition (a rare procedure to bypass committees and the congressional leadership) that some of the GOP moderates were pushing — with the support of the entire Democratic caucus — that would have forced votes on a whole spectrum of immigration proposals, with the original DREAM Act being the most likely survivor of the process. Now that it has led to yet another dead end, it’s possible the discharge petition idea could come back.

If that looks like it could happen, you can expect Paul Ryan and the leadership to shout and scream about the perfidy of giving the godless Democrats power over the House floor schedule, at the risk of damaging vulnerable members like Denham and Curbelo, who are needed to keep the gavel out of Nancy Pelosi’s hands. Ultimately opponents of bipartisan immigration legislation would rely on VERY LOUD Trump promises to kill any such abomination should it arrive at his desk.

(2) A renewed uproar over the Trump administration’s treatment of migrant families. When the crisis over family separation at the border blew up in late June, it looked momentarily like Congress would be forced to act to stop the separations — until the president abruptly acted with an executive order that at least temporarily reversed his administration’s toxic policies. If the growing realization that kids are still being detained (just with their parents) revives the big public furor, and/or the courts strike down Trump’s executive order, the pressure for legislation could ramp right back up. But it’s not at all clear that any of the necessary parties to a quick legislative fix (House Republicans, Senate Democrats, or Trump) would go along with a narrow bill instead of insisting on tying it to some broader objective. As Politico reports, Trump might not go along at all:

“Although top White House officials support such a fix, one told POLITICO that he wasn’t sure the president would sign anything without getting concessions from Democrats. Indeed, a House GOP source said Trump was asking for wall money to be included in any standalone legislation keeping families together — a nonstarter for many lawmakers.”

If as some observers suspect, Trump and his top immigration adviser Stephen Miller exult in border chaos and think the prominence of the immigration issue is a good way to motivate the GOP base heading toward the midterms, then the odds of a border fix could go way down. But that would not eliminate the pressure on congressional Republicans to do something.

(3) The courts force a DACA crisis. The family-separation issue isn’t the only one where action in the federal judiciary could force immigration into the headlines and onto the congressional agenda. The long-simmering conservative legal challenge to Obama’s original DACA executive order — which created a protected category for immigrants who came to the U.S. illegally as children — could reach at least temporary fruition as well, as Rachel Bade explains:

“A conservative-leaning federal court in Texas is expected to rule on the constitutionality of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program as early as mid-July, pushing the issue to the fore again.

“The case, brought by Texas and several other Republican-dominated southern states, could contradict a previous court’s decision that halted Trump’s move to end DACA. The result could be that Dreamers again face the risk of deportation unless the Supreme Court — or Congress — weighs in.”

Trump could again use the peril to Dreamers as leverage to demand his own shifting but politically explosive set of immigration policy goals. And the status of Dreamers as the most politically attractive subcategory of undocumented immigrants will again put vulnerable Republicans on the spot.

(4) Trump threatens a government shutdown. Even if Republicans avoid a crisis forced by public opinion or the courts, their own president is perfectly capable of generating one all by himself, and has already threatened to do so. In March and again in April, the president publicly suggested killing must-pass appropriations legislation at the end of September (when the omnibus appropriations measure he grudgingly signed runs out) if he doesn’t get full funding for his border wall. And it apparently came up again in June during a private meeting on spending plans, as Burgess Everett reported:

“Trump fumed at senators and his own staff about the $1.6 billion the Senate is planning to send him this fall, according to two people familiar with the meeting. Trump wants the full $25 billion upfront and doesn’t understand why Congress is going to supply him funds in a piecemeal fashion — even though that’s how the spending process typically works….

“The president said at the meeting that if Congress doesn’t give him the resources he needs for border security, he will shut down the government in September, according to one of the people familiar with the meeting. He did not give a specific number, but has been fixated on getting the $25 billion in a lump sum.”

Even if the Trump threat comes and goes with his moods or negotiating strategy, it could place immigration policy back on the front burner in Washington whether or not other Republicans want it there. And it’s not just Trump, of course, who has tunnel vision about immigration: Breitbart News, many conservative activists, and a sizable chunk of the party’s electoral “base” won’t be happy until deportations soar.

So congressional Republicans can run from the immigration issue, but they sure can’t hide.