From Ruy Teixeira’s introduction: “Demographic Shifts and the Future of the Trump Coalition: The Movie. The folks at C-Span were kind enough to film our conference today at the Bipartisan Policy Center so it is available for viewing in its entirety. If I do say so myself it was a very, very good conference, crisp presentations and discussions, no filler!”

The program:

Location: Bipartisan Policy Center: 1225 Eye Street NW, Suite #1000

Opening Remarks:
John C. Fortier, Director of the Democracy Project, Bipartisan Policy Center

Presentation:
Ruy Teixeira, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress
William H. Frey, Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution
Rob Griffin, Associate Director of Research, PRRI

Panel I:
Ruy Teixeira, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress
William H. Frey, Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution
Amy Walter , National Editor, Cook Political Report
Mark Hugo Lopez, Director of Hispanic Research, Pew Research Center
Matt Morrison , Executive Director, Working America
Moderator: Rob Griffin, Associate Director of Research, PRRI

Panel II:
Ruy Teixeira, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress
Anna Greenberg,Partner, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research
Sean Trende, Senior Elections Analyst, RealClearPolitics
Moderator: John C. Fortier, Director of the Democracy Project, Bipartisan Policy Center

View the video here.

Dan Merica reports at CNN Politics that “Red-state Democrats running for Senate in 2018 cautiously backed President Donald Trump’s decision to approve targeted strikes in Syria. But now that the strikes have happened,almost all are urging the President to make his future plans in Syria clear and come to Congress for approval…The Democratic support ranges from full-throated endorsements to tepid backing, but most Democrats running for the Senate in 2018 for now back the strikes…In a statement, Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown described the strikes as a “targeted and proportional response to the Assad regime’s gruesome attacks on civilians, and it’s important that our allies in Britain and France were part of this process.”…But he added that Trump now must “present a long-term strategy to the American people, and he must win their support before taking further military action.”

At FiveThirtyEight, Perry Bacon, Jr. and Dhrumil Mehta note that “Americans are split on whether or not the U.S. has a responsibility to get involved in the conflict in Syria, according to a YouGov/Economist poll, but they are not split along party lines. Twenty-eight believe that the U.S. has a responsibility to get involved (including 36 percent of Democrats and 32 percent of Republicans), while 37 percent believe the U.S. does not have that responsibility and 35 percent are not sure.”

In their article, “Democrats’ Chances Of Winning The Senate Are Looking Stronger,” Bacon and Mehta also note that “For some time, the conventional wisdom (and I largely agree with it) around the upcoming midterms has been that Democrats are modest favorites to win the House, while Republicans are likely to hold the Senate. Democrats, who have 49 Senate seats at the moment,¹ might win GOP-held seats in Arizona and Nevada, but it seems likely they’ll lose at least one of the 10 seats they hold in states that President Trump carried in 2016…But the 2018 Senate map is shifting — mostly in ways that make it more likely that Democrats could flip that chamber too. If you’ve only been paying attention to the House, it’s time to check back in on the upper chamber…So Democratic prospects are looking better in Tennessee, Arizona and Texas. There is one race, though, where the outlook seems to be improving for the GOP: Florida…Florida is about evenly divided between the two parties, so this was always going to be a close race, and polls have suggested Nelson and Scott are running neck and neck.”

“Democrats hold an advantage ahead of the midterm elections, but a Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that edge has narrowed since January, a signal to party leaders and strategists that they could be premature in anticipating a huge wave of victories in November,” Dan Balz and Scott Clement write at Thw Washington Post. “The poll finds that the gap between support for Democratic vs. Republican House candidates dropped by more than half since the beginning of the year. At the same time, there has been a slight increase in President Trump’s approval rating, although it remains low. Measures of partisan enthusiasm paint a more mixed picture of the electorate in comparison to signs of Democratic intensity displayed in many recent special elections…With the Republicans’ House majority at risk, 47 percent of registered voters say they prefer the Democratic candidate in their district, while 43 percent favor the Republican. That four-point margin compares with a 12-point advantage Democrats held in January. Among a broader group of voting-age adults, the Democrats’ margin is 10 points, 50 percent to 40 percent…The survey shows the GOP making a more pronounced shift among white voters, who now prefer Republicans by a 14-point margin over Democrats, up from five points in January. Republicans lead by 60 percent to 31 percent among white voters without college degrees, slightly larger than an 18-point GOP advantage three months ago.” However, add Balz and Clement, “The situation in the districts where control of the House is likely to be decided is slightly more favorable for Democrats. The Cook Political Report, which produces nonpartisan analysis, lists 56 of the 435 congressional districts as competitive — 51 of them in Republican hands to just five held by Democrats.”

A new national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll indicates that “Democrats enjoy a 7-point advantage in congressional preference, with 47 percent of voters wanting a Democratic-controlled Congress, and with 40 percent preferring a GOP-controlled Congress,” reports Mark Murray at nbcnews.com. However, “the poll doesn’t show “knockout numbers” for Democrats, which gives Republicans a chance of retaining control of Congress, says Republican pollster Bill McInturff of Public Opinion Strategies, who conducted this survey with Democratic pollster Peter Hart and his team at Hart Research Associates…But the current poll shows Democrats with a significant advantage in enthusiasm, with 66 percent of Democrats expressing a high level of interest (either a “9” or “10” on a 10-point scale) in November’s elections, versus 49 percent for Republicans…40 percent of voters in the poll said their 2018 vote in November would be a message that more Democrats are needed to check and balance Trump and congressional Republicans. That’s compared with 28 percent who said their vote would be a message that more Republicans are needed to help Trump and the GOP pass their agenda…Twenty-nine percent of voters said their 2018 vote would be a different message than the other two options.”

In his article, “Liberal Groups to Spend $30 Million Targeting Infrequent U.S. Voters” at Bloomberg News, John McCormick shares some good news: “Democrats trying to win control of Congress in 2018 will get a $30 million boost from Planned Parenthood’s political arm and other liberal groups working to mobilize infrequent voters favorable to their cause…Planned Parenthood Votes and three other organizations say they’re committed to spending that much to target people who who might cast ballots in presidential elections but tend to skip off-year ballots like the November congressional midterms…The investment seeks to change the electorate’s composition in three states expected to have close House and Senate contests — Nevada, Florida and Michigan — by encouraging more minorities, women and those younger than 35 to vote…Roughly half of the people the groups want to reach are in Florida, where Republican Governor Rick Scott is challenging Democratic Senator Bill Nelson in what’s expected to be one of the most expensive races in the U.S. this year. The work will be concentrated in South Florida and in the Orlando and Tampa areas, according to the groups.”

In case you were wondering, Paige Winfield Cunningham explains why “Why Republicans don’t talk about repealing Obamacare anymore” at WaPo’s The Health 202: “Republican candidates and others across the country find themselves bereft of what was once their favorite talking point: repealing and replacing President Obama’s Affordable Care Act — and all the havoc they alleged it wreaked…That’s because the GOP failed dramatically in its efforts last year to roll back the ACA as its first big legislative delivery on the promise of single-party control of Washington from Congress to the White House. That defeat has quickly turned attacks on Obamacare from centerpiece into pariah on the campaign trail, a sudden disappearing act that Democrats are looking to exploit as they seek to regain power in the midterms…“Yeah, we probably can’t talk credibly about repeal and replace anymore,” Rep. Tom MacArthur (R-N.J.) told me a few weeks ago…since the dramatic defeat of an ACA rollback bill in the Senate last July, many Republican candidates don’t have much to say about health care at all Instead, if they do talk about health care on the campaign trail, it is only to say they have been able to change pieces of Obamacare — repealing the individual mandate as part of their 2017 tax overhaul, for instance, and the Trump administration’s push to allow plans to be sold that fall short of ACA standards…A problem for the GOP is that a majority of the public wants to move toward more government control of health care. A Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll released Friday found 51 percent of all Americans, including 54 percent of independents, support a national health plan.” Put simply, smarter Republicans don’t mention their ‘repeal Obamacare’ fiasco much anymore because it reminds voters of their incompetence, even with majorities of all branches of government.

Max Boot has a well-stated point Democrat candidates campaigning to win moderate voters may find useful in his “Paul Ryan’s pathetic legacy” column: “The GOP tax bill is estimated by the Congressional Budget Office to add $1.9 trillion to the debt. Add in nearly $300 billion in additional spending over the next two years passed by Congress in March, and you’re looking at trillion-dollar annual deficits as far as the eye can see. There will be no entitlement reform, because Trump — “the king of debt” — couldn’t care less. So much for Ryan’s reputation as a fiscal conservative.” Leading up to the midterms, Ryan can still serve nicely, along with Trump and McConnell, as a poster-boy for the GOP’s inability to govern effectively.

Joan McCarter elaborates at Daily Kos: “Republicans have precisely one legislative accomplishment to run on in 2018: their tax cut scam. Normally, that would work. Normally, their tea party base would be so thrilled over it that they’d skate through November. But nothing is normal anymore, and too many people understand that the tax cuts passed have nothing to do with them, and in fact undermines the thing that they really do care about—health care. That means Republicans are having a hard time making this one thing they’ve accomplished work for them…These very tax cuts also got rid of the individual mandate for the Affordable Care Act, and that will result in higher premiums for health insurance on the individual market. Those premium increases are going to be announced in October, weeks before the election, and will dominate headlines. For plenty of people, the bit more they see in their paychecks could be dwarfed by insurance premium hikes…It doesn’t help at all that what’s dominating the headlines now when it comes to the tax cuts is how much it has helped big banks and corporate stock-holders. It also doesn’t help that the occupier of the Oval Office would rather talk about his racist delusions than “boring” tax law, even during an event held specifically to tout that very law.”

As the president’s behavior continues to offer frightening glimpses of a would-be authoritarian, the “I-word” naturally irises from time to time. But it’s being discussed in very different ways among Democrats and among Republicans, as I noted this week at New York:

One of the big, burning arguments among Democrats heading into the midterm elections is whether candidates (or their supporters) should be openly advocating impeachment of Donald J. Trump. By and large, candidates (following the advice of congressional Democratic leaders) are avoiding the question or addressing it indirectly by talking about “holding Trump accountable” or “upholding the rule of law” or pledging to investigate Trumpian actions that congressional Republicans are ignoring. One argument made by progressive opinion-leader Markos Moulitsas is that by focusing on driving Trump from office, Democrats would be passing up more effective messages that take advantage of the Republican Party’s unpopularity. Journalist Elizabeth Drew contends that Democrats shouldn’t “go there” until there is the kind of bipartisan support that led to Richard Nixon’s impeachment and resignation. And the extreme improbability of a Senate conviction of Trump even if he’s impeached is a broadly shared concern. Do Democrats really want to excite “the base” by making a promise they are in no position to keep?

But the question won’t go away. For one thing, billionaire activist Tom Steyer is in the process of spending $40 million on ads advocating Trump’s impeachment, which are designed to keep the issue on the table for Democratic candidates and officeholders alike. And a variety of progressive voices are passionately arguing that ignoring the impeachment option represents a white-washing of Trump’s behavior, and a normalization of unacceptable presidential actions. Brian Beutler, for example, believes that Trump’s day-to-day refusal to step away from his business empire is an ongoing impeachable act, whether or not Robert Mueller identifies collusion with Russia or other overt crimes and misdemeanors.

Beutler is not demanding that Democrats “commit” to impeachment proceeding going into 2018. But he does think it’s imperative to argue Trump deserves it.

The same argument is made in slightly varying forms by those who believe impeachment enthuses Democratic voters like no other cause, or that it’s the only thing that can vindicate the rule of law against someone like Trump, or that it’s the only proper means for reining in rogue presidents.

It’s generally conceded, of course, that new revelations from Robert Mueller’s investigation or other sources of outright criminal acts, such as obstruction of justice, could push the debate among Democrats in the direction of making impeachment a clear option if the party retakes control of the House. A Democratic House, obviously, would have the wherewithal to launch investigations and yes, impeachment hearings. And that looks more realistic each time a fresh hint of unsavory or illegal conduct, like the Stormy Daniels hush money saga, comes to light. Trump’s increasingly wild reactions to his investigatory tormenters, which could soon lead to the firing of Mueller or Rod Rosenstein, may also increase the atmosphere of confrontation with Congress that leads naturally to impeachment.

But even as the possibility of impeachment waxes and wanes among Democrats, something interesting is happening among Republicans, who are increasingly prone to using the threat of impeachment to mobilize their own base. Jonathan Martin of the New York Times recently wrote a much-circulated report on that phenomenon:

“What began last year as blaring political hyperbole on the right — the stuff of bold-lettered direct mail fund-raising pitches from little-known groups warning of a looming American “coup” — is now steadily drifting into the main currents of the 2018 message for Republicans.

“The appeals have become a surefire way for candidates to raise small contributions from grass-roots conservatives who are devoted to Mr. Trump, veteran Republican fund-raisers say. But party strategists also believe that floating the possibility of impeachment can also act as a sort of scared-straight motivational tool for turnout.”

It makes some political sense. Unlike most previous presidents facing toxic midterms (e.g., Bill Clinton in 1994, George W. Bush in 2006, and Barack Obama in 2010) Donald Trump is wildly popular among members of his “base.” And much of his bond with hard-core conservatives involves a shared persecution complex involving sneering elitist liberals who despise their values and want to disenfranchise or even silence them. The idea that talk of impeachment portends a “coup” to reverse the 2016 election returns does not seem that outlandish to people who think Democrats are disloyal to America and only believe in democracy when it suits their subversive purposes. Trump has already told them that their enemies routinely stuff ballot boxes and plan to win future elections by inviting hordes of illegal immigrants to come across the border and vote themselves lavish government benefits while running criminally amok. So why wouldn’t they “purge” Trump without justification, given the opportunity?

Building a backlash to impeachment is not a completely novel idea. It is arguably what happened in the 1998 midterms when Democrats used the impeachment threat to Bill Clinton to motivate their own base while making Republicans appear extremist and power-hungry (though high job approval ratings for Clinton–something Trump is very unlikely to enjoy–contributed to the results).

And the traditional midterm strategy for the president’s party of ignoring the commander-in-chief and “localizing” elections just isn’t available to Republicans in this Trump-dominated year, particularly given the MAGA-madness of their party base.

For the foreseeable future, conservatives are very likely to fight any move to impeach Trump with a furious intensity, barring a descent into the kind of self-destructive flailing about that made Richard Nixon’s bipartisan impeachment an afterthought and his resignation an almost universally welcomed end to what his successor called “our long national nightmare.”

And absent that sort of consensus, it’s inevitable, especially in the current climate of polarization, that Democrats and Republicans will view impeachment from completely different perspectives: the former as a solemn duty for purposes of maintaining the constitutional order, and the latter as an act of partisan political expediency. Perhaps that’s inevitable given the decision of the Founders to make impeachment a legal action carried out by politicians rather than judges.

Some findings from the Harvard University Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics Spring 2018 Youth Poll: Young Democrats are driving nearly all of the increase in enthusiasm; a majority (51%) report that they will “definitely” vote in November, which represents a 9-percentage point increase since November 2017 and is significantly larger than the 36 percent of Republicans who say the same. At this point in the 2014 election cycle, 28 percent of Democrats and 31 percent of Republicans indicated that they would “definitely” be voting. In the Spring of 2010, 35 percent of Democrats and 41 percent of Republicans held a similar interest in voting…Preference for Democratic control of Congress has grown between now and the time of the last IOP poll. In Fall 2017, there was a 32-point partisan gap among the most likely young voters, 65 percent preferring Democrats control Congress, with 33 percent favoring Republicans…Today, the gap has increased to 41 points, 69 percent supporting Democrats and 28 percent Republicans. “Millennials and post-Millennials are on the verge of transforming the culture of politics today and setting the tone for the future,” said John Della Volpe, Polling Director at Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics. “This generation of young Americans is as engaged as we have ever seen them in a midterm election cycle.

A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll indicates that Dems are gaining leverage from white senior voters. As Eric Levitz writes at New York Magazine, “Older, college-educated whites are among the most reliable voters in the nation. And in many of this fall’s most competitive districts, such voters account for nearly 10 percent of the population, according to Reuters’ analysis. Republicans were already at risk of losing the House due to shifts in turnout patterns, alone — but if those shifts are accompanied by significant defections among reliable GOP constituencies, the party could suffer historic losses up and down the ballot….“The real core for the Republicans is white, older white, and if they’re losing ground there, they’re going to have a tsunami,” political scientist Larry Sabato told Reuters. “If that continues to November, they’re toast.”

Writing in Social Europe, Ruy Teixeira presents “Five Theses For A New Left,” one of which bears special urgency for Democrats in the U.S.: “2. The left must unite. This is not an option, but a necessity. The rise of the disparate new constituencies in the left’s new coalition has accentuated the possibilities for division. This is particularly noticeable in Europe, where left strength is frequently diffused across several different parties (social democratic, left socialist, green, left social liberal, left populist, etc.) that regard each other with suspicion. The failure to present a common front is madness. The era when one tendency like the social democrats could completely dominate the left and didn’t need allies is over. The same applies to the Democrats in the United States; there is no way the Clinton supporters or Sanders supporters or minority-mobilization strategists or reach-out-to-the-white-working-class advocates can take over the party and succeed on their own. To beat the right, a fractured left must unite, bringing all progressives together in effective alliances.”

At Sabato’s Crystal Ball, Alan I. Abramowitz provides data analysis “Explaining Support for Trump in the White Working Class: Race vs. Economics,” and concludes, “Data from a Pew Research Center survey conducted during June and July of 2017 show that six months into Donald Trump’s presidency, the gap between whites with and without college degrees in opinions of the president was enormous. Non-college whites were far more likely to approve of Trump’s performance than white college graduates….However, this gap appears to have little or nothing to do with differences between the economic circumstances of these two groups. While whites without college degrees did experience far more economic distress than those with college degrees, economic distress itself appeared to have little relationship with opinions of Trump. Instead, the main explanation for the class divide in opinions of Trump among whites appeared to be differing views on race relations. White college graduates were much more likely than whites without college degrees to hold liberal views on the significance of racial discrimination in American society and opinions on the significance of racial discrimination were strongly related to opinions of Trump’s performance. Racial attitudes, not economics, appears to be the main factor producing strong support for Trump among members of the white working class.”

At The Atlantic, Ronald Browstein notes that Paul Ryan once worked for the late Rep. Jack Kemp, who was instrumental in passing the MLK holiday legislation, and “throughout his career” Ryan “presented himself as a disciple of Kemp,” who also had genuine friendships with many African American leaders. However, writes Brownstein, “after Trump took office, Ryan blinked at confronting the president’s appeals to white racial resentments,” and he “leaves the party lashed to a volatile, impulsive leader who is systematically stamping it as a vehicle for white racial resentment, even as the nation grows kaleidoscopically more diverse.” In the end, Ryan’s coldness towards disadvantaged Americans had less  in common with the warm-spirited Jack Kemp, than another of his reported idols, Ayn Rand.

E. J. Dionne, Jr. also notes Ryan’s “youthful fascination with the philosophy of Ayn Rand. She identified with society’s winners and regarded ordinary citizens as moochers and burdens on the creative and the entrepreneurial…Although Ryan gave warm speeches about compassion, his biggest fear was not that the poor might go without food or health care but, as he once said, that the “safety net” might “become a hammock that lulls able-bodied citizens into lives of complacency and dependency.”…He later backed away from Rand and acknowledged that the hammock was “the wrong analogy.” But his policies suggested that he never abandoned his core faith: If the wealthy did best when given positive incentives in the form of more money, the less fortunate needed to be prodded by less generous social policies into taking responsibility for their own fate.”

In The New York Times Sunday Review, Frank Bruni observed “Predominantly Republican and perversely gerrymandered, the Lone Star State is where Democrats send their dreams to die. Only 11 of its 36 House seats are in the party’s hands…But 2018 is shaping up as a year in which old rules are out the window and everything is up for grabs. Ryan’s planned retirement and the increasing disarray of the Republican Party illustrate that. So does Texas’ emergence as a credible wellspring of Democratic hope…Leave aside the Senate contest and Beto O’Rourke’s surprisingly muscular (if nonetheless improbable) bid to topple Ted Cruz. Several of the most truly competitive House races in the country are in Texas, which could wind up providing Democrats three or more of the 24 flipped seats that they need for control of the chamber.” Bruni spotlights several House races, which suggest that Democrats have some unusually-appealing candidates in Texas, in addition to all of the momentum that comes from the GOP’s lengthening string of embarrassments.

It appears that the president-in-waiting’s staff may not be quite ready for prime time. As John Wagner reports at PostPolitics, “As Vice President Pence prepared to head to Peru on Friday for the Summit of the Americas, his office advertised several events on his itinerary, including “a banquet hosted by President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski of Peru.”…One problem: Kuczynski resigned more than three weeks ago after becoming ensnared in a corruption scandal involving Latin America’s largest construction firm.” Wagner also notes a tasty typo in a recent Trump Administration statement, that “Air Force One became “Air Force Once” on the president’s public schedule.”

In the wake of House Speaker Paul Ryan’s retirement announcement, I had some thoughts about his legacy, which I wrote up at New York.

In the long run, Ryan may best be remembered as a Republican politician with the ambition and (it seemed, for a moment) the means to undertake a mission that had thrived in the conservative dreamscape since the days of Barry Goldwater: the unraveling of the New Deal/Great Society safety net, also known as “the welfare state.” Unless he and his destructive agenda make a major comeback, he will have to be adjudged a failure in that endeavor.

It’s true that Ryan’s most concrete contributions to the anti-welfare-state cause — all those annual “Ryan Budgets” that Republicans approved during the Obama presidency — were mostly symbolic measures sure to be vetoed by a Democratic chief executive. But they served to solidify Republican interest in Ryan’s twin goals of “entitlement reform” (fundamental overhauls of Medicare —converting it to subsidies for private health insurance — and Medicaid — making it a block grant to the states) and anti-poverty “strategies” that included killing off most existing public-sector programs.

Then, in October of 2016, apparently annoyed that media types were yawning at his agenda, Ryan offered a glimpse of what Republicans might do if they managed to pull off a “trifecta” and gain control of both the Executive and Legislative branches.

“’This is our plan for 2017,’ Ryan said, waving a copy of his “Better Way” policy agenda. ‘Much of this you can do through budget reconciliation.’ He explained that key pieces are ‘fiscal in nature,’ meaning they can be moved quickly through a budget maneuver that requires a simple majority in the Senate and House. ‘This is our game plan for 2017,’ Ryan said again to the seemingly unconvinced press.”

He even called the reconciliation process a “bazooka in my pocket.” And for a while there it seemed very likely that it would be the vehicle for a health-care-focused budget bill that would block-grant the old Medicaid entitlement while repealing the new Obamacare entitlement, thus giving Ryan and Republicans a historic victory.

But as we now know, the “bazooka” wasn’t powerful enough to blast the bill through the Republican-controlled Senate, and complicated matters on many occasions by subjecting the legislation to all sorts of arcane parliamentary rules that limited its scope. And so both Obamacare, and Medicaid-as-we-know-it, survived 2017.

Yes, Republicans did enact a tax cut that, for them, salvaged the year, and that had to be gratifying to the inveterate supply-sider Ryan. But when he talked about reviving his most important passion — “entitlement reform” or in its demagogic form, “welfare reform” — in 2018, he was brusquely shot down by Mitch McConnell and the White House.

So looking ahead to a straitened GOP margin in the House — if not a Democratic House — next year, and the prospect of having to wait until 2021 at the earliest to resume the fight against the welfare state (and that assumed the mixed blessing of a Trump reelection), Ryan decided to go home to Wisconsin and regroup. He’s only 48, and has plenty of time to gird his loins for another crusade against the New Deal and the Great Society.

But what Ryan’s setbacks should have taught him — as they earlier taught Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush — is that there is not and may never be a solid political foundation for a successful assault on popular programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, or even Obamacare, food stamps, and disability benefits. When push comes to shove, even Republican voters are squeamish about implementing their party’s rhetoric supporting the free market or the states as superior mechanisms for providing income security or health care. Crude, ignorant, and erratic as he is, Donald Trump seems to understand this basic reality. True believers in conservative ideology like Paul Ryan don’t, and thus tend to fail.

Harold Meyerson shares some provocative insights in his article “What Now for Unions?” in The American Prospect, including:

Today, both the Gallup and the Pew polls show public support for unions at its highest level in years: 61 percent at Gallup; 60 percent at Pew, a good 20 to 35 percentage points higher than the approval ratings of President Trump and the Republican Congress. Among Americans under 30, unions’ approval rating is a stratospheric 76 percent. As was the case in the 1930s, pro-union sentiment has grown only after the recovery was well under way.

At first glance, young people’s support for unions is puzzling: With union membership down to 10.7 percent of the workforce, and with many states having hardly any union presence, it’s a safe inference that most millennials have had no contact with a union at all. And yet, it’s young workers who are joining unions today, as the successful organizing drives among graduate students and the (disproportionately young) journalists at digital media outlets attest. According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, more than three-quarters of new union members in 2017 were under 35.

Meyerson says their support for unions is “rooted in the economic adversities afflicting the young, including employment insecurity, student debt, unaffordable housing, and more. These struggles feed millennials’ apprehensions that the middle class they seek to join is further out of reach for them than it was for their parents and grandparents.” He argues that social media popular with young people, especially Facebook, has been a pivotal asset for energizing union campaigns:

The growing share of union members who are both younger and professional is probably one reason why digital mobilization played such a key role in the West Virginia teachers strike, and is so crucial to similar labor actions in Oklahoma and elsewhere. Nearly all of West Virginia’s 20,000 teachers were signed on to a strike-participation Facebook page leading up to their walkout, and when the two teachers unions in the state struck a deal with the governor to end the strike in return for a promise of a 5 percent raise, it was the spontaneous Facebook-page resistance of teachers—some local union officials, some not—to going back to work before the deal was actually done that prevailed. Both the universal rank-and-file walkout and, then, the universal opposition to returning to work without a deal would have been impossible without Facebook.

Indeed, it’s clear that Facebook provides workers with a form of mobilization that both complements and eclipses unions’ own capacities. West Virginia has only 75,000 dues-paying members in all of its unions, and only a fraction of those are teachers—yet nearly every one of the state’s 20,000 teachers walked off their jobs. In Oklahoma, a state with a unionization rate of just 5.5 percent, and where all unions claim a bare 84,000 members, a Facebook page called “Oklahoma Teacher Walkout—The Time Is Now!,” started by one rank-and-file teacher, has 55,000 members and has been the key instrument for building support for a strike.

Looking ahead, Meyerson argues, “Should the Democrats recapture the federal government after the 2020 elections, they will need to do something that no Democratic Congress has mustered the will to do in the last 70 years: Change labor law to bolster workers’ right to organize—and, if the Democrats can figure out how to do so, do the same for workers who are independent contractors and temps.”

In meeting this challenge, supporters of the restoration of unions in America’s workplaces will find ample support from young workers. As Meyerson concludes, “The anti-plutocratic, pro-democratic politics of the young in particular apply not just to the polity, but to the workplace as well.”

The April/May issue of Washington Monthly includes three outstanding articles addressing facets of Democratic organizing:

“Voter Registration Won’t Save the Democrats: Progressives needs to target the large pool of citizens who are registered but don’t bother to vote” by Editor-in-Chief Paul Glastris focuses on a frequently-overlooked constituency. As Glastris explains, “data limitations make it hard to prove causal connections. But based on the evidence so far, the law seems mostly to have added to the substantial pool of citizens who are registered but don’t bother to vote.” Further,

…A few weeks before the 2016 elections TargetSmart, a Democratic political data firm, released a report showing that fifty million more Americans were registered to vote than eight years earlier, a whopping 33 percent increase during the presidency of organizer in chief Barack Obama, himself a big proponent of voter registration. The data showed that the newest voters leaned heavily Democratic.

It goes without saying that these new voters didn’t show up in sufficient numbers, or in the right places, to give Hillary Clinton a victory. In fact, an analysis recently published in the New York Times found that some four million voters who supported Barack Obama in 2012 simply failed to vote at all in 2016. What doomed Clinton was not a lack of registered voters, but a lack of turnout.

…But if the chief goal is helping the Democrats win, then concentrating on unregistered voters makes little sense. Consider the arithmetic. There are approximately fifty million Americans who are eligible to vote but aren’t registered. But there are far more “episodic voters”—citizens who are registered but often don’t show up. More than 100 million registered voters didn’t cast ballots in the 2014 midterms. About 145 million didn’t vote in the primaries.

These episodic voters are not only far more numerous than unregistered voters, they are also much likelier to change their behavior…A 2016 Pew survey asked people to explain why they don’t vote. Compared to those who were registered-but-infrequent voters, unregistered voters were nearly twice as likely to say that they dislike politics and don’t believe voting makes a difference. Registered-but-infrequent voters, meanwhile, were more than twice as likely to say that they don’t vote because they are not informed enough about the issues or candidates to make a good decision.

“If you were designing a system to maximize the Democrats’ electoral chances,” Glastris writes, ” you’d want it to be primarily focused on educating and mobilizing these episodic voters…Episodic voters are the orphans of American politics, ignored and unloved. But they are also the lost continent of American politics, just waiting to be developed. As for potential solutions, Glastris adds:

…One such reform is universal vote by mail, otherwise known as vote at home. With vote at home, polling places disappear. Instead, every registered voter automatically receives a ballot in the mail several weeks prior to an election, which they fill out at their leisure and either mail back or drop off at a secure site. As Washington Monthly contributing editor Phil Keisling has documented in these pages, turnout rates in the three states where the system has been implemented statewide—Oregon, Washington, and Colorado—are among the highest in the country. In Colorado, which launched its vote by mail regime in 2014, overall turnout grew by 3.3 percentage points, and by even more among young and low-propensity voters.

If Democrats were smart, they’d be funding ballot initiatives in at least a dozen states in 2018 to implement universal vote by mail. Instead, nearly all of the available money is being spent on drives to pass election-day and automatic voter registration at the state level. Again, these are worthy reforms, and they will do some good. But betting the farm on registering new voters while ignoring the far larger and easier-to-mobilize population of episodic voters is utter folly.

Also in Washington Monthly, Sahil Desai’s “The Untapped Potential of the Asian Voter: Asian Americans are the Democrats’ fastest-growing constituency, but the party has failed to mobilize them. That’s a major missed opportunity” takes an in-depth look at another neglected group of voters who have begun trending Democratic in recent elections. Desai explains how David Reid, an observant Democratic candidate for the Virginia House of Delegates, won his election by focusing on Asian-American voters in the district, and adds:

The GOP’s increased nativism after 9/11 has long been a turnoff for Asian Americans, even before Donald Trump descended the escalator in Trump Tower in June 2015. Trump has spent the better part of three years fear-mongering about undocumented immigrants—one out of six of whom is Asian. Asian Americans are the biggest beneficiaries of family reunification policies, which Trump and other prominent Republicans have taken to bashing as “chain migration.” (Family reunification is how nearly all Vietnamese and Bangladeshi immigrants have come to America.) Asian Americans might not be the direct target of Trump’s disdain as often as Hispanics, but the modern Republican Party’s increasingly overt hostility to nonwhite immigration can’t help but push them away.

All of which is good news for Democrats. But here’s the problem: Asian Americans have among the lowest voting rates of any racial group in America—49 percent of eligible voters, in 2016, compared to 65 percent among white people and 60 percent among black people. Not coincidentally, they also are less likely to be contacted by parties and campaigns. “Democrats are leaving a lot of votes on the table,” said Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and an expert in political demography. “They don’t need 100 percent Asian turnout, but if Asians could come close to what whites vote at, or even blacks, it could have a big difference.”

True, Asian Americans still make up only 4 percent of eligible voters. But they are the fastest-growing racial group in the country and increasingly vote as a Democratic bloc. In other words, Democrats’ failure to mobilize them has been a major missed opportunity for the party. As the Asian American population booms, and as state and national elections continue to be decided by the slimmest of margins, correcting that failure will only become more urgent.

Desai adds that “Of course, it’s crucial for Democrats to turn out Latinos, especially in places like Florida and Arizona. But while there are far more Latinos nationwide, Asian Americans nearly match them in a number of swing states—Michigan and Ohio, for example—and reddish-purple states like Missouri and Georgia.” He notes that “campaigns generally aren’t doing the work to engage with Asian voters. According to a survey following the 2016 campaign, only 29 percent of Asian Americans said that they had been contacted by a political party, compared to 44 percent of whites…non-voting Asian Americans rarely receive the nudge that could push them to the ballot box on election day. Low voting rates beget low voting rates.”

Desai spotlights Asain-American GOTV in Virginia as the exemplary success Democrats should emulate, and the efforts of one group in particular, the Democratic Asian Americans of Virginia (DAAV). Among their strategies:

Democratic campaigns provide DAAV, which became an arm of the Virginia Democratic Party in 2013, with lists of eligible Asian American voters. Then the group, with a phalanx of hundreds of volunteers speaking a variety of languages, targets those voters by phone banking and campaigning door to door. “One of my friends who tags along with me speaks Vietnamese, but doesn’t like to door-knock himself,” said Soeharjono, who immigrated from Indonesia. “There are times when he has to speak. It’s much easier to connect with someone who can speak your language.”

Northern Virginia, where DAAV focuses its efforts, has a substantial number of older voters with limited English proficiency. So the group prepares sample ballots and pamphlets in multiple languages, and has volunteers pass them out at community festivals, such as the annual Korean festival each autumn in Chantilly, Virginia, which attracted 30,000 people last year. Weeks before the November 2017 election, DAAV organized a Diwali celebration for gubernatorial candidate Ralph Northam, and helped him court voters by writing op-eds in Asian American newspapers. Northam would go on to win in a landslide, buoyed by higher-than-expected turnout among minorities, including Asians.

In his concluding paragraphs, Desai noptes, “The reason to invest in Asian American turnout isn’t just for electoral gains in 2018 (or even 2020). The Democratic Party desperately needs to be thinking beyond the prospect of unseating Trump, to building the type of durable coalition that will deliver victories a decade or even a generation from now…“If Democrats show up, and Asian Americans get to know the party and have contacts with the party, that’ll pay off over the longer run for sure,” said Ruy Teixeira, the political scientist. “But you can’t reap that harvest unless you’re there at the beginning of the growing season.”

Yet another noteworthy article in Washington Monthly’s May/June issue is Gilad Edelman’s “Planet Earth Gets a Ground Game: Political operative Nathaniel Stinnett’s brilliantly simple plan to turn out environmental voters.” As Edelman makes the case, “polls show that the environment is a very low priority for most voters. And persuading them to care more is devilishly hard…The stereotype of an environmentalist is someone deeply engaged in politics: the young Greenpeace volunteer gathering signatures on the sidewalk, the Birkenstock-wearing Baby Boomer who never misses a town hall meeting. But when it comes to voting, the stereotype is backward.”

Edelman relates how a Democratic operative, Nathanial Stinnett came to grips with a central problem facing envirnmentalists in the political realm:

…it’s a lot easier to get someone to vote than to make them care about an Antarctic ice shelf. And it gave him an idea. If there were all these registered voters out there who already prioritized the environment, and simply weren’t voting, then the problem wasn’t really about persuasion; it was about turnout. The size of the gap between the two polls suggested that a potentially huge number of environmental voters, perhaps millions, were routinely sitting out elections. If he could find these people and get them to vote, Stinnett reasoned, they would start getting picked up in models of likely voters in future elections. The environment would climb higher in those likely-voter issue priority polls. Climb high enough, and politicians would start feeling that they can’t win without catering to environmentalists.

…In October 2015, he launched a nonprofit, the Environmental Voter Project (EVP). Traditional environmental activism includes turnout, but it centers around advocacy: coordinating rallies, lobbying elected officials, endorsing candidates, and the like. Stinnett wouldn’t bother with any of that. His organization would have exactly one objective: push environmentalists into the electorate, and trust politicians to respond in their own rational self-interest.

To address the problem, Edelman writes,

Stinnett hired Clarity Campaign Labs, a Democratic-leaning analytics firm, to build a predictive model, beginning in Massachusetts. They conducted thousands of phone surveys, asking people to rate their political priorities. Once they had a big enough sample of people who prioritized the environment, they matched it to a voter file—a list of names, addresses, and voting histories—that itself had been matched up with demographic and consumer data. That revealed correlations between personal information—like your age, what magazines you subscribe to, what stores you shop at—and political priorities. It’s akin to the way online advertisers use our browsing histories to figure out what we’re likely to buy.

Because the data sample is so big, the correlations have tremendous predictive value. The model, which is built anew for each state that the Environmental Voter Project expands into, assigns each registered voter a score from 0 to 100, representing the probability that they would pick environmental issues as a top priority. This allows Stinnett to isolate likely environmentalists, which he defines as people who score at least two and a half times higher than the average registered voter in their state. Then he zeroes in on the ones who are unlikely to vote in the next election. That’s his target group. (Technically, the EVP builds two models per state, using two different measurements of voter priorities, and combines the results to generate the target populations.)

The data indicated that “environmentalists make up around 10 percent of registered voters nationwide—which tracks with recent public polling numbers. In any given election, however, their turnout rate lags between 10 and 20 points below the national average.” Further,

In Florida, about 547,000 registered environmentalists stayed home in 2016. Donald Trump’s margin of victory there was about 112,000 votes. In Pennsylvania, just under 300,000 environmentalists sat the election out; Trump won there by just over 44,000 votes. Both states have gubernatorial and senatorial elections this year, and because turnout is lower in midterms, the number of targets will be much higher than in 2016.

What Stinnett has not figured out is why so many environmentalists don’t vote. There’s no obvious demographic overlap that explains it. Within any given population slice, environmentalists almost always have a below-average turnout rate. When Stinnett surveyed a few hundred of them on a battery of civic participation–related questions, the always-voters and the never-voters gave identical answers.

However, “people who sign a pledge card are 21 percent likelier to vote than the control group, compared to 14 percent for people who say they will vote but don’t sign.” Also, “where the EVP combined remote outreach with in-person canvassing; nothing beats face-to-face interactions for boosting turnout.” Looking ahead, Edelman notes,

…In 2018, Stinnett says, the organization has identified 3.05 million environmentalists in six states who are very unlikely to vote, and will be targeting about 2.4 million of them. (The rest go into control groups.) Most of that will be through direct mail, online ads, and texting, because door-to-door canvassing, which requires boots on the ground, is much harder and more expensive to scale up. Extrapolating from his 2017 results, Stinnett expects to add “anywhere from 67,000 to 108,000 new environmental voters to the electorate,” depending on whether the results are more like Atlanta or more like St. Petersburg.

Edelman’s concluding paragraph brings it all together: “It’s fair to have contempt for politicians who take their cues from opinion polling rather than what’s best for the country. But since we know they do, there’s no excuse for not using it to our advantage. Our political life is besieged by anti-democratic distortions—big money, gerrymandering, nihilistically partisan right-wing media—that threaten to swallow the system whole. But they haven’t yet, quite. On climate change, as with so many other issues that bedevil us, votes are still the most powerful weapon we’ve got.”

And regardless of your top issue priority, that’s the message Democrats must make resonate in every state during the next six monhs.

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

I welcome their hatred!

There’s a bit of a kerfuffle about an article I recently wrote with Peter Leyden that was part of our California Is the Future series on Medium. The article, “The Great Lesson of California in America’s New Civil War”, was recently tweeted about by Jack Dorsey, the Twitter CEO, who said it was a “great read”.
Cue the right-wing outrage. Their view is:

1. The fact that the Twitter CEO favorably mentioned our article is irrefutable proof that Twitter is part of a Vast Liberal Conspiracy to promote the left and shut out the right.

2. The article argues that there is a struggle going on for which model America should follow and it will be resolved not by bipartisan compromise but rather by one side triumphing over the other. The article takes the Democrats’ side and sees California as our best current model for where the country is and should be going. The Trump model, closely embraced by today’s Republican Party, must be defeated.
That, according the right wing howls that Dorsey’s tweet has elicited, can only mean we envision turning America over to “mob rule” and a one-party state.

3. Since it is article of right wing faith that California today is a hellhole little better than Venezuela, the very idea of California as a model for America’s future sends them into a tizzy. As the commentator on the conservative Townhall site says: “I’d rather chug bleach”.

Well, that seems a bit over the top. Anyway, I do plead guilty to the idea that California is a way better model for the country’s future than the pronouncements and policies of the today’s Trumpized Republican Party.

Meanwhile, as FDR put it in a different context, I welcome their hatred.

In his article, “Republicans Seize on Impeachment for Edge in 2018 Midterms,” Jonathan Martin writes, “As Republican leaders scramble to stave off a Democratic wave or at least mitigate their party’s losses in November, a strategy is emerging on the right for how to energize conservatives and drive a wedge between the anti-Trump left and moderate voters: warn that Democrats will immediately move to impeach President Trump if they capture the House. What began last year as blaring political hyperbole on the right…is now steadily drifting into the main currents of the 2018 message for Republicans…Democrats are divided on how to respond to the charge. Many top officials in the capital fear it is a political trap that would distract from their core message and possibly even boomerang to harm them in November. But other more progressive figures see impeachment as a rallying cry of their own to galvanize the left’s anti-Trump base.” It doesn’t seem like a very promising strategy for Republicans. All Dems have to do to sound fair and responsible is say they are waiting for the investigations to conclude before making any commitments, while Republicans do their party no good by reminding the public that their leader deserves is being investigated for both corruption and treasonous offenses.

“The American people are not going to get the vapors from a politician who is willing to acknowledge what they already know—that there are businesses out there harming them for profit…This strategy would solve another pressing problem for Democrats: Americans not knowing where the party actually stands. A 2017 Washington Post poll found that only 37 percent of Americans say the Democratic Party “stands for something.” This has been an acknowledged problem among elected Democratic officials. But a huge part of knowing what someone stands for is knowing what they stand against…A liberalism that once again decides to start making Americans’ lives better through better Internet, cheaper flights, free health care, or fairer banking won’t be able to avoid upsetting those industries. But whoever takes up this task and, through her policies, enrages telecom companies, airlines, drug companies, and banks, can quote Roosevelt as he finished that speech in Portland: “To the people of this country I have but one answer on this subject. Judge me by the enemies I have made.”” — from Jack Meserve’s “Name the Enemy: Liberalism isn’t just about proposing solutions. It’s also about defeating those who would prevent them” at Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.

Democratic campaigns looking for a way to connect with small business people should consider adapting Sen. Ron Wyden’s comments at a Friday press conference. As Angela Simaan reports at Common Dreams, “Small business owners are what drive Oregon’s economy forward. They need a simpler, fairer tax code to grow and thrive,” Sen. Wyden said. “Trump’s tax law did the opposite. Today’s report highlights how Republicans’ choice to slash taxes for multinational corporations will bring financial harm to the rancher in Eastern Oregon, the small restaurant owner on the Oregon Coast, and their employees and customers. It’s more proof that this administration will continue to enrich the donor class at the expense of the middle class.”

Gideon Resnick explains “How Beto O’Rourke Is Building a Digital Fundraising Army” at The Daily Beast: “…The Texas Democrat and his top aides placed a major bet on a novel strategy: they would dramatically break down the barriers between candidate and voter. O’Rourke would make heavy use of social media to essentially broadcast otherwise mundane daily functions. And he would treat the often-pesky task of campaign fundraising as an ongoing conversation rather than a plea for cash…So far, at least, O’Rourke’s bet has paid off, and it’s paid off big. The campaign announced this past Monday that it had raised an excess of $6.7 million in the first fundraising quarter of 2018 with more than 141,000 contributions. That number nearly matches the massive haul Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) had in the first quarter of her 2012 campaign. In three of the four reporting periods so far, O’Rourke has outraised Cruz. And operatives and advisers are now confidently predicting that O’Rourke will raise the most online of any candidate in Senate history, building a formidable list of supporters along the way akin to that of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).”

“The immigration debate is a flashpoint into the larger divide between college-educated and non-college-educated white voters,” writes student columnist Derek Simshauser in his post, “Rethinking Democrats’ Strategy for 2020” in The Brown Daily Herald. “College-educated whites believe that immigrants strengthen the country by a margin of 52 to 35 percent; conversely, 61 percent of white working-class voters — defined by the study in question as whites who did not graduate from college and are paid by the job or by the hour — say that immigrants weaken the nation. William Galston of the Brookings Institute incisively notes the larger forces at work in these numbers: “working-class whites are experiencing a pervasive sense of vulnerability … on every front — economic, cultural, personal security — they feel threatened and beleaguered.” Trump won these voters by a much larger margin than Mitt Romney did in 2012 because he made immigration an issue of race politics, not of policy…Engaging in nativist and racist rhetoric on immigration is obviously a line in the sand that Democrats will not and should not cross. But the resonance of the immigration debate goes far deeper than other cultural issues in voters’ attitudes. The “Obama-Trump” voter, whose vote Democrats so badly covet, may not be persuaded by slight moves to the center from Democrats. And if the Democratic ticket ignores the progressive wing of the party on too many social issues, they risk alienating more voters from the left than they would win over on the right.”

At Vox, Emily Stewart reports that, “More Americans are hitting the streets to protest in the era of Trump.” As Steward notes, “According to a new poll conducted by the Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation and released Friday, one in five Americans have protested in the streets or participated in a political rally since the start of 2016; and of those, 19 percent had never done so before…The poll was conducted during the first two months of 2018 — before the March for Our Lives protest that advocated for gun control in March. It found that more rallygoers are Democrats and independents — 40 percent and 36 percent, respectively — than Republicans, who make up 20 percent of attendees. Rallygoers report attending events to express their views on a wide range of issues, including but not limited to Trump. Of those who went to an event over the past two years, 19 percent did so in support of Trump, compared to 32 percent who protested against him…But whether new protesters will go to the polls for the November midterm elections remains to be seen. Eighty-three percent of rallygoers said they plan to vote in the 2018 midterms, compared to 62 percent of respondents overall.”

Silicone Valley visionary Jack Dorsey, co-creator of both Twitter and The Square, is getting buzz in circles overlapping both tech and politics for his enthusiastic promotion of an article by Ruy Teixeira and Peter Leyden in Medium. As Jon Levine explains at sfgate.com, “Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey came under withering fire Saturday after promoting an article touting the end of bipartisanship and urging one side — Democrats — to thoroughly defeat their opponents as California did in the early 2000s…The original piece, published on Medium by authors Peter Leyden and Ruy Teixeira, analogized our current political environment to the Civil War and suggested that Republicans needed to be “thoroughly defeated.”…“In this current period of American politics,…there’s no way that a bipartisan path provides the way forward. The way forward is on the path California blazed about 15 years ago,” wrote Leyden and Teixeira.“ At some point, one side or the other must win – and win big. The side resisting change, usually the one most rooted in the past systems and incumbent interests, must be thoroughly defeated .” Dorsey has taken a lot of heat as a strong supporter of Democratic candidates, and he shows no signs of caving to conservative criticism. The California Democrats ‘big tent’ philosophy has strengthened the party in elections, while Republicans have demonstrated nation-wide that they have no interest in genuine bipartisanship, or even good-faith negotiations.

Conservative syndicated columnist George F. Will comes out strongly against felon disenfranchisement in his latest column, “There’s no good reason to stop felons from voting.” Will writes, “Intelligent and informed people of good will can strenuously disagree about the wisdom of policies that have produced mass incarceration. What is, however, indisputable is that this phenomenon creates an enormous problem of facilitating the reentry into society of released prisoners who were not improved by the experience of incarceration and who face discouraging impediments to employment and other facets of social normality. In 14 states and the District , released felons automatically recover their civil rights…What compelling government interest is served by felon disenfranchisement? Enhanced public safety? How? Is it to fine-tune the quality of the electorate? This is not a legitimate government objective for elected officials to pursue. A felony conviction is an indelible stain: What intelligent purpose is served by reminding felons — who really do not require reminding — of their past, and by advertising it to their community? The rule of law requires punishments, but it is not served by punishments that never end and that perpetuate a social stigma and a sense of never fully reentering the community…Again, who is comfortable with elected politicians winnowing the electorate? When the voting results from around the nation are reported on the evening of Nov. 6, some actual winners might include 1.6 million Floridians who were not allowed to cast ballots.”

“Lula’s imprisonment – an attack on the working class globally” by Vashna Jagarnath in South Africa’s The Daily Maverick, provides a well-argued critique of the jailing of Brazil’s former president. As Jagarnath explains, “The imprisonment of Lula is a last-ditch attempt to crush Lula’s growing popularity ahead of the elections in October. Lula had intended to stand as a presidential candidate. The imprisonment of Lula…is an attack on the Workers’ Party, and the Brazilian left more broadly. It is an attempt to restore the authority of the white oligarchy…Even conservative statisticians concede that under Lula’s presidency over 40 million Brazilians were lifted out of poverty. Under Lula’s stewardship Brazil created millions of jobs and unemployment fell from 12% to below 6%. Poverty fell by 27% due to pro-working-class reforms, including a raise in the minimum wage…With the “Zero Hunger” project more than 12 million families had three meals a day. In addition to this Lula invested heavily in education. The president who never had an opportunity to go to university built more universities and technical schools than any other Brazilian leader. In addition, he put in place badly needed affirmative action policies that allowed the poor and black population of Brazil to have a chance to access quality education, even at private institutions.” If Democrats win back the presidency in 2020, a top foreign policy priority should be pressing Brazil to release Lula.