As Trump and Republicans campaign on the relatively low official unemployment rate, Democrats would do well to master rebuttal soundbites. Toward that end, read “When adjusted for inflation, wages and weekly earnings for most workers are lower than 50 years ago” by Meteor Blades at Daily Kos, which notes, “Every month, Advisor Perspectives takes a look at what non-farm, non-supervisory, and production employees are being paid. They make up about 80% of all U.S. workers…Using the Consumer Price Index for Urban Consumers to adjust wages for inflation and adding that to the average number of hours employees work, AP’s Jill Mislinski comes up with hypothetical real annual earnings. In 1964, the average work week was 38.8 hours. Now it’s 33.7. If pay had risen commensurately, that would be a good thing. A four-day work week would be a boon for all but the most committed workaholics. But that’s not what happened. Thus, today, taking the average work week and multiplying it by the average hourly wage, he comes up with average inflation-adjusted annual earnings of $39,277. That’s down 11.5% since the peak in weekly hours in October 1972. And that gross figure doesn’t take into account reductions for taxes or other deductions…Hourly inflation-adjusted wages for four-fifths of the workforce—what economists label “real wages”—are now way above what they were in the depths of the Great Recession, but slightly less than they were at their peak 47 years ago. This is after a decade of economic growth since that recession officially ended in June 2009.”

In his Daily Beast article, “How Democrats Can Stop Playing Defense on Abortion,” Dean Obeidallah writes that “enacting a constitutional amendment on any issue, let alone a divisive one like abortion, is currently impossible. We simply can’t get the necessary two-thirds of Congress to first approve such an amendment, and then three-quarters of the state legislatures to sign on. Nor are the prospects of a constitutional convention better.  But if the leading 2020 Democrats make this a key issue, it could begin to lay the groundwork to build public support for such an amendment in years to come–the same way the GOP has built support over decades to ban abortion in its own ranks that is now manifesting as laws…But in the meantime, what can be done—and possibly in time for the 2020 election–is putting into action the process to amend state constitutions to recognize a constitutional right to reproductive freedom. In fact, Vermont is currently considering just such an amendment, which would make the Green Mountain state the first to enshrine abortion access in its constitution by ensuring that “every Vermonter is afforded personal reproductive liberty…Other states should follow Vermont’s lead. This can be accomplished by a ballot initiative in key swing states that provide for such measures including Michigan, Florida, and Wisconsin.  With recent polls showing that a solid majority of Americans oppose the GOP’s extreme laws to control women’s bodies, this could boost turnout for the Democratic candidates in those states.”

Josephine Huetlin explains why “Young Voters Might Just Save Europe From Right-Wing Madness” at the Daily Beast: “The message: “Everyone has a choice but not everyone has a vote: Make the European election about climate.”…Across Europe, inspired by such messages—and fearful about the world they are inheriting from profligate politicians—that is precisely what young people set out to do. And if there are real lessons to be learned here (ones that may well be relevant in the United States), it is that politicians ignore young voters at their peril, and climate change is the issue that mobilizes a great many of them…it was the Liberals and the Greens who stole the moment, and the political momentum, holding the populist tide in check everywhere except in Italy. The right-wing parties gained ground, true, but nothing like as much as had been expected…The Greens, with double-digit scores in most of Europe’s biggest countries, secured 71 seats in the European Parliament, up from 52 seats five years ago. In Germany, Ireland, Finland, and France, Green parties surged. Even in Britain amid Brexit chaos, the Greens scored more than 11 percent of the vote, which put them ahead of the shattered Tory party.”

Perry Bacon, Jr. reports on “What Republicans And Democrats Are Doing In The States Where They Have Total Power” at FiveThirtyEight, and observes “The 14 states — which are home to about 112 million people — that are totally controlled by Democrats are pushing forward an agenda of, among other things, hiking the minimum wage significantly above the federal $7.25 per hour, banning (for minors) therapy that is designed to “convert” gay and lesbian people from homosexuality (this treatment is widely condemned by medical experts) and mandating that the Electoral College votes in states go to whichever candidate wins the national popular vote. …The issues being pushed in liberal states aren’t too surprising. They reflect a combination of (i) initiatives the Obama administration was pushing in its latter stages but couldn’t get approved nationally because the GOP controlled Congress; (ii) reactions to the Trump era (particularly trying to ensure that another president is not elected without winning the popular vote), and (iii) priorities of the party’s activists.”

As for red states, Bacon notes, “The 22 GOP-totally-controlled states — which are home to about 136 million people — have tried to eliminate restrictions on gun rights, stop cities from becoming “sanctuaries” for undocumented immigrants and weaken the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement that targets the Israeli government for how it treats Palestinians…Similar to the Democratic list, this legislative agenda represents (i) Trump administration priorities that can’t get approved in Congress; (ii) reactions to the Obama administration (particularly the attempts to limit Medicaid, which was greatly expanded in the Obama years), and (iii) longtime conservative activists’ causes (limiting gun restrictions, for example)…And some of these ideas have crossed the red-blue divide — for example, some GOP-controlled states, like North Dakota, are joining the push to decriminalize marijuana, and many blue states, including California and New York, have enacted anti-BDS provisions.”

However, Bacon notes some that some policies you might expect “are not proliferating at the state level, including Medicare expansion — “only Washington has adopted a so-called public option at the state level. And even as some of the party’s presidential candidates emphasize hiking rates on the wealthiest Americans, totally controlled Democratic states haven’t been as enthusiastic. New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy’s push for a major tax increase on millionaires, for example, is facing strong resistance from his fellow Democrats in the state legislature.” Republican-dominated states have been slow to pass laws enabling charter schools — “of the six states that don’t currently have laws allowing for the creation of charters, four (Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota and West Virginia) are totally controlled by the GOP.”

“It’s common for critics of the new wave of state laws severely limiting access to abortion to say the measures are part of a Republican “war on women,”  writes Ronald Brownstein at The Atlantic. “But strong support from most white women, especially those who identify as evangelical Christians, has helped Republicans dominate local government in the states passing the most restrictive measures, from Alabama and Georgia to Kentucky and Missouri. In some of those states, polling shows that opposition to legal abortion is higher among white women than among white men…These attitudes underscore why it’s too simplistic to forecast that the renewed push against abortion will uniformly drive women away from the GOP…The nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) examined state-by-state attitudes on abortion in 2014. It found that just over three-fifths of white women in Alabama and Mississippi said that abortion should be illegal in most or all circumstances, almost exactly the same percentage as white men in those states. About three-fifths of white women in Kentucky and a narrow majority in Georgia said that abortion should be mostly illegal; in both cases, that was a higher share than among the state’s white men. Only in Missouri did a 51 percent majority of white women say that abortion should mostly remain legal.”

As for how this trend played out in the mideterm election, Brownstein adds that “In 2018, for instance, exit polls conducted by Edison Research found that fully three-fourths of white women supported the Republican Brian Kemp over the Democrat Stacey Abrams in the Georgia governor’s race. That same year, just 16 percent of white women picked the Democrat Mike Espy for Mississippi’s Senate seat. In the 2017 special Senate election in Alabama, 63 percent of white women backed the Republican Roy Moore, who faced multiple allegations that he had dated teenage girls as an adult, over the Democrat Doug Jones (who narrowly triumphed anyway)…In all of these races, southern white women’s preferences diverged sharply from those of African American women, who gave 97 percent of their votes to Abrams, 98 percent to Jones, and 93 percent to Espy…Fully 80 percent of southern white evangelical women backed Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, according to previously unpublished exit-poll results provided to me by Edison. Three-fourths of white evangelical women in Alabama backed Moore over Jones in 2017, and an even more emphatic 88 percent of them in Georgia backed Kemp over Abrams in last year’s governor’s race. Across the South overall, three-fourths of white evangelical women said they approved of Trump’s performance in the 2018 exit poll, according to Edison, and just 20 percent of white evangelical women backed Democratic House candidates that year.”

At The Boston Review, Richard Reeves shares some salient thoughts on class, specifically the social position of the upper-middle class in America: “…The popular obsession with the top 1 percent allows the upper middle class to convince ourselves we are in the same boat as the rest of America; but it is not true.  However messily it is expressed, much of the criticism of our class is true. We proclaim the “net” benefits of free trade, technological advances, and immigration, safe in the knowledge that we will be among the beneficiaries. Equipped with high levels of human capital, we can flourish in a global economy. The cities we live in are zoned to protect our wealth, but deter the unskilled from sharing in it. Professional licensing and an immigration policy tilted toward the low-skilled shield us from the intense market competition faced by those in nonprofessional occupations. We proclaim the benefits of free markets but are largely insulated from the risks they can pose. Small wonder other folks can get angry…The upper middle class has been having it pretty good. It is about time those of us in the favored fifth recognized our privileged position. Some humility and generosity is required. But there is clearly some work to do in terms of raising awareness. Right now, there is something of a culture of entitlement among America’s upper middle class. Partly this is because of a natural tendency to compare ourselves to those even better off than us…the size and strength of the upper middle class means that it can reshape cities, dominate the education system, and transform the labor market. The upper middle class also has a huge influence on public discourse, counting among its members most journalists, think-tank scholars, TV editors, professors, and pundits in the land…It has become a staple of politicians to declare the American dream dying or dead. But it is not dead. It is alive and well; but it is being hoarded by those of us in the upper middle class. The question is: Will we share it?”

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

Surround the Countryside from the Cities!

The Maoist dictum is to surround the cities from the countryside. Democrats need to reverse that dictum and push into the countryside from the cities because, as Will Wilkinson notes in a good piece in the Times, Donald Trump’s policies are leaving huge openings for the Democrats in rural areas. This idea is consistent, of course, with the Catalist findings on the 2018 election (reviewed yesterday) that showed Democrats making their largest vote gains in rural areas, essentially due to vote-switching by 2016 Trump voters.

Alabama Republicans did some unexpected damage to their own party in enacted their infamous legislation banning virtually all abortions, as I observed at New York:

Not long ago I observed that the tidal wave of early-term abortion bans being enacted in Republican-controlled states was undermining the GOP’s national message claiming mainstream status for its party in contrast to those “extremist Democrats” who are willing to accept “infanticide,” the anti-abortion movement’s favored term for medically necessary late-term abortions. But now the enactment of the most extreme abortion ban yet by Alabama Republicans isn’t just stepping on the “infanticide” messaging; it’s dividing the GOP and the anti-choice movement in a noisy manner.

By far the noisiest dispute is over Alabama’s failure to provide an exception to the ban for victims of rape and incest, which the president among others suggested was a mistake.

As Trump noted, accepting rape and incest exceptions has been standard for most Republican pols dating back to Reagan, though nearly every four years the official GOP platform omits them. The reason for making these exceptions is baldly political: Banning abortion in such cases is very unpopular. Indeed, even in Alabama a 2018 poll showed 65 percent of respondents opposing a ban when the pregnancy is the product of rape or incest.

Republicans have a particularly vivid example in recent political history of the peril of not accepting a rape exception: the 2012 elections, when not one but two favored Republican Senate candidates (Missouri’s Todd Akin and Indiana’s Richard Mourdock) lost after saying stupid and offensive things to justify forcing victims of rape to carry pregnancies to term.

But in the wake of the Alabama law, the always-latent pro-life support for a rigorously logical abortion ban without such exceptions has emerged with new force, dismissing the 2012 calamity as the result of an inept presentation of the case rather than its inherent demerits, as Ruth Graham recently explained:

“Alabama’s decision to omit exceptions (other than when the mother’s life is at serious risk) is partly because the law’s proponents wanted a ‘clean’ bill to directly challenge Roe v. Wade in the court system. But it is also a reflection of the coalescing consensus in contemporary anti-abortion circles that rape and incest exceptions are morally unacceptable.

“’For many traditional pro-life groups, this is now a litmus test for your seriousness about being in favor of the prenatal child,’ said anti-abortion ethicist Charles Camosy, the author of a new book on the connections between abortion and issues including immigration and mass incarceration. ‘Lost is any sense of complexity about the actual arguments, much to the detriment of the movement both intellectually and politically.'”

This quiet area of disagreement within the anti-abortion movement and the GOP never mattered much when the main divisions were between parties that accepted and rejected basic reproductive rights. But they are flaring up now, particularly after Trump, 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, RNC chair Ronna McDaniel, and even Christian right warhorse Pat Robertson all went out of their way to call the Alabama law “extreme.”

The dispute over rape exceptions won’t subside even if interest in the Alabama law recedes, since Republicans in Missouri (Todd Akin’s state) are on the brink of enacting a less-restrictive ban on early-term abortions with no exceptions other than threats to the life of the woman involved. Other states could follow in what is now looking like an anti-abortion–GOP stampede into the fever swamps.

Here’s an illustrative jeremiad from right-wing radio-talk-show veteran Steve Deace, writing for Glenn Beck’s website:

“[A]t the time the pro-life movement is finally authoring real legislation to cast out this demonic stronghold over the culture once and for all, ‘I’m pro-life but’ celebrity fauxservatives are lining up to let cable news bookers know they’re not as primitive as those folks who believe ‘thou shall not murder’ is a commandment and not a mere suggestion …

“God bless all those who will now seize this moment in the fight against one of the worst genocides in human history by refusing to let these ‘I’m pro-life but’ fauxservatives get away with the most preposterous and wicked equivocations.”

Deace also reflects the underlying delusion that Alabama’s action represents some great turning point in public opinion on abortion:

“The tide is turning on this issue like I’ve never seen before. Do your part to make sure that continues. Don’t accept lies. Don’t accept excuses. Don’t accept cowardice.”

It doesn’t help the anti-abortion movement or its major-party vehicle that the wait for SCOTUS action on their issue could be extended, particularly if it transpires that the five-justice conservative bloc on the Court is divided on how or how quickly to proceed. The divisions we are seeing thanks to the Alabama law do little but to show the rest of the world that all these people are extremists when it comes to their determination to ban the 99-plus percent of abortions that are not caused by rape or incest.

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

I’ve touted the Catalist estimates released previously as the best estimates we have of voter turnout and preferences by demographic group for the 2018 election and previous elections–and therefore the best tool for helping us understand what really drove the 2018 election results.

So send up the balloons! Yair Ghitza and the good folks at Catalist have just released their final data for 2018, incorporating final precinct-level elections and, critically, individual-level vote history records from voter files around the country. These are some tasty data and as close as we are ever likely to get to a definitive portrait of the 2018 election.

Great news from two of America’s most effective liberal groups, as reported by Gideon Resnick at The Daily Beast: “Two grassroots progressive organizations formed after President Trump’s inauguration are joining forces in advance of the 2020 election. Swing Left, which had been primarily committed in the last cycle to helping Democrats take back a majority in the House of Representatives, will bring Flippable, an outfit devoted to turning state legislatures blue, under its umbrella. The merged entity will continue to go by Swing Left…The goal of the merger is to create a unified strategy and better equip volunteers and donors to help in the upcoming presidential race as well as down-ballot contests. Combined, the organizations raised some $13 million in 2018 in addition to having a community of more than a million of those volunteers and donors…The groups’ founders think the combination of Flippable’s expertise in the states and Swing Left’s huge network will complement each other and ensure progressive voters do not get overwhelmed with too many outlets for activism and contributions.” These groups have done remarkable work as individual entities, and there is every reason to believe they will be even more effective as they merge and leverage their mutual resources.

From Frank Clemente’s op-ed,  “What Democrats must tell Trump: Get infrastructure money from corporations and the rich” in The Des Moines Register: “The American Society of Civil Engineers gives U.S. infrastructure a barely passing grade of D+. The group estimates it will take $2 trillion on top of current levels of spending to bring it all up to snuff…The wealthy and big corporations, which received massive tax breaks from the 2017 Trump-GOP tax cuts and are prime beneficiaries of a strong infrastructure system, need to contribute more and start paying their fair share…Other funding sources are inadequate. Raising the federal gas tax (or replacing it with a mileage-based user fee) could be part of the answer, but it’s a diminishing resource because of the growing use of electric and other fuel-efficient vehicles. Even tripling the gas tax to 53 cents a gallon would raise just over $500 billion over 10 years, a quarter of what’s needed. What’s more, does it really make sense to ask working families to pay a lot more to get to work or go on vacation after most of those Trump-GOP tax cuts benefited the wealthy and corporations?…Republicans weren’t bothered by the nearly $2 trillion cost of their tax cut bill, which was added to the federal debt. But they now display a striking double standard by objecting to spending the same amount to fix our infrastructure. More galling: A 2012 analysis by Mark Zandi at Moody’s Analytics shows that every dollar spent oninfrastructure pumps $1.44 back into the economy, while a dollar spent on corporate tax cuts returns just 32 cents.”

In her post, “What Led to Trump’s Rose Garden Temper Tantrum?,” Nancy LeTourneau outs Trump’s pre-planned walkout theatrics at The Washington Monthly: “When Democratic leaders arrived at the White House, Trump walked into the room, went on a five-minute rant about ongoing investigations, and then walked out. He proceeded to the Rose Garden where he held a supposedly impromptu press conference, refusing to govern until Democrats stopped their investigations. They claim that it was Pelosi’s remarks about a cover-up that triggered it all…But take a look at the lectern from which the president made his remarks in the Rose Garden.”

Lol pic.twitter.com/DkPS5IcpgG

— Bodak Red ??? (@AFarray) May 22, 2019

Trump’s ridiculous walkout probably won’t help his rapidly tanking re-election prospects. In his post, “Poll: 60 percent say Trump should not be reelected,” Jonathan Easley reports at The Hill that “A new poll finds that a strong majority of voters believes that President Trump does not deserve a second term in office…A Monmouth University survey released Wednesday found that only 37 percent of voters believe Trump should be reelected, while 60 percent said they think it’s time to have someone new in the White House…That’s the highest percentage of voters saying they’re eager for change since Monmouth first began asking the question in November. The numbers come weeks ahead of Trump’s expected official launch for his 2020 reelection campaign.” Easley also notes, however, that “Despite the desire to elect Trump’s replacement in 2020, a majority of voters, 56 percent, say Trump should not be impeached and compelled to leave office, while 39 percent support impeachment and removal…“A majority want someone else in the Oval Office, but are willing to wait until the next election,” said Monmouth University pollster Patrick Murray.”

At Politico, Natasha Korecki and David Sides take a look “Inside the 2020 Democrats’ survival strategies,” and observe: “Bernie Sanders must win New Hampshire. Julian Castro is letting it all ride on Nevada. South Carolina is essential to Cory Booker’s chances…The 23 candidates chasing the Democratic nomination are piling up events and plowing resources into the four early presidential states, telegraphing which states they’re prioritizing and which ones they’re writing off.” The article says Hickenlooper, Klobuchar, Swalwell, Delaney, Bullock and O’Rourke as Democratic candidates who have to do well in Iowa to stay in the race, while Biden would be in trouble with a “weak Iowa performance, as would Warren. Sanders and Warren both have to do well in New Hampshire, though biden still elads in state polls. The article credits Harris, Booker and Delaney as “having the most robust staffs” in NH. “For Buttigieg, there is some urgency to make his mark in either Iowa or New Hampshire…Four candidates have the most riding on South Carolina, home to the South’s first primary: Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris and Joe Biden.”

FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver disagrees with Ezra Klein’s Vox argument challenging the notion that “Americans are ideological moderates who punish political parties for nominating candidates too far to the left or right.” Silver puts together a chart diplaying “Average of favorability ratings in polls conducted wholly or partly since Biden entered the race,” and argues that, in terms of net-favorability, “Sanders’s numbers are decent — but in general moderate candidates have slightly better favorables. Buttigeg’s net-favorable ratings are a little betterthan Sanders, for instance, and Biden, Buttigieg and Julián Castro are the only Democrats with net-positive ratings. The worst ratings belong to liberal candidates such as Kirsten Gillibrand (who has opposed Trump more often than any other senator) and, especially, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio.” The chart:

In his update, “Notes on the State of the Senate,” Kyle Kondik writes at Sabato’s Crysal Ball that “Arizona looms so large because it’s hard to really piece together a plausible path to a Democratic majority without it flipping. If one assumes that Democrats lose Alabama but win Colorado — the former is a better assumption than the latter — that evens out to no net change. So even if Democrats win Arizona and Colorado but lose Alabama, they would need at least two more victories in GOP-held seats. Which ones? The list actually isn’t that long, or that appealing, for Democrats…Other Democratic possibilities are Georgia, Iowa, and North Carolina; the Tar Heel State may be the best target of that trio, given its history of close Senate races and because it was the closest of the three states in the 2016 presidential race. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) also now faces a primary challenger. If Trump tanks in 2020, Democrats could end up carrying all three states for president as part of a larger national sweep that wins them unified control of the presidency and Congress…Barring some other big upset (Texas?), Democrats probably won’t win the Senate without at least one of Georgia, Iowa, or North Carolina.”

I’ve been watching the president’s job approval ratings closely, and they’re again reverting to a mediocre mean, as I observed at New York:

Week before last, I wondered if at long last we were finally seeing a significant lift in the president’s job-approval ratings of the sort Republicans had been predicting from practically the moment the man took office:

“This morning as on every weekday morning I glanced at RealClearPolitics’ polling average for the president’s job-approval ratings, and I nearly dropped my coffee cup: It was at 45.1 percent. Just yesterday I had written that Trump had ‘yet to hit 45 percent in average approval ratings at either RealClearPolitics or FiveThirtyEightsince the earliest days of his presidency.’ Scanning RCP’s graph of past averages, I learned that today’s was Trump’s highest average approval rating since February 20, 2017.

“So is the president undergoing some sort of serious improvement in his famously stagnant levels of popularity, which could result in him reaching levels consistent with past presidents who were reelected? Are the economy and the triumphant GOP spin on the Mueller report combining to give him an unprecedented lift?”

I expressed some skepticism about that possibility, and indicated time would tell. Looks like it has. Trump’s approval-rating average at RCP hasn’t drifted ever upward, but is back down to 43 percent. At FiveThirtyEight, it’s at 41.8 percent. Most startling of all, it’s at 44 percent in the Rasmussen tracking poll, which is the lowest it’s been since February 1. The president has been known to tweet out unusually favorable numbers from this poll. He’s not going to mention this one.

We’ve been here many times before. Gallup calculates Trump’s average approval rating for throughout his presidency at 40 percent. Apart from a dip into the high 30s when he was unsuccessfully trying to kill Obamacare in 2017, the low 40s are where he’s been consistently in the RCP averages; at FiveThirtyEight (which weighs results for polling quality and partisan bias), he’s similarly very near where he’s usually been, with somewhat more frequent and recent dips into the high 30s.

So it’s more and more evident that the man’s popularity simply isn’t very elastic, regardless of economic conditions and/or the daily gyrations of his Twitter feed and the partisan conflict in Washington. And it reinforces the very high likelihood that his reelection is going to depend not on any Trump surge in approval but on dragging his Democratic opponents down into the depths of popular opprobrium right along with him, like an alligator executing a death roll to drown its prey.

Tom Jacobs explains why “Candidates Who Explain Progresive Policies Via Conservative Principles Could be Uniquely Persuasive” at The Pacific Standard:

South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg has impressed a lot of people with his ability to speak many languages during his campaign for the presidency. But Buttigieg’s greatest asset may be his ability to speak Republican.

Though he’s a liberal Democrat, the presidential hopeful often frames his arguments in terms of traditional, even conservative, values. He speaks about faith and freedom and service to the nation, arguing that these bedrock principles actually align with progressive policies.

The rest of the article is not so much about Buttigieg, though Jacobs notes that “this rhetorical ability could make him quite formidable in the general election” if he gets the Democratic nomination. Jacobs elaborates on the main findings:

Researchers report that, in two studies featuring more than 4,000 people, “a presidential candidate who framed his progressive economic platform to be consistent with conservative values like patriotism, family, and respect for tradition—as opposed to more liberal value concerns like equality and social justice—was supported significantly more by conservatives and, unexpectedly, by moderates as well.”

Sociologists Jan Voelkel and Robb Willer report that such a framing tells conservative voters that a candidate shares their principles, thus making voters more open to the candidate’s specific policy proposals. This research suggests that Democratic candidates don’t need to “move to the center” to attract support from Republicans; rather, they need to change the way they talk about their own policies.

The paper, which is available online but has yet to be peer reviewed, describes two similarly structured large-scale studies. The first featured 2,443 American citizens recruited online; the second featured 1,695 participants from the National Opinion Research Center’s AmeriSpeak Panel, which was designed to be representative of the population as a whole.

In both studies, Jacobs explains, the researchers posited an imaginary Democratic candidate named ‘Scott Miller,’ whose “policies were described as either moderately progressive (e.g. maintaining the Affordable Care Act in its current form), or highly progressive (e.g. expanding Medicare to cover all uninsured Americans).”

Some survey respondents were read ‘liberal frame’ speeches in which Miller’s “vision for our country is based on principles of economic justice, fairness, and compassion,” while others “read either a neutral framing or a conservative one,” in which Miller stressed values of “hard work, loyalty to our country, and the freedom to forge your own path.” Not that conservatives have a monopoly on the latter values — many liberals frequently cite them.

Then, writes Jacobs, “these value-oriented statements were randomly paired with the moderate or progressive policy platforms. After reading the entire package, participants indicated on a zero-to-100 scale how likely they would be to vote for Miller over President Donald Trump in 2020.” The findings:

In both studies, when Miller’s policies were expressed in terms of conservative values, he received significantly greater support from both conservatives and moderates than when they were described in terms associated with liberal values.

How significant was the change? In the first study, conservative, as opposed to liberal, framing “resulted, on average, in a 13-point increase in support on a scale of 0 to 100 among conservatives.” That increase was a still-robust 10 points in the second study.

Importantly, “there was no backlash to conservative framing among liberal participants,” the researchers add. Thus the most successful approach “advocated for progressive policies in terms of conservative value concerns.”

Jacobs notes also that “participants in Study 1 rated a progressive candidate with conservative value concerns as similarly consistent as a progressive candidate with liberal values…the researchers  suggest that “the ideological underpinnings of policies and candidates are more malleable than is commonly assumed…Or perhaps it means that people read just enough to be reassured they are on the same page as the candidate in terms of their core beliefs, which leads them to trust that candidate on specific positions.” Further,

These new results are consistent with a 2010 study that found people invested in justifying the status quo—that is, conservatives—were more supportive of pro-environmental policies when such policies were framed as a way to help sustain the American way of life. With all such questions, context is key.

“Moral re-framing may offer a more effective path to building political consensus than policy compromise,” Voelkel and Willer conclude. “This research suggests progressive policies and conservative value concerns are reconcilable in practice—and that such a combination can be persuasive.”

If the researchers are right, there is a case for a profound reframing of Democratic messages in federal, state and local elections. It would be instructive to see how such deliberate reframing performs in a few real-world elections, preferably those with Democratic candidates who were underdogs when they declared their candidacies.

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

Is Biden winning back Obama-Trump voters?

The short answer to this is “yes” if by that we mean some of these voters are willing to express a preference for Biden over Trump in 2020 trial heats. It’s difficult to interpret Biden’s significant leads over Trump in states like Michigan, ,Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in any other way.

As Martin Longman notes in a piece on the Political Animal blog, it makes more sense to reason from these polls–which apparently now include polls conducted by the Trump campaign itself–than from articles that quote non-randomly selected working class Trump voters saying how much they still love the President. The latter of course prove nothing other than that such voters exist and the reporter found some.

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

I’m not sure how many people have even absorbed the fact that there is now a competitor to the National Election Pool-sponsored exit poll, the AP VoteCast survey–used by Fox and AP affiliates–which has a very different methodology than the standard exits and purports to replace it.

Is it any better? Probably not. Both polls perform reasonably well in helping predict the outcome of races on election night, though some misses are inevitable. The real problem here is that people rely on the exit polls to give them a portrait of the demographic and attitudinal voting patterns of the electorate and therefore the underlying dynamics of the election. But the exit polls have been shown time and again to be inaccurate on this score and it is unlikely that the AP VoteCast survey is much better.

In his article, “The Democrats’ Age Divide Is Defining the 2020 Primary: Joe Biden’s edge with older voters is his greatest asset so far in the race” in The Atlantic, Ronald Brownstein shares some revealing stats: “His greatest strength is his appeal to older Democratic voters, both white and African American, who are typically more ideologically moderate and more politically pragmatic. For the 76-year-old Biden, that’s an acceptable trade-off because voters older than 45 cast fully 60 percent of all votes in the 2016 Democratic primary, according to a cumulative CNN analysis of all the exit polls conducted that year…Only a little more than one-fifth of Democratic voters ages 45 and older described themselves as very liberal in 2016; about twice as many described themselves as moderate or conservative…In CNN’s first national poll after Biden entered, the former vice president drew 45 percent of likely Democratic primary voters older than 45, four times as much as Sanders, his nearest rival. Among voters younger than 45, Biden also led, but only by 31 percent to 19 percent…In Pennsylvania, a Quinnipiac University pollreleased Wednesday showed Biden and Sanders running about even among voters younger than 50, but Biden leading him by almost 12 to one among those who are older.”

Perry Bacon, Jr., however, takes a different slant the age issue in “A Lot Of Americans Say They Don’t Want A President Who Is Over 70. Really?” and observes at FiveThirtyEight that, “Gallup recently released new data on Americans’ willingness to vote for presidential candidates with certain traits. About 1,000 adults were asked¹whether they’d vote for a well-qualified candidate who was nominated by their party and was black, gay or had one of 10 other characteristics that are rarely or never seen in presidential nominees…Almost all Americans said they’d be comfortable voting for a woman (94 percent), or a Catholic (95 percent), Hispanic (95 percent) or black (96 percent) candidate. But there are characteristics that big swaths of Americans said would be disqualifying — in particular being older than 70, being an atheist and being a socialist.” However, notes bacon, “Thirty-seven percent of Republicans said they would not back a GOP presidential candidate over the age of 70. Well … yep, President Trump was 70 on Election Day in 2016, and he’ll be 74 in 2020.”

For an update on the presidential candidates in relation to labor unions, read Tara Golshan’s “2020 Democrats’ battle for union support, explained” at vox.com. Some of Golshan’s insights: “Union members “vote at higher rates than most Americans, they are mobilized, they are in important states,” Paul Frymer, a political scientist with Princeton University who has written on the labor movement, said. “The union movement is a big part of the Democratic Party — there isn’t another mobilized coalition like it. They are the biggest civil rights movement in the country.”… Golshan notes that front-runners Biden and Sanders are at odds on some trade issues, with Sanders taking a more protectionist stance. “In an AFL-CIO poll of its members,” Golshan writes, “65 percent said they opposed NAFTA, and 72 percent said the TPP would have been bad for American workers, leading to outsourced jobs and lower wages…”

Golshan adds, “Exit polling from the 2016 presidential election showed Trump trailing Clinton by only 8 points among union households — a significant improvement from Mitt Romney, who trailed Barack Obama by 18 points with those same voters. Those numbers, in part, reflect a shift among white men, according to data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study.”..FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver put it in terms of the 2016 election results in states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, which Trump won by razor-thin margins to claim the presidency. In 2016, Clinton underperformed Obama among union members by 18 points. “That roughly 18-point swing was worth a net of 1.2 percentage points for Trump in Pennsylvania, 1.1 points in Wisconsin and 1.7 points in Michigan based on their rates of union membership — and those totals were larger than his margins of victory in those states…”

A DLCC e-blast notes that “Pennsylvania, more than almost any other state, helped put Donald Trump in the White House and Trump’s allies in charge of the Senate. This Tuesday, we have a chance to turn the tide and start pushing this key swing state back into the Democratic column…In just a few days, Pennsylvania will hold three special elections for their legislature, and these races are going to be tough…They’re happening in some of the reddest seats in the state, and they’re easily our most daunting challenge yet in the Trump era…Just last month, Democrat Pam Iovino — an exemplary public servant facing daunting odds — flipped a seat that backed Trump by nearly 6 points. A blue Pennsylvania is within our grasp…” And yes, you can help by clicking here, and doing your part.

At The Daily Beast, Allison Quinn argues that “GOP Congressman Justin Amash’s Impeachment Call Boosts Pressure on Pelosi.” As Quinn explains, “Many were quick to wonder aloud why it was a Republican lawmaker making the case for impeachment rather than top Democrat Pelosi, who has called Trump “unfit” for the presidency but come out against impeachment, saying it’d be too “divisive” for the country…Earlier this week at an event hosted by the Georgetown University Law Center, she said she doesn’t “want to impeach” even though in her opinion, Trump is giving more “grounds for impeachment” with every passing day by ignoring subpoenas issued by House Democrats.

If Trump is pondering some sort of power-grab after losing the 2020 election, he won’t find much support from voters, according to a new poll conducted by IPSOS and the University of Virginia Center for American Politics, as reported at Sabato’s Crystal Ball: “By a 77%-16% margin, respondents did not think that the 2020 election should be delayed and President Donald Trump given an extra two years in office. This question was based on a recent tweet by Liberty University President Jerry Falwell suggesting that because of Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, the president’s term should be extended two years (Trump retweeted Falwell). There were partisan differences on this question: Democrats said no overwhelmingly, 89%-9%, while Republicans said no by a smaller 62%-31% margin…Just 7% of respondents said that if Trump loses the 2020 election, he should ignore the results and stay in office.”

“Democrats beware: Trump could ride tariffs to a presidential win,” warns Egberto Willies at Daily Kos: “Trump’s Chinese tariffs create points of discussions on the deficit, taxes, lying to his base, the economic pain of the masses, and much more. But Democrats are just leaving it up to pundits, journalists, and others to craft a less-than-perfect narrative…The thing is, except for Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, the Democrats have not given voters a transformational vision of our economy that will help all those who are hurting financially. Trump is building such a vision, even if it’s just a facade. And whether he gets the beneficial terms from China or not, the truth is that because Democrats haven’t provided a compelling counter-narrative, Trump may win over enough voters to cruise to re-election in 2020.”