Having heard a lot of despair from Democrats over high-profile recruits turning down the opportunity to run for the Senate, I looked at some trends and suggested a more optimistic approach at New York:

[A]s my colleague Eric Levitz recently explained, a Republican-controlled Senate could dash hopes that a progressive 46th president could enact any kind of legislative agenda or reverse the conservative judicial revolution that Donald Trump is overseeing. Beyond that, a Democratic president who can’t get anything done would be a strong candidate for a disastrous 2022 midterm and early lame-duck status.

So picking up three net Senate seats is almost as urgent a task for Democrats in 2020 as getting Trump out of the White House. The conventional wisdom in some circles is that Democratic Senate hopes have been betrayed by potentially strong candidates (e.g., Texas’s Beto O’Rourke, Montana’s Steve Bullock, and Georgia’s Stacey Abrams) selfishly deciding to pursue other offices and other goals. Aside from how you feel about the proposition that these people owe the Democratic Party a year or so of tough, miserable campaign work and then six years in a job they may not even want, the candidate-driven look at 2020 Senate races may be missing something more fundamental. In the last presidential election year, split-ticket voting in Senate races basically vanished. That’s right: In 2016, all 34 races were won by the party that won the state in question in the presidential contest. That’s never happened before. As Harry Enten pointed out, there wasn’t much variation in the pattern of votes:

Unless 2016 was an outlier (and given a general trend toward straight-ticket voting, that’s unlikely), you can see why most observers are pessimistic about Democrat Doug Jones surviving a presidential year in Alabama (Trump won the state by 27 points), and also why Steve Bullock wasn’t interested in a Senate race in Montana (which Trump carried by 20 points) and Beto O’Rourke gave it a pass in Texas (a nine-point Trump win in 2016).

More generally, the depressing fact for Democrats is that 22 of the 34 Senate races in 2020 are happening in states won by Trump in 2016. Considering that Trump managed to lose the national popular vote, that’s mostly a reminder that the United States Senate, with its equal seats for California and Wyoming, is a fundamentally anti-democratic (and hence anti-Democratic) institution.

There is a flip side to this straight-ticket-voting reality: If Democrats win the presidential race decisively, some of those presidential red states could turn blue. In particular, Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina are states with 2020 Senate races against Republican incumbents where Democrats think they have a decent chance of beating Trump this time. Add in two states Trump lost last time that have Republican senators up in 2020 (Colorado and Maine), and the odds of liberating the upper chamber from Mitch McConnell’s death grip look a lot better. That means a strong Democratic investment in purplish states with Senate races could pay off doubly.

Strange things can always happen in the interim, of course: Joe Manchin could practically hand over his Senate seat to Republicans if he resigned to run for governor of West Virginia. On the other hand, Alabama Republicans could make an equally generous gesture by again nominating Roy Moore to run against Jones. But instead of obsessing about recruitment of ideal candidates for potentially winnable Senate races, Democrats would be wise to focus on winning those states against Trump, with all the good things that could mean down-ballot.

The following article by Stanley Greenberg and Nancy Zdunkewicz, which includes findings from March and April focus groups with unregistered and low propensity members of the Rising American Electorate, is cross-posted from Democracy Corps:

With voters turning out at historic levels in 2018 and people now following politics more closely than at any point in the past, WVWVAF asked us whether progressives should start working to register unregistered and low propensity voters? It usually conducts its registration programs with the Rising American Electorate in the Fall of the odd year before the election.

The answer for the women is resoundingly, yes. They are already politicized, engaged by President Trump, and looking for how to bring change.

Listening to these unregistered or low propensity African American women, Hispanic women, white unmarried women, and white millennial women tells us quickly they are so engaged early in reaction to President Trump:

• Trump has raised the stakes and you know elections and your vote matter.
• Trump’s in-your-face style and over-claiming tweets force them to pay attention.
• 100 new women being elected in reaction to Trump says change is possible.
• Claims of “greatest economy” is hurting Republicans, particularly as people are struggling financially, while corrupt politicians take care of the richest.
• Trump’s divisiveness is elevating their desire for greater unity.
• There is a new millennial consciousness – shaping the reaction to Trump.

We are in a unique time when every time Trump tweets to argue his case, he produces a backlash in the RAE that motivates them to register and vote. 

VIEW THE REPORT

We have given a fair amount of space to various arguments against impeaching Trump. But even the most ardent Democratic opponents of impeachment acknowledge that there may come a time when Democrats will look bad by not doing so.

For Democratic presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren and Julian Castro that time has arrived. As Castro said,

“I called several weeks ago now for impeachment proceedings to begin because it’s clear that this president obstructed justice,” he emphasized. “Congress needs to act. They should act…“The fact that you’d have almost 400 former federal prosecutors say that anybody else would have been charged with several felony counts for obstruction of justice, that says something…the question is – is this president above the law? I believe the answer to that is no, and that’s why impeachment is warranted.”

Warren said it this way:

“I have tried to let the House make its own determination and I’ve made clear how I see this…Every single person in the House and the Senate should take a vote on whether what Donald Trump did to obstruct justice was an impeachable offense. And then they ought to have to live with that vote for the rest of their lives.”..Mueller served up the evidence on a silver platter to Congress. Congress is now the only body that can act to prevent a president from obstructing justice and walking away with no penalty imposed.

There will be more. For most of the Democratic candidates, it’s more likely a matter of “when” than “if.” But at slate.com, Jim Newell says that that Speaker Pelosi’s strategy is pinned on “her own worst fears: that impeachment would backfire on Democrats, that it would distract them from their legislative agenda, and that there’s no chance Trump would get convicted in the Republican-controlled Senate.” Newell argues further,

The muddled message from Pelosi—Trump is obstructing justice every day, but we’ll show him by not impeaching—is a byproduct of the corner she’s occupying: Impeach the president and risk a catastrophic backfire that secures him another term, or don’t impeach him, and allow Donald Trump to operate in a space where the credible threat of impeachment is off the table. Beneath all of the mixed signaling, though, is a coherent decision that she has made: to delay the decision on impeachment indefinitely, by continually requesting more, seeing where facts land at the end of a time-consuming process of fact-landing, and, by then, arriving at Election Day.

Newell quotes WaPo’s Greg Sargent, who commented on impeachment as a way to make Trump’s tax returns public:

Democrats must now choose between continuing to pursue the returns through conventional channels, which carries some risk of failure, and getting serious about impeachment hearings, which would likely minimize that risk to the greatest extent possible,” Sargent writes. “If Democrats go with the first, it raises at least the possibility that they could squander months in court, only to fail to secure Trump’s returns at the end—at which point they’d decide it’s too late to pursue impeachment, because 2020 would be looming.

As Newell concludes, ” Investigations will serve as a tool to expose the president’s wrongdoing for voters to draw their own conclusions, not as the build-up to Congress reaching a conclusion of its own. In a way, it’s the highest-risk gamble of all: Betting everything on an election which, if Trump wins, would leave him with four more years, and Congress with a broken ability to oversee him.”

So it’s a risk for Democrats either way. Once impeachment begins, it will become the dominant media narrative. Coverage of Democratic policies addressing health care, trade, fair taxes, education, gun safety and other urgent priorities of voters will be smothered by media coverage of impeachment. Pelosi is not wrong about that.

But if Democrats don’t “do their job,” in the words of candidate Warren, they run the risk of appearing ‘soft on corruption,’ and they will have squandered what may be their best opportunity to make Trump resign or be removed. And there is the hope that future revelations about Trump’s corruption will shame nine Republican senators to join Democrats in supporting conviction.

It’s a tough call, and there is no middle ground. But Democrats must be unified for either strategy to achieve their goal.

Ronald Brownstein addresses the question of the hour for Democrats: “Can Democrats Bend Their New Coalition Without Breaking It? The voters who flipped the House aren’t uniformly on board with an ambitious progressive agenda” at The Atlantic: “Though they’ve attracted little attention, recent public polls have sent clear warning signals that the ambitious agenda of the rejuvenated Democratic left could strain the coalition that carried the party to its sweeping gains in the 2018 election…Recent surveys show that such prized progressive ideas as a government-run single-payer health-care system, tuition-free public college, and significantly higher top marginal income-tax rates hold the potential to starkly divide Democrats along racial lines. In polls, these policies have faced substantial skepticism not only from working-class white voters already drawn to President Donald Trump, but also from college-educated whites, whose recoil from him powered last fall’s Democratic wave in white-collar suburbs around the country. Support for these ideas is consistently higher among African Americans and Latinos, though in some cases equivocal even among them…These findings underscore the stakes in the rolling Democratic debate about the best pathway for the party to oust Trump in 2020, particularly as his job-approval rating ticks up in several polls amid broadening satisfaction with the economy.”

Brownstein quotes Adam Green, the co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which has endorsed Warren for the Democratic nomination. “We need an equal and opposite willingness to shake things up, but in the right way,..Part of the case that progressives will make is not only is there zero tension between electability and bold transformational ideas, but bold transformational ideas that shake up the system are absolutely key to electability against Trump…Meanwhile, centrists attracted to candidates such as former Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Amy Klobuchar insist that Democrats must find a nominee and formulate an agenda that holds the support of swing voters, who are contented with the economy and may support some of Trump’s economic policies, but dislike his views on race and culture and find him personally unfit for the presidency. “You will never beat him on just turnout, because he does as good or a better job of [inspiring] turnout,” says John Anzalone, a longtime Democratic pollster who has advised Biden. “So you have to do both. You have to do great turnout with your base and also appeal with independents.”

Further, adds Brownstein, “The 2018 results offered evidence for both approaches. The big Democratic gains were driven by much-improved turnout, compared with the 2014 midterms, among young people and minorities; a substantial improvement in vote share among college-educated white voters, especially women; and a smaller recovery among working-class whites, especially in the key Rust Belt battlegrounds of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. While self-described independent voters narrowly preferred Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016, Democratic House candidates carried those voters by double digits in 2018, according to network exit polls.” Brownstein cites “a fundamental fault line in a modern Democratic coalition that’s more and more dependent on upscale white voters, who are drawn to the party more for its views on cultural than economic issues” and notes, “Voters have repeatedly demonstrated that if they believe presidential candidates care about their lives, they are willing to overlook disagreements over important components of their agenda—or even, as in Trump’s case in 2016, serious doubts about their character and temperament.”

In “The Rise of White Identity Politics: White voters increasingly see themselves as a threatened ethnic group. By championing an inclusive American identity, liberal politicians can offer an alternative” at The Washington Monthly, Richard D. Kahlenberg takes a look at Duke University political scientist Ashley Jardina’s book, White Identity Politics, and explains, “Trump’s election sparked a furious debate on the left: was his popularity among white voters due more to racism, or to so-called “economic anxiety”? Extensive polling showed that racial resentment correlated much more strongly with support for Trump than did economic factors. But could tens of millions of Trump voters really be out-and-out racists?..Jardina’s book helps make sense of these questions, in part by revealing that white voters can be motivated by race without necessarily being motivated by racism. The traditional social science focus on white hostility and prejudice toward out-groups, Jardina suggests, misses a much bigger phenomenon: in-group white identity and favoritism. Her central finding is that while 9 percent of whites are unabashed racists who hold favorable views of the Ku Klux Klan, a much larger group—between 30 to 40 percent of whites—strongly identify as white, meaning they feel strong attachment to their whiteness. Whites who have high levels of white identity are not confined to the working-class; they make up a “much wider swath of whites,” and perhaps surprisingly, include a disproportionate number of women.”

“This demographic shift,” Kahlenberg continues, “is occurring at a time when whites remain deeply opposed to programs that provide preferences in college admissions and employment for African Americans and Latinos. A February 2019 Pew Research Center poll found that 78 percent of whites (and 73 percent of Americans overall) think race should not be a factor in college admissions decisions.  Universities routinely ignore that public sentiment. Careful researchers find that such programs provide a college admissions boost for African Americans over whites that is comparable to scoring 310 points higher on the SAT (out of a possible 1600). The sociologist Arlie Hochschild has documented thatwhites often described these types of preferences as allowing non-white groups to “cut in line.” Perceived as unfair, these programs—as well as other government efforts viewed, rightly or wrongly, as providing targeted aid to minority groups— can trigger white identification. In surveys, three-quarters of whites say it is at least somewhat likely that “members of their racial group are denied jobs because employers are hiring minorities instead.” More than three-quarters also say it is at least somewhat important “for members of their group to work together in order to change laws unfair to whites.” In sum, Jardina notes, “many whites have described themselves as outnumbered, disadvantaged, and even oppressed.”

At FiveThirtyEight, Nathaniel Rackich has developed a new statistical tool to illuminate the political context of U.S. Senate races: “PARS [Popularity Above Replacement Senator]…is calculated by measuring the distance between a politician’s net approval rating (approval rating minus disapproval rating) in her state and the state’s partisan lean (how much more Republican- or Democratic-leaning it is than the country as a whole).” Rakich uses the tool to look at Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s senate race, and writes, “Finally, the senator who ranks last in PARS is also up for reelection in 2020, and it’s a big name: Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. McConnell manages just a -13 net approval rating despite inhabiting an R+23 state. It’s not crazy to think he could be vulnerable in 2020. Democrats are reportedly trying to recruit former Marine fighter pilot Amy McGrath, who raised $8.6 millionfor an unsuccessful 2018 congressional bid, to run against him. But it’s worth remembering that Lucy has held this football in front of Democrats before. In 2014, McConnell also had popularity problems, and Democrats thought they had a top candidate to challenge him in Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes. McConnell beat Grimes 56 percent to 41 percent.” Rakich provides a chart showing the ratings for every U.S. senator.

Democratic  frontrunner Joe Biden is making a strong bid for working-class voters of all races, as evidenced by his pitch yesterday to Teamsters Local 149 in Pittsburgh. As Kevin Breuninger reports at CNBC: “Biden — speaking to a crowd filled with union members — steered his remarks heavily toward populist issues including corporate greed and income inequality….”I make no apologies — I am a union man. Period,” said Biden, who had received his first union endorsement earlier that morning….”The country wasn’t built by Wall Street bankers, CEOs and hedge fund managers,” Biden told the crowd. “It was built by you. It was built by the great American middle class.”…”We need to reward work in this country, not just wealth,” Biden said…The early days of the former Delaware senator’s campaign strategy appear to be aimed at shoring up his support in Pennsylvania, a swing state rich in electoral votes that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton narrowly lost to Trump in the 2016 election.”

William Saletan argues that Dems should “Trust Pelosi” at Slate: “The smarter play, in Pelosi’s view, is to defend policies that are well understood and supported. Let your enemy be the aggressor, and rally your base against his attack. Instead of pushing Medicare for All, the speaker targets President Donald Trump’s assault on the Affordable Care Act. She specifies elements of the ACA that score well in polls: “protections against pre-existing conditions, bans on lifetime limits and annual limits, the Medicare-Medicaid expansion, savings for seniors on their prescription drugs, [and] premium assistance that makes health coverage affordable.”…Pelosi understands that Trump is just a foil. The real goal is to build a relationship with voters. Contrary to perception, she hasn’t ruled out impeachment. But she does think Democrats should talk less about Trump and more about connecting with the public…Some critics see Pelosi’s centrist language as weak and uninspiring. But she cares about policies, not ideologies, so she’s ruthless about embracing or shedding labels. She believes, for instance, that fairness is a more popular and less incendiary term than socialism.,,A party can win more votes, in Pelosi’s view, by claiming to represent the middle than by claiming to represent a wing or a movement. “The Republicans have abandoned the center. The left can own it,” she argued on Tuesday.”

In his article, “Racism on the brain: a neuroscientist explains how the world moved right: The effects of fear and anger [on the brain]” may make us even more polarized, says neuroscientist Bobby Azarian,” at  Salon.com, Chauncey Devega interviews congnitive neuroscientist Bobby Azarian, who observes “In a healthy functioning brain, an area called the prefrontal cortex, which is slower acting, slows the amygdala response and in essence says to a person, “hey, there’s no rational reason to fear this or to feel angry.” One could really conclude that explicit racism is often the result of an impaired prefrontal cortex response. Understanding racism on the neural level is very important…It is in the realm of science fiction now, but someday in the future, 10, 20 [years] from now, we might be able to identify [the] pathways or abnormalities in the brain which [are] responsible for some of that nasty behavior such as racism and the like…Donald Trump and Steve Bannon understood the psychological effects of fear and they weaponized it to take power. Consider the Facebook Cambridge Analytica data scandal, where data got into the hands of Bannon [who] used it to manipulate voters. With Trump’s campaign, it seems like they perfected the a strategy of fear mongering to manipulate people into some other type of reality…As more and more damning information comes out about Trump, the public will be able to check their biases and assess the situation more rationally and reasonably. That is my hope for the future.”

As a long-time national convention junkie, I’m looking forward to next year’s Democratic assemblage with even greater than usual interest, and wrote about some candidate contingency planning at New York:

Even though campaigns stay mostly focused on the immediate, there have to be strategies in place for remote (in time and likelihood) contingencies. With 21 Democratic candidates already in the field and at least one more (Steve Bullock) on the way, they must all deal with the possibility of Democrats arriving in Milwaukee in July of next year with nobody having the requisite majority of pledged delegates buttoned down.

Under this “contested convention” scenario, a strange and ironic thing would happen once a by-the-book first ballot ended in deadlock. Party superdelegates, the ex officio delegates (mostly elected officials and DNC members) who lost their independent first-ballot voting power in a post-2016 concession to angry Bernie Sanders supporters, would regain it on any second or subsequent ballot. So after being written off as nonentities, these largely Establishment figures — 769 of them in all, compared to 3,768 pledged delegates — could, in the context of a contested convention, wind up deciding it all.

As Ruby Cramer of BuzzFeed reports, the Democratic campaigns are beginning to think about this scenario. Unsurprisingly, Bernie Sanders, who has (a) prior experience running for president, (b) money to burn, and (c) a robust record of trashing the very institution of superdelegates, seems to be thinking about it most deeply:

“’We’re taking superdelegates and superdelegates strategy seriously,’ a Sanders aide said, ‘hence having a team dedicated to delegates who can prepare for multiple convention scenarios. We will be reaching out to them over the course of the campaign. When the senator wins the nomination, he’s eager to work with them to support and unite of all the party in the general and beyond.'”

Of course he is.

Cramer touts Kamala Harris’s campaign as having a very effective superdelegate outreach program already, under the direction of Hillary Clinton’s top 2016 delegate tracker (who also worked for DNC chairman Tom Perez). But it’s kinda something any candidate with the resources for it would want to do even if a contested convention was impossible:

“An official from Harris’s campaign pointed out that superdelegate outreach is good politics regardless of whether they factor in the convention. ‘All of these people — whether they are DNC members or members of Congress — have footholds in their communities,’ the Harris official said. ‘Obviously we are reaching out to those individuals and doing our due diligence.'”

That will matter a whole lot more if Democrats look up after the blitz of March primaries and see no one really in charge of the race:

“[F]ully 60 percent of pledged delegates will be awarded during a two-week period running from March 3 (generally known as Super Tuesday) through March 17, when primaries are scheduled in fully half the states (a share that could go even higher if late-deciding states like New York move into this window). Depending on what happens in the four February contests that are “protected” from additional competition by national party rules (Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina, in that order), this huge bloc of early-to-mid-March states could either produce scattered results that make an early decision impossible, or could instead make one candidate the putative (not official, but certain) nominee.”

In the case of a Wild West scenario, superdelegates could again walk tall in the councils of the Donkey Party, and even the fieriest of insurgents will find kind words to say about those staid Establishment figures toiling in the party’s vineyards.

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

2018 Turnout Data-palooza

My friend and frequent co-author Bill Frey has issued a nice report on the Brookings site on 2018 turnout. In the report, he mines the recently released Census Current Population Survey voter supplement data to provide detailed findings on turnout and vote share in 2018 by key demographics.

By and large, the general patterns found in the Census data agree with those found in other data sources like Catalist (previously posted), even if specific levels may differ (white noncollege share, for example, is significantly lower than Cataist in the Census data).

The following article by John Russo of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor, is cross-posted from Working-Class Perspectives:

The recent debate over the Green New Deal got me thinking about a lecture I gave in 2018 at the Columbia University Seminar on Energy Ethics. The faculty who attended were mostly environmental lawyers and scientists. I am neither. But they asked me to discuss “The Fragility of the Blue-Green Alliance” – not so much the formal partnerships between union and environmental groups but rather the complex challenges of bridging differences between workers and environmentalists. My remarks were informed by three things: Pope Francis’s Encyclical (2015) on the environment, Laudato Si’; my research on working-class communities and economic change; and my frustration with the reporters, liberals, and environmentalists who show little understanding of the experiences of working people.

Our views on climate change reflect our social and economic positions, which in turn reflect multiple factors — class, race, ethnicity, gender, place, and religious and ethical frameworks.  Any discussion of climate change or environmental policies must acknowledge not only that individuals have different stakes in the environment and the economy but that sometimes, those stakes are themselves contradictory. Working-class people and their communities are harmed by both environmental and economic injustices, and they have few economic choices. Solutions that might seem obvious, like ending the use of coal, can come with real costs to workers and their communities, even as they address environmental injustices and climate change.

In talking with colleagues at Columbia, I drew on a local example, from an article in the New York Times, “How Skipping Hotel Housekeeping Could Help the Environment and Your Wallet.” The article described how hotels were promoting opting out of daily room cleaning as a sustainability program, because it reduced the hotels’ use of electricity, water, and chemicals. Customers could earn food and beverage credit by skipping housekeeping. But, I asked, sustainability for whom? As the Chicago Tribune reported in 2014, “green programs” like this were killing jobs and cutting wages as housekeepers lost tips and had to work harder, since fewer workers now had to clean rooms after guests left, but with the same hours as before.

Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild offers another example in her book, Strangers in Their Own Land.  Hochschild spent four years interviewing people living and working  near the polluted bayous near Lake Charles Louisiana who did not support greater environmental protections that could protect their health and safety. She asked “Why do working-class people support policies that liberals think hurt them?” which she described as the “Great Paradox.” The people Hochschild talked with often sided with the chemical and oil companies that provided local jobs while also polluting homes and bayous. Their beliefs were based on an underlying “deep story” or resentment — but not toward the companies. Rather, people felt they had been marginalized by flat or failing wages, rapid demographic and social changes, and a liberal culture that often mocked their faith and patriotism and assumes they are racist and sexist. Put differently, liberal culture and politicians did not have a real understanding and “empathy” for the plight of working class.

As these examples suggest, creating blue-green alliances requires empathy rather than just judgments. It also helps to have a clear shared enemy. Steve Early describes this kind of alliance in Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City. He writes about how workers, environmentalists, Latinos, African-Americans, and some progressives in highly polluted Richmond, California, organized a blue-green alliance in response to a major refinery fire. They built a culture of resistance and forced Chevron to spend $1 billion dollars to modernize a plant, making it safe and cleaner for the workers and community while saving jobs. It was this attention to jobs, working conditions, and the environment that enabled the group to build a volunteer-driven political organization. When Chevron spent $3 million to try to get new city council and mayor elected (an amount unheard of in a local election), the blue-green coalition fought back, electing three environmental-friendly city council members and Richmond’s current mayor. As Early states, “It was a clear achievement for class-based community organizing around environmental issues and the importance of politics.”

But Early acknowledges that this type of blue-green organizing is not easy. In fact, a similar blue-green alliance formed after a refinery fire in Torrence, California, came apart when union members faced the threat of job losses. As Early notes, “job blackmail—and fear of job loss—remains a potent check on labor organization behavior involving workers engaged in the extraction, refining, transportation, or use of fossil fuel.” Tension over jobscreates real divides between unions and environmentalists.

To find more comprehensive solutions, we need to start by identifying shared values. A good place to start might be in Pope Francis’ Laudato Si’, where he asks people to join an inclusive dialogue about how we are shaping the future of our planet. He speaks to the moral and spiritual challenges of the ecological crisis, its disproportionate impact on the poor, and environmental racism. He also calls for solidarity and shared responsibility and for economic development that will reduce injustice and inequality.

People have begun to take climate change and sustainability seriously, often with great empathy for working people. Interests and investments are growing for projects like greening of buildings and cities, producing green products, and developing sustainable global production networks. Most of these are grassroots efforts, but larger groups and institutions are forming new national and international organizations that link environmental concerns with workplace and economic transformation. For example, the ACW (Adapting Canadian Work and Workplaces to Respond to Climate Change) connects 25-partner organizations, including unions and environmental groups from seven countries, with 56 individual researchers working on opportunities and obstacles to create a low-carbon adaptations for resources, manufacturing, construction and services where worker agency, environmental concerns, and just transitions are all taken seriously. The model of just transitions emphasizes protecting and even improving workers’ livelihoods (health, skills, rights) as well as substantive community support.

Political leaders are just beginning to engage in this work, though the results so far are mixed. Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s New Green Deal (GND), a Congressional Resolution (not a bill), reimagines work in a period of climate change and a transforming economy. The GND offers an ambitious “vision statement” for a decarbonization infrastructure, yet it also provides social protection as just transitions for displaced workers, training for green skills jobs within a broader social safety net. The GND drew howls from elected officials and industry lobbyists, who complained that it was too big, too fast, and impractical. Others suggested watered-down policies that undermined the GND but provided political cover for future elections.

While the House did not vote on GND, Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell pressed for a vote in order to embarrass Democrats prior to 2020 elections.  In the Senate, Republicans all voted against the resolution and most Democrats voted “present” — a display of the politics of evasion only slightly less dramatic than Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord. If this is how Democrats respond, why should anyone expect workers to be more receptive response from the working class?

But there are signs of change, as some politicians are developing their own plans. In Los Angeles, Mayor Eric Garcetti has proposed his own Green New Deal, calling for the second-largest city in the country to have a carbon-neutral economy by 2050. Presidential Candidate Beto O’Rourke has proposed new federal policies that would lead to net-zero emissions by 2050 and $5 trillion in spending over 10 years for investments in clean energy and extreme weather preparation.

Energy companies are even getting involved. Worried that they will not be able to control legislation, they are trying to demonstrate their commitment to the environment through family-friendly and alternative energy commercials touting their work addressing climate change. Yes, these same companies had rejected climate science for years. Some, like the Koch brothers, used their financial strength and political clout to disrupt  the building climate and workplace justice movements.

To build a just and inclusive movement to fight climate change and overcome past environmental classism, we need empathy, shared values, and organizing. This is what the Green New Deal promotes. In a short film about the resolution, Ocasio-Cortez imagines a green future that links carbon use with job guarantees that provide workers with good wages and benefits. But the GND’s most important contribution may be its call to build an environmental movement where no one is left behind.

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

Should Democrats Be Talking More About Foreign Policy?

Yes, but the trick it to talk about in a way that voters can understand and identify with. A report from CAP describing and analyzing a major new survey of public views on foreign policy provides useful guidance along these lines. The first thing to note is Trump has serious vulnerability in this area. As summarized by EJ Dionne in his Post column on the survey:

“[T]he survey…found that foreign policy is a genuine vulnerability for President Trump. While voters narrowly (50 percent to 48 percent) approved of the president’s handling of the economy, a large majority (57 percent to 40 percent) disapproved of his handling of foreign policy. Just 31 percent of voters said that “the United States is more respected in the world because of President Trump’s leadership,” while 62 percent picked the other option: “Under President Trump, America is losing respect around the world and alienating historic allies.”

Harry Enten explains why “2020 Polls Lay Out an Ominous Pattern for Trump” with respect to a Trump race against the front-runner for the Democratic nomination: “Voter selection in the Biden/Trump matchup is nearly perfectly predicted by approval of Trump. Among those who approve of Trump, Trump leads 92% to 5%. Among those who disapprove of Trump, Biden is ahead 95% to 3%…The result of this breakdown is the same as it’s been in pretty much every other poll: Biden currently leads Trump…That’s because Trump’s approval rating stands at only 44%, compared to a disapproval rating of 53% among voters. To win in 2020, Trump can’t have the election be a referendum on him if his approval rating is this low. He needs to win a substantial share of those who disapprove of him. So far, that’s not happening..We saw this same paradigm in the 2018 midterms. Democratic House candidates won 90% of those who disapproved of Trump’s job performance, while Republicans took 88% of those who approved. Combining these stats with the fact that Trump’s approval rating (45%) was 9 points below his disapproval rating (55%) meant that Republicans lost control of the House.”

“Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin is a presidential phone-buddy and White House regular who’s become one of President Donald Trump’s loudest surrogates,” Alex Isenstadt writes in his article, “The 2019 governor’s race that has Trump’s team sweating” at Politico. “He’s also one of the most unpopular governors in the country, facing a treacherous reelection in November. And the White House, fearing that an embarrassing loss in a deep-red state would stoke doubts about the president’s own ability to win another term, is preparing to go all-in to save him…The Trump team has watched with growing concern as Bevin’s approval ratings have plummeted to the low 30s. With the presidential campaign kicking into gear, the Kentucky governor’s race is likely to be the most closely watched contest in the run-up to 2020, and Trump aides acknowledge alarm bells will go off if one of the president’s closest allies loses in a state that Trump won by nearly 30 percentage points.”

In related great news from Kentucky, Matt Morrison, executive director of Working America, shares an encouraging graphic about Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s re-election prospects:

But the news is not so good from Florida, as P. R. Lockhart reports at vox.com: “After weeks of debate and over the objection of several voting and civil rights groups, the Florida Legislature has passed a measure requiring people with felony records to pay all financial obligations from their sentencing or get these obligations excused by a judge before they can have their voting rights restored…On Friday, in the closing hours of the legislative session, the Florida House voted 67-42 to pass an amended elections bill containing the repayment requirement. A similar bill cleared the Florida Senate a day earlier…Politico reports that decision to add the requirements to a larger elections bill was an “11th hour” change. Previously, the requirement had been included in two standalone bills, both of which focused on implementing a 2018 ballot initiative that restored voting rights to people with felony records.” As many as 1.4 million Floridians may be affected.

Here’s hoping Democratic strategists are also paying close attention to the analysis of Ari Berman, who comments on the GOP’s voter suppression in Florida in Mother Jones, but also notes: “Arizona, another emerging battleground where Democrats picked up a US Senate seat and the secretary of state’s office in 2018, also passed a new law restricting voter access. Arizona holds early voting until the Friday before an election and then allows counties to open emergency voting centers for people that can’t get to the polls on Election Day. But under the new law, signed by Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, voters at the emergency centers must sign an affidavit under penalty of perjury claiming they have an unavoidable emergency. If they’re shown not to have a valid emergency, they face up to three years in jail…The Arizona law also gives county boards of supervisors the exclusive authority to open emergency voting centers. This seems aimed at Maricopa County elections director Adrian Fontes, a Democrat who opened five emergency centers before the 2018 election over the objections of the Republican-controlled county board of supervisors. Nearly 3,000 Maricopa County voters cast emergency ballots in 2018.”

The Pelosi-Schumer-Trump infrastructure summit thing got more distraction than traction, owing in part to the Trumpi/Barr and other sideshows, but also because of built-in booby traps. As Gabrielle Gurley notes at The American Prospect, “One problem with a Trumpian national infrastructure program is his belief that states that did not vote for him are not worthy of federal dollars—a mindset that should doom any such initiative in the Democratic-controlled House. There’s a spotlight on broadband, presumably because the president understands that he could enhance his standing with his favored rural constituencies who lack high-speed internet (and could ignore the underserved urban areas he loathes)…For now, the Democrats plan to wait for the White House to release the details of its proposals. But Schumer’s demand that Trump rescind portions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, his signature piece of legislation, to help pay for infrastructure projects is a nonstarter (as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other Republicans have pointed out) that could crater the talks…Trump has not shown any willingness to reach across the partisan divide on an issue that matters to so many Americans, and he probably won’t start now. Such a gesture would be an aberration in a presidency that has produced no programs of merit.”

“This is an insanely big deal,” says Josh Marshall, editor and publisher of Talking Point Memo, explaining that “the President’s personal lawyer is conducting unofficial diplomacy abroad, apparently mixed with his own private business and investments, in which he offers friendly treatment from the President of the United States in exchange for those governments targeting the President’s political enemies. This was reported and it wasn’t the biggest story of the week. This is a far, far bigger deal than any other fears about future tampering in a US presidential election using Facebook ads. The stakes are much higher, the danger much greater, when the colluding candidate is also the President of the United States.”

His article title, “Nobody Wants to Run for Senate: Why Democrats are opting to do just about anything else but campaign for Senate these days” grossly overstates the case, but Slate’s Jim Newell makes a worrisome point in noting that “The decisions by three candidates in key states to choose presidential bids over Senate races have given many Democratic voters and operatives apoplectic fits. Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke chose to spend the cycle standing on various objects in Iowa instead of doing so in Texas, where he nearly knocked off Sen. Ted Cruz last year and could have opted to try to knock out Sen. John Cornyn in 2020. John Hickenlooper, a popular two-term governor from Colorado, decided to launch a go-nowhere presidential campaign instead of challenging the state’s extremely vulnerable Republican senator, Cory Gardner. And it now appears that Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, one of the two Democrats capable of winning elections in Montana—the other, Jon Tester, already serves in the Senate—will also launch a go-nowhere presidential campaign instead of running against Republican Sen. Steve Daines…A number of other high-profile Democrats who aren’t running for president—there’s still time!—have also turned down Senate bids. Texas Rep. Joaquin Castro announced this week that he wouldn’t challenge Cornyn, either, while first-term Iowa Rep. Cindy Axne opted against challenging Sen. Joni Ernst, just as former governor and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack did in February. Perhaps most notably of all, Stacey Abrams, who captivated Democrats in Georgia’s gubernatorial race last year, recently informed Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer that she wouldn’t challenge Republican Sen. David Perdue this cycle.”

Here’s a messaging tip from “A new brain study shows a better way to engage voters on climate changeNeuroscience startup studies emotional intensity of response to different terms” by Joe Romm at Think Progress: “The phrase “climate crisis” engages voters emotionally better than either “climate change” or “global warming.”..That’s the new finding from the brain science startup SPARK Neuro, which used an electroencephalogram (EEG) and other bio-measurements to examine how 120 Democrats, Republicans, and independents responded to different terms for the growing threat we face from rising levels of carbon pollution…According to the study, “climate crisis” got a 60% higher emotional response from Democrats than “climate change.” It triggered triple the response from Republicans.”

One of the oldest arguments in politics reemerged this week, and I wrote about it at New York:

There is no area of argument in politics hoarier than the one that revolves around targeting “base” or “swing” voters — or to put it another way, the choice between mobilizing voters who already agree with you or persuading voters who don’t but might.

There’s obviously some ideological freight carried by the argument, since by definition base voters are going to be more comfortable with positions and messages most distinct from that of the opposition, while swing voters tend to listen to both sides. And so, among Democrats, base versus swing has long been a bone of contention between centrists and progressives.

This argument used to be one in which centrists usually had the upper hand because there were so very many swing voters, and also because winning a swing voter had the dual effect of gaining Democrats a vote while taking one away from Republicans. But with the rapid shrinkage of swing voting amid growing partisan polarization, and the heavy investment of Republicans in obstructing full voting opportunities for young people and minorities, the shoe is more often on the other foot now, with base mobilization becoming more essential and swing-voter persuasion being more difficult. It should still be possible for campaigns to do both. But on occasion representatives of the base view appeals to swing voters as something of a betrayal.

That’s how New York Times columnist Charles Blow appears to feel about appeals to white working-class voters:

“[T]here is part of the Biden enthusiasm, and to a lesser extent the energy around candidates like Bernie Sanders, that focuses too heavily on the fickle white, working-class swing voters and is not enough focused on the party’s faithful.

“Indeed, in political circles, Biden’s chief attribute in this election feels like his apparent appeal to these white voters.”

Then Blow, well, blows up:

Blow goes on to quote from a 2017 sociological study concluding that only 18.6 percent of 2016 voters were from the white working class. But that study develops its own, narrow definition of “working class” based on specific occupations, which may be defensible as a matter of sociology but does not describe the much larger universe (most commonly defined as non-college-educated) of voters actual politicians are actually targeting. As Ruy Teixeira reports from a 2018 study of this larger universe, it represented 44 percent of the 2016 electorate.

But even if I think his numbers are way off, I can understand Blow’s frustration with those exclusively preoccupied with swing voters who don’t share the party’s basic values. As a southern Democrat, I was always bothered that the members of the party’s most important electoral bloc, African-Americans, were expected perpetually to vote for white candidates, including those who self-identified as conservatives, with no expectation of white-voter reciprocity. As white southern voters increasingly moved into the GOP ranks, this particular swing-voter strategy became morally if not politically obtuse.

Is that what’s going on with the national Democratic Party now? And is that why Joe Biden is a viable candidate? Is Paul Waldman right in saying that “Hoe Biden seems to be assembling a coalition combining ‘People who’d just be more comfortable with an older white guy’ and ‘People who figure other people would just be more comfortable with an older white guy'”?

There’s enough truth in that to make me chuckle, but on the other hand, the only reason Joe Biden is the 2020 front-runner is that he’s also the single-most-popular candidate among minority voters. A March 28 Quinnipiac poll of Democrats with detailed cross-tabs showed Biden supported by 44 percent of African-Americans (and just 29 percent of white voters), with Bernie Sanders a distant second at 17 percent.

More generally, it’s a rare and foolish Democrat who argues for targeting all white working-class voters; there’s a large segment lost for the foreseeable future thanks to reactionary racial, cultural, and even economic views, and a smaller but still significant segment that’s open to the same Democratic messages as most base voters. We are mostly, after all, talking about white working-class voters who supported Barack Obama in 2008 or 2012 — a candidate deeply beloved among base Democrats (and perhaps the main reason so many base Democrats currently like Joe Biden).

What will fail to bring these voters back, of course, is a Democratic Party that ignores them, or that treats them as inherently reactionary, or that goes out of its way to tell them they don’t matter politically. Charles Blow comes pretty close to arguing for precisely those tokens of disrespect:

“At some point, the leadership and the front-runner are going to have to explain to women and minorities why their inordinate focus on white, working-class voters is justified, and that explanation will have to extend beyond, ‘It’s the only way.'”

“That explanation no longer has currency. ‘Anything to defeat Trump’ is also not a soothing elixir. At some point, the loyal constituencies will demand to know: ‘What’s in it for us, specifically?’ And I don’t blame them.”

No one that I’m aware of is in favor of an “inordinate” focus on white working-class voters, but in the end a vote is a vote, and an a priori rejection of broad demographic categories is a good way to make sure you don’t get enough of them.

Without question, the base will determine the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, and no matter how much talk about electability takes place, it’s extremely unlikely anyone can win without explaining to “loyal constituencies” what’s in it for them, specifically. But treating the defeat of Donald Trump as a second-order consideration that’s less important than rewarding the steadiest of base voters is an approach that runs a high risk of forfeiting these very voters’ interests.