The Washington Post‘s outstanding political commentator Paul Waldman wrote something over the Memorial Day weekend that struck a chord with me, and I expanded on it for New York.

It’s become a standard feature of big national holidays: pious chest-thumping and finger-pointing about how Americans used to truly represent a United States but have now let politicians with their petty partisan squabbles drive us apart, when a little old-fashioned good will and elbow grease would fix everything. I heard a species of this meme over the Memorial Day weekend from CBS correspondent Scott Pelley:

“Today, liberals and conservatives barricade themselves in digital citadels where some media, with calculated bias, assure their viewers that what they already believe is correct. If we wall ourselves in castles of confirming information, I fear a new Cold War. This time, a cold civil war.

“Given this danger, why do both parties promote almost nothing but divisive scandals? Because it is so much easier than health insurance or immigration reform. Taking on actual challenges would require work, and listening, and thought, and union.”

Aside from the implication that, say, the crimes and misdemeanors revealed in the Mueller report are simply “divisive scandals,” what is most objectionable about Pelley’s complaint and so many others like it is the suggestion that partisan differences are superficial, or even artificial. Yes, of course, there’s an element of self-interested gamesmanship in partisan competition, particularly in a period when neither party can secure a reliable grip on the White House, Congress, or public opinion. But you can make a strong case that today’s partisan disagreements are rooted in basic differences involving not just facts or policy positions but very basic principles and values.

Look at the key issue in the 2018 midterms, health-care policy. Even if they disagree on how to achieve universal health coverage, most Democrats agree it’s essential and a basic human right. Republicans almost never call health care a “right,” and instead tend to regard it as a scarce resource whose price should be regulated by markets and quantity should be limited by clean and responsible living. This is not a matter of “I say tomato and you say to-mah-to,” by any means.

Consider another ineluctable partisan fight concerning firearms regulation. To most Democrats, the “right to bear arms” has little or nothing to do with fanatics and other fury-driven testosterone addicts stockpiling automatic weapons and evading minimal background checks by frequenting gun shows. To nearly all Republicans now, the Second Amendment is the single most essential element of the Bill of Rights, the guarantor not only against violation of hearth and home but against tyrannical government. Maybe all partisans don’t share the views of those on the left who would ban all private gun ownership or those on the right who threaten to use their shooting irons to kill cops or soldiers who try to enforce laws they don’t like. But there’s really not much middle ground, and that’s not because partisans are inventing phony conflicts.

Look at how the two parties think about voting rights, which was once, in living memory, a truly bipartisan cause. Democrats almost invariably think of the right to vote as fundamental to democracy and resist any measures that tend to suppress the most abundant levels of participation in elections. To an ever-increasing extent, Republicans think of making voting easy as an invitation to fraud and the plundering of the public treasury by ignorant plebes who will “vote themselves benefits” in league with corrupt elites. That’s a gulf in perception that no compromise can bridge.

Check out one more issue on which the parties have become polarized: campaign-finance reform. For most Democrats, this is a common-sense matter of minimizing the strength of wealthy special interests and reducing official corruption; the whole chain of Supreme Court decisions leading up to Citizens United is considered an abomination. Most Republicans agree with the SCOTUS premise that “money is speech,” and fear campaign-finance regulation as a big step down the road to publicly financed and eventually government-controlled elections. In this case the two parties’ points of view are very nearly inverted, with the donkey’s freedom from special interests equaling the elephant’s enslavement. Can a room full of wheeling and dealing overcome that rift? I don’t think so.

Recognizing that partisanship is based on legitimate differences of opinion has huge implications for how one understands government dysfunction and the way to “fix” it, as Paul Waldman observed over the weekend:

“The reality is that we’re in an era when, unless there’s unified government, not much is going to get done, at least in terms of legislation. That’s not because there’s something wrong with Washington; it’s because the two parties have fundamentally different ideas about what we ought to do.

“Which means that, as they try to win back the White House and plan what to do with it if they succeed, Democrats don’t need to devise a strategy to persuade Republicans to join with them in a new era of bipartisan governing. They need a strategy to win full control of Congress, then a strategy to keep their members together to pass their agenda. If they manage that, nobody will complain that Washington can’t get anything done.”

This ought to be fairly obvious, but unfortunately, the idea that partisanship is somehow a free-floating demonic force rather than a reflection of deeply held values has infected political discourse even more than partisanship itself, as Waldman also notes:

“Unfortunately, politicians do a great deal to mislead voters about how politics works. Every election, candidates for the House and Senate tell voters that the problem is this thing called Washington, whose dysfunctions can be cured with the proper kick in the keister. And I, the candidate says, am just the person to do it, to change Washington into what it ought to be. Why? Not because I have policy expertise or relevant experience; those things don’t matter. No, it’s because I have common sense, and I know how to get things done.”

And so when nothing changes or partisan “dysfunction” gets even worse, voters become even more disillusioned with “Washington,” and listen to the pied pipers of rhetorical enchantment who pretend getting things done is easy for the stout-hearted and the open-minded. It’s not.

Matt Ford, staff writer at The New Republic, argues that “The Democrats Are Overthinking Trump’s Impeachment. Naturally: They’re scared that trying to remove him would backfire, but they’re taking the wrong lessons from the past—and ignoring voters’ wishes in the present.”

Ford says of “Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other top Democrats” that “their strategy of describing Trump as a lawless threat to the republic while refusing to begin impeachment proceedings against him has gone from simply untenable to openly laughable.” Further, Ford argues:

Anti-impeachment Democrats offer multiple reasons not to begin the process. Some have argued that the American people aren’t yet supportive enough of impeachment to justify it. Others have warned that it could energize Trump’s base and alienate moderate voters, thereby paving the road to his re-election next year. Many of them have argued that impeachment is a futile gesture while Republicans control the Senate, where a two-thirds vote would be needed to remove Trump from office. But none of these excuses are persuasive. And when placed alongside Amash’s honorable stand against his own party’s leader, they smack of political cowardice.

This approach was defensible at first. Impeachment is a weighty process that should not be undertaken lightly, so it’s understandable that Democrats wanted to show some caution before launching it. They also understandably wanted to hold off while Mueller’s investigation was ongoing, in case he uncovered evidence that would be relevant for impeachment proceedings. With Mueller’s findings now public, those arguments for prudence have lost currency.

Ford, a former skeptic about impeachment, believes that the arguments for delay have been invalidated by events and Trump’s behavior, including the probability that the Senate will not vote for conviction. “As Quinta Jurecic and Yoni Appelbaum have explained,” Ford writes, “the Senate’s potential unwillingness to finish the job does not free the House from its duty to begin it… Trump would take his acquittal by the Senate as vindication of his behavior, what conclusion would he and future presidents draw from the House’s refusal to impeach him for it in the first place?”

Ford distills his argument well in his concluding paragraphs: “Top Democrats are so obsessed with how Trump’s base would respond to impeachment that they neglect their own. The Democrats swept into power in last year’s midterms on a pledge to hold Trump to task. Will that energy hold if they keep telling liberal voters that accountability is just too hard…Nothing could make Democrats look weaker than spending the next two years warning that Trump is an existential threat to American democracy, then telling voters that it’s not worth the trouble to impeach him.”

Ford makes that argument as well as it’s been made. But is it possible that Pelosi, Schumer and other Democratic leaders know all that and generally agree with it, but also want to proceed cautiously so they don’t appear reckless? Ford may be underestimating these leaders, who, after all, understand congressional procedures, legal isues and the timetables involved better than most journalists. Pelosi’s strategic mastery of the Affordable Care Act debate and votes at least suggests the possibility.

I was one of those voters who used to roll my eyes when I thought President Obama was bending over too far backwards repeatedly in hopes of winning over reasonable centrists. But looking back, it now looks like he was crafting an image as the only adult in the room, and that credibility served him well in securing the only major health care reform legislation in decades. He was playing the long game, while I and others wanted instant gratification.

Democratic leaders are now feeling the heat for impeachment as they should. If a little delay on their part is needed to finesse optimal timing, that may end up being a good thing. FDR used to tell leaders of popular movements “Make me do do it” — his way of saying ‘I agree with you, but we’ve got to build popular support a bit more to make it work.’

Ford’s case may prove to be right. But Pelosi, Schumer, Nadler, Schiff and others didn’t get to be top congressional leaders by not being able to count votes or estimate popular support. Hell yes, Trump should be impeached. But if Democratic leaders need a little more time to make a winning case and build support, that seems like a reasonable approach.

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.