A little excerpt from “Shutdowns Always Backfire—Especially on Republicans” by Manhattan Institute conservative Brian Riedl, from The Daily Beast:

President Trump and House Republicans have shut down part of the government in hopes of forcing Senate Democrats to accept $5 billion in border wall funding.

This mistake will almost surely backfire on the GOP.

…This is the fourth significant government shutdown in 25 years. During the three previous shutdowns, the party that held government funding legislation hostage to additional demands experienced a nasty public backlash that inevitably led to a humiliating surrender.

Riedl adds that “In all three cases, an intense public backlash weakened the aggressors’ hands, until vulnerable members decided to stop committing political suicide…shutdowns alienate moderates and independents. While the party’s base cheers their lawmakers’ “fighting spirit,” moderates and independents see a temper tantrum and a government held hostage…the party shutting down the government alienates the swing voters who decide elections. Approximately two-thirds of independents oppose the new shutdown.”

Riedl provides a history of previous shutdowns, all of which ended badly for its advocates. Naked obstructionism is apparently a tough sell with mainstream voters, despite the bellowing of media wingnuts, who Trump thinks speak for the majority.

In their White House meeting with Trump, Schumer and Pelosi did a good job of portraying Democrats as the party of reasoned compromise, in stark contrast to the GOP’s embattled and increasingly desperate “leader.” With the support of McConnell and lame duck Ryan, Trump seems hell-bent on branding the GOP as the party of chaos. When your adversary is engaged in political suicide, get out of the way.

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

White Identity, Consciousness, Racial Resentment.

These terms get thrown around a lot and are seldom rigorously defined. Tom Edsall provides a useful discussion in his latest column on how contemporary political scientists tend to use these terms. One thing it seems to establish is that views associated with these terms are complex and should not be reduced to sheer racial bigotry (especially if one’s goal to move some of these voters away from the Trump/GOP camp).

Edsall’s article prominently cites the research of Duke political scientist Ashley Jardina:

“According to Jardina, “higher levels of white identity are somewhat linked to higher levels of racial animosity.” At the same time, she contends in her book:

A small percentage of white identifiers score quite high on measures of racial prejudice or resentment, but many more white identifiers possess average and even low levels of racial prejudice. In other words, white identity is not defined by racial animus, and whites who identify with their racial group are not simply reducible to bigots.”

There is also discussion of the ever-popular “racial resentment” scale, which is somewhat promiscuously used in political science research. The racial resentment scale is based on “responses to four survey items, with response options ranging from strongly agree to strongly disagree for each. The survey items ask respondents if they agree/disagree that (1) blacks should work their way up without any special favors; (2) generations of slavery and discrimination make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class; (3) blacks have gotten less than they deserve; (4) blacks must try harder to get ahead. The index is scaled to range from 0 (least resentful) to 1 (most resentful).”

Edsall properly notes that interpretation of these responses is vexed; these responses–and their associated scale–may not, in fact, mean what many researchers assume they mean. In so doing, he cites the landmark Carney-Enos study, which deserves to be more widely-known.

“There is an ongoing dispute over the use of such questions to measure racial resentment. Jardina acknowledges that “some scholars are critical of this framework” and “argue that racial resentment entangles conservative principles, like individualism, with racial prejudice.”

Most recently, Riley Carney and Ryan Enos, political scientists at Harvard, have sought to assess the validity of racial resentment questions in their working paper, “Conservatism and Fairness in Contemporary Politics: Unpacking the Psychological Underpinnings of Modern Racism.”

In survey experiments, Carney and Enos substituted Lithuanians and other nationalities for African-Americans so that the first resentment question would ask for agreement or disagreement with the statement: “Lithuanians should work their way up without any special favors.” Their conclusion:

The results obtained using groups other than blacks are substantively indistinguishable from those measured when blacks are the target group. Decomposing this measure further, we find that political conservatives express only minor differences in resentment across target groups. Far greater differences in resentment toward blacks and other groups can be found among racially sympathetic liberals. In short, we find that modern racism questions appear to measure attitudes toward any group, rather than African-Americans alone.

Carney and Enos conclude that the “modern racism scales” fail to capture attitudes specific to African-Americans. However, the scales do capture a form of racism, both a general resentment that applies to many groups and a specific failure to recognize the unique historical plight of African-Americans.”

Food for thought. Something to keep in mind when you read the next study linking racial resentment to Trump/GOP/whatever voting.

Dems should not even think about going wobbly on the shutdown. In addition to the stock market meltdown, “An estimated 800,000 federal employees may be impacted by the partial shutdown, either by having to work during it while their pay is withheld until it ends or by being furloughed,” reports Clare Foran at CNN Politics. “More than 420,000 government workers are expected to work without pay in a partial shutdown, according to a fact sheet released by the Democratic staff of the Senate Appropriations Committee. That estimate includes more than 41,000 federal law enforcement and correctional officers. In addition, more than 380,000 federal employees would be placed on furlough, according to the fact sheet.” Dems could not ask for better proof that Trump, McConnell and Ryan govern by chaos, complete with video clips that depict Trump arrogantly bragging about it. Trump and his GOP enablers control all branches of government, and they own the shutdown and the meltdown. Dems must make sure everyone understands it.

At Vox, however, Dylan Scott argues that “Voters don’t hold grudges against the party that shut down the government…They are feeling too fatigued to notice or remember it…The historical record is pretty persuasive at this point: Voters don’t hold grudges against the party that shut down the government…Republicans owned the shutdown in 2013; Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) made himself famous for reading Green Eggs and Ham from the Senate floor while urging the Democratic majority to defund their signature health care law. Polling at the time found more than 60 percent of the public disapproved of how the GOP was handling the shutdown. In November 2014, Republicans won 13 House seats and, more importantly, nine Senate seats to take a majority in the upper chamber and assume full control of Congress. During this year’s earlier multi-day shutdown, voters blamed Democrats and Trump in almost equal measure. The punishment for Democrats was winning 40 House seats and sweeping back into power in Congress on a blue wave…Surveys already show that people would blame Trump and Republicans for a shutdown now. But there is just little reason to think at this point that there will be any meaningful political aftershocks for the upcoming shutdown. For one thing, it will be a long time until voters go back to the polls. Many of the members of Congress who will be up for election in 2020 aren’t even in office yet. So much could happen before then.”

So, how does the public feel about the shutdown? “According to an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll, 57 percent of Americans think Trump should “compromise on the border wall to prevent gridlock,” reports Dhrumil Mehta at FiveThirtyEight, “while only 36 percent think he shouldn’t compromise even if that means a government shutdown…And that reflects a larger trend — in CBS News polls that have been conducted since July 2016,¹ Trump’s border wall proposal has generally been unpopular, except among Republicans…After the government closed for 16 days in 2013, a Washington Post-ABC News poll found that more Americans placed responsibility for the impasse on Republicans than on President Obama. And nearly 3 in 5 Republicans said they disapproved of how their party handled the shutdown negotiations.” However, “in the aftermath of the 2013 shutdown, Obama arguably didn’t escape unscathed: His favorable rating dipped below his unfavorable rating for the first time in his presidency. Government shutdowns can have serious political fallout in the short run for everyone involved.”

For more evidence of GOP government by chaos, read Michael Tomasky’s NYT op-ed, “The Steady Bedlam of the Trump White House,” which notes: “On Dec. 17, Brookings Institution scholars Elaine Kamarck, Kathryn Dunn Tenpas and Nicholas W. Zeppos released a report called “Tracking Turnover in the Trump Administration.” The study analyzes turnover among what the authors call the president’s “A Team” — the few dozen most influential positions within the executive office of the president — and among Cabinet members…Among the 65 Trump A Team members, they find, 42 positions have turned over, for a rate of 65 percent. Seventeen of these vacancies occurred because the person was promoted, 14 because the person “resigned under pressure” and 11 because the person simply resigned…The 65 percent turnover rate for the first two years is considerably higher overall than that of Mr. Trump’s five immediate predecessors. In Barack Obama’s first two years, his A Team turnover rate was 24 percent (Mr. No Drama!). George W. Bush’s rate was 33 percent. Bill Clinton’s was 38 percent. George H.W. Bush’s was 25 percent…If we extrapolate the Brookings numbers out, Mr. Trump is on track to have a four-year turnover rate of greater than 100 percent — that is, to have all 65 A Team positions change hands at least once. All of which makes the ‘Republicans govern by chaos’ meme an irresistably easy sell.

Is it realistic for Democrats to hope that Chief Justice Roberts will become more centrist in his rulings?  At The New York Times, Adam Liptak writes that “Chief Justice Roberts’s voting record has been generally conservative. On issues of racial discrimination, religion, voting and campaign finance, his views are squarely in the mainstream of conservative legal thinking…He voted with five-justice majorities in District of Columbia v. Heller, the 2008 Second Amendment decision that established an individual right to own guns; Citizens United, the 2010 campaign finance decision that amplified the role of money in politics; and Shelby County v. Holder, the 2013 voting rights decision that effectively gutted the Voting Rights Act.” Roberts was the lead staffperson for voter suppression in the Reagan white house. Also, “In June, Mr. Trump won the biggest case of his presidency so far, when Chief Justice Roberts wrote the majority opinion sustaining the administration’s order limiting travel from several predominantly Muslim countries.” Nor is there any reason to hope that Roberts will protect worker rights, when threatened by powerful companies. Roberts has shown some moderation in rulings on assylum policy, climate change and health care. Liptak explains, “by casting the decisive vote to save Mr. Obama’s signature legislative achievement, the Affordable Care Act, he transformed his reputation. Liberals hailed him as a statesman. Conservatives denounced him as a traitor.” History shows that a few conservative justices did become more progressive during their tenure, including Earl Warren, Hugo Black, Byron White and David Souter, all of whom seemed to mature in a more humanitarian direction. Still, the wisest course for Dems regarding Roberts is to plan for the worst, hope for the best.

Paul Krugman explores “The Case for a Mixed Economy” at The New York Times, and notes, “the choice is still between markets and some kind of public ownership, maybe with some decentralization of control, but still more or less what we used to mean by socialism…there are some areas, like education, where the public sector clearly does better in most cases, and others, like health care, in which the case for private enterprise is very weak. Add such sectors up, and they’re quite big.” Krugman argues that government directly or indirectly funds about a third of American jobs (15 percent government workers + another 15 or so percent employed in education, health care and ‘social assistance”). He sees a public sector employing a third of workers as a healthy share of a stable economy at present, with room for public sector growth in utilities and possibly pharmaceuticals, as Elizabeth Warren has suggested. In any case, it would help if the MSM showed a little more understanding that most Americans want a mixed economy with a sizable public sector.

In “Other Polling Nuggets,” FiveThirtyEight’s Dhrumil Mehta notes that “61 percent of Americans say they are concerned that they or a member of their immediate family will have to pay higher health-insurance premiums in the next few years, according to a Gallup poll. Forty-two percent said they were worried about themselves or someone in their family having to go without health insurance.” Shutdowns come and go. But the public’s legitimate concerns about health security now seems a more permanent feature of America’s political landscape.

Miles Rappaport and Cecily Hines see “A New Playing Field for Democracy Reform” at The American Prospect: “Perhaps the most amazing thing about the 2018 midterms was the turnout itself. The latest estimates are that 116 million people voted, compared with 83 million in 2014. That striking turnout clearly helped fuel the Blue Wave, both in Congress and at the state level. The turnout of constituencies voting Democratic was even enough to overcome the walls of gerrymandering in many districts, at both the congressional and state levels. In the states, the shifts in state control were not a full-scale tsunami, but they were significant enough to dramatically shift the equation on democracy issues going forward…the results of election-related ballot initiatives were, in a word, stunning. A remarkable element of these wins was that most of the ballot initiatives passed by more than 60 percent, meaning that they had strong bipartisan voter support…Leading these results was the mammoth victory in Florida of Amendment 4, with almost 65 percent of the voters supporting the restoration of voting rights to 1.4 million former felons. The Florida Rights Restoration Coalition led an extraordinary campaign that received bipartisan support, including from evangelical churches that believe in redemption. This will be transformative of democracy in Florida…Michigan had two major ballot initiative victories: one that created an independent redistricting commission, and a second, multifaceted initiative that enacted same-day registration, automatic registration, a constitutionally mandated post-election audit, and enhanced voting rights for veterans and military and overseas voters…in 2018, five states passed ballot initiatives that changed the redistricting process in a positive direction: Michigan, Missouri, Colorado, and, in a cliffhanger, Utah, all on Election Day. In addition, Ohio passed a significant reform by ballot initiative back in May as the result of negotiations between advocates and the legislature.”

In “Amid government shutdown, a host of bigger worries” at Post Politics, Michael Kranish, Joe Heim and Steve Hendrix have a quote by “Jon Meacham, the presidential historian and author of “The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels,” who “said the shutdown comes at a defining moment in America, as an anxious public yearns for Washington to calm down and start solving the nation’s problems. “In a sense, American history can be understood as a perennial battle between fear, which manifests itself in a politics and culture of exclusion and defensiveness, and hope, which manifests itself in inclusion and larger-heartedness,” said Meacham, who delivered one of the eulogies for former president George H.W. Bush earlier this month…“We’re now immersed in a fearful time, a moment where we speak of walls and tariffs rather than the free flow of ideas and people and goods. But here’s the good — or at least goodish — news: History tells us that hope tends to win in the long run…“Right now, there’s Trump. But if folks work hard enough, soon there’ll be a restoration of dignity and forward thinking. That’s the task.”

As the federal government partially shut down following a strange series of changes in direction from the president, it’s appropriate to compare and contrast how Donald Trump and Barack Obama responded to his party’s midterm defeat. I wrote about that this week at New York:

The standard reaction to the way the president has behaved since his party’s midterm setback has been to note accurately that he is Donald Trump acting just like Donald Trump. There’s been no “pivot’ (other than his standard minute-to-minute erratic communications), no effort to project a “New Trump,” and of course, no acceptance of responsibility. To the extent the president has even reflected on the results, it has been to deny it’s a defeat at all (which is ridiculous if predictable), or to blame Republican losers for ensuring their own defeat via insufficient sycophancy toward his own self.

Before moving on to the reality that Trump will probably remain Trump right on through to the 2020 election, it’s worth looking back at how the last president reacted to his own midterm defeat in 2010. For one thing, Obama accepted responsibility for his party’s performance, as the Washington Postreported at the time:

“President Obama, appearing somber and reflective after what he described as a ‘shellacking’ at the polls Tuesday night, conceded Wednesday that his connection with Americans has grown ‘rockier’ over the last two years and expressed sadness over the defeats of congressional Democrats who supported him…

“In response to a question about how he felt when some of his Democratic friends and supporters in Congress lost their reelection bids, Obama said: ‘It feels bad. You know, the toughest thing over the last couple of days is seeing really terrific public servants not have the opportunity to serve anymore, at least in the short term.’ Not only is he sad to see them go, he said, ‘but there’s also a lot of questioning on my part in terms of, could I have done something differently or done something more so that those folks would still be here?’ It’s hard. And I take responsibility for it in a lot of ways.’ “

And Obama also made immediate and reasonably durable overtures to the opposition in a way that Trump hasn’t done except in the most superficial (“let’s compromise: do it my way!”) manner:

“He said he told Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Rep. John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), the new presumptive speaker of the House, that he is ‘very eager to sit down with members of both parties and figure out how we can move forward together.’ He added, ‘I’m not suggesting this will be easy. I won’t pretend that we’ll be able to bridge every difference or solve every disagreement.’”

These Obama gestures led to the long and murky search for a “Grand Bargain” over budget and tax policy, which didn’t produce any breakthrough (Republicans couldn’t bring themselves to support any sort of tax increase, and Democrats wouldn’t buy into “entitlement reform”) but did arguably help Democrats clarify their side of the argument and position Obama for reelection in 2012. It wasn’t as dramatic as what Ronald Reagan did after his party lost ground in 1982; he accepted two tax increases before rolling to a landslide reelection win in 1984. But both of these presidents understood that going along with electoral signals that they had initially overreached made a sort of reset possible which set the foundation for reelection.

If there is any discernible lesson President Trump drew from his midterm defeat (beyond denying it) it seems to be that he and his party did not go far enough in energizing its base by driving so deep a ravine between the two parties that any talk of bipartisanship would be a laughable ruse. So instead of discussing a “Grand Bargain,” Trump has created a situation in which even a no-brainer tiny bargain to keep the federal government operating through the holidays looks very unlikely. To the extent that his strategy (or lack thereof) going forward relies on confrontation rather than actual negotiation, with (presumably) 2020 preelection polls and then the election results determining the “winner” rather than any policy accomplishments, Congress could shut down for much of the next two years and it would not make much difference, now that his party has lost the House.

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

Let me recommend a memo my old friend Andy Levison has written for The Democratic Strategist site. He takes aim at three myths–dangerous myths–that have taken hold in conventional interpretations of the 2018 elections. I have pushed back against each of these myths in various posts I have written since the election, but Levison does a nice job of rounding up much of the relevant data undermining these myths and putting it all in one place. I heartily endorse his conclusions.

Thinking about Trump’s 2020 campaign slogan led me to ask a simple question, which I wrote about at New York.

Despite Democratic improvement in support from rural voters in congressional disticts in the midterm elections over 2016, Nathaniel Rakich writes at FiveThirtyEight that “One theme of the 2018 election was that Democratic senators from rural, red states became an endangered breed. Three Democratic senators on deep-red turf — Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota — lost their seats. Two others managed to squeak out wins — Jon Tester of Montana and Joe Manchin of West Virginia — but they saw their support shrivel up in many parts of their states…In the six years since these senators last appeared on the ballot (in 2012), Democratic support has become increasingly confined to America’s metro areas…These five Democratic incumbents didn’t all manage that; as it has for Democrats nationally, their support deteriorated significantly relative to 2012 in areas outside of cities and suburbs, according to a county-by-county analysis of U.S. Senate results.”

Ella Koeze’s graphic comparison accompanying Rakich’s FiveThirtyEight article, illustrating the difference between county results in the five states in 2012 and 2018:

Yes, they are older guys. But “Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are both way more popular than Donald Trump,” as Matthew Yglesias reports at Vox. “Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are the best-known members of the Democratic Party’s very crowded 2020 primary field, and they are both more popular than Donald Trump, according to a new Quinnipiac University national poll…The two other moderately well-known Democrats — Elizabeth Warren and Michael Bloomberg — both fare less well with underwater favorable ratings. Everyone else, including Beto O’Rourke, Sherrod Brown, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Kirsten Gillibrand, is fairly obscure, with a majority of the public offering no opinion so far…In contrast to Trump, Joe Biden’s numbers look fantastic with a 53/33 favorable/unfavorable split. Democrats love Biden, with 84 percent approving, and he’s above water with essentially all demographic subcategories.” Yglesias breaks down the demographic components of support for the two Democrats, and notes that Biden is substantially more popular with African Americans, white males and seniors than Sanders, but Sanders has an edge over Biden with younger voters and Latinos. Biden also does a litle better with working-class whites than does Sanders, though both are under 50 percent approval with this large constituency.

In her CNN Politics article, “3 Kansas legislators switch from Republican to Democrat,” Sophie Tatum reports the good news for Democrats. “Two state lawmakers in Kansas announced on Wednesday that they would be switching their political party — from Republican to Democrat…In separate Facebook posts, state Rep. Stephanie Clayton and state Sen. Dinah Sykes said they would now be serving as Democrats in the state Legislature…Last Wednesday, Kansas state Sen. Barbara Bollier also had announced she would be leaving the Republican Party and would come back in 2019 as a Democrat.” Clayton cited the Republicans killing a “bipartisan education plan” in her statement, while Sykes noted “the Republican party focusing on issues and approaches that divide our country. I do not agree with that approach.”

“Americans are scattered and divided over which source they most trust for news,” reports Emily Guskin at The Fix. Among the findings of Guskin’s report on television news preferences: “A Washington Post Fact Checker poll used an open-ended format to ask what source of information viewers trust most for political news, which could include a person, company or organization. Cable news networks overall topped the list of responses, with 22 percent mentioning CNN (11 percent), Fox (9 percent) or MSNBC (2 percent), compared with a total of 5 percent who mentioned either ABC News, CBS News or NBC (together, 5 percent mention NBC or MSNBC)…Partisans split in trust for Fox News and CNN, with Fox volunteered as the most trusted by 22 percent of Republicans but just 1 percent of Democrats, while CNN is most trusted by 19 percent of Democrats but only 3 percent of Republicans. MSNBC is mentioned by 3 percent of Democrats as most trustworthy, while no Republican respondents mention the network.” Guskin also reports on data from a Pew Research Center and a 2018 Poynter Media Trust Survey on viewer preferences for television news. (There was no data on how TV compared to use of other internet sources).

For a good update on Democratic prospects in the Lone Star state, read “Is Texas finally turning blue? We looked at the electorate to find out” by Juan Carlos Huerta and Beatriz Cuartas at The Monkey Cage. As Huerta and Cuartas explain, “Although O’Rourke fell short, Democrats picked up 12 seats in the Texas House, two seats in the Texas Senate and two seats in the U.S. House, and came close in several statewide races. Nor were these anomalies. In the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton lost the state by only nine points, much less than Barack Obama’s 16-point loss in 2012…The state’s diversifying electorate and young people’s leftward shift appear to be weakening the GOP’s grip on the Lone Star State…By 2017, demographers estimate that Texas’s population was 58 percent people of color and 42 percent whites. As demographics have continued to change, the Texas legislature has passed laws such as strict voter-photo-identification requirements that are likely to make it harder to mobilize people of color in the state…According to data obtained from the States of Change: Demographics and Democracyproject, people of color were 44 percent of the voting eligible population in 2008 in Texas, and the project estimates that that population is 50 percent in 2018. From 2012 to 2016, Hispanic turnout increased by 30 percent while the percent of Hispanic population grew 15 percent, meaning the increase in turnout outpaced the increase in population.”

Ed Kilgore notes an historic milestone in his article, “Nevada Becomes First State With Women-Majority Legislature” at New York Magazine: “A couple of postelection appointments to vacant positions in the Nevada State Assembly included one in which criminal defense lawyer Rochelle Thuy Nguyen succeeded Chris Brooks as a Democrat representing Clark County. That officially gave the state a historic landmark, as the New York Times noted: “[W]omen will hold 32 of 63 seats in the Nevada Legislature when the next session begins in February, about 51 percent. No state house in history had ever crossed the 50 percent mark….New Hampshire previously had majority women representation in the state Senate, but women were not the overall majority in the Capitol.” Kilgore also notes that, according to National Conference of State Legislatures, women’s share of state legislators will increase by about 3 percent in 2019. Further, “Democrats outnumber Republicans by a more than two-to-one margin (1,431 to 660) among the women who will be serving in state legislatures in 2019.”

At PowerPost, Joe Davidson reports on a sophisticated Russian effort to sway African American voters away from opposing Trump: “Documents released by the Senate Intelligence Committee, first reported by my colleagues Craig Timberg and Tony Romm, show in previously unknown detail a complex, high-tech, surreptitious strike on American democracy, targeting African Americans. Unlike the Republican sledgehammers used to suppress votes and thwart electorates’ decisions in various states, the Russians are sneaky, using social media come-ons that ostensibly had little to do with the 2016 vote…“Messaging to African Americans sought to divert their political energy away from established political institutions by preying on anger with structural inequalities faced by African Americans, including police violence, poverty, and disproportionate levels of incarceration,” said the report by the Computational Propaganda Research Project. “These campaigns pushed a message that the best way to advance the cause of the African American community was to boycott the election and focus on other issues instead. This often happened through the use of repetitive slogans.”

Congratulations to Sabato’s Crystal Ball and their election forecasters on the accuracy of their Midterm election predictions. As the editors note, not only did they come very close on the net number of pick-ups for U.S. Senate and House seats and Governorships; they also nailed specific races with impressive accuracy. They picked the winners in: 34 of 35 U.S. Senate races, 423 of 434 House races and 32 of 35 Governors races.

In is article, “Should Democrats be as ruthless as Republicans when they have the chance?” at The Washington Post’s Plum Line, Paul Waldman reports that New Jersey Democrats are engaged in “attempt to push through a nakedly partisan gerrymandering plan for state legislative seats…The question is, should Democrats be as ruthless as Republicans when they have the chance, and do the same thing they’ve decried so often? It turns out to be a complicated question.”

Waldman notes that “Right now we have a situation where Republicans have been far more aggressive in using partisan gerrymandering in drawing both congressional and state legislative districts where they’re in control than Democrats have.” It’s the reality in New Jersey, but also in many other states.

Yes, Democrats have engaged in gerrymandering over the years. But in recent years they have been badly beaten at the game, owing in large part to the GOP’s REDMAP strategy, described at by David Daley, author of “Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count,” a senior fellow at FairVote:

The visionaries at the Republican State Leadership Committee, who designed the aptly-named strategy dubbed REDMAP, short for Redistricting Majority Project, managed to look far beyond the short-term horizon. They designed an audacious and revolutionary plan to wield the gerrymander as a tool to lock in conservative governance of state legislatures and Congress. It proved more effective than any Republican dared dream. Republicans held the U.S. House in 2012, despite earning 1.4 million fewer votes than Democratic congressional candidates, and won large GOP majorities in the Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan and North Carolina state legislatures even when more voters backed Democrats.

REDMAP and other Republican gerrymandering and disenfranchisement projects lavishly funded by the Koch Brothers and various GOP sugar-daddies have been extraordinarily effective. And no, it wouldn’t be all that much of a stretch to cite Democratic leaders and strategists for political negligence while REDMAP was going on, although it would have been hard for Dems to match the GOP’s financial investment in gerrymandering during the last decade.

Charles Pierce put it this way at Esquire:

The Democratic Party, at both the state and national levels, was completely wrong-footed on all of this. I’m telling you, people will be studying how the Republicans did this in political science classes for the next 100 years. It’s like the Republicans were the only ones that remembered everything they’d learned in civics class.

Waldman makes the case that Democrats have to respond in kind, because, “if Republicans aren’t going to fight fair, Democrats shouldn’t either.” Further,

Look at what just happened in Wisconsin: Republicans pushed through a series of measures limiting the power of the incoming Democratic governor, Democrats raised a big stink, and today outgoing Gov. Scott Walker signed the bills. Democrats retained the moral high ground, and what do they have to show for it? Pretty much nothing.” Also,

There’s another somewhat more sophisticated argument in favor of the New Jersey legislators, one suggested by Kevin Drum: “This is the only thing that will ever get the Supreme Court off its butt to do something about gerrymandering.” In other words, it’s a bit of strategic envelope-pushing that could produce a fairer system in the end. The court has never struck down a partisan gerrymander, though it recently heard a case involving the question and put off making a decision. As long as the five conservative justices see partisan gerrymandering as something that helps Republicans almost exclusively, they’ll never strike it down.

Waldman also acknowledges that “Being principled is important even if you don’t get a lot of political gain from everyone knowing you’re the principled ones.” But he notes that “Republicans have no principles at all when it comes to representation and democracy, and they’ve paid precisely zero price because of it.” However,

But that doesn’t mean Democrats’ principles will inevitably cause their defeat. Just this year they used voter initiatives to strike down felon disenfranchisement in Florida, create independent redistricting commissions in Colorado, Michigan and Utah, and pass automatic voter registration in Maryland, Michigan and Nevada. They’re making progress, even if it isn’t easy to do so while holding on to your belief in democracy.

Thus the “When they go low, we go high” principle has real-world limitations when it comes to hand-to-hand combat for control of state legislatures. For Democrats, gerrymandering is sometimes necessary for survival and to counter-balance the GOP’s current edge in the strategy.

Yet Democrats should support establishing independent redistricting commissions, especially when the cost of doing so is fairly-shared by both parties. It will be a great day when all states have independent redistricting, and Democrats should lead the way to it.

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

David Leonhardt makes this argument–correctly in my view–in his column in the New York Times. And check out the chart below for some of the evidence for his argument.

“There is only one quality — beyond, of course, charisma — that Democrats should demand in their nominee. The Democrats need a candidate who can and will run as an economic populist.

They need a candidate who will organize the 2020 campaign around fighting for the little guy and gal. (And most of the potential Democratic nominees could do so.) It would be a campaign about Republican politicians and corporate lobbyists who are rigging the game, a campaign that promised good jobs, rising wages, decent health care, affordable education and an end to Trumpian corruption.

The country doesn’t only need this agenda. It wants this agenda. A mountain of evidence shows that populism — the real kind, not the faux Trump version — is the Democrats’ most effective political strategy. Yet that evidence often gets obscured by less important issues, like a candidate’s race, sex or precise spot on a traditional liberal-conservative spectrum……

Populism takes very different forms — from odious racism to sensible economics — but there is no other political style consistently succeeding in the Western world right now.

There is more than one form that a Democratic populist can take. Franklin Roosevelt, the most successful populist of the past century, was an aristocrat. Bill Clinton and Lyndon Johnson were hardscrabble Southerners. Barack Obama managed to do quite well with much of the white working class despite having one big obvious difference from them.

So the need to run a populist campaign in 2020 doesn’t point to any specific candidate….

[A]lmost every single one of the potential Democratic candidates could run a smart populist campaign. Take Beto O’Rourke. His record in the House was not especially populist. He cast a procedural vote for a trans-Pacific trade deal, for example. Yet his Texas Senate campaign captured the energy of the moment. In campaign ads, his top issues included: “Get big money out of politics” and “Jobs for Texans.”

We’re living in a populist era. The question is who figures out how to thrive in it. In 2016, it was Trump. It doesn’t need to be in 2020.”

Exactly. And I would add that the approach Leonhardt recommends could put into play the basic components of the “equitable growth” agenda this country so desperately needs to move forward and leave reactionary populism behind for good.

As I conceive of it, the equitable growth approach has three broad components: (1) measures to directly improve economic outcomes for the working and middle classes; (2) measures to directly reduce the flow of excessive benefits to the wealthy; and (3) measures to increase societal investment in the jobs of the future.

Measures to directly improve economic outcomes should include the following. First, there is the provision of more and more widely-distributed educational opportunity. This provision is absolutely central to the life-chances and economic mobility of the working and middle classes. Making early childhood education available for all is part of this, as is more effective elementary and secondary education and much easier access to a college education.

Raising the quality and quantity of educational attainment helps individual workers but it does much more. Broad diffusion of knowledge and skills is a powerful countervailing force on rising inequality. And the role of rising societal skill levels in promoting economic growth is well-documented.

Policies to directly support wages are also important. A relatively high minimum wage, indexed to prices, fits in here, as do pro-work tax credits like the Earned Income Tax Credit and employee profit-sharing, share-ownership and representation. And, critically, the attainment and maintenance of full employment, including government as employer of last resort, will do a great deal to push wages up over the long-term.

Then there is the role of robust social insurance and social benefits. Besides the familiar old age programs of Social Security and Medicare, this includes the universal provision of health care, affordable child care, retirement savings accounts, paid sick and parental leave and paid vacation.

There is no question these measures would go a long way toward improving the lot of the working and middle classes in today’s America. But an equitable growth approach entails going beyond directly helping the great middle to cutting the flow of excessive benefits to the wealthy.

One part of this is increasing taxes on the wealthy and on wealth. As Thomas Piketty argues, low marginal income tax rates on the wealthy encourage the pursuit of extreme incomes, while much higher marginal rates can be implemented without adverse effects on work effort and entrepreneurship.

Curtailing wealth through tax increases on the wealthy would, by definition, make a contribution toward reducing inequality by pushing down excess at the top of the income distribution. These measures would also have the highly desirable side effect of helping raise revenue for needed social programs and government investments to lift up the great middle of society (even if such taxes, by themselves, would not be sufficient to provide all the revenue needed).

There is also the issue of laws and incentives that encourage excessive and destabilizing wealth accumulation. A host of changes are needed here. Measures to combat these tendencies include ending “too big to fail” in the financial sector, enacting a financial transactions tax to discourage short-term, speculative investments and eliminating tax loopholes on performance pay and other forms of compensation that have allowed CEO pay to skyrocket.

Direct measures to lift up the middle and push down the top are clearly necessary and important parts of an equitable growth program. But they are not sufficient. Sustained healthy economic growth also depends on increased long-term societal investment in the infrastructure, research and sectoral innovation that will underpin the jobs of the future.

There are obviously a lot of moving parts here. But several things are clear. There has been a systematic tendency to underinvest in infrastructure, both its maintenance and expansion to suit the needs of modern postindustrial economies. This tendency has been particularly acute in the United States, where investment in infrastructure is now at historical lows, despite an immense backlog of deferred maintenance and mostly unfilled needs for new infrastructure.

This underinvestment reflects in large part unwarranted faith in the ability of the private sector to “go it alone” and drive growth purely on the basis of entrepreneurship and profit-seeking. This ignores, of course, the well-known economic problem of “public goods” that are useful and necessary for many economic actors but are available to all regardless of whether they have contributed anything to the availability of the public good (“free-riding”) and cannot be appropriated for the exclusive use of any profit-making firm. Infrastructure is a classic example of such a public good, as is some basic research.

In the absence of a robust supply of public goods, some firms will still make healthy profits and economic growth will still continue. But growth will be less than it otherwise would be and it will be tilted toward areas where large profits do not depend on public goods (think finance). Good for those firms that do make large profits, bad for the working and middle classes.

Worse, the problem goes beyond that indicated by the public goods framework. As economist Mariana Mazzucato points out, the role of the state is not just to supply public goods the private sector ignores but needs (though this is very important) but also to be an entrepreneurial agent investing in areas that are far off the private sector’s radar screen because of extreme uncertainty in economic returns. This is particularly the case with fundamental knowledge generation and very early investments in new technological sectors. Current theories of economic growth assign such innovation a key role in economic growth and it is the “entrepreneurial state” in Mazzucato’s phrase who can afford—and is willing–to bear the inherently immeasurable risks of such innovation.

This has been the case in the United States where pretty much all research underlying the internet and modern computing was funded and initially capitalized by the US state. For example, the immensely profitable Apple corporation’s signature products, like the iPhone and iPad, rest on fundamental innovations developed by government funding . This includes everything from the internet to GPS to touch screens to Siri voice recognition. In other words, no entrepreneurial state, no Apple.

More generally, a Brookings Institution study found that 18 of the 25 most important breakthroughs in computer technology in the seminal 1946-65 period were underwritten by the federal government . And it’s not just information technology where the role of the state has been critical: between 1971 and 2006, 77 out of the 88 most important innovations outside of computing/communications, as rated by R&D Magazine, were heavily dependent on government support, especially in their earliest developmental stages.

The role of the entrepreneurial state has been critical to growth in the past and there is no reason to think it will not be critical in the future. Progress in such emerging fields as biotechnology, nanotechnology and, of paramount importance, green technology will continue to depend on the entrepreneurial state being willing to provide support in areas where the private sector sees only unknowable risks. And without such progress economic growth–and the consequent ability to raise living standards–will fall well short of potential.

It’s a big program and getting rid of Trump is just the first step. But it’s what we need.

In his article, “As Trump Comes Apart, Can Democrats Come Together?,” at The American Prospect, Robert Kuttner notes, “Democratic candidates found a winning formula on the issues—call it kitchen-table economics. Even candidates who considered themselves fairly centrist ran on such issues as defending and expanding Social Security; offering a buy-in to Medicare; cracking down on drug company pricing; dealing with the student debt crisis; and launching a large-scale public infrastructure program. The supposed ideological distance between the party left and center narrowed. Progressive became the new moderate…There is a principled family quarrel here between the Clinton/Obama center-left and the progressive left. It often gets conflated with two other discussions about moderation and centrism that are the subject of ongoing spin wars. It’s true that voters tend to describe themselves as moderates, but on all the key issues—Social Security, Medicare, education, drug prices, infrastructure—their opinions align with progressives. The genius of the midterm theme was presenting kitchen-table progressive issues not as radical but as common-sense.”

Matthew Yglesias explains why “The latest Obamacare ruling is part of a larger conservative attack on democracy” — and how Democrats should address it at Vox: “The case will, of course, wend its way up to higher courts where hopefully cooler, more humane heads will prevail. But whether they do depends not just on the law but on the political context. The rhetoric and practice of actual majoritarian populism — rather than simply assuming Chief Justice Roberts will do the right thing — is critical in moments like this. Judicial conservatives will be restrained in their activism if and only if they believe that defying the will of the people on such consequential matters will lead to their delegitimization. It’s a fear they ought to have. But one which will only develop if progressive leaders are able to move beyond excessive fear of populism and learn to speak the language of popular majoritarianism and democratic self-rule.”

“Are Republicans Crazy Enough to Kill Obamacare Like This?,” asks Michael Tomasky at The Daily Beast. If the appeal of the Obamacare ruling gets to the Supreme Court, as now seems likely, Tomasky believes that there are three options “One, they can decide not to hear it and let the Fifth Circuit’s decision stand. Two, they can uphold the Obamacare repeal. Three, they can overturn the Fifth Circuit and save Obamacare…For now, I bet—and obviously, I hope—that the court will choose option three. John Roberts, I think, will join the four liberals in striking down this decision. The legal basis is simple and has to do with the judge not acknowledging Congress’ intent in treating separate sections of the law separately (“severability,” in the parlance)…He’s shown awareness in the past (indeed in the first Obamacare case) about the court’s standing and the real-world ramifications of its decisions…And even if he doesn’t care about millions of people with cancer, he cares about his court’s reputation, which will be destroyed if a majority follows this judge’s reasoning and produces an obvious political decision. Destroyed. Right now it’s polling about 50-40, approve over disapprove. I have no doubt those numbers would flip and stay flipped for a long time. Roberts cares about this.”

Some conservatives who oppose Obamacare also believe the ruling is dubious. “Ted Frank, a lawyer at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who is critical of the ACA, called the decision “embarrassingly bad” because “you’re twisting yourself into knots” to reach a particular conclusion,” notes Devlin Barrett in “Legal experts rip judge’s rationale for declaring Obamacare law invalid“, at The Chicago Tribune. “Over the past two years, Frank said, conservative lawyers such as he have complained when district court judges did similar intellectual gymnastics to attack Trump administration initiatives. “It’s not appropriate in the other direction, either,” he said.”

And there is plenty of anxiety about health care brewing in the public. In “Other Polling Nuggets,” at FiveThirtyEight Dhrumil Mehta cites findings indicating that “61 percent of Americans say they are concerned that they or a member of their immediate family will have to pay higher health-insurance premiums in the next few years, according to a Gallup poll. Forty-two percent said they were worried about themselves or someone in their family having to go without health insurance.”

Those who think Trump’s threat to “shut down the government” will somehow hurt Democrats should read Mehta’s “Americans Don’t Want A Government Shutdown Because Of The Border Wall,” which notes “According to an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll, 57 percent of Americans think Trump should “compromise on the border wall to prevent gridlock,” while only 36 percent think he shouldn’t compromise even if that means a government shutdown. And that reflects a larger trend — in CBS News polls that have been conducted since July 2016,¹ Trump’s border wall proposal has generally been unpopular, except among Republicans…In the new NPR/PBS News/Marist poll, 30 percent of respondents who identified themselves as Trump supporters said they thought he should compromise on the wall. And a CBS News poll from November found that 28 percent of those who favored Trump’s border wall did not believe that it was worth risking a partial government shutdown over.”

Can Democrats win a Senate majority in 2020. Here’s some of Kyle Kondik’s take at Sabato’s Crystal Ball: “Of the 34 Senate races on the ballot in 2020, Republicans already control 22 of them while Democrats hold only 12. That represents something of a role reversal from 2018, when Democrats had to defend 26 of 35 seats being contested…Overall, in order to win the Senate, Democrats probably will need to win Arizona and Colorado as well as at least a couple of the Leans Republican states: Georgia, Iowa, Maine, or North Carolina. That these crucial states begin with Republicans as small favorites points to a larger overall assessment: the GOP starts this cycle favored to hold the Senate. However, there is a plausible path for Democrats, particularly if a Democrat wins the presidency and provides some down-ballot coattails.”

“The Secret to Winning in 2020: It’s the populism, stupid,” says David Leonhardt in his New York Times column. “There is only one quality — beyond, of course, charisma — that Democrats should demand in their nominee. The Democrats need a candidate who can and will run as an economic populist…They need a candidate who will organize the 2020 campaign around fighting for the little guy and gal. (And most of the potential Democratic nominees could do so.) It would be a campaign about Republican politicians and corporate lobbyists who are rigging the game, a campaign that promised good jobs, rising wages, decent health care, affordable education and an end to Trumpian corruption…More than 60 percent think taxes on upper-income people are too low, according to Gallup. Almost 70 percent say the same about corporations. A clear majority also favors expanded government health care, more college financial aid, a higher minimum wage and tougher anticorruption laws.

“Minimum-wage increases often pass in a landslide, including in red states like Arkansas, Montana and Nebraska. Expansions of Medicaid also keep passing,” Leonhardt continues. “In Missouri last month, 62 percent of voters approved a law to rein in the influence of lobbyists (a law that the state’s Republican leaders are now trying to undermine)…These issues are politically potent because they unite the Democratic coalition and divide the Republican coalition…The Democratic base — including Africans-Americans, Asian-Americans, Latinos, young college graduates and middle-class women — leans populist, polling shows. But so do the white-working class voters who often swing 21st-century elections…Democrats still aren’t going to win a majority of the white working class. But they don’t need to. They just need to avoid getting crushed. When they do that, they win elections.”