There’s a new wrinkle in the GOP attacks on single-payer health care proposals. I wrote about it this week at New York:

But what Trump and Scott are doing is asking seniors to selfishly (or resentfully) oppose giving younger people the same kind of health coverage they enjoy because it might somehow put their own “socialist” benefits at risk. And as with the attacks on Obamacare, there is more than a bit of a whiff of racism involved, as Cohen observes:

[T]aken literally, Trump was saying that Democrats want to raid socialism to pay for socialism, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

But Trump was probably making a clumsy version of the pitch that helped him get elected and that continues to keep his base loyal ― namely, that Democrats want to shift money and status away from the kind of people who voted for him and give those things to others.

His message to supporters, in other words, was that Democrats want to raid your socialism to pay for theirs.

It’s not crazy to hear a racist dog whistle in there, given Trump’s history. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time that a Republican tried to rally white voters by telling them that Democrats were going to take their money and give it to nonwhite people.

You could argue that Republicans are simply appealing to the innate conservatism of old folks who fear change even if they would be helped very directly by that change. But the country could do without the lies told by those with bad intent towards Medicare posing as its champions.

While following Brett Kavanaugh’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee from gavel to gavel, I saw a strange unscripted moment that told us a lot. I wrote about it at New York:

Throughout the confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, Democratic senators have challenged his acceptance of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that established a constitutional right to an abortion. He’s become adept in reciting a sort of formula acknowledging (in language also used by Chief Justice John Roberts at his own confirmation hearing) Roe as “settled law” and an important SCOTUS precedent — and then refusing to answer questions about Roe’s original legitimacy (the key to a possible future reversal by SCOTUS itself, which is not bound to its own precedents the way lower courts are) because his answers might prejudge a future case.

But Republican Lindsey Graham threw Kavanaugh a curve today by asking him to criticize Roe on the standard grounds that conservatives like both of those men have heard (and almost certainly agreed with) thousands of times in their adult lives.

Graham went back to basics:

GRAHAM: Is there anything in the Constitution about the right to an abortion? Anything written in it …

KAVANAUGH: Senator, the Supreme Court recognized the right to an abortion in the 1973 Roe v. Wade case, and has reaffirmed it many times.

GRAHAM: Look, my question is, did they find a phrase in the Constitution that says the state cannot interfere with a woman’s right to choose, until medical viability occurs? Is that in the Constitution?

KAVANAUGH: The Supreme Court, applying the liberty —

GRAHAM: This is pretty simple: “No, it’s not, Senator Graham.”

KAVANAUGH (laughing): I want to be very careful …

Kavanaugh tried to talk about the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the constitutional “liberty cause,” but Graham wasn’t having any of it:

GRAHAM: What are the limits on the Court’s ability to find a penumbra of rights to apply in a particular situation? What are the checks and balances for people in your profession, if you can find five people who agree with you, to confer rights, whether the public likes it or not, based on this concept of a penumbra of rights? What are the limits to this.

Graham is alluding to the famous “penumbra” doctrine of unenumerated but implied rights contained in Justice Willam O. Douglas’s decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 SCOTUS case that struck down a state ban on contraception as violating a right to privacy the Court had never explicitly identified before. It was, more importantly, the chief precedent cited by the Court majority in Roe v. Wade. Every American who has ever taken a constitutional law class knows all about Douglas, “penumbras,” Griswold, privacy rights, and Roe, and has heard the standard conservative complaint, echoed by Graham, that the whole thing is the epitome of illegitimate “judicial activism.”

But instead of agreeing or disagreeing with Graham, Kavanaugh tried to go off on a tangent about later Supreme Court cases about privacy rights being rooted in the country’s history and traditions. After mocking that idea, Graham got back to his basic objection of “five people” (justices) using “one word” (privacy) to “tell everybody elected in the country you can’t go there” (in restricting abortion).

GRAHAM: The only real check and balance is a constitutional amendment, to change the ruling. Would you agree with that?

This was a treacherous question, since most of the conservatives backing Kavanaugh would begin rioting in the streets if he conceded the Court had no power to “fix” Roe v. Wade. After a brief pause, Kavanaugh objected that he did not want to “comment on potential constitutional amendments,” and then mostly fell silent as Graham continued to offer the standard conservative rant about “judicial activists” robbing legislative bodies of their power to determine public policies. At the end, recognizing that Kavanaugh wasn’t going to comment, Graham concluded: “All I ask is that you think about it,” as though the veteran conservative jurist never had.

This near-comical exchange was revealing in that the well-rehearsed Kavanaugh had the discipline to act as though Graham, in enunciating tenets of liberal judicial overreaching that are part of his own philosophical inheritance, was handing him a rattlesnake to cuddle. There is no way Kavanaugh would have passed the Federalist Society vetting process if he didn’t at the very least broadly share Graham’s point of view about Roe. And if he is confirmed to the Court and blandly follows Roe as unshakable precedent, there will be hell to pay in conservative circles — from white-shoe law offices to small Evangelical churches — that will burn all the Republicans who voted to confirm him, and will even scorch Donald Trump if he is still in office at that point.

Everyone on the Judiciary Committee understands the deceptive game that he and Republican senators are playing on this subject. And that’s probably why Lindsey Graham felt secure in just making a speech to the galleries.

It was a true “teaching moment.”

Ronald Brownstein’s article, “What Liberal Organizers Are Seeing on the Ground in 2018” at The Atlantic spotlights the impressive activism of Working America, and offers a number of insightful observations, including: “Michael Podhorzer, who supervises Working America as the AFL-CIO’s political director, says the evidence suggests that suburban college-educated voters, particularly those who most revile Trump, will likely vote in large numbers in November. By contrast, the blue-collar whites who surged to the polls for Trump in 2016 appear less motivated to come out for other Republicans—just as many of Obama’s younger and minority supporters didn’t show up during the GOP landslide in 2010, his first midterm election. “In a peculiar irony,” Podhorzer says, “Trump may have something of Obama’s problem in 2010: If he’s not on the ticket, the surge voters are not going to come out and vote for congressional Republicans.”…And while support for the president in white working-class communities remains formidable, the Working America organizers say they have succeeded in moving some blue-collar Trump supporters, especially women, away from GOP candidates. They’ve done so by highlighting Republican efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, as well as the risk that huge deficits created by the GOP tax plan will eventually compel cuts in Medicare and Social Security.”

Brownstein continues, “But Podhorzer, Morrison, and Nussbaum all caution that recapturing the House this fall wouldn’t mean that Democrats have solved all of their problems for 2020. For starters, each says Working America’s experience indicates that, despite all of Trump’s racial provocations, Democrats still face a serious challenge improving on the lackluster minority turnout that hurt Clinton in 2016. In its canvasses, the group has found that working-class minority communities are no more, and may be even less, engaged than their white counterparts. All three say they see no sign this year of an uptick from the typical midterm-turnout decline among minorities—and no evidence that distaste for Trump alone will change the equation for 2020…The core of the Democrats’ problem, they believe, is that while many minority voters see Trump and the GOP as hostile, they are not convinced Democrats have ideas to meaningfully improve their economic condition. White blue-collar communities are even more skeptical. Among these working-class voters on both sides of the color bar, Morrison says flatly, “it is not credible to see the Democrats, broadly speaking, as a change agent.” The ominous result for Democrats? In all parts of the country, families that cite the economy as their top concern during Working America’s door-knocking visits prefer Republicans.”

NYT columnist Paul Krugman nails the GOP’s Kavanaugh confirmation strategy — and a good way for Dems to describe it: “At a fundamental level, the attempt to jam Brett Kavanaugh onto the Supreme Court closely resembles the way Republicans passed a tax cut last year. Once again we see a rushed, nakedly partisan process, with G.O.P. leaders withholding much of the information that’s supposed to go into congressional deliberations. Once again the outcome is all too likely to rest on pure tribalism: Unless some Republicans develop a very late case of conscience, they will vote along party lines with the full knowledge that they’re abdicating their constitutional duty to provide advice and consent.”

Democrats who want to see more passion from the party’s top leaders ought to be pleased with the  comments by Sens. Kamala Harris and Cory Booker at the Kavanaugh hearings. Booker’s “I am Spartacus” moment drew predictable ridicule from the GOP, but voters who like a little moxie in political leaders — a frequently-cited concern many voters have about Democrats — have to appreciate Booker’s gutsy dare to the GOP to “bring it,” regarding their threat to expel him. Harris also showed plenty of mettle in her bulldogging Kavanaugh, who looked quite shaken by focused interrogation. Not many Republican leaders would welcome the chance to debate her.

Ed Kilgore’s “Most Americans Can’t Name a Supreme Court Justice” at New York Magazine notes that “A new survey of likely voters by C-Span, moreover, shows that 91 percent of them agree that: “Decisions made by the U.S. Supreme Court have an impact on my everyday life as a citizen.” But asked if they could name any of the Court’s current members, 52 percent could not. This is not a new thing, to be sure: the same C-Span question back in 2009 showed 54 percent as unable to name a sitting justice.” Less depressing and more interesting, Kilgore notes that “82 percent of those who voted in the 2016 elections claim that Supreme Court appointments were important to their presidential vote. By nearly a three-to-one margin, respondents favored some sort of restriction on SCOTUS tenure (as opposed to the current lifetime appointments).”

In his New York Times op-ed, “Trump and the Koch Brothers Are Working in Concert: They disagree about trade, tariffs and immigration, but don’t be fooled. Neither side can get what it really wants without help from the other,” Thomas B. Edsall explains why Dems should not be suckered by talk that the Koch brothers have split with Trump: “In practice, the Trump-Koch alliance has been extraordinarily productive, and the alliance is the odds on favorite to win the battle to put Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, where he is likely to cement a conservative majority for the foreseeable future…Looking toward November, the Koch organizations are already committedto attacking incumbent Democratic Senators in Wisconsin, Indiana, Missouri and Florida while looking at their chance of influencing the outcome in as many as 14 other races. In addition, the network plans to support Republican candidates for governor in Nevada, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan and Florida, a list that is expected to grow longer as the midterms heat up.”

At FiveThirtyEight, Nathaniel Rakich and Nate Silver plug Silver’s concept of “elasticity” into the 2016 midterm elections. They note that “A state’s elasticity is simply how sensitive it is to changes in the national political environment. A very elastic state is prone to big shifts in voter preferences, while inelastic states don’t blow as much with the political winds…An elastic state isn’t necessarily a swing state, or vice versa. Think of the difference between a state that is decided by 1 percentage point every election (an inelastic swing state) and one that votes 10 points Democratic one year and 10 points Republican the next (an elastic swing state). In other words, elasticity helps us understand elections on a deeper level. Just knowing that both of those districts are competitive doesn’t tell you everything you need to know; for example, the two call for different campaign strategies (turnout in the former, persuasion in the latter).” Read the article for their take on particular midterm races.

Here’s how close the midterms are shaping up in Florida: “New Quinnipiac University polls of the gubernatorial and Senate races in Florida found that both are neck and neck, with voters almost evenly split between the Democratic and Republican candidates,” report Dhrumil Mehta and Janie Velencia, also at FiveThirtyEight. “That’s not all that surprising in a perpetual swing state like Florida. But here’s what did catch our eye: The vast majority of Florida voters are already committed to a candidate with about two months still left until Election Day. Only 3 percent of voters in the gubernatorial poll and 2 percent of voters in the Senate poll said they were undecided.”

Kyle Kondik writes at Sabato’s Crystal Ball: “In order for Democrats to win the Senate, they need to do two of three things: 1.) Win both Republican-held Toss-up seats in Arizona and Nevada; 2.) Hold all 26 seats they currently hold, several of which are in states that Trump won in landslides; or 3.) Win at least one Senate seat in a dark red state where Republicans are currently favored, be it Mississippi, Tennessee, or Texas. At this point, we might peg Democrats as slightly better than 50-50 to accomplish No. 1, but we’d put Republicans as a bit better than 50-50 to prevent Democrats from accomplishing No. 2 and even better to prevent them from accomplishing No. 3. So that’s why Republicans continue to be favored to hold the Senate, in our view. That said, the Democratic path to a Senate majority does not involve them doing something radically out of the ordinary to win: The presidential out party did not lose a single incumbent-held seat in any of the last three midterms in the Senate, for instance, and both Arizona and Nevada (if not the redder Republican-held states) certainly fit the profile of Senate battlegrounds the out party could win in a year like this one. In other words, if Democrats swept the closest races and captured a small majority, it would be surprising, but not shocking.”

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

There hasn’t been much polling specifically of Latinos in the 2018 election cycle and the subsamples in most polls are small enough not to be very trustworthy. So it’s nice to see Latino Decisions out of the gate with a tracking poll of Latinos that they will do every week until the elections.

Their first poll is now available. Topline for the Democrats for the House vote is good –a 70-22 advantage among likely voters. On the less positive side, mobilization leaves something to be desired–about three-fifths say they have not been contacted yet concerning their vote. This is not an election when you want to leave any votes on the table!

Could Trump’s “dumb southerner” comment hurt Republicans in the midterm elections. As Gabriel Pogrund sets the stage in “Southern senators bristle at Trump’s ‘dumb Southerner’ insult” in The Washington Post:

Southern Republican senators defended Jeff Sessions after an explosive new book by Bob Woodward recounted how President Donald Trump called his attorney general a “dumb Southerner” and mocked his accent.

In the forthcoming chronicle of Trump’s White House, “Fear,” Woodward writes that the president privately called Sessions a “traitor,” saying: “This guy is mentally retarded. He’s this dumb Southerner . . . He couldn’t even be a one-person country lawyer down in Alabama.”

The remarks are said to have come during a conversation between Trump and his former staff secretary Rob Porter about Sessions’ decision to recuse himself from the Russian investigation. They represent the most withering insults the president has directed at his attorney general in months of largely one-sided sniping.

Of course Trump denies ever having said any such thing. But Bob Woodward’s credibility is not so easily dismissed, and the follow-up diss about Alabama sounds a lot like Trump’s put-down style.

Trump is not literally on the ballot in November, although quite a few Senators and congressional Republicans have proudly accepted his support in GOP primaries. Let them now squirm a bit when asked by reporters about his “dumb southerner” remark.

Meanwhile some southern Republicans have responded, as quoted by Pogrund:

“I’m a Southerner, people can judge my intellect, my IQ, by my product and what I produce rather than what somebody else says,” said Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., in an interview…”We’re a pretty smart bunch. We lost the Civil War, but I think we’re winning the economic war since then . . . I’m not gonna get into name calling because I don’t think you should be allowed to call names – including the president,” he added.

Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., who served alongside Sessions during his 20 years as senator for Alabama, said: “Well, I’m sure I’ve got that accent, wouldn’t you think?”…He pointed out that Trump himself relied on Southern voters during the 2016 general election, warning: “I guess the president, he says what he thinks…

Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., added to the chorus of disapproval, joking that Sessions was not a “dumb Southerner” but a “smart Southerner.” “Oh come on,” he said. “I’m a Southerner too. I think it’s not at all appropriate. It’s totally inappropriate.”

…Said Bob Corker, R-Tenn., on Tuesday: “I think we all know it’s likely he is going to terminate him after the midterms. In the interim I think it would be good if he stopped raving about Sessions. It’s unbecoming. Either do something or don’t, but these comments just continue to degrade our nation.”

Even Lindsay Graham weighed in with a timid scold that “It’s probably not helpful to characterize the region that way…” Yet, the election is two months away, and such gaffes may not have all that much of a shelf life — especially if southern voters are not reminded in the two months ahead.

But the opinions that really matter are those of southern swing voters in hot races in state legislatures, congressional districts, and statewide offices, particularly the marquee governorship races in Georgia and Florida and Beto O’Rourke’s bid for senate in Texas. It’s not hard to envision some creative Democratic ads reminding southern swing voters how they are perceived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

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

Hillaryland Says: It’s Time to Think Big!

I thought this was really interesting. Jake Sullivan, who was senior policy adviser on Clinton’s 2016 campaign, has a lengthy article up on the Democracy Journal website where he argues strongly that Democrats should embrace big, bold policy ideas. Presumably this is indicative of how folks in that sector of the party are thinking about things these days. One of the most telling nuggets in the article is this:

“In contending with Sanders, we often fell back on the argument that his proposed agenda simply wasn’t achievable. I cheered when Hillary styled herself as a “progressive who gets things done” during the first primary debate in Las Vegas, but while it was a great debate moment, it also created a trap that became apparent as the campaign unfolded. Instead of aspiration, we gave people arithmetic: His numbers didn’t add up! This was a mistake. There was a time and place for expressing caution on the sheer magnitude of spending in Bernie’s agenda, but it should not have been our core critique.”

So clearly some serious re-thinking is going on here. What kind of re-thinking? Sullivan starts his article this way:

“When political commentators aren’t talking about Donald Trump, they are often talking about how the Democratic Party has “moved to the left.” This is often phrased as a lament, the notion being that the party has been hijacked by its progressive wing. But what if that is missing the point? What if, when it comes to economic policy at least, it’s the country’s political center of gravity that is actually shifting? That is, what if not just one party, but the American electorate as a whole is moving to embrace a more energized form of government—one that tackles the excesses of the free market and takes on big, serious challenges through big, serious legislation instead of the more restrained measures to which we’ve grown accustomed? What would that mean for Democrats?”

He answers his own question in a remarkably robust fashion:

“This essay proceeds from the premise that we have reached another turning point. Just as the Great Depression discredited the ideas of the pre-New Deal conservatives who fought for total laissez-faire outcomes in both the political branches and the courts, so the Great Recession once again laid bare the failure of our government to protect its citizens from unchecked market excess. There has been a delayed reaction this time around, but people have begun to see more clearly not only the flaws of our public and private institutions that contributed to the financial crisis, but also the decades of rising inequality and income stagnation that came before—and the uneven recovery that followed. Our politics are in the process of adjusting to this new reality. The tide is running in the other direction, and, with history serving as our guide, it could easily be a decades-long tide…

In the face of Trump, some Democrats will be skittish about embracing big, bold economic policy solutions for fear of alienating independents and moderate Republicans who can help defend our national institutions, our core values, and our democracy. What these trends suggest is that Democrats do not have to choose between shoring up the “vital center” in American politics and supporting a more vigorous national response to our economic challenges. Both are possible. Indeed, both are necessary to defeating the long-term threat of Trumpism.

Most important, the bottom line is that Democrats should not blush too much, or pay too much heed, when political commentators arch their eyebrows about the party moving left. The center of gravity itself is moving, and this is a good thing. The government’s role in checking the excesses of the free market and supporting workers and families should and will be redefined in the years ahead…..

We Democrats do need to embrace a big, bold policy agenda. We do need to heed the calls of Franklin Roosevelt, who asked us to save capitalism from its excesses, and Lyndon Johnson, who asked us to think ambitiously about how government—and yes, government programs—can help do that. But, crucially, we need to apply their principles to a new economic landscape.

What we need, ultimately, is to encourage the rise of New Old Democrats.

Here’s the old part: reclaiming a willingness to take energetic government action when the circumstances call for it, based on a respect for the free market but also a recognition that the free market alone will not serve the public interest without checks against abuse, corruption, and unacceptable levels of inequality. Roosevelt knew this as well as anyone. My hero Hubert Humphrey, another son of Minnesota, knew this too. They saw that public policy can solve these problems—that the rise of inequality and the loss of mobility is not chiefly a story of abstract “market failures,” but of self-serving actors intentionally distorting markets, and government failing to stop them.

Here are the new parts:

We need to marry the principles of Roosevelt and the ambition of Johnson with updated understandings of how the job market works, how families live, and how corporate and political power are exercised in the globalized, technology-driven landscape of the twenty-first century.”

New Old Democrats. Not sure that’ll catch on but I take his point and generally agree with it. As I do with most of the policy ideas he advances under four “Core Pillars for s New Old Democratic Platform” I was particularly taken with Pillar #3: “Tackle the geography of opportunity so that all regions experience a middle-class revival”. This is absolutely essential given current economic trends and has not, until very recently, gotten enough attention from Democrats. As Sullivan notes:

“Old Democrats thought a lot about communities that had been left behind in the face of social and technological change. Roosevelt invested in rural electrification. Bobby Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson fought urban and rural poverty. Today, the geography of opportunity should be a central focus once again—specifically, the disparity in growth and dynamism between cities and rural communities, the urban core and wealthier neighborhoods, the suburbs and the exurbs, the coastal metropolises and mid-sized cities in the middle of America.”

Amen to that. Exactly which big ideas Democrats should be pushing to address this big problem–and others–is a reasonable subject for debate and I think it’s fair to say Sullivan does not have the definitive take. But that’s fine. These are the debates Democrats should be having in the run-up to 2020 rather than the endless and rather pointless debates about base mobilization vs. reaching swing voters (Spoiler alert: you need to do both!) Sullivan points the way to a healthier and way more interesting and important discussion.

Sullivan is not unaware that some will see his recommendations as some sort of dismissal of what we might loosely call “identity politics”. He urges us not get dragged down into that kind of argument. Instead his view is that:

“[T]he only way out is through. Hillary Clinton was fundamentally right when she said that we need to deal with all of the barriers holding people back—not just the economic and political barriers, but obstacles of racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination. We should not be apologetic about that, or tiptoe around it. The task—and where we fell short—is to figure out how to speak honestly about these barriers in a way that allows everyone to see themselves as part of a common effort, a shared effort, an effort that benefits the whole country. While I disagree with those who argue that Democrats should de-emphasize or outright avoid what some see as “inconvenient” issues touching on race or identity or immigration, I take their point that an explicit list of groups in a candidate’s stump speech can end up dividing more than uniting. Which brings me back to Hubert Humphrey. We need “happy warriors”—strongly crusading against injustice and disadvantages and doing so in a way that is hopeful and summons us to shared purpose.”

Sign me up!

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

Democrats’ hopes are high that two Sunbelt prizes that seemed out of reach to them not long ago might fall to them this year: the governorship of Georgia and Ted Cruz’s Senate seat in Texas. Just in the last few days, both the Washington Post and New York Times have run detailed articles about each of these contests.

So can the Democrats do it? They’re running strong in both places and enthusiasm among Democrats and their core constituencies seems to be high. That is very important obviously and they can’t win without it.

Those who were hoping for a groundswell of popular opposition to the Brett Kavanaugh nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court are not going to like polling nuggets flagged by Dhrumil Mehta and Janie Velencia at FiveThirtyEight: “A C-SPAN/PSB poll found that 35 percent of likely voters can name President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, when asked in an open-ended question. Relatedly, an AP-NORC poll found that a plurality of Americans don’t have strong feelings about Kavanaugh as a nominee one way or the other.” But what will matter more to Senators in deciding if they will vote for confirmation of Kavanaugh is how the registered voters in their states feel about him, and there little or no data available for that. The Kavanaugh nomination is of such overarching importance that Democrats should still do everything they can to defeat it, without sacrificing too much of the time, energy and money resources needed for the midterm campaigns – a highly problematic challenge at best. Meanwhile, much of Kavanaugh’s history is being hidden from the public by his GOP handlers. The question for investigative reporters is, “Why?”

And speaking of the Kavanaugh cover-up, Sheryl Gay Stolberg writes in The New York Times that ” The Trump White House, citing executive privilege, is withholding from the Senate more than 100,000 pages of records from Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh’s time as a lawyer in the administration of former President George W. Bush…The decision, disclosed in a letter that a lawyer for Mr. Bush sent on Friday to Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, comes just days before the start of Judge Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings on Tuesday…Senate Democrats said this was the first time that a sitting president has exerted executive privilege under the Presidential Records Act in order to prevent documents from going to Congress during a Supreme Court confirmation process.”

The New York Times editorial “The Supreme Court Confirmation Charade” observes that “Republicans aren’t even pretending to do their constitutional duty. Senator Chuck Grassley, who chairs the Judiciary Committee, is refusing to let his colleagues or the American people see millions of documents from Judge Kavanaugh’s time as White House staff secretary to President George W. Bush — a job he has called the most influential of his career in terms of his approach to judging. And in recent weeks, multiple senators have been personally helping the judge prepare by holding mock hearings…Republicans are licking their chops. Out with squishes like Anthony Kennedy, the court’s last true swing justice, and in with reliable soldiers like Judge Kavanaugh, who is likely to provide the key fifth vote to reshape large portions of constitutional and statutory law in a deeply conservative mold. That means, for starters, making it harder for minorities to vote, for workers to bargain for better wages and conditions, for consumers to stand up to big business and for women to control what happens to their bodies. It also means making it easier for people to buy and sell weapons of mass killing, for lawmakers to green-light discrimination against gay, lesbian and transgender Americans, for industries to pollute the environment with impunity, and for the wealthy to purchase even more political influence than they already have.”

Labor Day seems like a good time to consider what little is known about Kavanaugh’s views on worker rights, which Steven Greenhouse does in his op-ed, “How Trump Betrays ‘Forgotten’ Americans” in The New York Times: “It doesn’t look as if Mr. Trump’s latest nominee to the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh, will be a friend to workers or unions. In an astonishingly anti-worker opinion in a case involving a SeaWorld trainer killed by an orca whale, Mr. Kavanaugh wrote in 2014 that the Labor Department was wrong to fine SeaWorld. Dissenting in a 2-to-1 case, he suggested that the Labor Department should not “paternalistically” regulate the safety of SeaWorld’s trainers because they, like tiger tamers and bull riders, were sports and entertainment figures who accepted the risk of injury in hazardous businesses that usually regulated their own dangers. His opinion had echoes of 19th-century state court rulings that factory workers assumed the risk of injuries from machinery that cut off their hands.” In other words, do owners of hazardous businesses have an obligation to protect their workers?  If Kavanaugh’s emails and records as white house staff secretary are ever released, no one should be shocked if they indicate his support of anti-worker legislation and nominees, as well as voter supression projects based on race.

Jonathan Chait’s “Trump Is a Snob Who Secretly Despises His Own Supporters” at New York Magazine explores a meme that may have utility for the 2020 campaign, if Trump stays in office that long. As Chait writes, “Conservatives have spent decades depicting liberals as coastal snobs. Entire campaigns were built from this theme, from Michael Dukakis’s “Harvard Yard boutique” to various Democrats failing to display the requisite enthusiasm for Nascar.” And yet, for all of Trump’s “vaunted populism, he is filled with contempt for average people in general and his own supporters in particular…Trump is the ultimate snob. He has no sense that working-class people may have equal latent talent that they have been denied the chance to develop. He considers wealthy and successful people a genetic aristocracy, frequently attributing his own success to good genes.” Chait is on to something here. The ‘Democrats are snobs’ meme has worked well for the GOP, and for Trump in particular, and yes some Democrats have helped it along, as in HRC “deplorables” comment — even though Trump and the Republican elites practice snobbery as a way of life. Successfully branding a political adversary as a snob provides powerful leverage because  everyone hates a snob. Democrats really ought to develop an ad campaign presenting Trump as the elitist snob stereotype he fits so well.

“There was always a false element in Trump’s common-man appeal. (The gender reference in that sentence is not an accident.) Limiting the working class with the adjective “white” is a large part of it,” writes E. J. Dionne, Jr. in his Washingon Post Labor Day column. “The core of Trump’s ideology, such as it is, has never been about class; his passion has always been for race, culture and immigration. Many post-election studies suggested that Trump’s voters were much more energized by these issues than by economics. Watch the typical Trump stump speech, and you will find that fear-mongering smothers any uplift and that falsehoods about immigrants outnumber truths about the challenges to middle-class living standards…Any politician who is serious about the working class needs to think about it as a whole — which means remembering how many wage-earners are African American and Latino. They have been hit as hard by deindustrialization as white workers and, in many places, harder…As David Cooper noted this summer in an analysis for the Economic Policy Institute, while 8.6 percent of white workers were paid poverty wages in 2017, the figures were 19.2 percent for Hispanic workers and 14.3 percent for African American workers.”

At The Plum Line, Paul Waldman touches on an often overlooked group conflict that influences today’s politics: “The version we live through, however, has its most direct roots in the 1960s, when liberals grew their hair long, danced to rock music, took drugs and had all the fun, while conservatives looked on in horror, contempt and more than a little envy…Ever since, barely a campaign goes by when we don’t replay the conflict between the hippies and the squares in one form or another. And it has often worked to the benefit of Republicans, who get strong support from older voters, including baby boomers of the Jeff Sessions variety, who ground their teeth in rage as they watched their free-spirited peers pile into vans and head off to Woodstock, vowing that one day they’d be in a position to lock those pot-smoking degenerates behind bars.” Ironically, an unknown, but probably substantial portion of the hippie generation actually became conservative Republicans over time– many, if not most of them, are now in their seventies. But the perception and it’s attendant resentments linger on in the likes of Jeff Sessions. The good news, as Waldman notes, is that today’s younger voters “can’t stand the GOP. According to a recent NBC/GenForward poll, only 26 percent of millennials have a favorable impression of the Republican Party, while 60 percent have an unfavorable impression. (The numbers for the Democratic Party were 44 percent favorable and 42 percent unfavorable.)” But there is reason to hope that today’s younger voters will turn out in more impressive percentages than did their predecessors.

In “Where did our raises go? To health care,” Washington Post columnist Robert J. Samuelson flags a new study co-sponsored by the firm Willis Towers Watson and the Council for Affordable Health Coverage, a business group, which finds that “For the bottom 60 percent of U.S. workers, wage gains have been completely wiped out by contributions for employer-provided health insurance…The study focused on full-time, year-round workers from 1980 to 2015. It did not cover people who were unemployed or had government insurance (Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act)…For the bottom 50 percent of workers, employers’ health insurance contributions averaged 30 to 35 percent of companies’ total compensation packages. Companies also increased the premiums that workers themselves must pay to get coverage. From 1999 to 2015, worker premiums for a family plan more than doubled in inflation-adjusted dollars, from about $2,000 annually to almost $5,000…The problem is plain: We’d all like both cheaper health insurance and higher wages, but the way the health-care system is operating today, we might get neither. As insurance premiums get more expensive, inflation-adjusted (“real”) wages will continue to stagnate or decline.”

An oldie, but more relevant than ever bumper sticker:

If you know anyone who doubts the bumper sticker’s premise, direct them to this 2012 article in Forbes, ‘The Capitalist Tool.’

All sorts of big things begin happening in election cycles around Labor Day. I discussed one of them at New York:

There comes a time in any campaign cycle when parties and the donors affiliated with them review their investments and cut their losses. It can be an especially painful process in a potential “wave” election year, particularly a midterm when the party in power knows it’s going to lose House seats but is focused on maintaining control.

For Republicans right now, that means holding the line at 22 net lost House seats at worst. Since there are very, very few vulnerable Democratic seats that could offset GOP losses (of the 66 House races the Cook Political Report considers competitive, only four are in districts held by Democrats), Republicans must triage their most afflicted incumbents. And as Politicoreports, the process is fully under way:

“Behind the scenes, senior party strategists have begun polling to determine which incumbents may be beyond saving. Among those most in jeopardy of getting cut off, they say, are Virginia Rep. Barbara Comstock, Pennsylvania Rep. Keith Rothfus, and Iowa Rep. Rod Blum, all of whom are precariously positioned in their districts.

“The party has to date reserved millions of dollars of future advertising time to buttress Comstock and Rothfus. Yet those funds are not guaranteed — they still might be diverted to other incumbents viewed as more likely to win in the fall.”

Cook rates the Comstock and Rothfus races as “Lean Democratic,” but still has Blum’s race as a toss-up. The three districts are illustrative of the range of problems the GOP is having this year. Comstock’s district is a classic suburban enclave loaded with college-educated voters who are hostile to Donald Trump. Rothfus was stricken by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s remapping of the state’s congressional districts to erase the effect of an earlier GOP gerrymander. He was tossed into a district with Democrat Conor Lamb, fresh from his astonishing special election win in more difficult terrain. And Blum is a conservative ideologue who won and was reelected in Iowa’s very good Republican years of 2014 and 2016, but is endangered by what appears to be a Democratic comeback in that state.

But these incumbents are just the low-hanging spoiled fruit, and others may soon get the financial heave-ho:

“The anxiety is already rising among lawmakers and their allies. Kansas Rep. Kevin Yoder, an imperiled suburban congressman whom Democrats are spending heavily to defeat, has recently complained to allies that the national committee hasn’t done enough to help him in his reelection bid, according to four people familiar with the conversations.”

Such complaints, however, go in both directions:

“During a House GOP Conference meeting this spring, NRCC [the party’s House fundraising committee] Chairman Steve Stivers told members not to expect the party to bail them out later in the campaign if they failed to pull their weight. He pointed out that the party had already waged a costly and ultimately unsuccessful effort to rescue an underperforming candidate in a Pennsylvania special election.

“As proof of that approach, the House GOP campaign arm has barely budged despite pleas for additional financial support from endangered Iowa Rep. David Young and his campaign team — at least partly because they view him as a sluggish campaigner, said two senior Republicans familiar with the party’s deliberations.”

It’s true that incumbents are likely to get a thumb on the scales in such calculations as opposed to open seat candidates or those challenging Democrats, since the party committees are supervised by incumbents and the “outside” groups tend to follow their lead. But when all those chairmanships and other perks of the majority are in danger, collegial solidarity will only go so far:

“‘The NRCC isn’t going to be able to help those who haven’t helped themselves,’ said former Pennsylvania GOP Rep. Phil English, who was involved with the committee during his House tenure. ‘These are very Darwinian decisions. It means selection of the fittest.'”

Donald Trump’s party can’t expected to do too much for “losers.”

 

At The Atlantic, Ronald Brownstein’s “How the Democratic Party Can Turn the Sun Belt Blue: From Florida to Texas, November’s elections provide an opening for Democrats to shift the balance of power—and make up for lost ground in the heartland” provides the outlnes for a new Democratic strategy in the Sun Belt. As Brownstein explains:

Can Democrats overturn the Republican advantage in the rapidly growing Sun Belt?

In the coming years, Democrats will likely face a growing need to expand their inroads in the Sun Belt states—which tend to be younger, racially diverse, and white-collar—as Republicans strengthen their position in older, predominantly white, and blue-collar states across the Midwest and Great Plains.

Brownstein cites increasing “pressure on Democrats to post deeper gains in Sun Belt states—such as Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, and perhaps even Texas—that more reflect their modern coalition.”

Brownstein sees a two-pronged transformation, including the erosion of Democratic strength in the Rust Belt states of the midwest and an uptick in the growth of pro-Democratic constituencies in the Sun Belt. Regarding the aging of the heartland, Brownstein writes:

The shift toward the GOP among older whites threatens the long-term position of Democrats in a wide array of states across the country’s heartland, where those adults constitute a critical mass.

…The resilience of industrial-state incumbents such as Brown, Stabenow, and Casey makes clear that Democrats aren’t facing imminent extinction in the heartland; they are even well positioned to potentially recapture several governorships there this year. But the potential losses among the second group of senators, who are defending more rural states, underscore the likelihood that the Democratic position in the heartland will continue to erode over time, particularly as the GOP appeals more overtly to white anxiety over demographic and cultural change.

As for the other transformation, the growth of pro-Democratic constituencies in the Sun Belt, Brownstein writes,

…Democrats through the 2020s will need greater gains in the Sun Belt to fill the gap at every level—in contests for the House, the Senate, and the Electoral College. Since 2008, Democrats have already brought into their camp two Sun Belt states that reliably leaned Republican through the early-21st century: Virginia and Colorado. New Mexico, a longtime swing state, has also tilted blue, with Clinton carrying it comfortably, Democrats holding both Senate seats, and Representative Michelle Lujan Grisham, the party’s nominee, in a close contest to recapture the governorship

But the Democrats’ status has been much more tenuous in six other pivotal states across the Sun Belt: Florida, North Carolina, and Georgia in the Southeast; and Nevada, Arizona, and, more distantly, Texas in the Southwest. Except for Nevada, Trump won all of those states in 2016. Republicans control the governorship in each except North Carolina, and hold all 12 Senate seats except for the lone Democrats in Florida and Nevada.

November offers Democrats an important opening to begin shifting that balance. Their best two opportunities nationwide to win Republican-held Senate seats are in Nevada, where Democratic Representative Jacky Rosen is challenging the incumbent Dean Heller, and Arizona, where voters on Tuesday nominated the Democratic congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema to face her Republican colleague Martha McSally. In Texas, Democratic Representative Beto O’Rourke has mounted an unexpectedly strong challenge to the GOP incumbent Ted Cruz. On the other side of the ledger, Democratic Senator Bill Nelson of Florida is facing a formidable threat from outgoing GOP Governor Rick Scott.

All of these states, except for North Carolina, are also picking governors this year. The Republican Greg Abbott appears to be cruising to reelection in Texas, but the other four contests look highly competitive. Especially revealing may be the races in Florida and Georgia, where Democrats picked African American nominees (Andrew Gillum, who beat a more centrist alternative, and Stacey Abrams, respectively), and Arizona, where they chose the Hispanic educator David Garcia.

Brownstein adds that “Two dynamics will likely determine Democratic prospects in the Sun Belt. One is whether they can replicate their improvement in other regions among college-educated whites; in the Sun Belt, those voters have leaned more to the right, especially on social issues, than elsewhere. But there are signs that some, especially women, are recoiling from Trump’s definition of the GOP.”

But, much depends on whether the Democrats can mobilize younger voters of color in the south.  And Democrats are going to need a more aggressive approach to registering and mobilizing eligible Latinos across the Sun Belt. Brownstein adds:

Even more important over the long term may be whether Democrats can energize the region’s huge population of young minorities. All of the Sun Belt states are defined by the same stark demographic divergence. Their youth populations are heavily nonwhite: According to projections by the Brookings Institution demographer Bill Frey, by 2020 minorities will constitute a clear majority of the under-30 population in Florida, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, and Texas, and more than two-fifths of that population in North Carolina. Meanwhile, older generations in the same states remain preponderantly white: In 2020, the population aged 65 to 69 in each of these states (save for Texas) will be roughly two-thirds white. In Texas, whites will represent about three-fifths. The white share of the 70-plus population in all six states is even higher.

…For Democrats across the Sun Belt, the diverse younger generations resemble a cavalry that always remains just over the hill: Despite their big numbers, their turnout has consistently disappointed, especially in midterm elections.Will that change this year? “At this point, I don’t see [young people] any more or less engaged than I have in past midterm elections,” says the Texas-based Republican pollster Mike Baselice. That’s an ominous forecast for Democrats, particularly in the Sun Belt, given that turnout among young people has sagged badly in the past two midterms.

…Across the Sun Belt, Democrats this year have bet heavily on diversity (the African American nominees Gillum and Abrams, the Hispanic nominees Garcia and Lujan Grisham, and Sinema, who is openly bisexual) and youth (Gillum is 39, and Sinema, Abrams, and O’Rourke are in their 40s). These candidates have provided a jolt of energy for state Democratic parties in the Sun Belt that have sometimes slumbered through recent elections. But unless these fresh faces can mobilize more young people of color to vote, many of them may fall just short in November. That need may be especially acute for Gillum, whose Bernie Sanders–style agenda could limit his opportunities in white-collar suburbs. In Texas, O’Rourke faces the challenge that a substantial minority of Hispanics there—perhaps as many as two-fifths—have consistently voted Republican in recent years.

Enormous obstacles remain for Democrats as they struggle to take advantage of favorable demographic trends in the south, including weak unions, gerrymandered sunbelt congressional districts, Latino citizenship issues and widespread voter suppression, along with the stubborn conservatism of the region’s high-turnout senior voters. But the trends are all in the right direction for Democrats. As Brownstein concludes, “Democrats can now see a clear path to greater inroads in the Sun Belt, centered on persuading more white-collar whites and mobilizing predominantly nonwhite younger generations.”