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

With the expansion of Medicaid in Virginia last week, it’s a good time to remind ourselves that, despite all the fulminations of conservatives about shrinking government, it’s damn hard to actually shrink the safety net because, well–people like it!

James Hohmann of the Washington Post noted after the VA expansion: “It’s another nail in the coffin for efforts to repeal Obamacare and a fresh reminder of how difficult it is to scale back any entitlement once it’s created. Many Republicans, in purple and red states alike, concluded that Congress is unlikely to get rid of the law, so they’ve become less willing to take political heat for leaving billions in federal money on the table.”

Noah Smith of Bloomberg has a bigger picture piece on positive trends in the social safety net, which I think many people on the left are not cognizant of or downplay:

U.S. government transfers have been increasing over time. The U.S. system of taxation and spending has become more progressive during the past two decades. Per-capita government transfers were about $8,567 a person in 2016, up from about $5,371 at the turn of the century (adjusted for inflation) — an increase of 60 percent.

The increasing generosity of the U.S. safety net in the 21st century began under President George W. Bush. Although mostly remembered for the war in Iraq, Bush in many ways fulfilled his promise to be a compassionate conservative. Major expansions of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps, were carried out in 2002 and 2008. Bush’s Medicare reform added prescription-drug benefits to the government’s premier health-care program. And Bush’s so-called housing-first policy reduced homelessness dramatically during his second term. Overall, real per-capita government transfers increased by about 38 percent during the eight years of the Bush administration.

Under President Barack Obama the pace of welfare expansion slowed a bit, probably as a result of the Great Recession. But it didn’t stop. Food stamps continued to expand, extended unemployment insurance helped many during the recession, and homelessness kept declining. Obama also implemented a number of tax credits for low-income families and passed the Affordable Care Act, which subsidizes health insurance.

After 16 years of expansions in the safety net under Republican and Democratic presidents alike, the U.S. has a much more robust welfare state than people seem to realize. The left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, using the U.S. Census Bureau’s new comprehensive poverty measure, estimates that government transfers have driven child poverty to a record low. Thanks mostly to government aid, the number of American children in poverty has fallen from more than one in four in the early 1990s to about one in seven today.

The following article by Eleanor Clift is cross-posted from The Daily Beast:

Macomb County, Michigan is where Democrats go for the hard truths to save their party. The working-class suburb of Detroit sent Bill Clinton to the White House and delivered two solid wins for Barack Obama before turning on the Democrats and giving Donald Trump 54 percent of its votes.

Globalization stole many good-paying jobs from Macomb, leaving fertile ground for Trump’s anti-trade message. Democrat Debbie Dingell, who represents the Detroit area — as her husband did before her, and his father before him – recalled to the Daily Beast how she confronted Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign.

“I told her in no uncertain terms, if you leave Michigan and people here don’t know you’re opposed to the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership), and will be opposed to it when you’re president – You can just forget it,” Dingell said.

She meant forget being president, which is what happened. Dingell still gets exercised over how her frantic calls for action then were ignored. “Anybody I talked to, I said it was a problem,” she recalled. “It was clearly a problem in Michigan. I was told not to worry, everything was fine.”

Democrats were so confident the “blue wall” would hold that Clinton made just one trip to Michigan that August, telling workers at Futuramic Tool & Engineering in suburban Detroit that she was against TPP, and would be as president. It wasn’t reassuring, not with President Obama openly lobbying for the trade deal, telling naysayers it would get done in the lame duck Congress after the election.

“Obama wanted it as a legacy issue, and that left her (Clinton) clearly muddled and jumbled,”  Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg told the Daily Beast. “Trade was a major factor in Trump’s victory, and she was perceived to be ambivalent. She was so concerned with not appearing to have any distance from Obama on the economy.”

Greenberg shares her angst about Macomb. He has made a career out of monitoring attitudes in the working-class suburb. The insights he gleaned more than 25 years ago paved the way for Bill Clinton to reorient the Democratic Party more to the center, allowing a Democrat to win the White House after 12 years in the wilderness.

The veteran pollster says Democrats don’t yet have a winning economic message that speaks to the real struggles people are having. Rising health care premiums top the list, he says. “I can’t tell you how powerful the health care issue is. People are in tears about the cost of health care, and they blame the Republicans.” The salience of the health care issue is a key takeaway from focus groups Greenberg conducted in March in Macomb with Trump voters and Detroit area base voters. He found that white college-graduate women “seemed as much a base, anti-Trump group as the African Americans.”

Greenberg sees Macomb as a bellwether for the country. In 2008, these working-class voters supported Obama, making a judgment about him that transcended race, “that he wouldn’t just work for his own folks, he would work for everybody.”

They voted for Obama because of economic self-interest, and they voted for Trump for the same reason. Working-class men in Macomb support Trump by two to one, and many have paid a high price for their vote in their own family. The politicized, polarized civil war in the country is in the family, says Greenberg, with older voters blaming the mainstream media’s “fake news” for their millennial children failing to understand what Trump is trying to do.

“Clean up corrupt government is not enough for them. Identity politics are not enough,” he says. Asked what he thinks of the Democrats’ new slogan, Better Deal, he replies, “Not a fan of it.”

The 1992 election that propelled Bill Clinton to the White House was famously staked on the phrase “It’s the economy, stupid.” Greenberg still thinks that has to be the bedrock message even with another month of positive job numbers released last Friday. People believe the economy is growing and more jobs are available, “but that has not diminished their frustration and insecurities about their stagnant pay in the face of rising costs,” Greenberg writes in his latest report on “Macomb and America’s New Political Moment.” Anti-Trump voters are consolidated and motivated, “and increasingly intent to vote,” Greenberg concludes. “They are seeking out tools and information to win arguments” and to convince themselves that Democrats have a vision that is about more than just reflexively resisting Trump.

It is a time unlike any other in recent history when the stakes are so elevated that both sides speak about a virtual civil war in the country, and in their own families.

Anti-Trump voters are consolidated and motivated, “and are increasingly intent to vote,” Greenberg says. “They are seeking out tools and information to win arguments,” and to convince themselves that Democrats learned from the last election and have a vision for the economy, and for the country, that is about more than Trump.

Vivian Yee explains why “Democrats Hope an Asian Influx Will Help Turn Orange County Blue” at The New York Times: “Though they have gravitated toward the left ever since the 1990s, they are fractured. According to a national survey of Asian-Americans conducted after the 2016 election, Indian- and Korean-Americans tack progressive, Chinese- and Vietnamese-Americans more conservative. While Asians registered as Republicans in Orange County outnumber Asian Democrats, more than one-third of Asian voters identify as independents…And though they tend to hold liberal views on issues like gun control, climate change and public spending, the political causes that some Asian-Americans have rallied around in recent years have veered conservative. Organizing on the social media platform WeChat, Chinese immigrants mobilized in 2014 to kill legislation that would have resurrected affirmative action at California universities…Even so, many Asians oppose the Trump administration’s makeover of the immigration system, and their votes evince a broader discomfort with the president. Orange County Asians re-elected their Republican congressional representatives, yet tilted toward Mrs. Clinton in 2016.”

So how can it be that the nation’s largest, most progressive state has a “weak bench” of Democratic House candidates? Ronald Brownstein probes the question at The Atlantic, and citing , “a long-term failure by California Democrats to invest in building a network of credible local elected officials…Particularly in Orange County, the epicenter of the competition for House seats in the state, Democrats are confronting what could be called a “resume gap”….While Republicans are fielding an array of candidates who are current or former elected officials, Democrats are relying entirely on first-time contenders who entered their races without any elected experience, existing political networks, or name identification in their districts. That’s making it tougher for any of the Democratic candidates to consolidate support within their party…The lack of experienced candidates “without question poses a big problem to the Democrats,” said Michael Moodian, a political scientist at Chapman College in the city of Orange. “The reason is that for decades the Orange County Republican Party has done a much better job than the Democrats at establishing a farm team of candidates.”

Dems have been warned: “State Websites Are Hackable — And That Could Compromise Election Security,” writes Clare Malone at FiveThirtyEight.com. “After receiving a tip from a small cyber firm called Appsecuri, FiveThirtyEight has confirmed that two states, Alabama and Nevada, had vulnerabilities that left them open to potential compromises of their state web presences….With five months to go until the midterm elections, the subpar preparation of state websites and election systems remains a concern for cybersecurity experts… Officials from both states said the flaws did not have the potential to allow the posting of erroneous vote counts to official pages. But outside experts suggested that there’s still reason to be concerned…“A lot of these vulnerabilities are easily classified as a cosmetic error until someone thinks through how they can be used for other purposes,” said Harri Hursti, a cybersecurity expert with a focus in election security. A hacker’s attack may seem minor now, but it could grow into a bigger, more urgent problem come Election Day.”

Attention all Democratic candidates and campaign workers in states and communities with substantial Puerto Rican populations: Read Alvin Chang’s Vox post, “How the media ignored Puerto Rico, in one chart,” which notes “This week, we learned that Hurricane Maria may be the deadliest natural disaster on US soil in the past 100 years, according to a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The study found that most of the estimated 4,600 deaths were because of delayed medical care…But on cable news, the top story by a wide margin was ABC canceling Roseanne after a racist tweet from its star, Roseanne Barr. In the New York Times, Roseanne was on the front page and Puerto Rico was on A13…This was yet another example of the media putting the Puerto Rico story on the back burner — something it’s been doing for a long time now. We analyzed the amount of airtime the major cable news networks devoted to Puerto Rico and found that after the first month, coverage has been virtually nonexistent.” The twin targets of negligent Republicans and twisted media priorities are begging to be blasted, and Democrats should not hesitate to bring it.

Nowhere is this more true than in the Sunshine State. As Stephanie Griffith reports in “As Puerto Ricans’ numbers grow in Florida, Hurricane Maria becomes pivotal campaign issue: “We’re a highly motivated vote, because Trump and the Republican Congress failed Puerto Rico” at ThinkProgress: “The Pew Research Center found that the number of Puerto Ricans in Florida has increased from around half a million in 2000 to more than a million in 2014...“We’re a highly motivated vote, because Trump and the Republican Congress failed the island,” U.S. Representative Darren Soto (D-FL) told ThinkProgress in an interview at his office on Capitol Hill…Soto said the Orlando community had already seen an influx of thousands of people each month fleeing a brutal recession on the island. The hurricane only accelerated the exodus…“In a state where the last several presidential and gubernatorial elections have been decided by less than one point, any changes can make a big difference. This is a state where Obama won twice by one point and Trump won by one point,” the Democrat said.”

The next time your crazy conservative uncle starts railing against “big government” meddling in health care, you can quote from “It Saves Lives. It Can Save Money. So Why Aren’t We Spending More on Public Health? Funding for health campaigns is surprisingly low when you consider they’re often so valuable that they pay for themselves” by Aaron E. Carroll and Austin Frakt at The Upshot. For example, Carroll and Frakt note that “A 2017 systematic review published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health looked at studies that calculated the return on investment for public health interventions. The researchers identified 52 studies that looked at interventions at a local or national level…Health protection interventions, which would include vaccinations, have saved $34 for every $1 spent on them, according to the review. But not every vaccine has a positive return. For example, in years for which the flu vaccine is a poor match for the actual influenza types that are circulating, the return on investment can be as low as -21, meaning that it costs $21 to save $1…In years for which the vaccine matches the disease well, the return on investment can be as high as 174. Such a high return occurs because of all the disease and death prevented.”

In his review article, “Ratfucked Again,” at The New York Review of Books, Michael Tomasky illuminates the political opportunity — and dangers — provided by the upcoming census and the role of the midterm elections in the outcome: “…As the next census approaches, state executive mansions and legislatures are at least as important, as liberals have belatedly come to realize. The Democrats actually have two election cycles to see how much ground they can regain here, as new district lines won’t be drawn until after the 2020 election results are in. The party that wins the right to draw the legislative maps of the 2020s will have enormous power to shape future Congresses and state legislatures—to determine, for example, whether districts are drawn in such a way that Republicans need only worry about winning conservative votes and Democrats liberal ones, or in a way that might push candidates toward the center; and whether districts comply with the Voting Rights Act, in a decade when much demographic change is expected, enough to perhaps turn the crucial state of Texas at least purple, if not blue. Much is at stake.”

“This coming Tuesday nearly 100 women will be on the ballot in congressional primaries…Women make up 23 percent of nonincumbents running for congressional seats in 2018 compared to 16 percent in the previous two cycles. In addition, nearly 80 percent of those women have been Democrats…Among all women nonincumbent candidates who have run so far, 47.55 percent have either won their race outright or advanced to a runoff. Only 23 percent of male candidates have kept up, as the table below indicates. — From “The pink wave makes herstory: Women candidates in the 2018 midterm elections” by Elaine Kamarck, Alexander R. Podkul, and Nicholas W. Zeppos at Brookings.

Check out Roll Call’s handy, color-coded, roll-over 2018 Election Guide, featuring projected outcome data on every congressional district, U.S. Senate seat and Governorship.

After reading a lot about new movement in Congress towards immigration legislation, I thought it was time for a reality check, which I wrote for New York.

In the House, an all-conference GOP confab on June 7 could well determine whether a variation on the hard-line Goodlatte legislation, a Democratic bill backed by a handful of Republican “moderates,” or some yet-to-be-identified compromise bill that virtually all Republicans can support — or some combo platter of alternatives — will make it to the floor. That’s pretty remarkable given the lower chamber’s record as a graveyard for immigration legislation in this century.

Meanwhile the Senate, where four separa”te immigration bills went down to defeat in February, is informally talking about the subject, if only because the House might toss a bill in their direction — or the federal courts might reach some action-forcing resolution of the legal challenges surrounding the president’s revocation of the DACA program protecting Dreamers last fall. But it’s quite the heavy lift, as Politico reports:

“In recent weeks, Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) has been taking the lead on talking to [Sen. James] Lankford and Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), two more junior GOP senators who are widely viewed as bellwethers of Republican support for immigration reform. While senators say that the staples of any immigration deal are protections for Dreamers and money for border security, negotiations have broadened to include the expiring protected status for hundreds of thousands of Central American immigrants.

In the past a narrower DACA-for-border-security deal was considered most likely to get something done on immigration policy. Now new issues — and new complications — have been introduced. That is probably not a good thing. And meanwhile, Mitch McConnell has cut to the chase:

“Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said he will not commit another week of the Senate’s time to immigration after the February exercise, but he added the Senate might take legislation if the president is supportive and it can pass the House.”

McConnell might as well have said “If I had some ham, I’d make a ham sandwich, if I had some bread.”

The problems the House is having on this subject are well known. So too is the likelihood that Trump will use a veto threat to head off any legislation that isn’t quite similar to his own proposal. Just last week he made it clear that he wouldn’t sign the kind of Democratic-backed bill that would likely come out of the House if the discharge petition House GOP moderates are threatening to consummate triggers a series of immigration votes:

“President Donald Trump said Wednesday he will veto any immigration legislation that emerges from Congress that does not include funding for a border wall and improved border security measures, a warning shot at moderate House Republicans pushing GOP leadership for a vote on immigration proposals.

“’Unless it includes a wall, and I mean a wall, a real wall, and unless it includes very strong border security, there’ll be no approvals from me. Because I have to either approve it or not,’ the president said in a Fox News interview that was taped Wednesday and aired Thursday morning. ‘There are bills going through. I’m watching one or two of them. We’ll see what happens, but I can tell you there is a mood right now for border security.'”

This was a pointed reminder that at the end of the long, twisting road which in theory leads to an immigration deal in Congress, Trump will be there with his chief immigration adviser Stephen Miller handing him a veto pen.

And that could sap the already limited interest in Congress in cutting an almost impossible deal.

The two most-likely scenarios in the House are passage of a Democratic bill with the support of the GOP “moderates” who want relief for Dreamers, or passage of some modified version of the Goodlatte bill with tweaks to attract some more votes. It is extremely unlikely either of those approaches would survive a Senate filibuster.

The Trump factor makes it all immensely more difficult. His own position has hardened during the course of his presidency, with his increasingly adamant demands for what he is calling a “real wall” at the border and his more recent but equally strident support for legal immigration restrictions — both reportedly at the behest of Miller. What makes the administration’s position especially problematic is that all these quasi-nativist provisions are combined with what many actual nativists despise as “amnesty” — a path to citizenship for Dreamers.

It’s no real surprise that Trump’s proposal, offered by Chuck Grassley, got only 39 of the required 60 votes. And it may have been designed that way.

In a fascinating new profile of Stephen Miller, McKay Coppins suggests that at the heart of Trump’s approach to the immigration issue is Miller’s lack of interest in actually accomplishing anything as opposed to outraging liberals and firing up Trump’s base:

“When Miller found out one afternoon in January that Senators Lindsey Graham and Dick Durbin were coming to the White House to pitch Trump on a bipartisan bill, he reportedly moved to stack the Oval Office with hawkish conservatives in hopes of swaying the president. By the time Graham and Durbin arrived, Trump was in an uncompromising mood: angry, dug in, and ranting about immigrants from ‘shithole countries.’ As Trump uttered those soon-to-leak words, which would poison the talks on Capitol Hill, Miller stood on the periphery. ‘He doesn’t have to command rooms to be effective,’ one senior Democratic Senate aide said, ‘because he does his thing behind the scenes.'”

This was the same dynamic, says Coppins, that led to Trump’s unnecessarily provocative travel ban, in which Miller played an equally prominent role:

“One of his first acts on the job was to work with then–chief strategist Steve Bannon in crafting an executive order that banned travel to the United States from seven majority-Muslim countries. The hastily written order contained no guidance on implementation, and soon after Trump signed it—on a Friday afternoon one week into his presidency—airports across the country were plunged into chaos. Hundreds of travelers were detained, civil-rights lawyers descended, and protesters swarmed. To many, the televised disarray was proof of failure. But according to Michael Wolff’s account of the Trump administration’s first year, Fire and Fury, the architects of the ban were tickled by the hysteria; Bannon (who was Wolff’s main source) boasted that they’d chosen to enact the disruptive measure on a weekend ‘so the snowflakes would show up at the airports and riot.’ They counted the anger on display as a political win.”

So don’t bet the farm on the success of any immigration legislation this year. To Team Trump, failure and the anger it generates may also be greeted as a political win.

It appears that Trump’s labored efforts to proclaim the death of Obamacare have proven highly premature. As Jennifer Rubin writes in her column, “What Virginia’s expansion of Medicaid means,”  in the Washington Post,

This is a victory for the Affordable Care Act, no question. Obamacare made Medicaid expansion possible and, whatever you think of the efforts by the administration and Congress to chip away at the ACA, an expansion of this size suggests President Barack Obama’s health-care legacy is on firmer footing than Democrats feared when they lost the White House, as well as their majorities in the House and Senate.

As Ed Kilgore noted at New York magazine,

For a health-care law that Donald Trump has been declaring “dead” or “dying” since 2013, Obamacare seems to have a lot of life in it yet, no thanks to his administration. Obama himself is probably sharing a bit of the good feelings among Democrats in Virginia.

For Democrats, Virginia’s Medicaid embrace is a big win, with far-reaching implications. As Rubin explains, “Achieving Medicaid coverage for 400,000 additional people is a mammoth victory for Democrats in a state that has been trending blue for years, but now seems firmly in that party’s column. The vote holds multiple lessons for both parties.”

And looking ahead to the months leading up to the midterm elections, Rubin observes,

This will be a big issue in November when multiple states (Utah, Idaho, Nebraska) will vote on Medicaid expansion, which delights Democrats. Democrats are returning to their bread-and-butter issues (e.g., wage stagnation, lack of access to health care) as they remind voters which party defended the ACA, and which party voted to eliminate it without an adequate replacement. The Medicaid issue will help the Democratic Party turn out its base, which is already pumped up to cast a symbolic vote against Trump.

…The Medicaid issue affects nearly every state and federal race. Democrats will argue that Republicans “want to take away health care” while Republicans will be forced to defend their votes and take a stance on expansion. That’s a problem given how popular Medicaid expansion has become. (“A poll conducted late last year by Public Opinion Strategies and the Virginia Hospital and Healthcare Association found 83 percent of the state’s residents supported the expansion, including a majority of self-identified Republicans. . . . Polls show that two thirds of Utah voters support the Medicaid expansion in their state. So it’s unlikely to be close,” The Post report continued.) Meanwhile, Maine’s controversial Republican Gov. Paul LePage is being sued for failure to expand Medicaid after a state referendum approving it passed with 59 percent of the vote.

In addition, Rubin writes,

Virginia will be the 33rd state (along with the District of Columbia) to approve Medicaid expansion. Medicaid expansion appears here to stay, and despite the best efforts of the GOP House and right-wing pundits, has widespread, bipartisan support in every geographic region, with the exception of the Southeast (which includes some of the poorest states) and the Great Plains (although Nebraska and Idaho could join Virginia). “In a nutshell, Medicaid is the absolute star of the Trump presidency despite every effort on their part,” said Andy Slavitt, the former head of Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, who served during the Obama administration. “By the end of his term, you could see five more states expand. And there is a tipping point for the hold out states at that point. The irony of course is that this is a far more Democratic idea than exchanges, a Republican idea [originating at the Heritage Foundation].”

Don’t be surprised if the political fallout provokes an infantile tantrum on the part of Trump and a doubling down on dubious, spiteful executive orders to further weaken Obamacare. There may also be some grumbling on the left about the Virginia tweaks requiring either work or volunteer service and cost-sharing. All in all, however, it’s a great victory, not only for Virginia Democrats and Obamacare, but down the road, for millions of Americans who currently lack affordable health care.

Democrats have tried with very limited success to make U.S. Supreme Court picks a pivotal issue in presidential elections. Perhaps Dems could do better with some targeted messaging about the importance of the far more numerous lower court picks. Conservative writer Hugh Hewitt, quoted in David Smith’s article, “How Donald Trump is weaponising the courts for political ends” at The Guardian puts the scope of the stakes in perspective: “By 2019, Trump judges will be participating in more than 15,000 decisions every year, and almost all those decisions will be the law of the land. There will be no fewer than 400 crucial case votes and dozens of signed opinions, each year, every year for most of the Trump judges.” Further, adds Smith, “With just over a year in office, Donald Trump has already appointed 21 of America’s 167 current circuit judges and intends to fill an additional 20 or more vacancies by the end of the year. He is far outpacing Barack Obama, whose 21st circuit court nominee was approved 33 months into his presidency amid gridlock in Congress. Seventeen of Trump’s nominees for district courts, most of whom replaced Democratic appointees, have also been approved by the Republican-controlled Senate…Trump’s judicial picks are profoundly shaped by the Federalist Society, a group of conservatives and libertarians who favour an “originalist” interpretation of the constitution, and the Heritage Foundation, a Washington thinktank where Newt Gingrich is a regular speaker and where Margaret Thatcher is lionised.”

“Although it is tempting for conservatives to assume that single-payer health care would be a nonstarter for most Americans, the idea polls pretty well,” concedes conservative David Thornton at The Resurgent. “A March 2018 poll from the nonpartisan Kaiser Foundation found 59 percent of Americans like the idea of Medicare-for-all. When the national health plan was made a voluntary option, the share of those in favor increased to 75 percent, including 64 percent of Republicans…Perhaps ominously for Republicans running against the idea, 74 percent of independents favored the idea of an optional national health insurance plan. The big question is how voters in swing House and Senate districts will view the idea.”

“From the rumored 2020 presidential challengers in the Senate to midterm candidates up and down the ballot, in both red and blue states and districts, the future of health care in America is shaping up as perhaps the central policy concern of 2018. The contours of the candidates’ messages might vary and, for many, the particulars of the path forward — how far, how fast — remain an open question. But there is little question, for Democrats in this cycle, which way is up…Capitol Hill, despite being home to a pair of Republican majorities, has become a stage for Democrats who, in less than two years, have rolled out at least five significant proposals for big ticket expansions of government-backed health care. That the legislation is dead on arrival in Trump’s Washington is beside the point. These are statements of intent and appeals to current and future voters…On the trail this year, candidates have swung at the issue from all angles. A scan of ads from congressional hopefuls reveals a diverse suite of tactics buttressed by a clear strategic decision to hammer Republicans over their efforts to gut Obamacare and either cut or complicate funding for programs like Medicaid.” — From “It’s health care, stupid! Democrats dig in as midterms ramp up” by Gregory Krieg and David Wright, at CNN Politics.

NYT’s Abby Goodnough reports some really good news, “After Years of Trying, Virginia Finally Will Expand Medicaid,” noting that: “Virginia’s Republican-controlled Senate voted on Wednesday to open Medicaid to an additional 400,000 low-income adults next year, making it all but certain that the state will join 32 others that have already expanded the public health insurance program under the Affordable Care Act…Republican lawmakers in the state had blocked Medicaid expansion for four straight years, but a number of them dropped their opposition after their party almost lost the House of Delegates in elections last fall and voters named health care as a top issue…Efforts to expand the program are actually gaining steam in some other Republican states. With midterm elections approaching, advocates in Idaho and Nebraska are trying to get Medicaid expansion initiatives on their ballots. Their state legislatures have repeatedly refused to expand the program. Utah’s measure officially qualified for the ballot on Tuesday, and officials in Idaho are determining whether supporters have gathered enough signatures for their question to qualify.” Virginia will soon be the poster state for showing how voting for Democratic Governors and state legislators can save lives.

Here’s a messaging tip from Sen. Sherrod Brown, quoted in Seth Masket’s “What Democratic candidates’ priorities say about the party’s direction” at Vox: “Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio talked about the need to listen to workers in places like, well, Ohio. Donald Trump won in places outside of urban areas that, according to Brown, he just had no place winning. Brown explained that what Democrats need to do to win back those voters is to talk about “the dignity of work.” He said even using terms like “the Rust Belt” to describe this region is offensive to this dignity: “It diminishes what we are, and it diminishes what we do.”

In her article, “Millennials take on Trump in the midterms: Younger candidates are flooding Democratic congressional primaries — and winning” at Politico, Elena Schneider writes, “At least 20 millennial Democratic candidates are running in battleground districts, a leap over previous cycles that could remake the party’s generational divide. “I don’t recall a cycle with anything close to this number of younger candidates in recent times,” said Ian Russell, a Democratic consultant who served as the deputy executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “Notably, younger candidates who actually have a good shot at winning – raising money, running professional campaigns.” And not a minute too soon for those who are concerned about the aging universe of Democratic office-holders. “Currently, the average age of a member of 115th Congress — nearly 58 years old in the House and nearly 62 years old in the Senate — is among the oldest of any Congress in recent history, according to a report by the Congressional Research Service. The youngest member of Congress, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), will turn 34 in July.”

Juan Williams shares some revealing polling stats in his post, “Midterms will be referendum on Trump” at The Hill: “With less than six months to go to the midterm elections, Republicans think they have Democrats in an impeachment trap…Seventy percent of Democrats in recent polling from Quinnipiac University say they will vote for a midterm candidate who plans to impeach President Trump. But 84 percent of Republicans say they’re ready to oppose any candidate planning on impeachment…And overall, the Quinnipiac polling shows 55 percent of voters don’t want Democrats to begin impeachment proceedings…An April NPR/PBS/Marist survey found 47 percent voters would “definitely” vote against a candidate who campaigned on impeaching Trump while 42 percent said they would “definitely” vote for the candidate who ran on impeachment…Unless Trump fires the special prosecutor, talk of impeachment remains a sideshow. It is not going to decide the outcome in November…Trump is too big. The election will be a referendum on him.”

Politicians of both parties are getting pretty creative in doing end-runs around the traditional media obstacle course, writes Sydney Ember in “Never Mind the News Media: Politicians Test Direct-to-Voter Messaging” at The New York Times: “Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Representative Sean Duffy of Wisconsin, both running this year, have started podcasts, with humanizing names like “Canarycast” and “Plaidcast.”…Representative Beto O’Rourke, a Democrat making a long-shot bid to unseat Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, is streaming his entire campaign live on Facebook. And many other politicians are now routinely Instagramming and Facebooking, tweeting and Snapchatting…These media methods have obvious appeal: Politicians can appear accessible but remain insulated from the press. They are also not altogether new. President Trump eschewed traditional television advertising during the 2016 campaign and can now overshadow even his own party’s message at the drop of a tweet. And many politicians have long made a practice of ducking reporters.” Ember notes also that Sen. Elizabeth Warren also deployed a little media jiu-jitsu when, “last year, after she was blocked from reading a letter from Coretta Scott King on the Senate floor, she live-streamed herself reading the letter instead,” and got great coverage.

In his ‘post-Memorial Day’ update on Democratic 2018 prospects, Kyle Kondik offers this assessment of Democratic chances in Governors races: “Republicans hold a 33-16-1 edge over the Democrats in state governorships. Of the 36 governorships on the ballot this year, Republicans are defending 26 and the Democrats are only defending nine, or the exact opposite of the level of party exposure in the Senate. An independent, Gov. Bill Walker of Alaska, is also on the ballot…Because of the level of exposure for Republicans in the governorships, it would be shocking if the Democrats didn’t net at least some governorships. Our current ratings show them favored to pick up three: Illinois, Maine, and New Mexico. Alaska is a Toss-up and probably represents the Republicans’ best chance to pick up a governorship. There are six other Toss-ups, all of which are open seats: Democrats are defending Colorado, Connecticut, and Minnesota, while Republicans are defending Florida, Michigan, and Nevada. We have previously suggested that the winner of this year’s gubernatorial elections probably will be the party that wins a majority of these five big states that appear competitive: Florida, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Republicans currently hold all but Pennsylvania, where Gov. Tom Wolf (D) remains a favorite over the newly-minted Republican nominee, state Sen. Scott Wagner.”

When Nate Silver released FiveThirtyEight‘s revised pollster ratings for the first time in two years, I was all over it at New York:

The letter grades Silver and his people assign to particular polling outlets is mostly based on accuracy over time, with adjustments for methodological quality and transparency. The database for the ratings “includes all polls in the final 21 days of gubernatorial and congressional elections since 1998 and presidential primaries and general elections since 2000. It also includes polling of special elections for these offices.” That’s a lot of data.

There’s a short list of outlets that earned an A-plus rating. Some are well-known nationally: Monmouth, ABC/Washington Post, and Selzer and Co. A few others limit their work to particular states or regions, such as Colorado-based Ciruli Associates and the Northwest-focused Elway Research. There’s one other, sadly, that has closed its doors (California-based Field Research). The longer list of “A” pollsters includes some very familiar names: Survey USA, Marist, Siena, Fox News, PPIC, and Marquette Law School.

At the other end of the spectrum, one very prominent online-polling outfit, Survey Monkey, gets a D-minus rating. An enormous number of pollsters do no better than C-plus, including a lot of smaller, state-based enterprises, but also nationally renowned and prolific sources of data like Zogby Interactive, Trafalgar Group, Rasmussen Reports, and Opinion Savvy.

Having a high rating is no guarantee of infallibility, of course. One of Silver’s A-plus pollsters, Ann Selzer, who has a long-established reputation for accuracy, missed the order of finish in her final 2016 Iowa Caucus poll of Republicans (she had Trump rather than Cruz winning), which was shocking at the time. And being inaccurate doesn’t mean an outlet’s data is useless: Survey Monkey may have a bad rating from FiveThirtyEight, but its vast sample sizes can provide valuable information on non-horse-race matters, and trend lines in even dubious polls can have some predictive significance. Polls can be misleading if you aren’t careful, but the answer to poor data is more and better data, not throwing it all out and relying on intuition, anecdotes, or academic models.

And as Nate Silver makes clear in the article accompanying his new ratings, the recent rap on polls — much of it attributable to a misunderstanding of what happened in 2016, with Donald Trump piling on with ignorant or malicious takes on the polls ever since — is largely a crock:

“Over the past two years — meaning in the 2016 general election and then in the various gubernatorial elections and special elections that have taken place in 2017 and 2018 — the accuracy of polls has been pretty much average by historical standards….

“The media narrative that polling accuracy has taken a nosedive is mostly bullshit, in other words. Polls were never as good as the media assumed they were before 2016 — and they aren’t nearly as bad as the media seems to assume they are now. In reality, not that much has changed.”

Some basic limitations of polling remain as important as ever: primary (and special election) polling is very difficult to do, and state polling is almost always less accurate than national polling. It’s also worth remembering that getting the winner right is no indicator of quality: some national polls that picked Trump to win in 2016 were not especially close on the actual popular vote totals, while some that picked Clinton to win were spot on (because she did in fact win the popular vote by more than 2 percent).

In the end it’s smart to pay more attention to the aggregate polling averages (most notably those maintained by FiveThirtyEight and RealClearPolitics) than to any one or two or three individual polls, and to avoid the temptation to hype polls showing one’s own “team” doing well while filtering out adverse findings — particularly if “your” poll is conducted by a firm with a poor reputation and “their” poll is gold-standard. When all else fails, you can just wait for actual elections and go with that. But even then, polls help us understand the “why” as well as the “what.” And that matters, too.

At The Monkey Cage, Amanda Clayton and Pär Zetterberg explore the ramifications of an expected “pink wave” in the midterms. Not pink in the sense of the blue-red spectrum (Democrat-Republican) , but in “the record number of women who have entered midterm congressional races.” If recent patterns hold, most of the 2018 women candidates will be Democrats, and if generic polling averages stay on course, there should be an increase in the percentage of congress members who are women.

For those who wonder what more women in congress might mean in terms of policy changes, Clayton and Zetterberg analyzed the experience of nations which have implemented “electoral gender quotas that require a certain minimum proportion of women in political institutions. Most countries in the world have adopted electoral gender quotas, with the majority doing so in the past 25 years…To see whether female representatives change government spending, we looked at annual government budget data that the World Bank collected from 139 countries from 1995 to 2012 in three categories: public health, education and the military.” Among their findings:

Countries whose quotas increase women’s representation by more than 10 percentage points see the most dramatic increases in health spending — jumping, on average, from 10.3 percent of total government expenditures in the budget years before quotas to 13.1 percent in the budget years afterward. That increase is more than a full percentage point higher than in countries that did not implement quotas during comparable periods.

Costa Rica, for example, implemented a gender quota in 2002 — and saw female representation jump from 19 percent to 35 percent of parliament. Before that jump, from 1995 to 2002, Costa Rica was spending 22.7 percent of its budget on public health on average every year. In the decade following the quota, health spending increased, on average, to 25.4 percent each year. That’s about $120 million more in government health funding each year.

We also examined two other budget categories: education and military spending. We see that military spending went down after quota adoption, changes that are relatively minor when measured as a percentage of total expenditures. But when we measure military spending relative to health spending, we see that ratio of health to military spending increases significantly after quotas are adopted, particularly in countries where quotas dramatically increased female representation.

However, add the authors, “We see no changes in education spending after countries adopt gender quotas.” In conclusion, they write that “The record number of women expected to enter Congress after November’s election may not bring the leaps in representation that often come with quota policies. But if other countries are any indication, they may bring with them a new set of government priorities.”

For the many millions of Americans struggling with health security issues, more women in congress could bring welcome change, and for Democrats, a stronger appeal to working families.

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

Dare I say it? The Democrats may actually be doing something right!

I get asked a lot by the press to comment on the Democratic civil war. It is always my sad duty to inform them that the rumors of war are greatly exaggerated. Folks are actually getting along pretty well and seem to have a solid idea of what they need to do to inflict a defeat on the merry band of lunatics running our country.

One guy who does get it is David Leonhardt. He has a terrific column in the Times on the actually-existing Democratic midterm campaign rather than the caricature of infighting factions favored by many reporters.

Leonhardt has this to say:

“Stacey Abrams and Conor Lamb are supposed to represent opposite poles of the Trump-era Democratic Party. She is the new progressive heroine — the first black woman to win a major-party nomination for governor, who will need a surge of liberal turnout to win Georgia. He is the new centrist hero — the white former Marine who flipped a Western Pennsylvania congressional district with support from gun-loving, abortion-opposing Trump voters.

But when you spend a little time listening to both Abrams and Lamb, you notice something that doesn’t fit the storyline: They sound a lot alike.

They emphasize the same issues, and talk about them in similar ways. They don’t come across as avatars of some Bernie-vs.-Hillary battle for the party’s soul. They come across as ideological soul mates, both upbeat populists who focus on health care, education, upward mobility and the dignity of work…

Yes, there are some tensions on the political left. But these tensions — over Obama-style incrementalism vs. Bernie-style purism, over the wisdom of talking about impeachment, over whether to woo or write off the white working class — are most intense among people who write and tweet about politics. Among Democrats running for office, the tensions are somewhere between mild and nonexistent.

Democratic candidates aren’t obsessed with President Trump, and they aren’t giving up on the white working class as irredeemably racist. They are running pocketbook campaigns that blast Republicans for trying to take health insurance from the middle class while bestowing tax cuts on the rich (charges that have the benefit of being true)….

The political scientist Theda Skocpol is among the sharpest observers of modern American politics, having studied the Obama presidency, the Tea Party reaction and now the Trump resistance. Skocpol and her colleagues are tracking Trump-leaning areas in four swing states, and she too has been struck by the Democrats’ relative unity. “Media pundits and even social scientists want to look for some kind of ideological divide,” she told me. “I just don’t see a huge set of divisions in the Democratic Party. They’re all talking about economic issues.

Doing so is smart, because it helps Democrats send the most powerful message in politics: I’m on your side — and my opponent isn’t. Americans really are divided on abortion, guns, race and other cultural issues, but they’re remarkably progressive on economics. When Democrats talk about health care, education and jobs, they can focus the white working class on the working-class part of its identity rather than the white part. And Democrats can fire up their base at the same time.

Abrams is a particularly good case study. In the primary, she argued that Democrats should stop chasing conservatives who were lost to the party and instead work to lift progressive turnout. But Abrams’s universal, populist message shows that she hasn’t given up on swing voters. Her message resembles the one that helped Barack Obama win over enough white voters in his 2012 re-election campaign.”

All correct. Now if he could just get his colleagues in the rest of the press to report this rather than the chimera of a Democratic civil war.

The Working-Class Studies Association will hold a major conference, centered on the theme “Class at the Border: Migration, Confinement and (Im)mobility” hosted by The Center for the Study of Inequality,  Social Justice and Policy, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY from June 6-9, 2018.

The conference will explore “how an explicit recognition of class can deepen our understanding of the structures and ideas that divide individuals, communities, societies, and nations across the globe. Presentations for this conference will consider how walls, borders, and other dividing lines–of both the material and figurative variety–are constructed, upheld, resisted, and dismantled.”

The program for the conference will feature more than three dozen roundtables, workshops and sessions on a broad range of sub-topics, including “Geographies of 20th- Century American Working-Class Culture,” “Globalization, Global Justice, and Populism,” “Race and Class in the South,” “The Future of Working- Class Movement-Building” and “Working-Class Cultures of Resistance,” to name just a few. For an updated program schedule, click here.