In the wake of House Speaker Paul Ryan’s retirement announcement, I had some thoughts about his legacy, which I wrote up at New York.

In the long run, Ryan may best be remembered as a Republican politician with the ambition and (it seemed, for a moment) the means to undertake a mission that had thrived in the conservative dreamscape since the days of Barry Goldwater: the unraveling of the New Deal/Great Society safety net, also known as “the welfare state.” Unless he and his destructive agenda make a major comeback, he will have to be adjudged a failure in that endeavor.

It’s true that Ryan’s most concrete contributions to the anti-welfare-state cause — all those annual “Ryan Budgets” that Republicans approved during the Obama presidency — were mostly symbolic measures sure to be vetoed by a Democratic chief executive. But they served to solidify Republican interest in Ryan’s twin goals of “entitlement reform” (fundamental overhauls of Medicare —converting it to subsidies for private health insurance — and Medicaid — making it a block grant to the states) and anti-poverty “strategies” that included killing off most existing public-sector programs.

Then, in October of 2016, apparently annoyed that media types were yawning at his agenda, Ryan offered a glimpse of what Republicans might do if they managed to pull off a “trifecta” and gain control of both the Executive and Legislative branches.

“’This is our plan for 2017,’ Ryan said, waving a copy of his “Better Way” policy agenda. ‘Much of this you can do through budget reconciliation.’ He explained that key pieces are ‘fiscal in nature,’ meaning they can be moved quickly through a budget maneuver that requires a simple majority in the Senate and House. ‘This is our game plan for 2017,’ Ryan said again to the seemingly unconvinced press.”

He even called the reconciliation process a “bazooka in my pocket.” And for a while there it seemed very likely that it would be the vehicle for a health-care-focused budget bill that would block-grant the old Medicaid entitlement while repealing the new Obamacare entitlement, thus giving Ryan and Republicans a historic victory.

But as we now know, the “bazooka” wasn’t powerful enough to blast the bill through the Republican-controlled Senate, and complicated matters on many occasions by subjecting the legislation to all sorts of arcane parliamentary rules that limited its scope. And so both Obamacare, and Medicaid-as-we-know-it, survived 2017.

Yes, Republicans did enact a tax cut that, for them, salvaged the year, and that had to be gratifying to the inveterate supply-sider Ryan. But when he talked about reviving his most important passion — “entitlement reform” or in its demagogic form, “welfare reform” — in 2018, he was brusquely shot down by Mitch McConnell and the White House.

So looking ahead to a straitened GOP margin in the House — if not a Democratic House — next year, and the prospect of having to wait until 2021 at the earliest to resume the fight against the welfare state (and that assumed the mixed blessing of a Trump reelection), Ryan decided to go home to Wisconsin and regroup. He’s only 48, and has plenty of time to gird his loins for another crusade against the New Deal and the Great Society.

But what Ryan’s setbacks should have taught him — as they earlier taught Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush — is that there is not and may never be a solid political foundation for a successful assault on popular programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, or even Obamacare, food stamps, and disability benefits. When push comes to shove, even Republican voters are squeamish about implementing their party’s rhetoric supporting the free market or the states as superior mechanisms for providing income security or health care. Crude, ignorant, and erratic as he is, Donald Trump seems to understand this basic reality. True believers in conservative ideology like Paul Ryan don’t, and thus tend to fail.

Harold Meyerson shares some provocative insights in his article “What Now for Unions?” in The American Prospect, including:

Today, both the Gallup and the Pew polls show public support for unions at its highest level in years: 61 percent at Gallup; 60 percent at Pew, a good 20 to 35 percentage points higher than the approval ratings of President Trump and the Republican Congress. Among Americans under 30, unions’ approval rating is a stratospheric 76 percent. As was the case in the 1930s, pro-union sentiment has grown only after the recovery was well under way.

At first glance, young people’s support for unions is puzzling: With union membership down to 10.7 percent of the workforce, and with many states having hardly any union presence, it’s a safe inference that most millennials have had no contact with a union at all. And yet, it’s young workers who are joining unions today, as the successful organizing drives among graduate students and the (disproportionately young) journalists at digital media outlets attest. According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, more than three-quarters of new union members in 2017 were under 35.

Meyerson says their support for unions is “rooted in the economic adversities afflicting the young, including employment insecurity, student debt, unaffordable housing, and more. These struggles feed millennials’ apprehensions that the middle class they seek to join is further out of reach for them than it was for their parents and grandparents.” He argues that social media popular with young people, especially Facebook, has been a pivotal asset for energizing union campaigns:

The growing share of union members who are both younger and professional is probably one reason why digital mobilization played such a key role in the West Virginia teachers strike, and is so crucial to similar labor actions in Oklahoma and elsewhere. Nearly all of West Virginia’s 20,000 teachers were signed on to a strike-participation Facebook page leading up to their walkout, and when the two teachers unions in the state struck a deal with the governor to end the strike in return for a promise of a 5 percent raise, it was the spontaneous Facebook-page resistance of teachers—some local union officials, some not—to going back to work before the deal was actually done that prevailed. Both the universal rank-and-file walkout and, then, the universal opposition to returning to work without a deal would have been impossible without Facebook.

Indeed, it’s clear that Facebook provides workers with a form of mobilization that both complements and eclipses unions’ own capacities. West Virginia has only 75,000 dues-paying members in all of its unions, and only a fraction of those are teachers—yet nearly every one of the state’s 20,000 teachers walked off their jobs. In Oklahoma, a state with a unionization rate of just 5.5 percent, and where all unions claim a bare 84,000 members, a Facebook page called “Oklahoma Teacher Walkout—The Time Is Now!,” started by one rank-and-file teacher, has 55,000 members and has been the key instrument for building support for a strike.

Looking ahead, Meyerson argues, “Should the Democrats recapture the federal government after the 2020 elections, they will need to do something that no Democratic Congress has mustered the will to do in the last 70 years: Change labor law to bolster workers’ right to organize—and, if the Democrats can figure out how to do so, do the same for workers who are independent contractors and temps.”

In meeting this challenge, supporters of the restoration of unions in America’s workplaces will find ample support from young workers. As Meyerson concludes, “The anti-plutocratic, pro-democratic politics of the young in particular apply not just to the polity, but to the workplace as well.”

The April/May issue of Washington Monthly includes three outstanding articles addressing facets of Democratic organizing:

“Voter Registration Won’t Save the Democrats: Progressives needs to target the large pool of citizens who are registered but don’t bother to vote” by Editor-in-Chief Paul Glastris focuses on a frequently-overlooked constituency. As Glastris explains, “data limitations make it hard to prove causal connections. But based on the evidence so far, the law seems mostly to have added to the substantial pool of citizens who are registered but don’t bother to vote.” Further,

…A few weeks before the 2016 elections TargetSmart, a Democratic political data firm, released a report showing that fifty million more Americans were registered to vote than eight years earlier, a whopping 33 percent increase during the presidency of organizer in chief Barack Obama, himself a big proponent of voter registration. The data showed that the newest voters leaned heavily Democratic.

It goes without saying that these new voters didn’t show up in sufficient numbers, or in the right places, to give Hillary Clinton a victory. In fact, an analysis recently published in the New York Times found that some four million voters who supported Barack Obama in 2012 simply failed to vote at all in 2016. What doomed Clinton was not a lack of registered voters, but a lack of turnout.

…But if the chief goal is helping the Democrats win, then concentrating on unregistered voters makes little sense. Consider the arithmetic. There are approximately fifty million Americans who are eligible to vote but aren’t registered. But there are far more “episodic voters”—citizens who are registered but often don’t show up. More than 100 million registered voters didn’t cast ballots in the 2014 midterms. About 145 million didn’t vote in the primaries.

These episodic voters are not only far more numerous than unregistered voters, they are also much likelier to change their behavior…A 2016 Pew survey asked people to explain why they don’t vote. Compared to those who were registered-but-infrequent voters, unregistered voters were nearly twice as likely to say that they dislike politics and don’t believe voting makes a difference. Registered-but-infrequent voters, meanwhile, were more than twice as likely to say that they don’t vote because they are not informed enough about the issues or candidates to make a good decision.

“If you were designing a system to maximize the Democrats’ electoral chances,” Glastris writes, ” you’d want it to be primarily focused on educating and mobilizing these episodic voters…Episodic voters are the orphans of American politics, ignored and unloved. But they are also the lost continent of American politics, just waiting to be developed. As for potential solutions, Glastris adds:

…One such reform is universal vote by mail, otherwise known as vote at home. With vote at home, polling places disappear. Instead, every registered voter automatically receives a ballot in the mail several weeks prior to an election, which they fill out at their leisure and either mail back or drop off at a secure site. As Washington Monthly contributing editor Phil Keisling has documented in these pages, turnout rates in the three states where the system has been implemented statewide—Oregon, Washington, and Colorado—are among the highest in the country. In Colorado, which launched its vote by mail regime in 2014, overall turnout grew by 3.3 percentage points, and by even more among young and low-propensity voters.

If Democrats were smart, they’d be funding ballot initiatives in at least a dozen states in 2018 to implement universal vote by mail. Instead, nearly all of the available money is being spent on drives to pass election-day and automatic voter registration at the state level. Again, these are worthy reforms, and they will do some good. But betting the farm on registering new voters while ignoring the far larger and easier-to-mobilize population of episodic voters is utter folly.

Also in Washington Monthly, Sahil Desai’s “The Untapped Potential of the Asian Voter: Asian Americans are the Democrats’ fastest-growing constituency, but the party has failed to mobilize them. That’s a major missed opportunity” takes an in-depth look at another neglected group of voters who have begun trending Democratic in recent elections. Desai explains how David Reid, an observant Democratic candidate for the Virginia House of Delegates, won his election by focusing on Asian-American voters in the district, and adds:

The GOP’s increased nativism after 9/11 has long been a turnoff for Asian Americans, even before Donald Trump descended the escalator in Trump Tower in June 2015. Trump has spent the better part of three years fear-mongering about undocumented immigrants—one out of six of whom is Asian. Asian Americans are the biggest beneficiaries of family reunification policies, which Trump and other prominent Republicans have taken to bashing as “chain migration.” (Family reunification is how nearly all Vietnamese and Bangladeshi immigrants have come to America.) Asian Americans might not be the direct target of Trump’s disdain as often as Hispanics, but the modern Republican Party’s increasingly overt hostility to nonwhite immigration can’t help but push them away.

All of which is good news for Democrats. But here’s the problem: Asian Americans have among the lowest voting rates of any racial group in America—49 percent of eligible voters, in 2016, compared to 65 percent among white people and 60 percent among black people. Not coincidentally, they also are less likely to be contacted by parties and campaigns. “Democrats are leaving a lot of votes on the table,” said Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and an expert in political demography. “They don’t need 100 percent Asian turnout, but if Asians could come close to what whites vote at, or even blacks, it could have a big difference.”

True, Asian Americans still make up only 4 percent of eligible voters. But they are the fastest-growing racial group in the country and increasingly vote as a Democratic bloc. In other words, Democrats’ failure to mobilize them has been a major missed opportunity for the party. As the Asian American population booms, and as state and national elections continue to be decided by the slimmest of margins, correcting that failure will only become more urgent.

Desai adds that “Of course, it’s crucial for Democrats to turn out Latinos, especially in places like Florida and Arizona. But while there are far more Latinos nationwide, Asian Americans nearly match them in a number of swing states—Michigan and Ohio, for example—and reddish-purple states like Missouri and Georgia.” He notes that “campaigns generally aren’t doing the work to engage with Asian voters. According to a survey following the 2016 campaign, only 29 percent of Asian Americans said that they had been contacted by a political party, compared to 44 percent of whites…non-voting Asian Americans rarely receive the nudge that could push them to the ballot box on election day. Low voting rates beget low voting rates.”

Desai spotlights Asain-American GOTV in Virginia as the exemplary success Democrats should emulate, and the efforts of one group in particular, the Democratic Asian Americans of Virginia (DAAV). Among their strategies:

Democratic campaigns provide DAAV, which became an arm of the Virginia Democratic Party in 2013, with lists of eligible Asian American voters. Then the group, with a phalanx of hundreds of volunteers speaking a variety of languages, targets those voters by phone banking and campaigning door to door. “One of my friends who tags along with me speaks Vietnamese, but doesn’t like to door-knock himself,” said Soeharjono, who immigrated from Indonesia. “There are times when he has to speak. It’s much easier to connect with someone who can speak your language.”

Northern Virginia, where DAAV focuses its efforts, has a substantial number of older voters with limited English proficiency. So the group prepares sample ballots and pamphlets in multiple languages, and has volunteers pass them out at community festivals, such as the annual Korean festival each autumn in Chantilly, Virginia, which attracted 30,000 people last year. Weeks before the November 2017 election, DAAV organized a Diwali celebration for gubernatorial candidate Ralph Northam, and helped him court voters by writing op-eds in Asian American newspapers. Northam would go on to win in a landslide, buoyed by higher-than-expected turnout among minorities, including Asians.

In his concluding paragraphs, Desai noptes, “The reason to invest in Asian American turnout isn’t just for electoral gains in 2018 (or even 2020). The Democratic Party desperately needs to be thinking beyond the prospect of unseating Trump, to building the type of durable coalition that will deliver victories a decade or even a generation from now…“If Democrats show up, and Asian Americans get to know the party and have contacts with the party, that’ll pay off over the longer run for sure,” said Ruy Teixeira, the political scientist. “But you can’t reap that harvest unless you’re there at the beginning of the growing season.”

Yet another noteworthy article in Washington Monthly’s May/June issue is Gilad Edelman’s “Planet Earth Gets a Ground Game: Political operative Nathaniel Stinnett’s brilliantly simple plan to turn out environmental voters.” As Edelman makes the case, “polls show that the environment is a very low priority for most voters. And persuading them to care more is devilishly hard…The stereotype of an environmentalist is someone deeply engaged in politics: the young Greenpeace volunteer gathering signatures on the sidewalk, the Birkenstock-wearing Baby Boomer who never misses a town hall meeting. But when it comes to voting, the stereotype is backward.”

Edelman relates how a Democratic operative, Nathanial Stinnett came to grips with a central problem facing envirnmentalists in the political realm:

…it’s a lot easier to get someone to vote than to make them care about an Antarctic ice shelf. And it gave him an idea. If there were all these registered voters out there who already prioritized the environment, and simply weren’t voting, then the problem wasn’t really about persuasion; it was about turnout. The size of the gap between the two polls suggested that a potentially huge number of environmental voters, perhaps millions, were routinely sitting out elections. If he could find these people and get them to vote, Stinnett reasoned, they would start getting picked up in models of likely voters in future elections. The environment would climb higher in those likely-voter issue priority polls. Climb high enough, and politicians would start feeling that they can’t win without catering to environmentalists.

…In October 2015, he launched a nonprofit, the Environmental Voter Project (EVP). Traditional environmental activism includes turnout, but it centers around advocacy: coordinating rallies, lobbying elected officials, endorsing candidates, and the like. Stinnett wouldn’t bother with any of that. His organization would have exactly one objective: push environmentalists into the electorate, and trust politicians to respond in their own rational self-interest.

To address the problem, Edelman writes,

Stinnett hired Clarity Campaign Labs, a Democratic-leaning analytics firm, to build a predictive model, beginning in Massachusetts. They conducted thousands of phone surveys, asking people to rate their political priorities. Once they had a big enough sample of people who prioritized the environment, they matched it to a voter file—a list of names, addresses, and voting histories—that itself had been matched up with demographic and consumer data. That revealed correlations between personal information—like your age, what magazines you subscribe to, what stores you shop at—and political priorities. It’s akin to the way online advertisers use our browsing histories to figure out what we’re likely to buy.

Because the data sample is so big, the correlations have tremendous predictive value. The model, which is built anew for each state that the Environmental Voter Project expands into, assigns each registered voter a score from 0 to 100, representing the probability that they would pick environmental issues as a top priority. This allows Stinnett to isolate likely environmentalists, which he defines as people who score at least two and a half times higher than the average registered voter in their state. Then he zeroes in on the ones who are unlikely to vote in the next election. That’s his target group. (Technically, the EVP builds two models per state, using two different measurements of voter priorities, and combines the results to generate the target populations.)

The data indicated that “environmentalists make up around 10 percent of registered voters nationwide—which tracks with recent public polling numbers. In any given election, however, their turnout rate lags between 10 and 20 points below the national average.” Further,

In Florida, about 547,000 registered environmentalists stayed home in 2016. Donald Trump’s margin of victory there was about 112,000 votes. In Pennsylvania, just under 300,000 environmentalists sat the election out; Trump won there by just over 44,000 votes. Both states have gubernatorial and senatorial elections this year, and because turnout is lower in midterms, the number of targets will be much higher than in 2016.

What Stinnett has not figured out is why so many environmentalists don’t vote. There’s no obvious demographic overlap that explains it. Within any given population slice, environmentalists almost always have a below-average turnout rate. When Stinnett surveyed a few hundred of them on a battery of civic participation–related questions, the always-voters and the never-voters gave identical answers.

However, “people who sign a pledge card are 21 percent likelier to vote than the control group, compared to 14 percent for people who say they will vote but don’t sign.” Also, “where the EVP combined remote outreach with in-person canvassing; nothing beats face-to-face interactions for boosting turnout.” Looking ahead, Edelman notes,

…In 2018, Stinnett says, the organization has identified 3.05 million environmentalists in six states who are very unlikely to vote, and will be targeting about 2.4 million of them. (The rest go into control groups.) Most of that will be through direct mail, online ads, and texting, because door-to-door canvassing, which requires boots on the ground, is much harder and more expensive to scale up. Extrapolating from his 2017 results, Stinnett expects to add “anywhere from 67,000 to 108,000 new environmental voters to the electorate,” depending on whether the results are more like Atlanta or more like St. Petersburg.

Edelman’s concluding paragraph brings it all together: “It’s fair to have contempt for politicians who take their cues from opinion polling rather than what’s best for the country. But since we know they do, there’s no excuse for not using it to our advantage. Our political life is besieged by anti-democratic distortions—big money, gerrymandering, nihilistically partisan right-wing media—that threaten to swallow the system whole. But they haven’t yet, quite. On climate change, as with so many other issues that bedevil us, votes are still the most powerful weapon we’ve got.”

And regardless of your top issue priority, that’s the message Democrats must make resonate in every state during the next six monhs.

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

I welcome their hatred!

There’s a bit of a kerfuffle about an article I recently wrote with Peter Leyden that was part of our California Is the Future series on Medium. The article, “The Great Lesson of California in America’s New Civil War”, was recently tweeted about by Jack Dorsey, the Twitter CEO, who said it was a “great read”.
Cue the right-wing outrage. Their view is:

1. The fact that the Twitter CEO favorably mentioned our article is irrefutable proof that Twitter is part of a Vast Liberal Conspiracy to promote the left and shut out the right.

2. The article argues that there is a struggle going on for which model America should follow and it will be resolved not by bipartisan compromise but rather by one side triumphing over the other. The article takes the Democrats’ side and sees California as our best current model for where the country is and should be going. The Trump model, closely embraced by today’s Republican Party, must be defeated.
That, according the right wing howls that Dorsey’s tweet has elicited, can only mean we envision turning America over to “mob rule” and a one-party state.

3. Since it is article of right wing faith that California today is a hellhole little better than Venezuela, the very idea of California as a model for America’s future sends them into a tizzy. As the commentator on the conservative Townhall site says: “I’d rather chug bleach”.

Well, that seems a bit over the top. Anyway, I do plead guilty to the idea that California is a way better model for the country’s future than the pronouncements and policies of the today’s Trumpized Republican Party.

Meanwhile, as FDR put it in a different context, I welcome their hatred.

In his article, “Republicans Seize on Impeachment for Edge in 2018 Midterms,” Jonathan Martin writes, “As Republican leaders scramble to stave off a Democratic wave or at least mitigate their party’s losses in November, a strategy is emerging on the right for how to energize conservatives and drive a wedge between the anti-Trump left and moderate voters: warn that Democrats will immediately move to impeach President Trump if they capture the House. What began last year as blaring political hyperbole on the right…is now steadily drifting into the main currents of the 2018 message for Republicans…Democrats are divided on how to respond to the charge. Many top officials in the capital fear it is a political trap that would distract from their core message and possibly even boomerang to harm them in November. But other more progressive figures see impeachment as a rallying cry of their own to galvanize the left’s anti-Trump base.” It doesn’t seem like a very promising strategy for Republicans. All Dems have to do to sound fair and responsible is say they are waiting for the investigations to conclude before making any commitments, while Republicans do their party no good by reminding the public that their leader deserves is being investigated for both corruption and treasonous offenses.

“The American people are not going to get the vapors from a politician who is willing to acknowledge what they already know—that there are businesses out there harming them for profit…This strategy would solve another pressing problem for Democrats: Americans not knowing where the party actually stands. A 2017 Washington Post poll found that only 37 percent of Americans say the Democratic Party “stands for something.” This has been an acknowledged problem among elected Democratic officials. But a huge part of knowing what someone stands for is knowing what they stand against…A liberalism that once again decides to start making Americans’ lives better through better Internet, cheaper flights, free health care, or fairer banking won’t be able to avoid upsetting those industries. But whoever takes up this task and, through her policies, enrages telecom companies, airlines, drug companies, and banks, can quote Roosevelt as he finished that speech in Portland: “To the people of this country I have but one answer on this subject. Judge me by the enemies I have made.”” — from Jack Meserve’s “Name the Enemy: Liberalism isn’t just about proposing solutions. It’s also about defeating those who would prevent them” at Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.

Democratic campaigns looking for a way to connect with small business people should consider adapting Sen. Ron Wyden’s comments at a Friday press conference. As Angela Simaan reports at Common Dreams, “Small business owners are what drive Oregon’s economy forward. They need a simpler, fairer tax code to grow and thrive,” Sen. Wyden said. “Trump’s tax law did the opposite. Today’s report highlights how Republicans’ choice to slash taxes for multinational corporations will bring financial harm to the rancher in Eastern Oregon, the small restaurant owner on the Oregon Coast, and their employees and customers. It’s more proof that this administration will continue to enrich the donor class at the expense of the middle class.”

Gideon Resnick explains “How Beto O’Rourke Is Building a Digital Fundraising Army” at The Daily Beast: “…The Texas Democrat and his top aides placed a major bet on a novel strategy: they would dramatically break down the barriers between candidate and voter. O’Rourke would make heavy use of social media to essentially broadcast otherwise mundane daily functions. And he would treat the often-pesky task of campaign fundraising as an ongoing conversation rather than a plea for cash…So far, at least, O’Rourke’s bet has paid off, and it’s paid off big. The campaign announced this past Monday that it had raised an excess of $6.7 million in the first fundraising quarter of 2018 with more than 141,000 contributions. That number nearly matches the massive haul Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) had in the first quarter of her 2012 campaign. In three of the four reporting periods so far, O’Rourke has outraised Cruz. And operatives and advisers are now confidently predicting that O’Rourke will raise the most online of any candidate in Senate history, building a formidable list of supporters along the way akin to that of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).”

“The immigration debate is a flashpoint into the larger divide between college-educated and non-college-educated white voters,” writes student columnist Derek Simshauser in his post, “Rethinking Democrats’ Strategy for 2020” in The Brown Daily Herald. “College-educated whites believe that immigrants strengthen the country by a margin of 52 to 35 percent; conversely, 61 percent of white working-class voters — defined by the study in question as whites who did not graduate from college and are paid by the job or by the hour — say that immigrants weaken the nation. William Galston of the Brookings Institute incisively notes the larger forces at work in these numbers: “working-class whites are experiencing a pervasive sense of vulnerability … on every front — economic, cultural, personal security — they feel threatened and beleaguered.” Trump won these voters by a much larger margin than Mitt Romney did in 2012 because he made immigration an issue of race politics, not of policy…Engaging in nativist and racist rhetoric on immigration is obviously a line in the sand that Democrats will not and should not cross. But the resonance of the immigration debate goes far deeper than other cultural issues in voters’ attitudes. The “Obama-Trump” voter, whose vote Democrats so badly covet, may not be persuaded by slight moves to the center from Democrats. And if the Democratic ticket ignores the progressive wing of the party on too many social issues, they risk alienating more voters from the left than they would win over on the right.”

At Vox, Emily Stewart reports that, “More Americans are hitting the streets to protest in the era of Trump.” As Steward notes, “According to a new poll conducted by the Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation and released Friday, one in five Americans have protested in the streets or participated in a political rally since the start of 2016; and of those, 19 percent had never done so before…The poll was conducted during the first two months of 2018 — before the March for Our Lives protest that advocated for gun control in March. It found that more rallygoers are Democrats and independents — 40 percent and 36 percent, respectively — than Republicans, who make up 20 percent of attendees. Rallygoers report attending events to express their views on a wide range of issues, including but not limited to Trump. Of those who went to an event over the past two years, 19 percent did so in support of Trump, compared to 32 percent who protested against him…But whether new protesters will go to the polls for the November midterm elections remains to be seen. Eighty-three percent of rallygoers said they plan to vote in the 2018 midterms, compared to 62 percent of respondents overall.”

Silicone Valley visionary Jack Dorsey, co-creator of both Twitter and The Square, is getting buzz in circles overlapping both tech and politics for his enthusiastic promotion of an article by Ruy Teixeira and Peter Leyden in Medium. As Jon Levine explains at sfgate.com, “Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey came under withering fire Saturday after promoting an article touting the end of bipartisanship and urging one side — Democrats — to thoroughly defeat their opponents as California did in the early 2000s…The original piece, published on Medium by authors Peter Leyden and Ruy Teixeira, analogized our current political environment to the Civil War and suggested that Republicans needed to be “thoroughly defeated.”…“In this current period of American politics,…there’s no way that a bipartisan path provides the way forward. The way forward is on the path California blazed about 15 years ago,” wrote Leyden and Teixeira.“ At some point, one side or the other must win – and win big. The side resisting change, usually the one most rooted in the past systems and incumbent interests, must be thoroughly defeated .” Dorsey has taken a lot of heat as a strong supporter of Democratic candidates, and he shows no signs of caving to conservative criticism. The California Democrats ‘big tent’ philosophy has strengthened the party in elections, while Republicans have demonstrated nation-wide that they have no interest in genuine bipartisanship, or even good-faith negotiations.

Conservative syndicated columnist George F. Will comes out strongly against felon disenfranchisement in his latest column, “There’s no good reason to stop felons from voting.” Will writes, “Intelligent and informed people of good will can strenuously disagree about the wisdom of policies that have produced mass incarceration. What is, however, indisputable is that this phenomenon creates an enormous problem of facilitating the reentry into society of released prisoners who were not improved by the experience of incarceration and who face discouraging impediments to employment and other facets of social normality. In 14 states and the District , released felons automatically recover their civil rights…What compelling government interest is served by felon disenfranchisement? Enhanced public safety? How? Is it to fine-tune the quality of the electorate? This is not a legitimate government objective for elected officials to pursue. A felony conviction is an indelible stain: What intelligent purpose is served by reminding felons — who really do not require reminding — of their past, and by advertising it to their community? The rule of law requires punishments, but it is not served by punishments that never end and that perpetuate a social stigma and a sense of never fully reentering the community…Again, who is comfortable with elected politicians winnowing the electorate? When the voting results from around the nation are reported on the evening of Nov. 6, some actual winners might include 1.6 million Floridians who were not allowed to cast ballots.”

“Lula’s imprisonment – an attack on the working class globally” by Vashna Jagarnath in South Africa’s The Daily Maverick, provides a well-argued critique of the jailing of Brazil’s former president. As Jagarnath explains, “The imprisonment of Lula is a last-ditch attempt to crush Lula’s growing popularity ahead of the elections in October. Lula had intended to stand as a presidential candidate. The imprisonment of Lula…is an attack on the Workers’ Party, and the Brazilian left more broadly. It is an attempt to restore the authority of the white oligarchy…Even conservative statisticians concede that under Lula’s presidency over 40 million Brazilians were lifted out of poverty. Under Lula’s stewardship Brazil created millions of jobs and unemployment fell from 12% to below 6%. Poverty fell by 27% due to pro-working-class reforms, including a raise in the minimum wage…With the “Zero Hunger” project more than 12 million families had three meals a day. In addition to this Lula invested heavily in education. The president who never had an opportunity to go to university built more universities and technical schools than any other Brazilian leader. In addition, he put in place badly needed affirmative action policies that allowed the poor and black population of Brazil to have a chance to access quality education, even at private institutions.” If Democrats win back the presidency in 2020, a top foreign policy priority should be pressing Brazil to release Lula.

After reading for some time about 2018 indicators improving for Republicans, I thought it made sense to pay more attention to the small ball of particular races as analyzed by the Cook Political report, and wrote up some observations at New York:

In the RealClearPolitics polling averages, the Democratic advantage in the generic congressional ballot (which basically projects, with some accuracy, the national House popular vote) has dropped from 12.5 percent at the beginning of the year to 7.5 percent today. Meanwhile, another important indicator of how things will go in November, the president’s job approval rating, has improved slowly and marginally as well; it’s now at 41.5 percent according to RCP, as opposed to 39.8 percent on January 1.

But if the big-picture indicators are looking a tad better for the GOP, the landscape in terms of individual House races continues to deteriorate as contests firm up. That’s made clear by a fresh analysis from the Cook Political Report, whose House specialist, David Wasserman, is a generally recognized wizard at this stuff. As he explains, a combination of open seats and vulnerable incumbents adds up to a big problem for Republicans under current conditions:

“There are 36 districts where Republicans [are] not running for reelection in 2016, including 12 at serious risk of falling to Democrats (Lean Republican or more vulnerable). Only 18 Democrats are exiting, and just four represent seats at serious risk of falling to the GOP. Additionally, Democrats are competitive in an August 7 special election in Ohio’s 12th CD to replace GOP Rep. Pat Tiberi, who resigned in January.

“If Democrats pick up at least eight Republican open seats (and today, eight of the 36 are leaning their way), they’ll already be a third of the way to the 23 they need for a majority. Beyond those, there are 18 Republican incumbents in the Toss Up column and another 20 in the Lean Republican column —- including five in California, three in Texas and three in Virginia. Private partisan polling continues to show most GOP incumbents in much weaker positions than last cycle — even in districts Trump won.”

Add in the four to six seats in Pennsylvania that Democrats are in a position to pick up after the state’s Supreme Court invalidated a GOP gerrymander, and you can see how strong a foundation has been laid for flipping the House. All in all, the landscape is looking very blue:

“Our latest ratings feature 55 competitive seats (Toss Up or Lean Democratic/Republican), including 50 currently held by Republicans and five held by Democrats. There are also three non-competitive seats poised to switch parties thanks to Pennsylvania’s new map (PA-05 and PA-06 to Democrats, PA-14 to Republicans). Overall, Democrats would need to win 27 of the 55 competitive races to win a majority. We continue to view Democrats the slight favorites for House control.”

That’s a pretty conservative projection since “wave” elections tend to gain momentum as Election Day approaches, with districts originally looking marginally competitive becoming red-hot down the stretch. According to some data Wasserman sent me by email, in 2010, the last really big GOP wave election, Cook showed 38 Democratic districts as having competitive races at the beginning of the cycle. By the end that number had swollen to 91.

And that process seems to be occurring this cycle. In January Cook showed 38 Republican seats as being in competitive races. That number’s up to 50 now, not counting Pennsylvania. The trend continues, with Wasserman moving four seats into the competitive column in his latest forecast.

It’s always possible, of course, that the meta trends as measured by the generic ballot and Trump’s approval ratings will improve enough for the GOP to shift some of the newly vulnerable House seats back into safety while boosting its odds of winning half or more of the barnburners. But at this point such widely discussed pro-GOP factors as gerrymandered districts and incumbency are already baked into the cake. The landscape you see is probably the landscape you’ll get when things get deadly serious in the late summer and fall. And if there’s a tiebreaker, it’s likely to be the Democratic enthusiasm advantage that’s been so apparent in 2017 and 2018 special elections. That matters more in relatively-low-turnout midterms than in presidential cycles.

There are obviously a thousand small factors affecting individual races. We’ll find out in June, for example, whether Republicans have succeeded in “blocking out” Democrats from the general election in several GOP-held districts under California’s top-two system, thanks to there being too many Democratic candidates.

But for the most part, what the GOP most needs right now is a good economy, no international crises, and a stretch of time when the president isn’t dominating the news with threats, scandals, or White House turmoil. They should be so lucky.

At The Hill, Jonathan Easley reports that, according to the latest Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll of 1,340 registered voters, “Voters Fear a Trade War,” but also share some concerns about America’s trade deficit with China:

A strong majority of Americans believe the U.S. should take steps to correct its trade deficit with China, but a majority disapprove of President Trump’s proposed tariffs and there are fears that a trade war could damage the economy.

According to the latest Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll, 71 percent of voters say the U.S. should take steps to address a $375 billion trade imbalance with China.

Fifty-two percent disapprove of the administration’s proposed tariffs on aluminum and steel imports, including those from China, and 43 percent said they believe Trump’s proposed tariffs will result in job losses. Thirty-eight percent said the tariffs would protect American jobs and 18 percent said the tariffs would have no impact.

More than two-thirds of voters say they’re concerned countries will retaliate against the U.S., potentially sparking a global trade war.

Yet, “Sixty-one percent of those polled said they approve of using the threat of tariffs to win more favorable terms in trade negotiations,” while “Fifty-five percent believe existing trade agreements cost American jobs.”

Sahil Kapur notes at Bloomberg that “If China follows through on its retaliatory tariffs, they’d be hitting just as campaigns are gearing up for the midterm elections that will decide control of Congress. Republicans already are confronting signs that Democrats have a solid chance to seize control of the majority in the House of Representatives.”

And the stock market decline may help Democrats get some traction with high-turnout senior voters by the midterm elections.

After watching the election returns from Wisconsin Tuesday night and marveling at an unexpectedly big win for a left-of-center judicial candidate, I offered some observations at New York:

Yesterday’s landslide win for progressive (and Democratic-backed) Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Rebecca Dallet may be dismissed by some observers as the product of a low-turnout special election with no particular implications for the November midterms, when Governor Scott Walker is on the ballot and the massive money and mobilization effort he has generated in the past is in play. But Walker himself is not exactly exuding confidence:

Tonight’s results show we are at risk of a #BlueWave in WI. The Far Left is driven by anger & hatred — we must counter it with optimism & organization. Let’s share our positive story with voters & win in November.

— Scott Walker (@ScottWalker) April 4, 2018

It’s the startling double-digit margin of Dallet’s win that’s setting off alarm bells among Wisconsin Republicans. Yes, turnout in November will likely more than double yesterday’s million-voter performance (though it did significantly exceed average turnout in Wisconsin’s traditional spring Supreme Court elections). But it’s a combination of mobilization and persuasion that seems to have produced Dallet’s big win.

The results end a pretty impressive Wisconsin winning streak for the GOP, featuring Walker’s 2014 reelection by more than a five-point margin, and then in 2016, Senator Ron Johnson’s comeback win over Russ Feingold and Trump’s shocking victory in a state that hadn’t gone Republican in a presidential election since Reagan’s 49-state wipeout in 1984. Indeed, as conservative blogger Allahpundit noted, Wisconsin Republicans have lost a lot of ground in the last year:

“Last year Wisconsin Republicans practically ruled America: Reince Priebus was in charge in the White House, Paul Ryan was in charge in the House, and Scott Walker was a three-time gubernatorial winner in an important purple state. A year later Priebus is long gone, Ryan’s the subject of endless rumors that he’s on his way into retirement if Dems flip the House this fall, and Walker’s banging the drum warning that a Democratic landslide could bury him.”

A lot could change between now and November, and Walker has survived adverse political developments before. But he’s not invincible, as evidenced by his ignominious withdrawal from the 2016 presidential contest long before the first vote was cast. 2018 could be the year when his and his party’s remarkable run of luck in Wisconsin just runs out.

Trump’s Electoral College victory in 2016 is often linked to his pugnacious statements regarding trade and American jobs. But things have gotten considerably more complicated, now that he has launched the opening salvos of what could soon degenerate into a trade war. As Erica Werner notes in “Ohio workers love Trump’s tariffs, and that’s making trouble for the GOP” at The Washington Post: “Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown is running for reelection partly by touting his support for the president’s aggressive trade strategy and trumpeting his longtime opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement and other trade deals Trump rails against. That’s largely a boon in Ohio, where Trump won by 8 percentage points in 2016. “I’m working with the president to make these tariffs work,” Brown said last week after addressing a gathering of Teamsters at a United Steelworkers hall in Akron…For Brown’s likely Republican opponent, Rep. James B. Renacci, Trump’s trade moves are a growing political headache, forcing the candidate to explain his own past support for trade pacts and his concerns about the tariffs…Renacci, like GOP lawmakers elsewhere, is being forced to explain to blue-collar voters why he supports free trade policies that are now out of step with Trump’s Republican Party…Similar upside-down trade politics could emerge in House races, too, in districts from California to Washington state to Michigan.”

Comments by Ari Berman, from his interview by Amy Goodman on ‘Democracy Now’ addressing Trump’s decision to ask Census repondents about their citizenship status: “…The census affects everything in American life, Amy. It affects how $675 billion in federal funding is allocated to states and localities. It affects how many congressional seats and electoral votes states get. It affects how local and federal districts are drawn. It affects the data that every institution in America, from corporations to universities to the military, uses to understand their populations. And so, if the census is rigged, if the census is manipulated, then all of American democracy is rigged and manipulated as a result…there has always been a tremendous undercount of people of color by the census. In the 2010 census, 1.5 million people of color were undercounted, were not counted by the Census Bureau. That undercount could be dramatically larger now under Trump, because immigrants are going to be afraid to respond to the census now. And so, what Donald Trump is doing is he’s turning the census, which is a constitutionally mandated act every 10 years, he’s turning the census into a tool of voter suppression and to a tool of nativist resentment. And that’s so shocking for our democracy.”

David Leonhardt sketches a major opportunity for Democrats in his column, “Asian-Americans, a Sleeping Political Giant” at The New York Times:“In a new piece for Washington Monthly, Saahil Desai suggests that Virginia can serve as a model for Democrats nationwide. “Democrats’ failure to mobilize” Asian-Americans, Desai writes, “has been a major missed opportunity.” Outside of Virginia, many other swing states and House districts — in California, Nevada, Arizona, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida and elsewhere — have meaningful Asian-American populations. In the last midterm election, in 2014, the nationwide turnout for Asian-American citizens was dreadful — just 27 percent, according to the census. That’s far below the rates for whites and blacks and virtually identical to the Latino rate…The six biggest Asian-American groups — which, in descending order, are Chinese-, Filipino-, Indian-, Vietnamese-, Korean- and Japanese-Americans — have varying opinions on nearly every major political issue (as these charts show). Yet not one of these subgroups leans Republican.”

How are Dems doing in the quest to level the playing field among America’s governorships in the 2018 midterm elections? Kyle Kondik and Geoffrey Skelley share some insights at Sabato’s Crystal Ball: “On the gubernatorial front, Democrats seem better than 50-50 to win Republican-held seats in Illinois, Maine, and New Mexico. The GOP’s best targets are Alaska, where independent Bill Walker is unpopular, and open seats Democrats are defending in Colorado, Connecticut, and Minnesota, particularly if and when former Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R) decides to try for a third, nonconsecutive term in the Gopher State (he appears likely to run). Democrats have several other prime targets, which is natural given both the environment and the immense amount of defense Republicans need to play on this map…We’ve previously said that the best way to judge 2018’s gubernatorial races is by which party wins a majority of five big states: Florida, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Republicans currently hold all but Pennsylvania…Gov. Bruce Rauner (R) is an underdog against Democratic nominee J.B. Pritzker in Illinois. Florida and Michigan are open-seat Toss-ups, and Ohio Leans Republican but should feature a competitive race in the fall. Meanwhile, Gov. Tom Wolf (D-PA) seems like an increasingly good bet for reelection, as we explain in our next section.”

At The Fix, Eugene Scott flags a frequently-overlooked point in the ongoing discussion about class and politics in the U.S.: “The teacher boycotts making national headlines highlight the problem with the way many define class in the United States — especially “working class.”…But a lack of understanding about education and income often make addressing the economic woes of Americans like these teachers challenging. In the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, analysts often conflated the working class with those who don’t have a college degree…But the teacher walkouts are a reminder that even professionals with master’s degrees in some of the country’s largest cities endure many of the same economic challenges associated with those in blue-collar jobs. This is perhaps why most — 54 percent — of white working-class Americans said investing in college education is a risky gamble, according to a survey by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Atlantic…According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average salary for elementary and middle school teachers is $56,420 per year, while high school teachers earn an average of $58,170. The salary is comparable to some trade jobs, like plumbers ($57,070), electricians ($57,910) and food service managers ($57,250).” The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) estimates that about 3.6 million teachers are “employed in public and private elementary and secondary schools in 2007-2008.” Democrats might also think about the number of recent college graduates they know who are doing working-class jobs, including waiting on tables, walking dogs, baby-sitting and other such employment in the ‘gig economy.’

It is amazing how much the gun safety protests have accomplished in a short period of time. Check out Amanda Holpuch’s post, “Six victories for the gun control movement since the Parkland massacre” at The Guardian, which presents the litany of achievements of the movement, including: “Florida’s governor, Rick Scott, on 9 March signed a $400m bill to tighten the state’s gun laws while flanked by family members of students killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas. The bill fell short of what campaigners had hoped for, a ban on assault weapons, but it did raise the age for buying a gun to 21 from 18, ban bump stocks and extended a three-day waiting period for handgun purchases to include long guns. Hours after it was signed into law, the NRA filed a federal lawsuit against Florida…The week after the Parkland shooting, US companies distanced themselves from the country’s National Rifle Association (NRA) amid public pressure. Hotel chains, car rental firms and home insurance businesses had offered discounts to members of the NRA but cancelled them in droves after the shooting.”

Helene Cooper’s “‘All It Takes Is One Mistake’: Worries Over Plan to Send National Guard to Border” at The New York Times” provides one of the more perceptive critiques of Trump’s ill-advised idea to put large numbers of American troops on the border we share with Mexico: “At the Pentagon, several officials privately expressed concern about being seen as picking a fight with an ally at a time when the military has plenty of adversaries — the Islamic State, North Korea, Russia, Syria — to contend with. Massing American troops at another country’s border, several current and former Defense Department officials said, would send a message of hostility and raise the chances of provoking an all-out conflict…“We are so lucky here in this country when you look at our borders,” said Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, a retired veteran of the Iraq war. “We’ve got the Pacific on one side, the Atlantic on the other and allies to the north and the south. Mexico is not an adversary. Why would you present this offensive barrier to a friendly country?””

In his slate.com post, “It’s Time to Stop Yammering About Liberal Bias: The right has plenty of representation in the nation’s opinion pages,” Ositu Owanevu has a richly-deserved scold for conservatives, observing: “If, as conservatives have insisted over decades of uninterrupted complaint, the American people really are being indoctrinated into liberalism in their formative years at our schools and colleges and in their adult years by an oppressively slanted press, how exactly does one explain the American political situation in 2018, with right-wing control of the presidency, the House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, 33 governorships, and 32 state legislatures? If America’s citizenry really has been spoon-fed leftist propaganda for nearly 70 straight years, isn’t the reorganization of the United States into semiautonomous workers’ republics long overdue?”…Regarding charges that The New York Times, Washington Post and The Atlantic are examples of major media infected with liberal bias, Owanevu writes, “those three publications already employed, by my cursory and possibly incomplete count, 18 conservatives and libertarians writing regularly for them: David Brooks, Bret Stephens, Bari Weiss, Ross Douthat, David Frum, Conor Friedersdorf, Reihan Salam, George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Megan McArdle, Marc Thiessen, Max Boot, Michael Gerson, Jennifer Rubin, Kathleen Parker, Radley Balko, Ed Rogers, and Anne Applebaum. The majority offer their takes frequently and freely without liberals on Twitter or anywhere else jeering in mass protest.”

A TDS staff post on Tuesday commented on TV shows about the working-class, noting that only one show, the edgy drama “Atlanta,” often spotlighted Black working-class characters. “ABC Scored With ‘Roseanne.’ But Where Are TV’s Black Working-Class Shows?” by Ira Madison III at The Daily Beast has more to say about that. As Madison notes:, “the easy answer could be to reboot shows like Sanford and Son or Everybody Hates Chris, two very good shows that depicted working-class black families. It’s worked well for One Day at a Time on Netflix, which has rebooted the Norman Lear comedy with a Cuban family. The show has tackled racism, PTSD, sexuality, the economy, and health care—all the issues that affect the working class…It might seem gauche, perhaps, for white executives to try and greenlight shows where the leads are lower-income black people. Perhaps they can only feel comfortable with affluent depictions of black lifestyles. But it’s absolutely necessary that we let all Americans see themselves, I mean, that’s the heartland strategy, yes?..Of course, that would require the media to focus as well on the people who are working class in America who didn’t turn out for Trump, minority and white ones—which is actually a majority of Americans. And the last time I checked, the electoral college didn’t log its Nielsen ratings.”