From Cole Stangler’s report on a new NBC News/SurveyMonkey/Esquire Online Poll conducted 11/20-24: “Americans are mad as hell. Results of a survey sponsored by Esquire and NBC News and published Sunday indicated half of the U.S. is angrier than it was last year. And the rage appears to transcend class, gender, race and sexual orientation…Sixty-eight percent of those polled said they hear or read something in the news that makes them angry either “once a day” or “a few times a day.” That encompasses 73 percent of whites, 66 percent of Hispanics and 56 percent of blacks.”
At National Journal Karen Bruggeman notes in her post, “Hotline’s 2016 Governors Race Rankings” that “Com­ing off an up­set win in Louisi­ana in Novem­ber, Demo­crats will mostly be on de­fense, hop­ing to hold open seats in Mis­souri, New Hamp­shire, Ver­mont, and West Vir­gin­ia in 2016 and Vir­gin­ia in 2017. The only ob­vi­ous pickup over the next two years is in New Jer­sey in 2017 thanks to term-lim­ited Chris Christie’s tank­ing pop­ular­ity post-Bridgeg­ate. Oth­er­wise, the top tar­get for Demo­crats is North Car­o­lina, where they hope to pick off vul­ner­able Gov. Pat Mc­Crory.”
No surprise that Trump, or any Republican, would think that former President Bill Clinton’s personal mistakes in the 1990s are relevant to the 2016 presidential campaign — yet another example of the GOP’s desperate politics of distraction. But it’s amazing that Trump thinks he has the credibility to criticize anyone about disrespecting women. Rabid narcissism often comes with an astounding lack of self-awareness.
Although Trump symbolizes what is dysfunctional in American politics, Mark Schmitt has a New York Times op-ed reminding readers that “Trump Did Not Break Politics.” Schmitt explains, “…in recent years, Republican politicians especially have not only defied the rules, they have also protected themselves from the consequences. Restrictions on voting, along with aggressive redistricting, reduce the influence of the median voter. Campaign war chests (including “super PACs”) scare off opponents, from within their own party as well as the other. By crippling civil-society institutions such as unions and community groups, which organize middle- and lower-income voters, they sometimes avoid being held accountable. They can use ideological media to reach mostly like-minded voters…Long before Mr. Trump came along, the supposedly immutable laws of politics had begun to fall.”
Supporters of reducing income inequality take note: As Paul Krugman observes, as a direct consequence of the presidential 2012 election, the wealthy are now paying more taxes. Says Krugman, “…while the 2013 tax hike wasn’t gigantic, it was significant. Those higher rates on the 1 percent correspond to about $70 billion a year in revenue…If Mitt Romney had won, we can be sure that Republicans would have found a way to prevent these tax hikes. And we can now see what happened because he didn’t. According to the new tables, the average income tax rate for 99 percent of Americans barely changed from 2012 to 2013, but the tax rate for the top 1 percent rose by more than four percentage points. The tax rise was even bigger for very high incomes: 6.5 percentage points for the top 0.01 percent…for top incomes, Mr. Obama has effectively rolled back not just the Bush tax cuts but Ronald Reagan’s as well…The bottom line is that presidential elections matter, a lot, even if the people on the ballot aren’t as fiery as you might like.”
Perhaps the most striking thing about the chart in this National Journal article on minimum wage hikes now going into effect in 13 states is the small size of the increases — from 25 cents to a buck. Raising the wage floor to a level more commensurate with a decent living standards should be a potent message for Dems who want to increase turnout of low-income voters.
President Obama’s decision to hold town meetings on gun violence and take some executive actions to prevent more of it will drive wingnuts even battier than usual. But it will also make some Democrats down ballot more than a little nervous. However, a recent Quinnipiac University poll conducted 12/16-20 showed that 87 percent of respondents favored “requiring background checks on people buying guns at gun shows or online” and 58 percent supported “a nationwide ban on the sale of assault weapons,” while 83 percent favored “banning those on the U.S. government’s terrorist watch list from purchasing guns.” There is ample political room for meaningful reforms to curb gun violence, and Dems should not be intimidated from supporting such clear, common sense reforms to reduce gun violence.
At the Washington Post, “Here’s the secret to making people care about climate change: Make them think about their legacy.” by Ezra Markowitz and Lisa Zaval provides an instructive read for those who want to promote, not just awareness, but also action to heal and protect the environment. As the authors note, “Here’s a depressing statistic if you’re worried about climate change: 63 percent of Americans say they’re concerned about the issue, but only 47 percent think the government should do anything about it…That divide, known as the “attitude-behavior” gap, isn’t all that uncommon. And activists and politicians have tried all kinds of strategies to address it…In a series of psychological studies we conducted over the past two years with Americans from across the country, we found that simply asking people to reflect upon how they want to be remembered by future generations can lead them to engage in more “helping behavior” in the present, particularly when it comes to protecting the environment.”
I’ll conclude this first Strategy Notes posting of 2016 with an observation that facebook may be the most powerful forum for mass political education America has ever known. Nowhere else in American life are political ideas and information so thoroughly discussed or broadly-shared. Even newspapers at their peak power never matched the level of inter-active citizen participation we see on facebook. Television still reaches more people, but it’s all pretty much one-way communication. Twitter has its uses in terms of planting soundbites and memes, but the 140 character limitation makes it a poor instrument for education. Granted, there is a lot of misinformation being bandied about on facebook, and also a lot of preaching to the choir. But now at an astounding 1.5 billion average monthly users, facebook has become the most-visited town hall for tens of millions of Americans, the place to go for convenient, up-to-date, free-of-charge discussion about the political issues of our times. There is even some data indicating Facebook has boosted voter turnout. Political campaigns that fail to leverage it are doomed. Those which master it are going to do better.

Re last night’s GOP debate, the pundit and prediction markets consensus seems to be that Rubio amped up his game with punchy rebuttals and hogging more time than previously. Carson won the new twitter followers and Facebook ‘likes’ derbies, while Bush scored the bold-type quote of the evening at Rubio’s expense with his carefully-crafted zinger referencing the “French work-week.” But Trump edged out Rubio and smoked all of the other candidates (Bush dead last) on stage on the applause-o-meter, reports Andre Tartar in his Bloomberg by-the-numbers post.
At FiveThirtyEight.com Nate Silver mulls over the debate and some recent numbers and concludes “Yeah, Jeb Bush is Probably Toast.”
The concerted GOP whine of the evening was that the media has failed to give their presidential candidate field enough softballs. NBC’s Chuck Todd called it a “premeditated attack” on the media. All of which smells like the GOP field hopes to intimidate the MSM from asking tough questions.
Speaking of softballs, the hapless “undercard” candidates were actually asked if they thought the day after the superbowl should be a national holiday.
A new Gallup poll indicates that “Americans’ support for the Tea Party has dropped to its lowest level since the movement emerged on the national political scene prior to the 2010 midterm elections. Seventeen percent of Americans now consider themselves Tea Party supporters.”
Back in the real world, a just-released Associated Press-GfK poll shows strong support for tighter gun laws: “Eight in 10 Democrats favor stricter gun laws, while 6 in 10 Republicans want them left as they are or loosened…Still, the results show the calls for tighter laws have some bipartisan appeal, with 37 percent of Republicans, including 31 percent of conservative Republicans, favoring stricter gun laws,” reports AP’s Emily Swanson.
A newly-published ‘Third Way’ report makes the case that “The Democratic economic agenda should be organized around one over-arching goal: sustained private sector economic growth that expands and greatly benefits the middle class.”
Could it be that the continuing litany of scandals involving former GOP House speakers and Boehner’s failed legacy sets an irresistibly low bar for Paul Ryan, as he preps for the speakership?
‘Partner” would be a contortionist’s stretch.

Apparently President Obama’s track record is shaping up as a real asset for Democratic presidential contenders. Associated Press reports, “You would expect in a Democratic primary field when people are crossing a broad ideological spectrum that they might be critical of the incumbent no matter who the incumbent is,” Democratic pollster and strategist Celinda Lake said. “But I think Democrats demonstrated that across the spectrum it’s good to run with the president rather than against him.”
NYT columnist Paul Krugman has the response to GOP disinformation specialists trying to discredit Denmark’s example, which was spotlighted in the first Democratic presidential debate.
Here’s an important lesson for Democratic campaigns to absorb: Generate sharable content. “Successful social-media strategists understand that viral opportunities are fleeting. The window of opportunity often disappears minutes after an event. Successful rapid responses appear to be spontaneous, but most are carefully constructed and planned…Campaigns’ social-media teams should have a strong enough understanding of their candidates key talking points on every issue to successfully pre-write mounds of copy – hundreds of pre-vetted tweets and graphics which only require small tweaks before their timely post. Given Clinton’s vast resources and unparalleled access to the lead strategists and tools that defined Obama’s 2012 campaign, it is no surprise that her campaign employed a top-notch strategy to amplify her message. It is, however, surprising that neither Bernie Sanders nor Martin O’Malley generated shareable content on their Facebook pages during the debate – a huge opportunity squandered…Whenever her campaign tweeted issue specific messaging, it included a shortened URL, which linked to a trackable sign-up page. This will allow the campaign to identify these potential donors and volunteers by the issues that brought them into the campaign and ultimately use that data to buy targeted programmatic advertising buys and send super targeted emails to these voters in the future. More impressively, each link led to an issue specific landing page, thus potentially increasing the user’s engagement and likelihood of signing up. This data-driven approach was pioneered by the Obama campaign and is sure to pay big dividends down the road.” — from Reed Scharff’s “The candidate winning on social media” at CNBC.com.
The Communications Workers of America have launched a “Voting Rights Denied Story Project,” collecting accounts of voter suppression across the U.S. Story and link to reporting form here. I would urge the CWA to collect this testimony from everyone, not just their members, as a much-needed public service.
House of Reps Benghazi committee chair Representative Trey Gowdy, Republican of South Carolina, was caught in a false allegation that former Secretary of State Clinton outed a classified source, which the C.I.A. then denied was classified, reports Michael S. Schmidt in the New York Times. Committee member Elijah E. Cummings (D-MD) explains: “Unfortunately, the standard operating procedure of this select committee has become to put out information publicly that is inaccurate and out of context in order to attack Secretary Clinton for political reasons,” Mr. Cummings said in a letter to Mr. Gowdy. “These repeated actions bring discredit on this investigation and undermine the integrity of the select committee and the House of Representatives.”
Lawrence Lessig explains the rationale for his presidential candidacy at The Atlantic.
The Clinton campaign clearly places a lot of value in building campaign infrastructure. “Hillary Rodham Clinton has spent more than twice as much as any other presidential candidate on campaign staff, more than three times as much on office space and millions of dollars more on advertising, according to reports filed this week with the Federal Election Commission.,” report Nicholas Confesssore, Maggie Haberman and Sarah Cohen at The Times.
…while Patrick Healey reports “Bernie Sanders Uses Smaller Crowds to Push Back Against ‘Radical’ Label,” also at The Times.
Not much good cam come from this — unless some of the proceeds benefit good causes.

Writing in Nation of Change, C. Robert Gibson has a post “Six Reasons Sanders Actually Won the Debate Despite What Pundits Claim,” featuring statistical evidence from: Online polls of a half-dozen news organizations, including CNN, Time and Fox News; Facebook and twitter mentions; Google searches; a fund-raising uptick; and CNN, Frank Luntz and Fusion focus group picks.
However, respected poll analyst Mark Blumenthal, along with co-authors Ariel Edwards-Levy, Natalie Jackson and Janie Valencia, cite a Clinton win in a new HuffPo/YouGov poll that indicates 55 percent of registered Democratic voters picked Clinton as the winner, with 22 percent for Sanders. However, note the authors, “The difference between candidates disappears if Democratic-leaning independents are included with Democratic voters. Among this larger group, 46 percent say their opinion of each candidate improved.” Further, an “NBC/Survey Monkey poll finds similar result – Allison Kopicki and John Lapinski: “Hillary Clinton’s performance in Tuesday night’s debate resonated strongly among members of her party, with more than half–56%–saying [Clinton] won the debate.” The authors add “Instant online polls are informal and unscientific. The results rely on a self-selecting group of respondents with no regard to political affiliation, age, country, or even whether the person doing the responding actually watched the debate. Respondents, meanwhile, don’t have even the slightest motivation to be objective…Like tracking new Twitter followers or Google searches, the online surveys provide an interesting snapshot of the mood of a particular slice of the Internet, but they’re mostly for entertainment (for the reader) and traffic (for the outlet). No one should mistake them for the scientific surveys done by professional pollsters.”
Daily Kos Elections explains why the U.S. Senate race in PA may be competitive after all.
In Charles Pierce’s Esquire post, “Ted Cruz Has the Look of a Dangerously Unhinged Charlatan,” he writes “Ed Kilgore is absolutely right about what Tailgunner Ted Cruz is up to out there on the stump, where he is sitting inside a powder magazine, playing with a blowtorch and giggling like a child.​..There’s no third alternative. Simply put, unless every other candidate on the stage in a couple of weeks loudly and forcefully distances themselves from this kind of, then the Republican Party is not worth the sneeze that at this point would blow it to hell.”
I agree.
Whatever else can be said about the Sanders campaign, generating articles like this one enriches America’s political dialogue significantly.
Blog for Our Future’s Terrence Heath makes an excellent point in his post, “Democratic Debate Proves Movements Matter.” To all of those progressive activists laboring in social change movements, your efforts to make a significant difference, and they are well-reflected in the first Democratic presidential debate.
At The Nation Joan Walsh explains why progressives should be very pleased about the quality of the Democratic debate, and she also highlights some of the differences in policies.
Keep it up guys!

Today marks the 50th anniversary of President Johnson’s signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But the anniversary is likely to be overshadowed by the first major televised debates of Republican presidential candidates. The big debate, the one with the candidates leading in the polls, with Donald Trump and nine others, will be broadcast from Cleveland at 8:50 EDT. There will also be a sort of a pre-game ‘weenie bowl’ broadcast at 5 pm for the 7 candidates who didn’t make the top ten cut, but it’s unclear who will show up for that unhappy affair (Would you?). In any event, the hope is that all of the candidates who participate will be at least asked to address GOP-driven voter suppression on the day our nation commemorates one of the most significant milestones in the history of democracy. For those who can bear it, Fox News is providing an “Election HQ 2016 app.”
Ari Berman, political correspondent for The Nation and author of “Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America,” has an op-ed in the New York Times, “Why the Voting Rights Act Is Once Again Under Threat.” Berman notes that, despite growing protests against voter suppression in NC and other states, “The voting rights landscape today most closely resembles the period before 1965, when the blight of voting discrimination could be challenged only on a torturous case-by-case basis.”
Greg Speed, president, America Votes and America Votes Action Fund, writes at HuffPo: “While there is little prospect of congressional action on strengthening the VRA in the near future, there has been a growing trend of state legislation building modern, more accessible voting systems signaling hope for breaking down some barriers to minority voters and other segments of the electorate…Colorado, Oregon and California have excelled in the movement to modernize election systems with significant changes, such as automatic mail ballots and, in Oregon, automatic voter registration….This year, states like Florida, New Mexico and Indiana also took important steps forward by enacting election modernization laws with strong bipartisan support. America Votes was deeply engaged in the push for online registration in Florida and New Mexico, where state and local officials from both parties strongly supported online voter registration…Seeing bipartisan support in states this year for online registration and other laws expanding early voting, rights restoration and Election Day registration is very encouraging. ”
At The Plum Line Greg Sargent reports on a new Washington Post poll: “…A large majority of Americans now thinks the country needs to continue making changes to give blacks equal rights… 52-43. There’s been a big shift towards seeing a need for more racial change among whites overall (now at 53-44) and independents (62-34)…But Republicans and conservatives differ with majority sentiment: majorities of Republicans (63-34) and conservatives (52-46) say that the country has already made “the changes needed to give blacks equal rights with whites.”
Facing South’s Sue Sturgis has “A Texas-sized reminder of why the Voting Rights Act still matters.” One of her revealing stats: “While the GOP majority in the Texas legislature claimed rampant voter fraud makes strict photo ID rules necessary, number of people who have actually been accused of such ballot fraud since 2004: 4.”
Adel M. Stan reports at The American Prospect on the Koch Brothers grovelfest last week and “why Jeb Bush’s Pitch to the Koch brothers Should Scare You.” Stan defines the stakes in 2016 for Bush in particular. But it could also apply to most of the other GOP presidential candidates: “…The election of a president who is ready to make life easier for the biggest hoarders of private capital could be devastating to any shred of democracy left in our political system…The appointment of Supreme Court justices by a president who holds the shrouded workings of private capital in such high esteem promises future decisions that will make Citizens United look like a ray of sunlight…In his bid to become the third in his family’s dynasty of mediocrity to occupy the White House, Jeb Bush is ready to sell the nation to the most secretive corner of the 1 percent…With masses of private capital to back him–routed through the Kochs’ opaquely funded nonprofits–he could actually win.”
Republicans switching parties to become, gasp, Democrats? It happens …sometimes, reports Nathan L. Gonzales at Rothenblog.
Alan I. Abramowitz and Steven Webster crunch some polling data at Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball and observe “Democratic and Republican primary voters in 2016 are likely to be drawn disproportionately from the angriest segment of each party’s base and that candidates who can tap into that anger are likely to do well…No matter who wins the Democratic and Republican nominations next year, we can expect anger at the opposing party’s candidate to run high, and we can expect both parties’ nominees to seek to tap into this anger in order to energize and mobilize their supporters. It promises to be a long and nasty campaign.”
Hey Republicans, you really think this guy can manage America’s budget?

Following what HuffPo’s political commentaors Michael McAuliffe and Christine Conetta call “The GOP’s Epic Month Of Dysfunction,” Michael Tomasky puts the Republicans’ current situation in perspective with his Daily Beast post “The GOP: Still the Party of Stupid,” which calls the current GOP pack of presidential wannabes “an astonishingly weak field.” Tomasky notes the GOP field’s “hostility to actual ideas that might stand a chance of addressing the country’s actual problems,” and adds, “The Democratic Party has its problems, but at least Democrats are talking about middle-class wage stagnation, which is the country’s core economic quandary.”
“If Jeb Bush wants to be a different kind of Republican, he should end GOP war on voting,” writes Paul Waldman at The Plum Line. Walkman explained, “And while Jeb will happily tout his record on things like charter schools as helping African-Americans, one topic he didn’t raise [when he recently spoke at the Urban League] was voting rights. That may be because on that subject, his hands are as dirty as anyone’s…When he was governor of Florida, Bush’s administration ordered a purge of the voter rolls that disenfranchised thousands of African-Americans, in a happy coincidence that made it possible for his brother to become president. The private corporation they hired to eliminate felons from the rolls did so by chucking off people who had a names similar to those of felons; people who had voted all their lives showed up on election day to be told that they couldn’t vote….At a moment when his party is fighting with all its might to limit the number of African-Americans who make it to the polls, it’s going to be awfully hard to make a case that the GOP has their interests at heart.”
NYT’s Jonathan Martin presents an interesting argument that Jeb Bush benefits from Trump’s campaign because Bush wasn’t going to get those voters anyway, and Trump draws support away from Scott Walker. “Mr. Trump’s bombastic ways have simultaneously made it all but impossible for those vying to be the alternative to Mr. Bush to emerge, and easier for Mr. Bush, the former Florida governor, to position himself as the serious and thoughtful alternative to a candidate who has upended the early nominating process.” Bush can’t have Trump as his running mate, unless he wants to run alongside a loose canon. So how would he keep Trump from running a third party campaign? Cabinet post?
John Sides interviews David Shor at The Monkey Cage on the topic, “Do early campaign polls tell us anything? Let’s ask a campaign data guru.” Much of their discussion is about the utility of early polls to political scientists (they agree that early polls don’t help much with outcome predictions). But I think they missed an important benefit of early polls, which is they help candidates to better hone their messaging.
Marian Cogan’s “Everyone Is Already Freaking Out Over the 2016 Election Polls” at New York Magazine has more to say about the misuse of early polling.
At The Upshot, Lynn Vavreck mulls over “2016 Endorsements: How and Why They Matter,” and shows that there is a relationship between a presidential candidate’s success and his/her endorsements. It’s just not quite so clear that it’s a causal relationship.
In his post at AlJazeera America, “Most Americans don’t vote in elections. Here’s why,” Demos research associate Sean McElwee contends that “The rise of the donor class and the influx of corporate cash have caused many voters to lose faith in politics.”
But many want to vote, but are still being denied their voting rights by Republican-driven suppressive state legislation and court rulings. Jim Rutenberg’s excellent “A Dream Undone” in the New York Times Magazine takes a thorough look “inside the 50-year campaign to roll back the Voting Rights Act of 1965.”
For Kasich’s campaign, there’s good news and bad news.

From “Latino turnout in congressional elections is low and falling” by Matthew Yglesias at Vox: “Overall turnout in 2014 was the lowest in a generation. Black turnout actually increased slightly over this period, but white turnout has fallen and Latino turnout has fallen a lot even as the Latino share of the population rose considerably…And this, to be clear, is turnout among eligible voters — i.e., US citizens over the age of 18. The overall Latino population in the United States is disproportionately likely to be too young to vote, so Hispanics are even more underweighted in actual congressional politics.”
At Daily Koz Leslie Salzillo flags a study by the CDC’s Violence Policy Center ranking the 50 states according to state firearm deaths in 2011. Guess which political party controls all of the top ten. As for the bottom ten states, where Americans are safest from firearm deaths, eight are solid blue states, with one (IA) purplish and one red (WI).
Washington Post syndicated columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. explains why “Americans are polarized but ambivalent.” Dionne notes “…the Pew Research Center released findings that should alarm Republicans. Its survey found that only 32 percent of Americans had a favorable view of the Republican Party — down nine points since January — while 60 percent had an unfavorable view. For Democrats, the numbers were 48 percent favorable (up two points) and 47 percent unfavorable.” Dionne cites TDS and adds, “One key finding, from pollster Stan Greenberg: Such voters are “open to an expansive Democratic economic agenda” but “are only ready to listen when they think that Democrats understand their deeply held belief that politics has been corrupted and government has failed.” This calls for not only “populist measures to reduce the control of big money and corruption” but also, as Mark Schmitt of the New America Foundation argued, “high-profile efforts to show that government can be innovative, accessible and responsive.”
Zogby, NBC/Marist, Economist/YouGov and CNN/ORC polls show Trump still leads in GOP race.
Not to be outdone in awful taste by Trump, Huck tries a little grotesque bomb-throwing of his own, and draws this response: “Cavalier analogies to the Holocaust are unacceptable,” said Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee. “Mike Huckabee must apologize to the Jewish community and to the American people for this grossly irresponsible statement.”
Dartunorro Clark reports on a new app at the Albany Times Union, via Government Technology: “Electorate literally puts information on elected officials into the palm of your hands,” Krans said. “The biggest impact comes when we marry easily accessible voting information with the power of existing social networks…[It] allows registered voters…to find out information on local, state and federal elected representatives. Additionally, it allows users to verify and link their voting record with their Facebook account to display their full voting record and history, see upcoming elections and endorse candidates and also see who their Facebook friends have endorsed.”
Laura Lorek of siliconhillsnews.com reports more “High Tech and Low Tech Solutions to Low Voter Turnout,” and notes “To encourage people to be more civically engaged and to vote is one of the latest challenges the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation took on. On Wednesday morning, the foundation announced the winners of its Knight News Challenge on Elections. The foundation received more than 1,000 submissions and awarded $3.2 million to 22 winners. “Ten of the winners will receive investments ranging from $200,000 to $525,000 each, while 12 early stage ideas will receive $35,000 each through the Knight Prototype Fund,” according to the Knight Foundation.” Loren adds, “The largest grant for $525,000 went to a project titled “Inside the 990 Treasure Trove” by the Center for Responsive Politics and Guidestar. The project seeks to better inform the public about who is funding campaigns through a partnership with Guidestar to reveal the sources of so-called “dark money.”
The Berkeley News reports on a new study “Does the American Dream Matter for Members of Congress? Social-Class Backgrounds and Roll-Call Votes,” from the Political Research Quarterly. Among the findings: “Having a working-class background tends to make members of Congress (especially Democrats) more liberal,” explained Grumbach. “There are other factors that make legislators more liberal, too, such as coming from a district with liberal voters, or being nonwhite or female — but coming from a working-class background is especially impactful.”…Grumbach observed that “almost all members of Congress are upper-class and held elite occupations before being elected to seats in Washington, D.C…Few Republicans with working-class experiences get elected to public office, and upper-class Republicans in Congress do not back government support programs for the working class as often as Democrats even if they did grow up in families of modest financial circumstances.”
Betsy Woodruff’s “The Walker Slayers Dish: How They Beat Him” may come in handy.

Rebecca Kaplan reports from CBS News that the Dems’ 2016 front-runner Hillary Clinton clarifies her position on TPP, in the wake of the House rejection of key provisions: “Let’s take the lemons and turn it into lemonade. Let’s see if there is a way to get to an agreement that does do what I expect it to do,” she said. She voiced her support for the worker retraining program, called Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA), but added, “I am willing to try now to see whether you can push to get rid of the objectionable parts to drive a harder bargain on some of the other parts and to provide more transparency so that the American people can actually see what will be in a proposed final deal.”..”If I were in the White House that’s what I’d be doing right now,” Clinton concluded.” And that may be what the present occupant of 1600 PA Avenue, who is no slouch at political chess, has wanted all along.
NYT columnist Paul Krugman reaffirms his conviction that TPP is a bad idea, and also notes, “Democrats, despite defeats in midterm elections, believe — rightly or wrongly — that the political wind is at their backs. Growing ethnic diversity is producing what should be a more favorable electorate; growing tolerance is turning social issues, once a source of Republican strength, into a Democratic advantage instead. Reagan was elected by a nation in which half the public still disapproved of interracial marriage; Mrs. Clinton is running to lead a nation in which 60 percent support same-sex marriage.”
Clinton may be getting most of the ink, video and bytes, but Eleanor Clift reports at The Daily Beast that “Bernie Sanders Is Building an Army to Take D.C.: It’ll take an army to change Washington, says the insurgent senator–and with the crowds he’s been drawing, he just might be building one.”
At The Upshot David Leonhardt presents a rather stunning map, showing “The North-South Divide on Two-Parent Families.” It’s not a shocker when you think about it, but it does illuminate the complexity of the south in American politics. Leonhart offers a number of insightful observations, including “…politically conservative states, for all their emphasis on family values, have long had high divorce rates.” Further, adds Leonhardt, “…the situation also has some important nuances. Above all, divorce is no longer the main reason that children do not grow up with both of their parents. Divorce has declined in recent years. So, however, has marriage, while single parenthood — and the number of children who never live with both parents — has risen sharply. Marriage and single parenthood don’t break down along the same red-blue lines that divorce does.”
“Just call me Jeb” could be a very problematic sell.
GOP Rep. Paul Ryan gets brutally told by Michigan’s Democratic congressman Sander Levin, after Ryan’s latest cheap shot at Obamacare, and Angry Bear got it all down: “What’s busted is not ACA But your attacks on it, endless attacks.”Sander Levin said calmly and deliberately. “Never coming up with a single comprehensive alternative all these years. So you sit as armchair critics while millions of people have insurance who never had it before. Millions of kids have insurance who would not otherwise have had it. People who have pre-existing conditions no longer are cancelled or can’t even get insurance. The donut hole is gone. Millions of people in lower income categories are now insured through Medicaid…Cost containment is beginning to work. The increase in cost net rate is going down. And so you are livid because it is getting better. That’s why you are livid…And the states that are denying their citizens further coverage under Medicaid, are essentially telling people, well get lost when it comes to healthcare…And you have a governor Mr. Chairman, who is running around this country talking about the evils of healthcare when millions of people are benefiting…Your frustration is millions and millions and millions of people are benefiting, have healthcare when they did not before.”
Scott Walker may be a “top-tier” candidate for the GOP nomination. But he is going to have a lot of trouble explaining why living standards for middle class citizens of his state are lagging so far behind those of neighboring Minnesota, under the leadership of its impressive Democratic Governor, Mark Dayton. Ann Markusen has the story at The American Prospect.
National Journal’s Shane Goldmacher explains why Facebook is “The Epicenter of the Presidential Race”: “There are new built-in Facebook tools that can help campaigns, too. Candidates can upload their databases of donor emails, find their corresponding profiles on the site, and ask Facebook to spit out ads to a “look-alike” universe of users whom they haven’t yet pitched for money. Or they can take the sign-ups from an event, upload them, and ask to advertise to people who look like them. While the best-funded campaigns will almost certainly do some of this modeling themselves, Facebook’s “look-alike” feature didn’t exist until 2013, and it promises to allow poorer campaigns to tap into sophisticated analytics on the cheap…BY FAR THE BIGGEST development for 2016 is video. “Video advertising wasn’t around in the 2012 cycle,” says Goudiss. “That’s going to be huge in 2016…Facebook says users log about 4 billion video views every day.”
Charles P. Pierce has a rollicking read at Esquire, riffing on the GOP presidential debate follies. He graciously presents “a modest proposal” for the GOP, accompanied by one of the best political cartoons of the 2015 silly season (Scott Walker must be represented by the little Koch sticker on the clown car).

Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has identified a source of ballooning discontent in America, which progressives must address. From his blog post:

As I travel around America, I’m struck by how utterly powerless most people feel.
The companies we work for, the businesses we buy from, and the political system we participate in all seem to have grown less accountable. I hear it over and over: They don’t care; our voices don’t count.
A large part of the reason is we have fewer choices than we used to have. In almost every area of our lives, it’s now take it or leave it.
Companies are treating workers as disposable cogs because most working people have no choice. They need work and must take what they can get.
Although jobs are coming back from the depths of the Great Recession, the portion of the labor force actually working remains lower than it’s been in over thirty years – before vast numbers of middle-class wives and mothers entered paid work.
Which is why corporations can get away with firing workers without warning, replacing full-time jobs with part-time and contract work, and cutting wages. Most working people have no alternative.
Consumers, meanwhile, are feeling mistreated and taken for granted because they, too, have less choice.
U.S. airlines, for example, have consolidated into a handful of giant carriers that divide up routes and collude on fares. In 2005 the U.S. had nine major airlines. Now we have just four.
It’s much the same across the economy. Eighty percent of Americans are served by just one Internet Service Provider – usually Comcast, AT&T, or Time-Warner.
The biggest banks have become far bigger. In 1990, the five biggest held just 10 percent of all banking assets. Now they hold almost 45 percent.
Giant health insurers are larger; the giant hospital chains, far bigger; the most powerful digital platforms (Amazon, Facebook, Google), gigantic.
All this means less consumer choice, which translates into less power.

The political consequences are also quite disturbing, as Reich explains:

…As voters we feel no one is listening because politicians, too, face less and less competition. Over 85 percent of congressional districts are considered “safe” for their incumbents in the upcoming 2016 election; only 3 percent are toss-ups.
In presidential elections, only a handful of states are now considered “battlegrounds” that could go either Democratic or Republican.
So, naturally, that’s where the candidates campaign. Voters in most states won’t see much of them. These voters’ votes are literally taken for granted.
Even in toss-up districts and battle-ground states, so much big money is flowing in that average voters feel disenfranchised.

Reich is on to something here. The decline in personal power felt by millions has happened so slowly that most of us take it for granted, as if it’s just ‘the way things are’ and there isn’t much we can do about it. The rioting in Ferguson and Baltimore may also be more an expression of the growing sense of powerlessness than anything else.
Reich goes on to identify a common denominator that feeds the spreading feelings of powerlessness — the lack of choice. He stops short of suggesting remedies. But it is clear that Democratic political leaders face both a crisis and opportunity here: If Democratic leaders fail to address the growing sense of powerlessness in a direct way, we shouldn’t be surprised if voters keep it home or cast their ballots for other parties.
But there are things that can be done about it, such as intensified voter registration and turnout drives, reinvigorating America’s labor movement, energizing the co-op and credit union movements and launching boycotts and stockholder’s campaigns to compel corporations to conduct business with a greater sense of social responsibility, to name just a few possibilities. If Democratic leaders will directly address the underlying causes of powerlessness in a way that average Americans will find credible, we just may be able to win something that now seems far out of reach — a Democratic landslide and a real working majority in congress.

From “Democrats’ hunt for the white working-class male voter,” Doyle McManus’s L.A. Times column: “…[Stan] Greenberg has proposed adding another piece to the Democrats’ message: a more serious commitment to both campaign reform and a leaner, more efficient federal government…White working-class voters “are skeptical of government and skeptical of Democrats,” he told me last week. “They’re surprised to hear Democrats say they want to change politics and change government.”..That message, he said, “is a precondition to reaching them on other issues.””
For the definitive in-depth take on Democratic prospects for winning more votes from this pivotal demographic, you won’t find more astute, data-driven analyses by a host of top experts than the essays in TDS’s The White Working-Class Roundtable Newsletter.
Susan Page reports at USA Today that “In a nationwide USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll, those surveyed say by 51%-35% that it’s no longer practical for the Supreme Court to ban same-sex marriages because so many states have legalized them. One reason for a transformation in public views on the issue: Close to half say they have a gay or lesbian family member or close friend who is married to someone of the same sex.”
At cbsnews.com Rebecca Kaplan profiles former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley’s strengths and weaknesses as a voice for Democratic progressives in the presidential primaries ahead.
In “Will you miss the biggest story of the 2016 presidential election?,” Taegan Goddard notes at The Week: “…Obama’s political skills were only a small part of why he ultimately won. It was his strategy of competing in and winning early caucus states — places like Colorado, Idaho, Kansas and Minnesota — that allowed him to rack up delegates…In the general election, “the Obama campaign could reach nearly all of the young people in America through Facebook. Democratic strategists also realized that Romney had a minimal presence on Facebook, so they could run a mostly positive campaign about Obama with very little competition from their opponent.” So Goddard cautions: “Don’t immediately dismiss all process stories you see over the next 18 months. Just question whether you’re getting the right ones.”
Here’s one reason why the Libertarians are not going to be a unified force for Republicans in 2016.
The GOP’s top union-basher, Scott Walker tries out ‘regular guy’ optics, reports Robert Costa at The Washington Post: “Calling voters “folks” and boasting about his cut-rate suits from Jos. A. Bank…Pointing to his rolled-up blue sleeves, Walker said he has been buying “shirts like this” for decades and that he is a devoted fan of Harley-Davidson motorcycles, which he plans to ride through New Hampshire’s 10 counties.” Can the NASCAR hat be far behind?
Those who would dismiss the argument that demographic trends strongly favor Democrats in the 2016 election should ponder the concluding sentences from E.J. Dionne, Jr.’s latest column: “In 2012, Mitt Romney carried 59 percent of the white vote and he carried independents. In 2004, this would have elected him president. In 2000, it would have given him an Electoral College landslide. In 2012, it gave him second place.”
It’s not that most voters want to “soak the rich” or favor “income redistribution.” Ditch the jargon and try asking them if they favor more fairness in taxation and better wages for the poor.