There’s not much a political party out of the White House and lacking majorities in the Senate and House can do to challenge the President’s State of the Union Address in real time. But, stewing in silence should not be an option, while the president serves up a rancid mash of nasty stereotypes, gross exaggerations, lies and hypocritcal pieties.

Granted, the optics of the SOTU address are rigged from the get-go, favoring the President, particularly one who has majorities in both houses of congress. And the Republicans have to be credited with making the most of it, putting on a sparkly, glitch-free show for the TV audience. Riddled though his speech was with toxic ingredients, Trump’s delivery was sharp and uncharacteristically disciplined.

Not that the substantive elements of Trump’s presentation were all that impressive. As Ed Kilgore notes in his New York Magazine coverage of the SOTU, Trump “failed to give Americans the details that separate bogus and magical promises from an actual, realizable agenda” and “And there was nothing at all about how to pay for whatever comes next after Obamacare.”

Kilgore’s colleague at New York, Jonathan Chait focuses on Trump’s insincere pleas for bipartisanship, and concludes:

On the whole, Trump’s agenda shows a president who has not departed from the plutocratic agenda that has dominated his party for a quarter-century, but only added grotesque, cruel, racist, and deeply stupid selling points. He has nothing to offer a party not enamored of the opportunity to carry out a massive and historic upward redistribution of wealth.

At The Nation, John Nichols notes a worrisome uptick in Trump’s enthusiasm for increasing the already bloated military budget at the expense of jobs and other human needs:

The rhetoric was, by the standards of this presidency, disciplined. But the specifics were few. Only toward the end did the president get specific, saying, “I am sending the Congress a budget that rebuilds the military, eliminates the Defense sequester, and calls for one of the largest increases in national defense spending in American history.”

Trump was not at all specific about paying for that increase—aside from mentioning the fact that he had “placed a hiring freeze on non-military and non-essential Federal workers.” But his administration has been clear about its hope that the money will come from deep cuts to domestic programs.

At The Daily Beast, Michael Tomasky observed,

All the Republicans applauded, it seemed, but remember that polls are coming out right now showing that their position on this is now the minority position. I think Mitch McConnell knows this in his bones. I’m not sure that the positions Trump stated tonight on health care are positions that can win 60 votes in the Senate, and I’d wager that McConnell isn’t sure they can, either.

 This speech will get very positive reviews. But remember—government isn’t a speech. Today, before this speech, with little fanfare, Trump signed into law an NRA-backed bill that will allow more mentally ill people to buy guns. And remember, there is still Russia. That is not going and cannot go away.

The following post is by Keith Gaby from the EDF Action.

The Trump administration is in the midst of one of the most chaotic presidential launches in American history. Intelligence agencies are reportedly withholding information from the White House for fear of it being passed to Moscow, a senior general has publicly fretted about the stability of the government, and the president creates daily distractions with tweets and false information.

By historical standards, the president is deeply unpopular. A recent CNN poll showed that just 44% of the American people believe he is doing a good job – in what should be his “honeymoon” period. By contrast, a majority of Americans approved of the job performance of the last nine newly elected presidents in their first months in office, averaging a positive rating of 61%.

There were almost as many people (43%) who had “strongly” negative feelings as approved of him at all. How does that compare to former presidents? At this point in their first terms, strong disapproval was Reagan 9%, Clinton 16%, Bush 9%, and Obama 18%. In other words, intense feelings against Trump are more than triple the average of four of his immediate predecessors.  Since intensity drives activism and voting in mid-term elections, this is a dangerous sign for the president and his allies in Congress.

The administration’s early moves on environmental policy will not likely be met with favor. During the campaign, Trump said he would dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency and eliminate 70% of governemnt rules and safeguards. The leader of his EPA transition suggested cutting the agency’s staff by two-thirds and the president nominated a famous opponent of clean air and water rules, Scott Pruitt, to lead EPA. But polling suggests moves like these will not sit well, even with those who voted for Trump. A Morning Consult poll revealed that 78% of Trump voters want the same or stronger federal limits on air pollution.

Trump has also said he is not a “big believer” in climate change and wants to end the EPA’s Clean Power Plan, which limits carbon pollution. But the same poll showed that 61% of his voters want to “require US companies to reduce carbon emissions that cause climate change.”

The public at large, of course, is even less disposed to giving industry whatever it wants. A Quinnipiac Poll found that just 39% of voters want the administration to “remove regulations on businesses and corporations” and only 29% want to end rules “designed to limit climate change”.

Until the next presidential election, the most important impact of the president’s unpopularity will be the effect it has on members of Congress. With his party in control of both houses, and 10 Democratic senators from Trump states up for re-election in 2018, a popular president should be able to push through his agenda. But Congress is watching the spectacle at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue warily. Aligning themselves with a failing president is a dangerous thing.

However, they are not ready to abandon him yet. Because a primary challenge is often the greatest threat to their political careers, most members of the House and Senate focus on views within their own party. At the moment, nearly 90% of Republican voters are sticking with Trump. But even in a highly partisan atmosphere, the missteps of the administration will eventually begin to drag on voters who are now giving Trump the benefit of the doubt as a fellow-Republican. (The polling cited above was taken before the resignation of Michael Flynn as National Security Advisor and the accompanying revelations about Russia. In a Gallup survey taken after the Flynn events, Trump’s job approval had sunk, at least for the moment, to 38%.) And only one-third of Independent voters approve of Mr. Trump.

Despite all that’s happened and historically low approval ratings, the Trump administration still threatens our most important environmental protections. With just executive powers, he could sharply curtail enforcement and strip away important safeguards. But the president’s initial unpopularity, and the incompetence of his White House staff provide progressives with a unique opportunity to limit the damage.

“DNC race in rear view, Bernie Sanders heads to Kansas to rip Republican policies” — Love this headline and the story by Dave Weigel at PowerPost. As Sanders says in the article, “One of my goals as outreach chair of the Senate Democrats is to do everything I can to make the Democratic Party competitive in red states…I think the Democratic Party has been embarrassingly bad at that recently, and we need to expand our reach.” Wouldn’t it be great if a team of top Democrats began visiting states controlled by Republicans and called attention to metrics of their failures? If they can’t visit, then have the national Democratic leaders hammer away at the state GOP establishments on twitter and Facebook. Sow the seeds of a real 50-state strategy with some message discipline displayed by national leaders, as well as local Democrats.

Another encouraging story about a successful Democratic uprising: Paul Blumenthal’s “Buoyed By Anti-Trump Activism, Democrat Wins Delaware Special Election:An army of volunteers, many from out of state, flooded the state Senate district for Stephanie Hansen” at HuffPo. As Blumenthal reports, “The last time her opponent, John Marino, ran in this district, in 2014, he lost by just 2 points. [Stephanie] Hansen’s 58-42 percent victory over Marino on Saturday ensured that Democrats will maintain control of the state Senate. It also notched a big Donald Trump-era win for a new generation of Democratic activists shocked into action by the November election.”

Greg Sargent gets down to raw specifics in his Plum Line post “Trump will likely sell out his working-class white base. Here’s how.” In one section, Sargent writes, “…Trump strongly signaled to working-class white voters that, while he’d repeal the Affordable Care Act, he isn’t like those other mean old Republicans when it comes to government’s role in expanding health care to the poor and sick. He and his advisers recently insisted that under the GOP replacement, no one will lose coverage. But they’ve already backed off that promise, instead signaling that they may embrace the block-granting of Medicaid, which would probably lead to cuts over time. The bottom line: The Trump/GOP replacement is likely to end Obamacare’s effort to create a universal coverage guarantee.”

For those who believe that Democrats can regain lost ground by focusing more on economic issues, Alexander Burns has a New York Times article of interest, “Angling for a Comeback, Democratic Governors Sharpen Focus on Jobs.” As Burns explains, “Gov. Gina M. Raimondo of Rhode Island, a Democrat who is in her first term, said her party had too often failed to put jobs and economic opportunity at the forefront of its agenda. Democrats had erred, she said, by treating jobs merely as one issue in a “check list” of positions…“My own view is, we have to say: The whole game is job growth,” Ms. Raimondo said. “People feel left behind because they are left behind. People feel the playing field isn’t level because it’s not level. So let’s level it.”…Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington State, the vice chairman of the Democratic Governors Association, said Democrats had to make job growth their organizing theme on all subjects, including immigration and the Affordable Care Act. The most effective attacks on Mr. Trump, he said, would cast the president’s policies as harmful to the economy. “We as a party have to wrap all of our messages and all of our issues in a central jobs and economic message…”

Tip of the hat to both Rep. Keith Ellison and former Secretary of Labor Thomas Perez, the latter just elected head of the DNC, for the classy way they handled their rivalry, despite some acrimony among their respective followers. As NYT’s Jonathan Martin reports, “Taking the microphone from Mr. Perez, Mr. Ellison pleaded with his fervent backers: “We don’t have the luxury to walk out of this room divided…Directly appealing to his disappointed supporters, Mr. Ellison said, “If they trust me, they need to come on and trust Tom Perez as well.” Perez, who also called for unity, is expected to leverage some of Ellison’s interesting ideas for maximizing voter turnout.

In his column, “Bannon’s dangerous ‘deconstruction’,” E. J. Dionne, Jr. provides a crisp description of Bannon’s use of the expression “deconstruction of the administrative state” and what it means on the ground: “In practice, this is a war on a century’s worth of work to keep our air and water clean; our food, drugs and workplaces safe; the rights of employees protected; and the marketplace fair and unrigged. It’s one thing to make regulations more efficient and no more intrusive than necessary. It’s another to say that all the structures of democratic government designed to protect our citizens from the abuses of concentrated private power should be swept away…Trump and Bannon are happy to expand the reach of the state when it comes to policing, immigration enforcement, executive-branch meddling in the work of investigative agencies, and the browbeating of individual companies that offend the president in one way or another. The parts of government they want to dismantle are those that stand on the side of citizens against powerful interests.”

In bad news for Betsy Devos, a new Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll finds that a healthy majority, “58 percent of Iowans oppose taking public school funds to help parents pay for non-public schools, while only 35 percent support it,” reports Mackenzie Ryan in the Register. It’s “just” Iowa, conservatives will say. But ‘just Iowa’ was a heartland Trump state, and a 23 percent gap (+/- 3.5 m.o.e.) is pretty significant, especially because Iowa’s popular Republican governor Terry Branstad and a host of state Republican leaders supported it. Secretary of Education Devos has been an ardent advocate of  public school privatization schemes.

John Schuppe of NBC news shares a revealing quote by Speaker John Boehner at a recent health care forum: “In the 25 years I served in the United States Congress, Republicans never, ever, one time, agreed on what a healthcare proposal should look like. Not once.” When the ‘repeal and replace’ follies are all played out, the only thing certain is that some major provisions of Obamacare will endure because they are higly popular, but they will call the package something else. Whether the ‘replacement’ will actually function remains much in doubt.

CNN’s Jake Tapper sticks it to Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, who had the hypocrisy to blast the New York Times for not noting his birthplace accurately: “I imagine it must be really annoying when someone puts out false info about where you were born,” tweets Tapper. “Must really bother you!!”

After watching and pondering Donald Trump’s speech to a large roomful of conservatives at CPAC, I no longer had any doubt about the 45th president’s relationship with the GOP and its long-dominant faction. I wrote up my conclusions for New York:

Amazingly, Trump spoke for an extended period to an exclusively conservative audience and never used the terms liberty or limited government or free enterprise. He used the word freedom exactly twice. Once was in a reference to the TPP agreement being a threat to “our economic freedom,” a characterization that — until recently — few mainstream conservatives would support. The other was in boasting about his election win:

“The victory and the win were something that really was dedicated to a country and people that believe in freedom, security and the rule of law. Our victory…(APPLAUSE)… was a victory and the win for conservative values.”

That was also the speech’s only clear reference, explicitly or implicitly, to the brand of conservative values that have dominated the discourse at CPAC for decades.

Trump did offer a lot of crowd-pleasing lines, roughly divided equally between attacks on common enemies like the non-conservative elements of the news media, and promises to pursue specific policies most conservatives like, from defense spending increases to tax cuts to deregulation to aggressive exploitation of fossil fuels.

But invariably Trump framed his policies not with the traditional memes of movement conservatism, but as expressions of his one clear guiding principle: nationalism. Or, as he put it: “The core conviction of our movement is that we are a nation that will put its own citizens first.”

While patriotism, of course, is a common touchstone for American conservatives (and for liberals, though conservatives often have trouble acknowledging it), nationalism disassociated from the idea that America distinctively stands for universal values — e.g., freedom or “liberty” or limited government — is not a value Republicans have traditionally embraced. Presumably many of the same people who cheered Trump at CPAC also cheered George W. Bush when he used to talk about freedom and democracy being America’s gift to the world, a gift worth fighting to defend and extend — rhetoric Ronald Reagan also used throughout his career (otherwise his favorite rhetorical reference to America as “a shining city on a hill” is nonsensical).

The idea that Trump isn’t asking conservatives to change that much simply is not true. He’s asking them to acknowledge that discarding their most cherished positions in order to vanquish their foes and achieve their immediate goals is absolutely necessary, with his electoral victory after the defeat of more conventional leaders like McCain and Romney being the proof. And thus he represents the eternal temptation of right-bent political thinkers and actors everywhere and at every time to overcome their scruples and embrace “populist” demagogues.

As Trump ended his speech and the room was filled with his odd campaign anthem, the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” for the first time I saw the song as entirely appropriate. Conservatives cannot elect a president who talks only or mostly of freedom and capitalism or of those Western values that transcend the nation-state. But they can win with Trump, so they’ll get what they need, at the mere expense of their principles, if not their souls.

It’s a deal with the devil most of them seem more than willing to take.

Here we go again with yet another article about Dems having to chose between a ‘big tent’ vs. ‘turnout the base’ strategy. Clare Foran has some interesting observations on the topic in her article in The Atlantic, “Can the Democratic Party Win Back Voters It Lost to Trump? Liberals may need to decide whether to focus on energizing their base or expanding their coalition.”

As the Democratic Party contemplates what’s next in the wake of its defeat in the presidential election, liberals may have to decide what matters more: Building a big tent party where far-left voters and moderate centrists can co-exist even if they occasionally disagree on policy and strategy, or focusing on the demands of the party’s progressive base, potentially creating a more like-minded and ideologically rigid coalition in the process.

In an effort to persuade Democrats to embrace a big-tent strategy, Third Way, a center-left think tank, argues in a new report that voters aren’t necessarily rigidly attached to a particular party, and might be won over as a result. The report, titled “Why Demography Does Not Equal Destiny,” concludes that demographic change in the United States won’t deliver Democrats a winning electoral coalition by default, but that there are still opportunities for the party to convince Americans to vote for Democratic candidates even if they haven’t always done so in the past

….[Third Way V.P.] Erickson Hatalsky argues that voting trends suggest that some voters swing back and forth between the two parties rather than remain consistently loyal to one party or the other. For example, hundreds of counties across the United States flipped from voting for Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election to voting for Trump in 2016. Some congressional districts also delivered victory for Trump while at the same time reelecting Democratic members of Congress, like Cheri Bustos in Illinois and Matt Cartwright in Pennsylvania.

Foran has Alan Abramowitz present the counter-argument, that investing more in turning out the Democratic base is a more promising strategy:

Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University, is skeptical that Democrats can significantly grow their base by converting large numbers of either Republicans or Trump voters. He believes Democrats would be more effective if they focused on increasing turnout of core Democratic constituencies, such as African American, Hispanic, and younger voters.

“There’s a reason why campaigns are devoting more and more resources trying to energize the base rather than trying to persuade people. It’s because trying to persuade people is extremely difficult in this day and age,” Abramowitz said in an interview. “That’s not to say there won’t ever be any movement back and forth between parties,” he added, “but I just don’t see there being any large number of movable voters.”

Abramowitz notes that looking back at the voting behavior of independents spanning the past several decades may fail to adequately recognize that party loyalties are much stronger today than in the 1970s and 80s. Instead, he points to increasing ideological division among voters in recent years and what he calls “negative partisanship”—a phenomenon whereby animosity toward the opposing party becomes a driving factor behind how a person decides to vote—to argue that there likely isn’t a significant number of voters up for grabs.

But few Democratic strategists are saying that it must be all about one or the other option. It’s more a matter of allocating resources optimaly between turning out the base and targeting persuadable voters, including those who have voted for Republicans.

There is a third category, however, which doesn’t fit neatly into either the ‘persuadable’ or ‘base’ voter pidgeon holes, non-voters who are waking up to the reality that their lives are indeed affected by politics, thanks in large part to Trump’s scary extremism. Review the articles about the women’s marches across America leading up to Trump’s inauguration, and you will find numerous quotes from women and some men saying they have not been politically-involved, but now they are worried.

This is a new constituency for Democrats. It’s not that they are ‘persuadables’. It’s more that they are now available. Nobody knows how large is this segment of new likely voters. But Democrats could use some creative ideas for reaching them.

Going into this week’s annual CPAC conference, I thought it would be a good idea to examine the power dynamics between the new regime and the conservative movement that once kept its difference from Trump. I did so at New York earlier this week:

The chief celebrant [at CPAC] will, of course, be the president of the United States, Donald Trump, who welcomes every chance to display his political success and bask in the adulation of people who very likely viewed him as a sideshow act during his previous appearances at CPAC in 2011, 2013, and 2015. This year’s CPAC caps the remarkable process whereby this heretic not only became acceptable to conservatives during the course of the 2016 campaign, but is rapidly placing his stamp on conservatism as we know it —in the past a durable ideology that transcended constant arguments over strategy and tactics. It is safe to say that a lot, perhaps a majority, of those who will hear Trump speak Friday morning could not have imagined the scene just two years ago. So the question that will come up again and again at CPAC is whether Trump is adjusting himself to conservatism now that he leads America’s conservative party, or whether conservatism is fundamentally changing to accommodate his power and voter appeal.

Luckily for Trump, CPAC is occurring before any major rifts have opened up between his nascent administration and the Republican leadership of Congress. So the mood is likely to be upbeat, with various factions on the right all seeing what they want to see in the road just ahead. Don’t let the brouhaha over Milo Yiannopoulos’s scheduled and then canceled appearance fool you, though: The furor he aroused among conservatives was more about issues relating to his provocative treatment of his own gay sexuality (very recently CPAC was roiled by arguments as to whether pro-gay-rights conservative groups were even welcome as paying sponsors of the event) than about his role as a legitimizer of the seedier side of the alt-right. Yes, an ACU board member is scheduled to assail the alt-right in a speech Thursday morning. But that may be part of a process to limn the limits within which Trumpian nationalism will be fully embraced.

And embraced it most definitely will be. The Washington Post’s veteran conservative watchers Robert Costa and David Weigel had this assessment:

“This year’s CPAC schedule represents a marked shift toward Trump’s politics and penchant for showmanship. Nigel Farage, the pro-Brexit politician from Britain who spoke to an emptying room in 2015, will speak the same morning as Trump. Reality TV star Dog the Bounty Hunter will appear with a super PAC trying to draft Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, a regular Trump supporter on the cable news circuit, into Wisconsin’s 2018 Senate race.

“’There used to be Pat Buchanan’s people, the populist ­revolt-types and the establishment of the anti-establishment, who’d get a third of the vote in the primaries and we’d beat them back,’” said Mike Murphy, a veteran Republican consultant who led a super PAC that supported former Florida governor Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign. ‘Now they’ve hijacked the Republican Party.’”

Murphy is the rare bitter-end #NeverTrump conservative who is still speaking out against the new regime. The vast majority of former Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and John Kasich supporters who are going along with Trump, with or without private misgivings, are probably more likely to think CPAC is seducing Trump rather than succumbing to his sinister blandishments. But it is hard to deny the different tone of this particular CPAC. I count eight separate appearances by Brietbart writers on the agenda. The very first speaker when the full event begins tomorrow is Kellyanne Conway. Later that day Stephen Bannon and Reince Priebus will appear together. As Costa and Weigel explain, the symbolism of that appearance is not lost on anyone:

By sitting with Priebus, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, Bannon aims to showcase how the party guard and formerly obscure players on the right are in power and working together to enact a new kind of conservative agenda, the official said, one that is directed at reaching working-class voters who are disillusioned with the global economy and elites.
The new crowd at CPAC will displace certain once-prominent members of the old crowd. From 2007 through 2015, the CPAC presidential straw poll was won four times by Mitt Romney, twice by Ron Paul, and three times by Rand Paul. Romney and the Pauls will be nowhere in sight at this CPAC. That may help answer the underlying question of (to borrow Aretha Franklin’s phrase) who’s zooming who in the relationship between conservatism and Team Trump.

“To resist the Trump presidency effectively, Democrats have to go beyond the defensive posture of relying exclusively or even primarily on protests, demonstrations and other forms of opposition. Instead, Democrats must seek to establish an independent and strong political base from which to articulate an alternative vision for the country. One way to do this would be for the governors of the blue states — California, New York, Oregon, Washington, Illinois, Connecticut and Colorado, to name some of the mightiest in numbers and weight — to form a very public council to articulate that alternative vision and publicly seek to make that vision a reality within their respective states: a vision that includes universal health care, strong support for labor unions, a humanitarian approach to immigrants and refugees, protection of the environment, among other morally necessary and compelling elements…This kind of public group stance by those representing the people who actually provided the popular vote majority for Hillary Clinton would be the assertion of a positive vision supported by a real political base to realize that vision. It would give people everywhere a sense of hope and strength from which to fight the larger national battle. And it would offer up a highly visible, positive alternative worldview to Trump’s dystopian picture of social reality that lacks any idealistic social elements.” – from “Going on the Offensive: A State-Based Strategy for the Democratic Party” at Truthout by Peter Gabel, editor-at-large of Tikkun magazine and author of Another Way of Seeing: Essays on Transforming Law, Politics, and Culture.

The Upshot’s Nate Cohn is geting some buzz with his post, “Democrats’ Best Bet to Retake the House? Follow the Sun.” Cohn explains, “Mrs. Clinton’s success in Orange County, and in well-educated and Hispanic areas elsewhere in the Sun Belt, helped her win the popular vote — though there was no payoff in the Electoral College. But it’s districts like these that will decide whether the Democrats can make a serious run at control of the House…There is no guarantee that the Democrats can put the House in play, even if Mr. Trump’s approval ratings remain as low as they are now or slip further. The Republicans have so many safe seats that they could even survive a so-called wave election like the ones that swept Democrats to power in 2006 and out of power in 2010. The Democrats need 24 seats to retake the House…But whether the Democrats can do it will come down to places like Orange County, which is more populous than Iowa. Four congressional districts that have at least some territory in the county still have Republican representatives, and all four were carried by Mrs. Clinton…It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that the road to a Democratic House begins and ends at Laguna Beach.”

At The Plum Line Greg Sargent, who likes Cohn’s analysis, believes the 2018 outcome may turn on the answer to a key question: “One of the big questions in American politics right now is how deep public support really is for the agenda loosely known as “Trumpism.” Did the 2016 election represent a fluke-like confluence of factors that enabled Trump to eke out a narrow electoral college win, despite having his worldview repudiated in the popular vote? Or are we in the midst of a genuine turn in public opinion — away from the inclusive, cosmopolitan pluralism that seemed to be gaining ground and toward restrictive, America-first, wall-them-off nationalism?

In his post at The Fix, “Donald Trump is losing his war with the media,” Aaron Blake notes “A new poll from Quinnipiac University suggests that while people may be broadly unhappy with the mainstream media, they still think it’s more credible than Trump. The president regularly accuses the press of “fake news,” but people see more “fake news” coming out of his own mouth…The poll asked who registered voters “trust more to tell you the truth about important issues.” A majority — 52 percent — picked the media. Just 37 percent picked Trump…The poll did find that registered voters by a narrow margin think the media has treated Trump unfairly, with 50 percent saying they disapproved of the coverage of Trump and 45 percent approving. But voters are even more critical of Trump’s treatment of the media, with 61 percent disapproving and 35 percent approving…Even 23 percent of Republicans say Trump is mistreating the media, and independents disapprove 59-35.”

In his  Politico post “Poll: Support for Obamacare is rising” Steven Shepard writes “…A new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll shows voters are now split evenly on the law. Forty-five percent of registered voters approve of the law, the poll shows, and 45 percent disapprove…Of nine separate provisions of the law tested in the poll, more poll respondents want to repeal only one — the individual mandate that Americans purchase health insurance — than want to keep it…Other provisions are resoundingly popular. Nearly two-thirds of voters, 65 percent, want to keep prohibiting insurance companies from denying coverage to patients with pre-existing conditions, including 59 percent of Republicans. Sixty-three percent want to keep allowing those younger than 26 years of age to stay on their parents’ plan, including 56 percent of Republicans…Voters even want to keep provisions of the law opposed by most Republicans. Only a quarter want to repeal requiring businesses with more than 50 full-time employees to provide health insurance, while 59 percent want to keep it. Just 28 percent want to repeal requirements that insurance companies cover birth-control medication, and 55 percent want to keep it. And one-third, 33 percent, want to repeal taxes on medical devices, while slightly more, 39 percent, want to keep those taxes in place.”

Told:

Lanae Erickson Hatalsky and Jim Kessler, both vice presidents of the centrist think tank Third Way, write in their Washington Post op-ed, “Why demographics weren’t — and won’t be — destiny for Democrats” that “Democrats need to dig themselves out of a big hole from state legislative races on up, and it starts by treating voters as more than a check box on a census form. It will require building a big-tent coalition based on values and experiences, not just demographic groups, and rethinking the party’s pitch and policies to respond to the needs and concerns of Americans across the country, not just in cities and on coasts. Only if the Democratic Party can transform itself to meet those goals will it be ready to counter Trump and his noxious, dangerous strain of right-wing populism over the long term.”

NYT columnist David Leonhardt explains why “The Democratic Base Isn’t Enough“: “Winning back the House and Senate requires doing better in heavily white, nonmetropolitan America, which tends to be conservative…Democrats would be crazy to alienate the growing voting groups, such as millennials, Latinos andAsian-Americans, that now support the party so strongly. The answer for the party is almost surely more complex than simply moving to the right. Instead, it likely revolves around an economic message that appeals to both center and left…But if Democrats want to return to power — not just in the White House, but in Congress and at the state level too — they need a strategy that appeals to more white voters.”

Well, here’s a telling moment of candor from Montana GOP Chairman Jeff Essman, as reported by Tom Lutey of The Billings Gazette: “In an email to party members, Jeff Essmann warned Republicans the mail-in election would “give the Democrats an inherent advantage in close elections due to their ability to organize large numbers of unpaid college students and members of public employee unions to gather ballots by going door to door….At issue is state Senate Bill 503, which would require a mail ballot election this spring when Montanans are likely to vote to replace U.S. Rep. Ryan Zinke, a Republican nominated by President Donald Trump to be Interior secretary. The Senate is expected to vote on Zinke’s confirmation next week. A special election would follow within 85 to 100 days.”

In his Boston Globe column, “Renewing the Democrats — and America,” Richard North Patterson’s lede shares an ominous statistic:

WHY HAVE DEMOCRATS struggled to defeat President Trump’s most objectionable cabinet nominees? Because Hillary Clinton’s 3 million popular vote margin obscures this nettlesome fact: Outside California, Massachusetts, and New York, Donald Trump won by 4 million votes.

Patterson was making the point that Trump’s popular vote totals were broadly impressive outside those three states. Indeed, this is the kind of statistic Trump supporters will use to justify their “mandate,” such as it is. But, if Clinton had won Florida and North Carolina she would be the new president. There are many such cherry-picked alternative scenarios favoring either Clinton or Trump, none of which adequately reflect the complex totality of America very well.

When you factor in the votes of third and fourth party candidates, Trump lost the popular vote by more than 10,600,000, hardly a mandate to force unwanted legislation or executive orders on the majority of voters. Not that he will ever admit it, claiming as he still does that he won a popular vote majority, which was ‘stolen’ and is not reflected in the official count.

Trump clearly hopes to dazzle the public with his mighty juggernaut that runs on hot air and outright lies, to an extent never before seen in the White House. Instead of picking a moderate cabinet, or one with both conservatives and liberals, to indicate that he respected the real popular vote and wanted to win broad sympathy for his bipartisan efforts, he thought he could bluff his way into stampeding a fearful congress, egged on no doubt, by the likes of Bannon, Flynn and other extremists in his circle.

Call it a missed opportunity. A Republican who charted a more moderate course might have been able to build popular support to the point where he could actually pass legislation and break the partisan deadlock in congress. That would have required real leadership, the kind that strives to bring people together, rather than drive them even further apart. Apparently, that was never a consideration. Trump’s governing philosophy is the polar opposite of he Lincoln/Obama strategy of reaching out to adversaries and building unity.

Trump has chosen to govern from his ever-dwindling base of resentful authoritarians, who get their jollies bashing liberals, joined by wealthy elites who benefit from right-wing economic policies. By all appearances, this is about a third of the electorate at most, and shrinking. Many of those who voted for him are abandoning ship, as it becomes increasingly clear that he has no intention of actually helping the working-class voters who enabled his electoral college majority. His “disapproval’ poll figures are already setting records early in his presidency.

In his column, Patterson does share some good ideas, urging that “a responsive Democratic party can provide education and retraining for the new economy; strengthen public schools; diminish student debt; and make college free for those in need.” Democrats have supported those policies, but somehow, have failed to get any credit for doing so. Also

Universal health care prevents illness from ruining lives and draining our collective wealth. Rebuilding infrastructure — roads, airports, internet access, energy grids — creates jobs and strengthens our economy. Tax breaks? Former Democratic National Committe chairman Howard Dean suggests they go to businesses that invest in regions left behind.

This vision of national renewal cuts across age, ethnicity and class. Further, Dean believes, Trump is repelling young people who embrace inclusiveness, reproductive choice, and combating climate change. Last year’s election showed them that disengagement breeds disaster; now the party must become their vehicle.

The voters leaving the Trump ship are not quite ready to get on board with the Democratic Party, which has yet to successfully brand itself as the credible alternative for working people, or the party of “national renewal,” to use Patterson’s term. Democrats have the right policies, but they have failed convince the public as a whole that they intend to serve first and foremost, as champions of America’s workers of all races.

The prevailing image of the Democrats is one of an umbrella party sheltering a gaggle of different interest groups, but lacking a central message of incorruptible support for working people and their families. That has to change. When it does, a new era of Democratic-driven progress can finally begin.

The following post by Keith Gaby is cross-posted from the Environmental Defense Fund:

The Trump administration’s stumbling start – daily controversies, “alternative facts,” historically low approval ratings and much more – doesn’t mean the president and his allies can’t carry out plans to undermine decades of environmental progress.

But the fact that their views are unpopular with the American people, and that there’s been a massive mobilization to fight back, does mean we have a good chance to protect much of what we’ve gained.

The attacks from the White House and Congress have been coming fast since Trump took office.

• The House has voted to end a rule that limits methane pollution from oil and gas leaks and saves taxpayers millions of dollars every year – a hat trick by lawmakers that’s fiscally irresponsible, damages our health and accelerates climate warming.

• The House also passed bills to hobble agencies from developing health and safety rules on clean air, worker protections and food safety.

• As many as 118 House members co-sponsored a bill to amend the Clean Air Act to prohibit federal agencies from limiting carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride – all dangerous climate pollutants. The bill would declare them not to be pollutants under the law, despite decades of scientific evidence showing they contribute to climate change.

• Several new House bills would weaken the Clean Water Act and eliminate the latest updates to the Good Neighbor Rule, which limits air pollution that floats from one state into another. How the state on the receiving end is supposed to deal with pollution coming from outside its borders is unclear.

This week brought a new rash of assaults, some shockingly radical. One bill consists of a single sentence, “The Environmental Protection Agency shall terminate on Dec. 31, 2018.”

The agency of 15,000 employees who have saved the lives of countless Americans and transformed our nation into a dramatically cleaner and healthier place would simply go away.

Odds are that Congress won’t go that far, but the fact that three members of the U.S. House of Representatives have sponsored it shows just how extreme some elected officials have become.

It is true that President Trump said during the campaign he wanted to dismantle the EPA as we know it, explaining he didn’t like limits on big business. In other words, we were warned and given an explanation. But, like Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts said, we are nevertheless persisting in fighting back.

This week, Environmental Defense Fund filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act asking for documents on the Trump transition team’s advice for overhauling the EPA, including a reported “Action Plan” that called from drastic changes to the agency. It’s critical that these plans be made transparent and available for public scrutiny.

Our advocacy partner, EDF Action, has also spent more than $1 million fighting against the confirmation of Scott Pruitt, the anti-EPA crusader nominated to run the agency – and on ads running across the country against overturning the methane waste rule and other health and safety protections.

We must hold members of Congress who voted for these bills accountable.

The battle, in other words, is fully engaged on both sides.

With all its flaws, our democracy still responds to public opinion. And we continue to focus on making Congress aware that Americans will not be happy if our air, water and future become less healthy.

From “41 Democratic Senators Can Stop Donald Trump’s Supreme Court Pick” a HuffPo article by Richard Greene: “…It is not a certainty that Republicans will, indeed, “nuke” the filibuster. They need 50 of their 52 Senate members and it is unlikely that experienced members like John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Susan Collins or Lisa Murkowski and Trump critics like Jeff Flake or Ben Sasse will go along with the destruction of historic minority rights in The Senate.  They understand that “what goes around comes around” and that, one day, they will again be in the minority.  This hard reality kept 53 Democrats from eliminating the filibuster for Supreme Court Justices when they voted to reform the procedure in 2013.” Republicans have shown impressive discipline recently, but it’s hard to see much of a downside for Dems in forcing their hand, and a successful fillibuster could slow Trump’s agenda.

The Center for American Progress has an article, “States of Change: Demographic Change, Representation Gaps, and Challenges to Democracy, 1980–2060” by Rob Griffin, William H. Frey, and Ruy Teixeira, which deploys simulations to show that the best way to reduce “future representation gaps lies in equalizing registration and turnout rates across races.” In one section the authors write, “The assumption that all newly registered voters would turn out at the same rate as currently registered voters is probably very unrealistic. Those who have registered without benefit of reform are likely more motivated and attuned to politics than those who have not and, therefore, are more likely to actually cast a ballot than those who are newly registered due to a reform process…This view is supported by recent results from Oregon’s new system of “opt-out” voter registration, where those who interact with the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles are automatically registered and then have to actively respond to a postcard notification to opt out of being registered. If they do nothing, they remain registered. In 2016, those registered by this method in Oregon turned out at a rate that was roughly half of those registered by conventional means…So, in this scenario, we still assume that registration reform will be hugely successful at elevating and equalizing registration rates, but we also assume that these new registrants will turn out at only half the current rate for registrants in their state, race, age, and gender group…”

At salon.com Sean McElwee’s “Automatic voter registration isn’t a sexy topic — but it’s crucial to Democrats and progressives regaining power:  Data from New York, a blue state with regressive voting laws, shows how easier registration could change everything” ought to be required reading for every Democrat. From the concluding paragraph: “Evidence is still coming in on the impact of AVR, but early evidence is positive. Oregon automatically registered 225,000 people through the state Department of Motor Vehicles, and 43 percent voted in the 2016 election. Other reforms, like same-day registration and looser voting registration deadlines, are shown to bolster turnout. In New York and other states where Democrats have power, progressives should push for the implementation of automatic voter registration, same-day registration and early voting, as well as other reforms to ease access. Of the six states in which Democrats  have a trifecta, meaning they control the governor’s office and both legislative chambers, four still don’t have automatic voter registration. In states where they don’t have full power, progressives should put automatic voter registration on the ballot. (Alaska, a heavily Republican state, recently passed automatic voter registration by referendum.) Automatic voter registration can ensure that all Americans are represented in the voting booth, and progressives should embrace it.”

An eye-opening statistic from “Tracking the fortunes of the white working-class” at The Economist: “…The gap in wage levels between all workers and WWCM [white working-class males] has widened from an average of 3.7% in 1990-92 to 6.9% over the past two years.”

Katie Zezima has an interesting report, “‘California is a nation, not a state’: A fringe movement wants a break from the U.S.” at The Washington Post. California pulling out of the U.S. would be like Scotland becoming independent of the U.K. in that it would provide a green light for an extreme right takeover of   the rest of the country. The movement is not likely to prevail, but it provides another reminder that Trump may be the most divisive president in U.S. history.

Here’s a question that is surely on the minds of millions.

In his NYT column, “How Can We Get Rid of Trump?,” Nicholas Kristoff observes, “One poll from Public Policy Polling found that as many Americans — 46 percent — favor impeachment of President Trump as oppose it. Ladbrokes, the betting website, offers even odds that Trump will resign or leave office through impeachment before his term ends…Sky Bet, another site, is taking wagers on whether Trump will be out of office by July.” Kristoff says, “My take is that unless things get much worse, removal may be a liberal fantasy…If I were betting, I’d say we’re stuck with Trump for four years.” However, Kristoff adds, “And what does it say about a presidency that, just one month into it, we’re already discussing whether it can be ended early?”

A quote from Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-PA) in “Democrats Aim to Reclaim the Working-Class Vote” by Mori Rothman and Yasmeen Qureshi at npr.org: ” I really believe our party is at its best when we’re the Robert Kennedy coalition, that we are the party of blue collar workers, of all races, of all backgrounds, that we are the party of those who were left out and deeply believe in the American dream and want to achieve it. That is who the Democratic Party is in our soul, that is the best to win elections, but it’s also the best to govern. If we’re going to achieve progress in these areas, we need to it needs to be everyone and that includes white working class voters.”

Do acquaint yourself with a couple of groups working to elect Democrats at the state and local legislative levels and click around on their website links to see what works for you. “The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee is the permanent authority and central headquarters for Democratic state legislative leaders and races nationwide. The DLCC is the only Democratic organization led by progressive champions in state legislatures around the country. Our board and partners are all legislators on the front lines of fighting back against the Trump agenda.” The second group is “Flipable,” described by Mashable’s Jason Abbruzzese as “an organization focused on identifying local political positions that could turn from Republican to Democratic, and figuring out how to provide the resources to flip them.”