If reason and rules prevail, the amount of damage Trump and the Republicans do to Obamacare should be limited, according to incoming Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. “Mr. Schumer vows to block all efforts to kill Obamacare, or gut Dodd-Frank financial regulation. “We’re not going to undo it, period. And I have the votes,” says Schumer, quoted in the New York Times editorial “Can Senate Democrats Save the Party?” The Bipartisan Policy Center concurrs, noting “the Senate is not likely to have the 60 votes needed to pass a wholesale repeal” of Obamacare.

Schumer’s confidence may seem a little cocky in light of the electoral college thrashing Democrats just suffered. But Dems did pick up a couple of senate seats. And Clinton’s historically-unprecedened popular vote win for a presidential candidate who lost the electoral college vote — 2 million plus and counting — should temper the public’s perception of any mandate the Republicans can credibly claim. The Times editorial adds, further:

Much of the burden will fall on Democrats in the closely divided Senate, where arcane rules give the opposition party leverage to shape or block legislation passed by the rigidly conservative, Republican-dominated House. The challenge facing the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, is to determine when to say no and when to compromise on matters of broad economic benefit.

Numerous opinion polls indicate strong support for key provisions of Obamacare, and a healthy share of those who criticise the ACA want a stronger, not a weaker role for government in providing health care. Asked, “Now, please tell me if you favor or oppose having a national health plan in which all Americans would get their insurance through an expanded, universal form of Medicare-for-all” last December, 58 percent of respondents in a Kaiser Family Foundation poll said they would favor such a reform.

Most Democrats have long been open to “mend it, don’t end it” reforms to make Obamacare better serve the public, with considerable public support. Asked “Which is closer to your view on the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare? It is working relatively well, and it needs some fixes to be better. It is fatally flawed and should be repealed and replaced?” in a Bloomberg Politics Poll conducted March 19-22,  50 percent of respondents agreed that “it needs some fixes,” while 46 percent said “it should be replaced.”

The Republicans have thus far refused to negotiate in good faith for anything short of an all-out repeal of the measure. The central question going forward is, will Trump eventually settle for reasonable changes to the ACA with bipartisan support?

After meeting with President Obama, Trump reportedly told the Wall Street Journal three days into his transition that he might keep popular Obamacare provisions, including “the prohibition against insurers denying coverage because of patients’ existing conditions, and a provision that allows parents to provide years of additional coverage for children on their insurance policies.” Trump said “I like those very much.”

President Obama has indicated even he might support “replacement” legislation that gives the Republicans some credit, if it preserves the popular provisions of the ACA, even if it’s called something else. If Trump gets to the point where he is willing to support bipartisan reform of Obamacare, he might get some deserved credit for real leadership, instead of parroting the GOP’s childish, triumphalist demand that Obamacare be obliterated and replaced with a vaguely-stated something more to their liking at a later date.

Even with bipartisan reform of the ACA, Trump and GOP leaders can still strut, crow and gush about how they ended Obamacare. But it will be sensibly-calibrated, bipartisan reform, if it’s anything at all. Republicans will likely win some of their favored “reforms,” such as health savings/reimbursement accounts and greater flexibility for the states in administering Medicaid allotments.

No doubt some Republican hard-liners are hoping enough Democratic senators will be so cowed by Trump’s electoral college win and the difficult 2018 senate race landscape Dems face, that they will simply cave and support repeal of Obamacare, with no guarantees of any of the popular provisions being included in some sketchy “replacement bill.” More likely, Democratic senators will insist on responsible reforms, and that they will get some of the credit for it.

At Politico Gabriel Debenedetti’s “Democrats wrestle with Rust Belt dilemma: Party leaders in fast-growing states warn against obsessing over Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin” cautions against overreacting to Trump’s electoral college win and notes a couple of bright spots for the future. “The Arizona and Georgia margins turned out to be closer than in Ohio and Iowa — two swing states Obama won twice,” notes Debenedetti. “…Reed, the Atlanta mayor, makes the point that Clinton lost North Carolina and its 15 electoral votes — where her team spent tens of millions of dollars — by just roughly one point less than she lost Georgia and its 16 votes…“It would be a mistake to not look at the gains that were made in Georgia,” said Rebecca DeHart, executive director of that state’s Democratic Party, nodding to the looming uncertainty about resources.”

Lynn Vavreck reported in the New York Times that “Only 9 percent of Mrs. Clinton’s appeals in her ads were about jobs or the economy. By contrast, 34 percent of Mr. Trump’s appeals focused on the economy, jobs, taxes and trade.”

In his Daily Beast post, “Dems Can’t Afford to Say Yes to Trump: The few last times Democrats were in the oppositional spotlight, they were excessively accommodating to Republican presidents. The party can’t risk that now,” Michael Tomasky makes a strong case against Dems taking an accommodationist tilt toward Trump. In one graph Tomasky shreds the myth that Dems outspent Republicans leading up to 2016, particularly at the state level: “…It’s the right that spends more. Rob Stein, the founder of the Democracy Alliance, the group of wealthy liberal donors that tries to coordinate investment in a progressive infrastructure, has studied this question for years. He told me: “The right has been building its infrastructure for more than 40 years. Whereas 10 years ago the right’s independent political apparatus was outspending progressives in electorally relevant state-based political mobilization by over two to one, in this cycle that margin appears to have been in excess of four to one.”

You’ve probably seen a fair number of posts disparaging “identity politics” in recent weeks. Most of these articles are talking about pro-liberal demographic groups. But Trump played the identity card with a much heavier hand than did Clinton, and more pundits than you can count attribute his electoral college victory and state upsets to his leveraging white working-class resentments. Laila Lalami’s “The Identity Politics of Whiteness” explores the phenomenon at The New York Times Magazine.

From “Vilsack’s tough message for fellow Democrats: Stop writing off rural America,” by Greg Jaffe at The Washington Post: “Democrats need to talk to rural voters,” Vilsack warned this summer. “They can’t write them off. They can’t ignore them. They actually have to spend a little time talking to them.” There is no question that Democrats do better in towns and counties where they put in the time, as Obama proved in the 2008 Iowa caucuses. For a strongly-stated opposing view, however, read this post.  A possible copromise might be for Dems to campaign more in rural areas in state and local races and during the presidential primary elections and caucuses, but for Democratic presidential candidates hold off on spending much time and resources in rural areas in the 2020 general election presidential race.

Although the 2018 election offers a scary landscape for Democrats campaigning for senate seats, at The Plum Line Greg Sargent points out that Democrats face more encouraging terrain in upcoming races for governorships. Sargent writes that “in 2017 and 2018, there will be a total of 38 gubernatorial contests…Of these races, those that will feature Republicans defending GOP-held seats…will vastly outnumber those that will feature Democrats defending Dem-held seats…The vast majority of these races take place in 2018 (only two, Virginia and New Jersey, take place next year), so we’re really talking about the 2018 map here. It has big transformative potential for Democrats, since many of the states in which Republicans are defending seats are ones Barack Obama (and to a lesser extent Hillary Clinton) won…There has been a great deal of chatter about how Democrats should retool their economic message to win back the working class and middle class whites that Trump overperformed among, but these races provide a chance to actually try to do this in the immediate future.”

Maybe 2016 really was the “facebook election,” though not in a good way, as Jenna Wortham observes, also in the New York Times Magazine: “Social media seemed to promise a way to better connect with people; instead it seems to have made it easier to tune out the people we don’t agree with. But if we can’t pay attention to one another, we might as well not live on the same planet at all.” Despite all of the educational promise of social media, it may be feeding polarization, instead of reducing it. Not only are left and right mostly preaching to their respective choirs on social media, the medium seems to encourage name-calling, insults and ostracism. What might help would be social media forums that  stimulate civil dialogue and consensus-building.

In The NYT Sunday Review Steven Greenhouse previews the tough times ahead for unions under Trump:  “Unions are expecting a series of stinging blows. Even as Mr. Trump talks of spending $1 trillion to improve infrastructure, many Republicans are eager to repeal an 85-year-old law requiring that contractors pay union-level wages on federal projects. Congressional Republicans are likely to take up nationwide “right-to-work” legislation, which would sap union treasuries by barring any requirement that workers pay union dues or fees. And even if Senate Democrats manage to block such a law, Republican gains in Kentucky and Missouri mean those states are likely to enact their own right-to-work laws…Mr. Trump will most likely scrap most of Mr. Obama’s executive orders on labor, including ones requiring federal contractors to disclose labor law violations, provide paid sick leave and pay a $10.10 minimum wage. He may also erase a regulation that lets four million additional workers qualify for overtime pay. (Last Tuesday, a federal judge in Texas suspended that regulation.) And the National Labor Relations Board under Mr. Trump will no doubt overturn numerous union-friendly moves by the Obama board, among them ones speeding up unionization elections and giving graduate research and teaching assistants at private universities the right to unionize.”

At HuffPo Robert Kuttner has an article that puts many of the Democratic-friendly post-mortems in perspective. Kuttner argues, “While posing as a populist, he [Trump] seems inclined to let the Republican establishment have its way, not just with welfare for the poor but with federal programs that Middle America actually values, such as social security and medicare…At some point, even the devout Trump backers may notice that the man is a fraud. And Democrats need to be there with a brand of constructive economic nationalism that actually serves working people…But in the meantime a great deal is at risk — not just the programs going back to Franklin Roosevelt and the civil rights victories going back to LBJ and Martin Luther King but constitutional democracy itself…Now, can the Democrats please suspend their usual ritual of the circular firing squad — and get on with the business of defending what’s decent in America?”

John A. Farrell’s Politico post, “What Today’s Democrats Can Learn From Tip O’Neill’s Reagan Strategy: In deciding to work with, rather than obstruct, the president, the wily House Speaker came out on top” is certain to generate buzz inside Democratic circles. Among Farrell’s several instructive paragraphs: “And the results of Nov. 8 brought nothing if not a lesson in humility to scribes who draw conclusions from insufficient or misread data. Yet, given the tides of politics and business, Democrats may have the opportunity to saddle Trump with all the ills he railed against—and much of what his white working-class constituency voted against…And the world, they are already discovering, is an unwieldy place. Wall Street banks won’t yield the Treasury Department to right-wing populists. Manufacturers won’t stop seeking low-wage workers because President Trump was elected. Immigrant women won’t stop bearing children. Health care costs won’t plummet. Powerful special interests won’t stop trying to rig the system. Rush Limbaugh and Fox News won’t stop finding cause to complain. Trade wars won’t bring on economic bliss. The planet won’t stop cooling. Tea Party Republicans won’t suddenly become reasonable, nor will Middle Eastern fanatics. American soldiers won’t stop dying. Hurricanes and microbes won’t stop at borders. Roads and bridges won’t repair themselves.”

In his WaPo column “For Democrats, the Road Back,” Conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer accuses Dems of marinating in short-sighted identity/tribal politics at home, while naively embracing universalist values in foreign policy under President Obama. Both accusations are characteristically  overstated, as is often the case with conservative commentators. And, reasonable people can disagree about whether Dems failed to include one of the largest tribes, the white working-class, in their big tent. But there is no question as to whether Trump’s noxious brand of “tribal” politics includes a comfy seat at the head table for white supremacists — and that is completely ignored by the columnist. Krauthammer also takes a shot at  Vladimir Putin, who “thinking tribally, renewed the savage bombing of Aleppo and then moved nuclear-capable missiles into Kaliningrad to remind Europeans of the perils of defying the regional strongman,” while failing to acknowledge that Putin is Trump’s most fervent supporter abroad.

Nora Kelly notes at The Atlantic that five presidents have ben elected with smaller popular vote percentage leads than Clinton’s popular vote lead: James Garfield in 1880: 0.09 percentage points; John F. Kennedy in 1960: 0.17 percentage points; Grover Cleveland in 1884: 0.57 percentage points; Richard Nixon in 1968: 0.7 percentage points; and James Polk in 1844: 1.45 percentage points. Further, adds Kelly, “If the final vote count does, indeed, put her roughly 2 percentage points ahead of Trump, her margin would edge up against those of winning presidential nominees Jimmy Carter in 1976 (2.07 percentage points) and George W. Bush in 2004 (2.47 percentage points). And all this is not to mention the presidents who’ve been elected without winning the popular vote at all. That’s a list that includes Bush in 2000, and will soon include Trump. As my colleague Ronald Brownstein put it, Trump “is on track to lose the popular vote by more than any successfully elected president ever.”

Washington Post opinion writer Charles Lane addresses a question that has preoccupied numerous writers posting at TDS over the years in his article, “What will it take for Democrats to woo the white working class?” Lane sees Democrats caught in a dilemma, and frames it tis way: “The Democrats’ dilemma, then, is this: They can make only limited political gains with an economic pitch to the white working class, unless they adjust on immigration and other issues of identity too, probably…Yet this would require compromising on what the party defined as matters of basic justice and tolerance, and turn off voters from their racially and ethnically diverse “coalition of the ascendant.” Lane does suggest a path forward, though in vague terms: “The alternative, of course, is to appeal to the public on the basis of our common American identity, and aspirations, rather than our overlapping grievances — cultural, racial, economic or otherwise.”

At The Wall St. Journal Democratic activist Ted Van Dyk has an article, “How Democrats Can Win Again: Develop a new vision now, and inspiring leaders to implement it will come later.” van Dyk observes, “The path to Democratic recovery does not lie with ever-shriller denunciation of Republicans as alleged racists, enemies of women, or allies of the wealthy. Democrats must demonstrate ourselves capable of growing a fair economy and keeping the country safe. Today, given our party’s and candidates’ ties to big money and finance, we are not credible as populists or allies of the common man. Millions of voters think we are committed to our own political success but not necessarily to the national welfare…Democrats should not worry about their current shortage of leaders. More will emerge. Better to ask: What are the country’s big problems? What are our plans to address those problems? How can we persuade a majority to support those proposals?”

At The Week Scott Lemieux writes on “The Democrats’ postmortem problem,” comments that “In retrospect, for example, it seems like the campaign made a mistake in making so much of its advertising negative attacks on Donald Trump’s character. Given that Trump always had high personal negatives these attacks had diminishing returns, and Clinton missed an opportunity to highlight economic policy differences where public opinion favored her position. While it was not unreasonable to think Trump’s particular unfitness for office created an opportunity to peel off suburban Republicans, it didn’t work.“… Be wary of assertions that there was One Magic Trick a candidate could have used to win an election, and be doubly wary when this magic bullet is an argument that the candidate advancing the policy ideas the pundit agrees with is also by remarkable coincidence always the best political strategy as well.”

Nobel Prize laureate and NYT columnist Paul Krugman remains skeptical about the media’s commitment to adequately cover political policies of candidates: “Any claim that changed policy positions will win elections assumes that the public will hear about those positions. How is that supposed to happen, when most of the news media simply refuse to cover policy substance? Remember, over the course of the 2016 campaign, the three network news shows devoted a total of 35 minutes combined to policy issues — all policy issues. Meanwhile, they devoted 125 minutes to Mrs. Clinton’s emails…Beyond this, the fact is that Democrats have already been pursuing policies that are much better for the white working class than anything the other party has to offer. Yet this has brought no political reward.”

At Vox Timothy B. Lee explores the Jill Stein recount idea and sheds some interesting light on the process. Lee notes that “someone — likely the Russian government — tried to hack voting infrastructure in Ukraine to change the outcome of the election there. And a skillful attacker could alter the results of a vote without leaving any obvious fingerprints.” Lee explains what could be revealed by one kind of recount technology. But home-grown voter suppression, both “legal” and illegal, may be the more significant factor in the electoral vote outcome.

Yeah, everybody is sick of polls and skeptical about their value as a result of the election. But this one merits thoughtful consideration, because crafting an immigration policy that is just, economically-wise and politically-feasible is an imperaive for the incoming president. The central finding, that 60 percent of respondents “would like to see undocumented immigrants stay in the country and get a chance to become citizens” provides a sobering counerpoint to the cheap-shot immigration-bashing that characterized the GOP primary season.

Those who have an interest in subtextual political messaging and the psycholinguistic underpinnings of political attitudes have an interesting article to read in George Lakoff’s “A Minority President: Why the polls failed, and what the majority can do” at HuffPo. Lakoff, author of “The ALL NEW Don’t Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate” and “Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, Third Edition,” writes:

Hillary Clinton won the majority of votes in this year’s presidential election.

The loser, for the majority of voters, will now be a minority president-elect. Don’t let anyone forget it. Keep referring to Trump as the minority president, Mr. Minority and the overall Loser. Constant repetition, with discussion in the media and over social media, questions the legitimacy of the minority president to ignore the values of the majority. The majority, at the very least, needs to keep its values in the public eye and view the minority president’s action through majority American values.

The issue of moral legitimacy is central for Lakoff, and Clinton’s popular vote majority (actually a plurality at this point as commenter Jack Olson notes below) is a useful reminder that Trump has no mandate for eradicating all of the hard-won reforms of recent years. Trump and the Republicans would like the public to forget that he lost the popular vote by 2 million and rising, which could happen. It is the duty of Democrats and progressives to keep this central fact in the forefront of all political discussions that touch on what the voting public actually wants.

Lakoff argues that “the nature of mind is not a mere technical issue for the cognitive and brain sciences, but that it had everything to do with the outcome of the 2016 election,” and he reviews at length the key ideas of his books, and how they applied in the election:

Conscious thought is a small part of thought — estimates by neuroscientists vary between a general “most” to as much as 98 percent, with consciousness as the tip of the mental iceberg. We do know that people tend to make decisions unconsciously before becoming consciously aware of them. How the neural unconscious functions in decision-making is vitally important for politics.

…The first thing that is, or should be, taught about political language is not to repeat the language of the other side or negate their framing of the issue…The Clinton campaign consistently violated the lesson of Don’t Think of an Elephant! They used negative campaigning, assuming they could turn Trump’s most outrageous words against him. They kept running ads showing Trump forcefully expressing views that liberals found outrageous. Trump supporters liked him for forcefully saying things that liberals found outrageous. They were ads paid for by the Clinton campaign that raised Trump’s profile with his potential supporters!

…The polls failed because they work by demography, using census data, and other readily accessible data. The census tells us where people live, their age, gender, ethnicity, educational level, marital status, income level, etc. These are objective data, and this kind of data is easy to get and sample. But demographic data leaves out what is most important in elections and in political polling generally: Values! One’s sense of right and wrong. That omission was crucial in this election.

A common observation of contemporary political discussions, from the dining room table to academic forums, is that many low and moderate income people routinely “vote against their own interests.” But economic, or material interests, are not the pivotal principle for many voters, according to Lakoff.

“Everyone likes to think of himself or herself as a good person,” notes Lakoff. “That means that your moral system is a major part of your identity — who you most deeply are. Voting against your moral identity would be a rejection of self. That is why poor conservatives vote against their material interests. They are voting for their moral worldviews to dominate, and for public respect for their values.”

Lakoff has a lot more to say about nurturant family values, the ‘strict father’ paradigm and how such modeling affects political attitudes. Regarding the white working-class, he writes,

Many members of the white working class have strict father morality, even those in unions. Many have their strict father views limited to their home life, but many have them as a major worldview. As conservatives, they believe in individual responsibility, not government “handouts;” they may resent union dues and prefer “right to work” laws; and they may implicitly accept the moral hierarchy and believe they are superior to non-whites, Latinos, non-Christians, and gays and should be in a higher financial and social position. Conservative women may accept their position as inferior to their men, but still see themselves above the rest of the hierarchy. The white working class has been hit hard by income inequality, globalization and outsourcing, computerization, the decline of coal mining, low-wage chain stores driving out small business, and if older, ageism. They are largely uneducated and see themselves as looked down on by the educated “elite” who tell them that everyone should go to college to merit today’s jobs. They also resent “political correctness,” which directs resources to those who need them even more, but are lower on the conservative moral hierarchy. They want the respect of being on the right side of politics, of having their moral views— and hence their deepest identity — confirmed.

It’s not hard to imagine how the need for respect and confirmation played out in the rust belt, where Trump found his treasure trove of voters, who delivered the electoral college victory to him. Lakoff believes, further that the tilt of the Supreme Court became a key consideration for voters who felt their values were disrespected. “All three of these groups — evangelicals, corporatists, and the white working class,” writes Lakoff, “correctly saw the Supreme Court issue as central to upholding their values across the board, on all issues.”

Lakoff cites ten trigger mechanisms to leverage the unconscious thought of voters, among them:

1. Repetition. Words are neurally linked to the circuits that determine their meaning. The more a word is heard, the more the circuit is activated and the stronger it gets, and so the easier it is to fire again. Trump repeats. Win. Win, Win. We’re gonna win so much you’ll get tired of winning.

2. Framing: Crooked Hillary. Framing Hillary as purposely and knowingly committing crimes for her own benefit, which is what a crook does. Repeating makes many people unconsciously think of her that way, even though she has always been found to have been honest and legal by thorough studies by the right-wing Bengazi committee (which found nothing) and the FBI (which found nothing to charge her with.) Yet the framing worked.

There is a common metaphor that Immorality Is Illegality, and that acting against Strict Father Morality (the only kind off morality recognized) is being immoral. Since virtually everything Hillary Clinton has ever done has violated Strict Father Morality, that makes her immoral to strict conservatives. The metaphor makes her actions immoral, which makes her a crook. The chant “Lock her up!” activates this whole line of reasoning.

4. Grammar: Radical Islamic terrorists: “Radical” puts Muslims on a linear scale and “terrorists” imposes a frame on the scale, suggesting that terrorism is built into the religion itself. The grammar suggests that there is something about Islam that has terrorism inherent in it. Imagine calling the Charleston gunman a “radical Republican terrorist.”

Trump is aware of this to at least some extent. As he said to Tony Schwartz, the ghost-writer who wrote The Art of the Deal for him, “I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration — and it’s a very effective form of promotion.”

“Our neural minds think in certain patterns,” continues Lakoff. “Trump knows how to exploit them. Whatever other limitations on his knowledge, he knows a lot about using your brain against you to acquire and maintain power and money.”

As for the tendency of the media to echo Trump’s messaging, Lakoff observes that “The head of CBS, Leslie Moonves, for example, said that CBS benefitted by giving Trump free airtime during the campaign. “It may not be good for America, but it’s good for CBS,” he said.”

“More than ever we need courage and imagination in the media. It is crucial, for the history of the country and the world, as well as the planet,” says Lakoff. The media can better serve the public interest by doing some soul-seartching regarding the terminology they use, and to consciously avoid being manipulated by right-wing frames and memes.  For example, notes Lakoff,

One possibility is for journalists to use more accurate language. Take government regulations. Their job is to protect the public from harm and fraud composed by unscrupulous corporations. The Trump administration wants to get rid of “regulations.” They are actually getting rid of protection. Can journalists actually say they are getting rid of protections, saying the word “protection,” and reporting on the harm that would be done by not protecting the public.

Can the media report on corporate poisoning of the public — through introducing lead and other cancer-causing agents into the water through fracking and various manufacturing processes, through making food or toiletries that contain poisonous and cancer-causing ingredients, and on and on. The regulations are there for a purpose — protection. Can the media use the words POISON and CANCER? The public needs to know.

Looking toward the future, Lakoff has some thoughts on what can be done to prevent Trump from further manipulating the public and the media with his ‘strict father’ messaging:

There are certain things that strict fathers cannot be: A Loser, Corrupt, and especially not a Betrayer of Trust.

Trump lost the popular vote. To the American majority, he is a Loser, a minority president. It needs to be said and repeated.

Above all, Trump is a Betrayer of Trust. He is acting like a dictator, and is even supporting Putin’s anti-American policies.

He is betraying trust in a direct way, by refusing to put his business interests in a blind trust. By doing so, and by insisting on his children both running the business and getting classified information, he is using the presidency to make himself incredibly wealthy — just as Putin has. This is Corruption of the highest and most blatant level. Can the media say the words: Corruption, Betrayal of Trust? He ran on a promise to end corruption, to “drain the swamp” in Washington. Instead, he has brought a new and much bigger swamp with him — lobbyists put in charge of one government agency after another, using public funds and the power of the government to serve corporate greed. And the biggest crock in the swamp is Trump himself!

The Trump administration will wreak havoc on the very people who voted for him in those small towns — disaster after disaster. It will be a huge betrayal. The $500 billion in infrastructure — roads and bridges, airports, sewers, eliminating lead water pipes — will probably not make it to those thousands of small rural towns with in-group nurturance for the townspeople. How many factories with good-paying jobs can be brought to such towns? Not thousands. Many of those who voted for Trump will inevitably be among the 20 million who will lose their health care. And they will become even further victims of corporate greed — more profits going to the top one percent and more national corporations, say, fast food and big-box stores paying low wages and offering demeaning jobs will continue to wipe out local businesses. Will this be reported? Will it even be said? And if so, how will it be said in a way that doesn’t wind up promoting Trump?

Trump as betrayer is a powerful image that can help limit his ability to fully institutionalize a kleptocratic government that enriches his wealthy associates at the expense of working people and their families. But the protests must also include an alternative, positive vision. As Lakoff concludes,

By fighting against Trump, many protesters are just showcasing Trump, keeping him in the limelight, rather than highlighting the majority’s positive moral view and viewing the problem with Trump from within the majority’s positive worldview frame. To effectively fight for what is right, you have to first say what is right and why.

Trump’s election confounded pollsters, pundits and Democratic activists who placed too much confidence in their data-driven analyses and high-tech GOTV, and not enough focus on how Democratic messaging frames morals and values. If ever there was a time for Democratic leaders to study Lakoff’s ideas more seriously, that moment has arrived.

Criticizing Trump’s corruption with specifics is essential. But, as Lakoff argues, it is even more important that Democratic messaging spell out the moral dimensions of the society progressives want to create, and the more inclusive is the vision, the better. When a substantial portion of the white working class feels like they are included in such a vision, a stable progressive majority can become a reality.

The following article by Jack Metzgar of Chicago Working-Class Studies is cross-posted from Working-Class Perspectives:

Those of us from white working-class families with people we know and love who voted for Trump have a special heartache over this year’s election.  Why do so many good people have such deplorable politics?  I mostly took a pass this election on arguing with family members, because it was convenient to avoid the emotion and hurt feelings that these arguments often generate, even though I know those hurts eventually pass into our stronger lifetime relationships without leaving significant scars.  I also didn’t work this time to help turn out the vote.  Why did I do that and what have I learned from it that might be useful to others going forward?

First, it is self-satisfying in the aftermath to blame Hillary Clinton and her kind of Democrats.  Pushed by us Berniecrats, she actually had a pretty good progressive economic program to run on. It wasn’t big enough to make the kind of transformational political and economic change we need (or to inspire people with a sense of possibility), but it was moving in all the right directions.  What I blame her for is the strategic decision to focus her campaign on Trump’s character vs. her character, his temperament and style vs. hers, rather than on their very different policy positions – especially class issues like the minimum wage and their tax policies, even the wonky class differences between a tax credit and a tax deduction for child care expenses — anything that would have shifted the political “debate” to substance rather than style.  Her ambiguous (and untrustworthy) position on trade and her lack of a larger economic vision or narrative had an impact as well, but I don’t blame her for that in the same way that I don’t blame frogs for being amphibious.  She is who she is, and she is representative of many professional middle-class Democrats whose hearts are in the right place, by my lights.

But, like those Democrats, Clinton’s presumption that “people” vote on character not policy condescendingly underestimates the political and economic intelligence of most voters, and especially “low-information voters.” Instead of “I’m a really good person and you can trust me,” what low-information voters need is well-articulated explanations for policy choices – not just facts or information, but arguments and rationales.

Complicated economic explanations can be challenging for a low-information, “poorly educated” voter to follow in the first instance, but not so much when you repeat and elaborate, as can happen in national political campaigns.  I know from three decades of teaching working-class adults that though you’re not going to convince many of them, you can complicate their thinking (which is the goal in my line of work), and, more relevant to politicians, you can win their respect.  That is, you’ll get some points for character for making the effort to explain and convince.  Engagement, real engagement, in arguing for your view as if convincing people mattered has political benefits beyond getting them to vote for you.  It also puts you in a better position to govern if you are elected, and it advances your political agenda for next time even if you’re not.

Though I knew better, I hoped that Clinton’s running on “Trump is an asshole” would be effective because he was so good at illustrating it, but it also undermined the perception of her character, getting her into a mud fight with a mud wrestler.  The polls, which as a data-driven middle-class professional I put altogether too much faith in, kept reinforcing my complacency.  So, like many of my friends, I also blame Nate Silver!  Clinton couldn’t motivate me, and Silver unintentionally led me to think that was okay this time around.  So, I got my excuses, but it’s on me that I didn’t put in the work.

The other mistake I made is that I overestimated the good sense of that part of the white working class I think I know, the so-called Blue Wall Rust Belt states from Pennsylvania to Iowa.  And I underestimated the necessity and importance of contesting for that good sense.

I didn’t underestimate the long-term, grinding pain of deindustrialization in those states – the social and economic dislocation of increasingly unsteady work at lower and lower wages.  Nor did I miss what Sarah Jaffe calls Clinton Dems’ “colossal misreading of a moment when rage at the establishment (of both parties) was simmering everywhere.”  I even expected the Blue Wall states would not match the relatively high levels of support white workers had given Obama in 2008 and 2012 (with actual majorities in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa in 2008).   But I did not expect the precipitous drops in both voter participation (except in Pennsylvania) and percentage support for Clinton vs. Obama. Clinton garnered from 10 to 21 points less support in these states than Obama had won in 2008.

My gripe with much of the punditry is that they so routinely mistake one part of the white working class for the whole, thereby stereotyping a class of people with whom they have little direct contact or knowledge.  I insist on the value of using a union organizer’s approach when discussing the politics of working-class whites.  Following Andrew Levison’s three-part breakdown, based on opinion research, one part are unreachable conservatives who can never be won over, but you must work to “neutralize” them in order to reduce their influence on others.  Calling them boilerplate names rather than engaging their arguments doesn’t accomplish that, however, and it may actually increase their influence.  Another part consists of solid supporters, and you need to enlist their activity and leadership in persuading “the persuadables,” which is the third part that Levison calls “on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand thinkers.”

By sitting out the 2016 election within my own family, for example, I did not do the work of neutralizing the unreachables, which is who I usually argue with.  It seemed like a reasonable choice; why stir up old feuds if they are unreachable? But by not engaging them as I have in the past, I gave up what influence I might still have among the persuadables who listen in, “putting in their two cents” from time to time, often simply by asking a challenging question.  What’s more, I didn’t help the solid supporters amplify their voices, which they often do by distancing themselves from “the professor” even as they agree with me. In one instance a Hillary supporter mentioned after the election that she had kept largely silent because she didn’t think two of her daughters “would actually vote for that asshole.”  I made the same mistake.

I’m still puzzling over why such large majorities of non-college-educated whites voted for Trump.  But it looks like part of what happened in the Blue Wall States is that hundreds of thousands of white working-class Obama voters from 2008 just didn’t show up in 2016, thereby increasing the relative weight of the unreachables.  Sort of like me, they may have lacked enthusiasm for a flawed candidate executing an even more flawed campaign message.  Or, unlike me, they may have come to the actually very reasonable but terribly misguided conclusion that it really does not matter.

At New York Magazine Jonathan Chait’s “Charles Schumer and Nancy Pelosi Have a Plan to Make President Trump Popular” makes a strong case against Democrats cooperating much with Trump’s infrastructure “plan,” such as it is: “How and where to cooperate with Trump presents many dilemmas for the opposition, pitting the Democrats’ self-interest against the need to safeguard the welfare of the country’s political institutions. There are certainly venues where Americans alarmed by the incoming president ought to consider working with him for the sake of preserving the welfare of the country. But infrastructure is not one of those dilemmas. Supporting a Trumpian infrastructure bill would be to cooperate with the subversion of American government and an act of political self-sabotage. It is an idea so insanely bad it disturbingly suggests the party utterly fails to grasp the challenge before it, or the way out…For Democrats to cooperate unconditionally with this strategy is to institutionalize a political order in which Democratic presidents must be punished with contractionary policy while Republicans are rewarded with expansionary policy. Reasonable people can disagree about what level of national debt can be sustained, but the figure is finite. The political system seems to passively accept that America’s long-term debt should be allocated toward the goal of maximizing growth exclusively during Republican administrations. Why Democrats would find this system good for their country, let alone their party, is difficult to understand…Trump is actually proposing to invite unprecedented levels of corruption into government. Trump’s high potential for corruption involves the interplay of two different rejections of political norms. First, unlike every other presidential candidate in modern history, he has refused to disclose his tax returns, so his financial interests remain opaque. Second, he will continue to hold his interests in office rather than retreat into passive investment.”

In “Should Democrats Work With Donald Trump? Only under the following extremely stringent conditions,” Jim Newell writes at slate.com, “Since Election Day, Democrats of all stripes have signaled a willingness to work with the president-elect on issues of common concern. Specifically, they’ve broadcast their interest in helping Donald Trump follow through on his vow to fix the nation’s ailing roads, bridges, and grids….Rep. Ruben Gallego, a Democrat representing Phoenix, said that Trump’s “infrastructure plan is really a privatization scheme, rife with graft and corruption, whose real purpose is to enrich the Trump family and his supporters.”…To whatever extent Democratic senators work with Trump on these proposals, they should work extra hard to block the rest of his agenda. They should fight mass deportations, hard. They should fight appointments, like Jeff Sessions’ for attorney general, hard. They should walk out of Congress if Trump moves forward with a “Muslim registry.” They should use all the leverage they can possibly muster in the appropriations process to block rollbacks of the social safety net. If they do it right, they can show that they’ll work with Trump on areas where he meets their interests, on their terms, while also making it known that they’re not, in any way, interested in seeing this president serve a second term.”

Here’s how political commentator Julian Zelizer addresses the question “Should Democrats cooperate with Trump?” at CNN Politics: “Right now there is no reason for Democrats to believe that Donald Trump will refrain from pursuing a fairly radical political agenda. With united government and a rightward GOP, he will be under intense pressure to move forward with the most radical elements of his agenda: a draconian immigration crackdown, rolling back regulations on climate change, regressive tax cuts, deregulating the financial sector, harsh national security measures targeting Muslims and more. As Politico reported, bankers are pretty optimistic from what they are seeing in the transition that this White House will be extremely friendly to them. House Speaker Paul Ryan is planning to move forward with plans to privatize Medicare…The obstructionist and confrontational approach might be less palatable; it certainly does not sound as good in public and will put Democrats in the uncomfortable position of doing exactly what they didn’t think Republicans should do…M ore importantly, the party needs to make a decision about entering into any kind of an alliance with a politician whose ideas and arguments were so antithetical to every ideal that the party has been fighting for over the past few decades. While some Democrats might worry about how this would “look” to the public, they should remember that it didn’t look good for Republicans to be obstructionists and they now have control of the White House, Congress, and 34 state legislative bodies.”

“…For the past generation, the Democratic Party has been dominated by leaders and funders who supported shipping jobs overseas. And those same leaders largely supported the monopolization that has jacked up prices and driven down wages at the jobs that remain here. That must now end…Democrats should stand for roads and bridges, for broadband and clean water infrastructure, for the Erie Canal spirit that we can and must build a future together. Democrats must also stand against all unfair or dangerous concentrations of private power, in every sector of our political economy.” – Zephyr Teachout, “The Price of Failed Thinking” in the Washington Post

“We need first to acknowledge the root of this election’s pain — on Election Day, economic fears trumped social values. And while a clear majority of Americans agree with us on social values — that government should stay out of our bedrooms and marriages, that there is no place in America for racism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia — these messages get lost if we aren’t helping Americans reduce their debt, buy a house and grow our economy for everybody.” Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, “The Root of the Pain” in the Washington Post.

From Robert Reich’s “The Democratic Party Lost Its Soul. It’s Time to Win it Back” at HufPo: “…What we now have is a Democratic party that has been repudiated at the polls, headed by a Democratic National Committee that has become irrelevant at best, run part-time by a series of insider politicians. It has no deep or broad-based grass-roots, no capacity for mobilizing vast numbers of people to take any action other than donate money, no visibility between elections, no ongoing activism…If it is to be relevant to the future, the Democratic party must be capable of organizing and mobilizing Americans in opposition to Donald Trump’s Republican party – turning millions of people into an activist army to peacefully resist what is about to happen by providing them with daily explanations of what is occurring in Trump’s administration, along with tasks that individuals and groups can do to stop or mitigate their harmful effects.”

Larry J. Sabato, Kyle Kondik, and Geoffrey Skelley observe at Sabato’s Crystal Ball that “the Democratic bench has taken an unprecedented hit during President Obama’s time in office. The numbers have worsened slightly following Obama’s final election as a part of the political environment. With most 2016 results in (adding projections for some uncalled races based on who is ahead at this point), the damage is as follows: a net loss of 13 governorships, nine Senate seats, 63 House seats, 949 seats in state legislatures, and 29 state legislative chambers. Some other modern presidents lost more governorships, Senate seats, and state legislative chambers, but none has lost more net House seats and — especially — state legislative seats.” This is not to blame President Obama, who has faced an unprecedented level of GOP obstruction and an extremely well-organized, corporate-financed effort to defeat Democrats in state electoral politics. Clearly it’s time for the state Democratic parties to step up their game or go under.

In his RealClear Politics post, “The God that Failed,” Sean Trende notes “…Trump received more votes from white evangelicals than Clinton received from African-Americans and Hispanics combined.  This single group very nearly cancels the Democrats’ advantage among non-whites completely.  This isn’t a one-off; it was true in 2012, 2008 and 2004…You may wonder why this group voted in historic numbers for a man like Trump.  Perhaps, as some have suggested, they are hypocrites. Perhaps they are merely partisans.  But I will make a further suggestion: They are scared…the sneering condescension of the Samantha Bees and John Olivers of the world may be warranted, but it also probably cost liberals their best chance in a generation to take control of the Supreme Court.”

Here’s some salient points to put Trump’s “mandate” in perspective, from “The voters gave Democrats a mandate to fight Trump’s extremist agenda” by Laurence Lewis at Daily Kos” “In last week’s election, Hillary Clinton received more votes for president than any candidate not named Obama ever. Hillary Clinton received more votes for president than any Republican candidate ever. Hillary Clinton received more votes for president than any white male candidate ever. Hillary Clinton received over 1.5 million more votes than Donald Trump, and that number continues to rise. She lost the election because of the arcane and undemocratic Electoral College—and while the rules are the rules, her margin of defeat under those arcane and undemocratic rules was miniscule…This was no mandate for Trump. Mandate winners have coattails, sweeping their parties to gains in both the House and Senate. Not only did Trump fail to have coattails, but it was Clinton, the national popular vote winner, whose party picked up seats in both the House and Senate.”

Like a lot of Democrats who have been mulling the 2016 election results, I am torn between signs of hope and signs of distress. But there is one basic problem Democrats must come to grips with: the implications of geography in a system where small states have enormous influence. I discussed this at New York:

In a deep dive into the 2016 presidential election returns, however, Ron Brownstein hears the distant echo of another presidential election — one dominated by a traditionalist reaction to changing times: 1920.

“This election … carved a divide between cities and non-metropolitan areas as stark as American politics has produced since the years just before and after 1920. That year marked a turning point: It was the first time the Census recorded that more people lived in urban than non-urban areas. That tangible sense of shifting influence triggered a series of political and social conflicts between big cities teeming with immigrants, many of them Catholic, and small towns and rural communities that remained far more homogeneously, white, native-born, and Protestant.

“In an extended tussle over the country’s direction, forces grounded outside of the largest cities overcame urban resistance to impose Prohibition in 1919 and severely limit new immigration in 1924. The same fear of “a chaotically pluralistic society,” as one historian put it, fueled a resurgence of religious fundamentalism and a revival of the Ku Klux Klan.”

But the urbanization trend that so divided Americans in 1920 has now largely triumphed. So the latest reaction to the latest era of cultural and economic change is not nearly as powerful. In 1920, Warren Harding defeated James Cox by the largest popular-vote percentage margin (26 percent) since Monroe’s Era of Good Feelings. In 2016 the candidate of nativism, protectionism, and cultural reaction lost the popular vote.

In a twist of irony, though, urbanization has left incredible large swaths of the country behind, and in this election at least, in the camp of resistance to change. As Brownstein points out, Hillary Clinton appears to have won no more than 420 of the nation’s 3,100 counties (her husband won more than 1,500 20 years ago). “Her” counties include 88 of the nation’s 100 largest. But looking at a map of “red” and “blue” counties, it looks like Donald Trump’s country with a few strips and islands of some alien incursion.

If square mileage could vote (and it sort of can via the Senate, the Electoral College, and the various powers of state governments), the presidential election would have been even more lopsided than the one in 1920. As it is, a plurality of Americans look out across the heartland and see wonderful places to visit — in many cases to visit the hometowns of their own pasts — but not to live in and vote.

The point is, if it is not clear already, that winning a plurality or even a majority of the national popular vote in a presidential election does not matter much if the consolidated power of Republicans voting in small places gives them disproportionate control over not only a majority of the states but much of the federal government. We all know that this isn’t a pure democracy, but we are really remote from democracy today.

In his Washington Post column, “Republicans have heart disease. Democrats have a gushing head wound,” Michael Gerson, Former speechwriter for George Bush II, describes the crossroads the Democratic party faces:

What are the Democratic options moving forward? First, there is the Bernie Sanders option — the embrace of a leftist populism that amounts to democratic socialism. This might also be called the Jeremy Corbyn option, after the leftist leader of the British Labour Party who has ideologically purified his party into political irrelevance. Second, there is the Joe Biden option — a liberalism that makes a sustained outreach to union members and other blue-collar workers while showing a Catholic religious sensibility on issues of social justice. Third, there is the option of doubling down on the proven Barack Obama option, which requires a candidate who can excite rather than sedate the Obama-era base.

Gerson sees option number three at the most promising for Dems. “Democrats should not overlearn the lessons of a close election. Option No. 3 is the Democratic future on the presidential level.” It’s a ‘demography is destiny’ argument, and the case for it will be stronger in four years, given current trends. Gerson believes, however, that Dems could well chose the Bernie Sanders option, which Gerson argues would lead to another electoral disaster.

Clearly, it’s a simplistic menu of choices. While you’ve probably already heard fellow Democrats say that Sanders or Biden could have beaten Trump, they would have to be running at ages 78 and 77 respectively in 2020. It should also be noted that Sanders is a hell of a lot more politically-astute than Gerson observes — you don’t win 22 states in the Democratic primaries, including a healthy portion of the Rust Belt, by campaigning as an impractical leftist.

More likely that Democrats will come up with a ‘fresh face’ option that charts a path somewhere between Gerson’s narrow alternatives. Party strategists are already mentioning names, including Sen. Sherrod Brown, a well-grounded Ohio progressive, along with impressive newcomers, including NV Senator-elect Catherine Cortes Masto. Neither Brown or Cortez Masto fits neatly into Gerson’s choices. There are others who are ready to prove that the Democratic ‘bench’ is much better than pundits have indicated thus far.

The emerging leaders of the Democratic Party have lessons to learn about the nuances of strategy, tone and messaging from Sanders, Biden, Obama, Clinton, and yes, even Trump. It will be a tough road back for Democrats, and the candidate who can beat Trump in 2020 will be better prepared to take on the GOP’s echo chamber.

All four of those Democrats are highly-experienced realists, whose insights about their respective victories and defeats can help guide the Democratic Party back to a more competitive posture. And if other Democratic leaders and state parties will do their part to improve leadership recruitment and development, Dems will be in a much stronger position in 2020, if not 2018.

Sen. Sherrod Brown’s NYT op-ed “When Work Loses Its Dignity” should be a handout for Dems concerned about rebuilding the party in the wake of the 2016 election. Sen. Brown, frequently mentioned as a future Democratic presidential candidate, writes, “Ohio families will watch to see if the new president follows the billionaire agenda of the Republican leadership in Washington, which has called for overturning a new rule that increases overtime pay for many workers — an action that would strip thousands of dollars in wages from 130,000 of Ohio’s moderate-income workers. They will measure this president to see if he continues to oppose increasing the minimum wage, which is worth nearly 20 percent less than in 1980. Workers will expect the president to keep his promise of a trade agenda that puts their jobs above corporate profits. And they will scrutinize whether he will throw in with Washington’s moneyed interests at the expense of middle-class and working-class families…If President Trump takes the likely path that almost all Washington Republicans hope — tax cuts for the rich, an easing up on Wall Street, more voter suppression — Ohio workers will feel betrayed. Again. And they will respond.”

At Roll Call Nathan L. Gonzales takes a look at the next midterm elections in “Senate Landscape: Never Too Early to Look at 2018.” Democrats have some rerason to be optimistic, since the party out of the white house usually makes gains in  int he midterm election. Gonzales cautions, “Not only are Democrats defending more seats in 2018 (25, including two held by independents who caucus with the Democrats), compared to just eight by the Republicans, but 17 of those Democrats were initially elected in 2006 or 2012, which were good or great Democratic years.

“In 1964, 37 percent of Ohio workers belonged to a union; that number fell to 12 percent by 2016, and incomes for the working class tumbled in tandem. It’s a similar story in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Indiana, West Virginia and Wisconsin. Republican policies are largely responsible, but Democrats have done little to address the precipitous decline of the working class…Trump, despite being very short on specifics, spoke directly to people who have felt overlooked for decades. “Today is our Independence Day. Today the American working class is going to strike back, finally,” he said as he ended his campaign in the hard-luck state of Michigan. Trump stepped directly into a vacuum left by the fall of unions and the Democratic Party’s abandonment of the white working class.” — From Sean T. Posey’s “How Democrats lost the Rust Belt in 2016: The party of the working class is reaping the harvest of decades of neglect” at salon.com.

Burgess Everett writes at Politico: “Though incoming leader Chuck Schumer has yet to show his hand, the outline of a Democratic strategy for dealing with Donald Trump is beginning to take shape, based on interviews with several senators and aides. Their thinking: Exploit the inevitable divisions between Trump and the increasingly conservative GOP leadership over tax policy, infrastructure spending and possibly social issues. And Senate Democrats hope to use the filibuster — the only real leverage they have to stymie Trump and congressional Republicans — sparingly…While it might seem like wishful thinking for Democrats to think they can do an end run around a Congress firmly under Republican control, Democrats say they could envision cutting deals with Trump on passing a public works package, killing the “carried interest” loophole, and cracking down on currency manipulation by China. Many conservatives oppose all those proposals.”

But The Plum Line’s Paul Waldman isn’t having any of the ‘Dems should make nice’ talk towards the incoming Trump Administration. As Waldman writes, “Trump ran one of most vile presidential campaigns in American history, one based on racial and religious hatred, resentment and fear. He sought to normalize toxic misogyny. He celebrated violence. He mainstreamed white supremacy. His election has spurred a wave of racist intimidation and hate crimes, as bigots across the country have become emboldened by his victory to act out their most despicable impulses. He’s a demagogue and a dangerous fool, and while Democrats aren’t going to question the legitimacy of his presidency the way Republicans did with Obama, he shouldn’t ever be treated like an ordinary president with whom Democrats just have some substantive disagreements…So, absent an incredibly powerful reason to cooperate with him on any particular bill, the last thing Trump should get from Democrats is a clean slate and a hand extended in cooperation.”

Time magazine’s Sam Frizell has an update on “Democrats’ First Big Decision Since the Election: Choosing a New Leader.” Thus far the competitors for DNC chair include: Rep. Keith Ellison; former VT Gov. and former DNC Chair Howard Dean; and possibly former MD Gov. Martin O’Malley; DNC Vice Chair Ray Buckley; Labor Secretary Tom Perez; and SC Democratic Party Chair Jaime Harrison. The new chair will be elected in March.

Pro-choice voters can find a source of qualified encouragement in Amelia Thomson Deveaux’s Vox post, “Trump Probably Can’t Get Roe v. Wade Overturned: But expect more abortion restrictions under the new administration.” As Deveaux explains, “As the states continue to grapple with abortion restrictions, President Obama will leave behind one potential barrier to additional limits on the procedure: a federal judiciary full of Democratic appointees. “After the Supreme Court’s decision in June, the lower courts will be the ones deciding how that ruling is interpreted,” Hill said…But for abortion-rights advocates who were hoping to gain momentum after the Supreme Court decision in June, Trump’s win is a definite loss. “It’s more and more difficult for women to access abortion services, especially rural women and low-income women,” Nash said, “and we certainly don’t have reason to believe it will get easier under this new administration.”

Just a thought for progressives, especially writers and commentators. Instead of using the term “Clinton’s defeat,” say “Clinton’s Electoral College defeat,” a reminder that she won the popular vote, and quite substantially. This is not just sour grapes or a pointless consolation prize; it is more accurate; it serves the purpose of building awareness and discussion about a festering injustice that has frustrated the will of a majority of voters about the direction of our country twice in 16 years; and it also challenges the myth that Trump has a genuine popular mandate to eradicate needed reforms. “Nationally, just 3 in 10 Americans — 29 percent — say he has a mandate to carry out the agenda he presented during the campaign, while 59 percent say he should compromise with Democrats when they strongly disagree with the specifics of his policy proposals,” note Scott Clement and Dan Balz at the Washington Post, reporting on a Washington Post-Schar School national poll.

Speaking of “mandates,” Julia Azari probes the concept in her Vox post, “Every president claims to have a mandate. Does Trump actually have one?” Azari notes, “In my research on presidential mandate claims, drawing on an analysis of more than 1,500 presidential communications from 1929 through 2009, including press conferences and major and minor speeches, I found a distinct pattern. Although election margins have tended to be tighter since the 1970s, presidents have talked more about how those election results justify what they’re doing…Research suggests that mandate claims, despite their tenuous connection to reality, can be effective in affecting legislative behavior. Research also shows that these perceptions can be influenced by how politicians and the media frame elections. But these effects are short-lived. Political science studies show that legislators will change their behavior in response to the perception of a mandate election — but only for so long.”

The anti-Trump ferment in so many parts of the country is beginning to generate some serious and sustained activity–including one intra-Democratic-Party disciplinary movement that I’m skeptical of, as I noted at New York:

[A]ccording to Politico, restive progressives have a very particular and entirely understandable goal that has nothing to do with the campaign that just ended:

“’Our big goal is to support primary challenges against those Democrats who negotiate with Donald Trump,’ said the organizer, Waleed Shahid, a veteran of Bernie Sanders’ campaign who is working for a group called AllofUs, launched in September.”

The first question that must be asked about this agenda is whether Trump and his people need or even want Democrats on the other side of a negotiating table. With a solid majority in the House and a two-vote majority in the Senate (buttressed by the absence of the potentially troublesome heretic Mark Kirk of Illinois), it may not be necessary. If Trump and congressional Republican leaders can come to agreement on a budget reconciliation bill to achieve most of their common goals, from a big upper-end tax cut and more money for the Pentagon to the decimation of low-income programs and the disabling of Obamacare, then they probably will not need a single Democratic vote. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski are about the only Republican senators Mitch McConnell would need to worry about, and with Mike Pence breaking tie votes in the Senate, they really don’t matter any more than the Democrats. Yes, all other things being equal, Republicans would prefer securing some Democratic votes for a Trump Supreme Court nominee and an Obamacare replacement plan in order to avoid the messy process of eliminating the Senate filibuster altogether. But it’s not mandatory, and it’s likely that Republicans, fearing midterm House losses in 2018, will want to rush through as much simon-pure conservative legislation as quickly as possible, without screwing around too much with the powerless Democrats.

But it is also possible that Donald Trump personally would like to be able to claim some bipartisan support. The way his cabinet is beginning to shape up, his idea of bipartisanship will probably be the old gibe “Let’s compromise — do it my way.” If down the road Trump has a truly decisive break with congressional Republicans, though, all bets are off. At that point, even the lefty-est of lefty Democrats might support some tactical maneuvering to split the GOP.

So for the time being you have to figure the threat of primarying “traitorous” Democrats is mainly hypothetical and prophylactic. But then the secondary question comes up: Which wavering Democrats are going to be intimidated by a “tea party of the left”?

The obvious targets for either a bipartisan Trump outreach or for disciplinary efforts by progressives are the Democratic senators up for reelection in 2018 who represent states carried by Trump. There are ten of them: Bob Casey (Pennsylvania), Joe Manchin (West Virginia), Bill Nelson (Florida), Sherrod Brown (Ohio), Debbie Stabenow (Michigan), Joe Donnelly (Indiana), Tammy Baldwin (Wisconsin), Claire McCaskill (Missouri), Heidi Heitkamp (North Dakota), and Jon Tester (Montana). You might imagine some of these states are not reliably Republican in the future, but the flip back to the Democrats won’t be automatic, either, in a midterm election when the turnout dynamics have recently favored Republicans.

Now, Sherrod Brown and Tammy Baldwin and probably Debbie Stabenow are not the sort of Democrats who will be hankering for a way to show Trump voters they’re not all bad, and Bob Casey has his own appeal to white working-class voters that doesn’t necessarily depend on bipartisanship. But the rest of these vulnerable Democratic senators could waver.

And if they do, what exactly is “the tea party of the left” going to do about it? Joe Manchin, for one, would probably pay for left-bent protests against his “centrist” heresies in West Virginia, and would definitely welcome a progressive primary opponent to triangulate against. Heitkamp’s state went for Trump by 36 points; Tester’s, McCaskill’s, and Donnelly’s by 20 points or slightly less. Does anyone think a candidate more progressive or partisan than any of these worthies has a prayer of carrying their states in the immediate future?

At some point, would-be members of a “tea party of the left” need to come to grips with the fact that the “tea party of the right” had more geographical material to work with. Trump carried 30 states. So long as every state has two senators, and particularly if the recent trend toward straight-ticket voting persists, it will be difficult for Democrats to control the Senate. Similarly, it will be difficult for Democrats to control a majority of state governments, and that in turn gives Republicans the upper hand in House redistricting. Given that reality, is the biggest problem Democrats face really spinelessness or friendliness with Wall Street? Or is it the absence of candidates and a message that can broaden not just the Democratic popular vote coalition, but its geographical reach?

In the meantime, Democrats should not be surprised if endangered politicians in Trump country choose to “negotiate” instead of defiantly thumbing their noses at their wayward constituents. A national movement of resistance to Donald Trump and all his works may well be the only moral course of action for progressives. But there will be no-shows on the battlefield when the trumpet sounds.