Yesterday J. P. Green flagged a post by Sam Wang, an expert on probability statistics,  who pinpoints North Carolina as the only state he could rate a genuine toss-up at this political moment.

Today President Obama will join Hillary Clinton in Charlotte to help boost her campaign and see if they can move NC into the “leans Democratic” category. Obama won the state’s electoral votes in 2008, but lost it in 2012. In their Bloomberg.com post on the changing political views of educated white voters in the tarheel state, Margaret Talev, Jennifer Epstein and Gregory Giroux note that African Americans are expected to be about one in four NC voters in November.

Since 2012 the demographic winds have shifted in a slightly more favorable direction for NC Democrats. Perhaps even more significantly, the NC Republican establishment has made an awful mess of their prospects by cranking up hysteria on the transgender bathroom “issue” with the ‘HB2 law,’ which has cost the state significant business revenues and embarrassed NC residents.

Talev, Epstein and Giroux quote Morgan Jackson, a Raleigh consultant to the Clinton campaign, who notes the effect of the publicity and other trends favoring Clinton and the Democrats in NC, which also has a GOP governorship and Senate seat being contested:

…We are growing in a more diverse way, the electorate’s getting less and less white, and more urbanized, and more folks have college degrees. All those things are connecting together. And there’s a huge out-of-state migration into these areas. People move to where the jobs are.”

Meanwhile, Jackson said that that the HB2 law had “turned off all of suburbia” and represented “a big mistake” for Republicans. A number of artists, from Bruce Springsteen to Cirque du Soleil, nixed plans to perform in the state, while some, like Cyndi Lauper, said they would donate proceeds from their shows there to LGBT causes.

“It very quickly went from being about bathrooms, or even discrimination, to jobs and the state’s reputation nationally,” said Jackson. “Exactly the voters Trump needs to bring over not only are turned off by his rhetoric, but the water is poisoned by HB2.”

The authors also quote TDS founding editor Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and author of major works on changing political demographics and political attitudes in the U.S., who sees Democrats making significant inroads with white educated voters: “The moment [Trump] became a serious candidate, it immediately presented itself as a hypothesis…” Further,

Texeira said Clinton isn’t expected to win a majority of the white, college-educated vote in North Carolina, and that she doesn’t have to to carry the state. He said she just needs to do better than Obama did in 2012, when he took about 30 percent of that vote. “If the minority vote’s very strong for Clinton and she can even do somewhat-less-bad among the white, college-educated vote, then that should be enough,” he said. “If she got 40 percent it’s almost a lock that she wins the state.”

The authors add that Clinton is now doing much better with white educated voters:

Recent national polls of registered voters show Clinton leading with college-educated whites, a group that Obama lost by 14 percentage points nationally in 2012 and by four points in 2008. The size of her advantage in late June varied from just one point in a Wall Street Journal-NBC News survey, to an eight-point edge in a Washington Post-ABC News poll, to 10 points in a Quinnipiac University survey.

…If the shift in the white, college-educated vote nationally holds in swing states, Texeira predicted Trump is “toast.” “Trump would have to carry the white, working class vote by something like 36 points or 40 points,” he said.

…White, college-educated voters could also help Clinton strengthen Democrats’ prospects in states like Colorado and Virginia, which rank No. 1 and No. 9, respectively, in a Bloomberg analysis of 2014 U.S. Census Bureau data that calculates the percentages of non-Hispanic whites age 25 or older who hold bachelor’s degrees or higher. They are 44.4 percent of the population in Colorado and 40.3 percent in Virginia.

The question is, can Trump offset Clinton’s inroads with educated white voters with equivalent or better performance with white voters who have less than a college education? Trump’s prospects are further diminished by Clinton’s clear edge with Latino voters in NC and other swing states.

Much depends on the respective voter turnout operations of the two campaigns. Given the signs of increasing disarray in Trump’s campaign and the impressive management displayed by the Clinton campaign, the smart money favors the Democrats.

Dave Weigel’s post at The Fix “Democrats have a bad habit of giving away Senate seats” should be required reading and thoroughly discussed by strategists in the Clinton campaign, as well as the DNC.

Sen. Sanders is calling on Clinton delgates to the Democratic convention to clarify their opposition to a vote on the Trans-Pacific Partnership in the lame duck session of congress. Michael Edison Hayden reports at ABC News that “The Clinton campaign responded to ABC News’ request for comment by forwarding a recent statement the candidate made on TPP in response to criticisms from the Trump campaign: “Hillary Clinton opposes TPP today, she will oppose it in November, and she would not move it forward in January. Hillary Clinton has made clear that she is not interested in tinkering around the margins with TPP. As she has said repeatedly, she believes we need a new approach to trade that protects American jobs, raises incomes for American workers, and strengthens our national security.”

“The crown jewel of Obama’s machine, an email list of supporters that included 20 million addresses in 2012, is now fully available to Clinton. That list had been closely held within an Obama campaign committee that still exists to pay off old debt. Democratic groups and even Obama’s Organizing for Action nonprofit had to rent the list for a hefty sum…Now a copy of that list, which helped propel Obama to record-breaking fundraising, is controlled by the Democratic National Committee, which can send emails at will without going through Obama’s campaign…” — from Josh Lederman of the A.P.

Those who would like a little more political wonk with their morning coffee should try Sam Wang’s “The Presidential Meta-Analysis for 2016” at The Princeton Election Consortium. After analysing all of the data, Wang sees only one state, NC, in the toss-up category. Here’s one of his nifty graphics:

Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com is also providing data-driven updates in their feature, “Who will win the presidency?”

Economist Neil H. Buchanan makes a case at Newsweek that “Republicans Should Embrace a Hillary Clinton Presidency” and notes, “They will significantly increase their chances of winning in the future if they are seen as the party that is big enough to put partisanship aside in the best interests of the country…The entire political conversation would change from, “Wow, the Republicans are literally willing to do anything to win,” to an outpouring of plaudits for Republicans’ genuine patriotism.”

At The American Prospect Joshua Holland explains why it is unlikely that Hillary Clointon will move toward the political center to get elected. “..Democrats have won the popular vote in five of the last six elections, and in the past two they did it with what’s been called the “Rising American Electorate”—African Americans, Latinos, urban and suburban college-educated whites, and unmarried women. According to [Stan] Greenberg, those groups constituted 51 percent of voters in 2012, and he estimates that they’ll represent 53 percent of voters this year. But he also thinks that secular voters should be considered part of that new majority. Their inclusion, he says, expands the universe of voters who lean toward Democrats—and who are not moved by conservative messaging—to more like 64 percent of the electorate…“If they are consolidated and voting in large numbers, then that gives you a huge election,” says Greenberg. “For me, step one is to consolidate those voters and energize those voters, and if you look at the margin right now, many of the Sanders voters and many of the millennial voters have not yet consolidated. So [Clinton] has gains to be made by energizing that broad progressive base.”

Allie Yee crunches some numbers at Facing South and explains why “With deportation relief at stake, South’s Latinos could swing presidential race”

At Vox Caleb Lewis reports that “2 weeks out, and Trump’s convention is a total mess. Sad!” But at least it may not be as boring as the last couple of GOP quadrennial conventions, with all of the loons expected to participate.

Greg Sargent’s “The Plum Line Opinion: A Sanders endorsement of Clinton could still make a big difference” reports that a new battleground state poll from Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg’s Democracy Corps finds that “among likely voters in nine key battleground states, Clinton leads Donald Trump by eight points, 49-41.” Further,

…Trump’s Rust Belt strategy may be failing: In the aggregate of five of the states — Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and New Hampshire — Clinton leads by eight, 44-36. A second is that Clinton may be able to expand the map because she’s also doing well in the more diverse remaining states: In the aggregate of North Carolina, Arizona, Nevada, and Florida, Clinton also leads by eight, 47-39.

In addition, Sargent concludes that ” Sanders’ endorsement [of Clinton] could, in fact, still have a real impact, meaning he may still have some genuine leverage to try to win more concessions designed to continue pushing the party’s agenda in a more progressive direction.”

Sargent notes that, while 89 percent of Democrats in the nine states are already supporting Clinton,

…Peek below the toplines, and it’s clear there’s plenty of room for a Sanders endorsement to help Clinton. This becomes clear when you look at the breakdown of numbers among not just Clinton and Trump, but also with libertarian Gary Johnson factored in, because apparently, a lot of Sanders supporters are now going for Johnson.

The poll finds that among voters who supported Sanders in the primary in the nine battlegrounds polled, 69 percent support Clinton, while six percent back Trump and another 17 percent support Johnson. What’s more, among millennials, it’s even more stark: 46 percent support Clinton, 24 percent back Trump, and 22 percent support Johnson.

Sargent quotes Greenberg, who adds

“It’s quite possible that many Sanders voters and millennials may be identifying as independents…Millennials, and white millennials in particular, are still out there and have not consolidated behind her.”

“Of his vote, there’s still a significant bloc voting for the Libertarian Party,” Greenberg continues. “Ninety percent of Sanders voters should be voting for Hillary.” If Sanders were to succeed in consolidating his voters and millennials behind Clinton, Greenberg adds, “it could kick her lead into double digits.”

And a double-digit victory for Clinton in November, some political observers believe, would result in a wave election that would likely provide Democratic majorities in both houses of congress and many state legislatures now controlled by Repubicans.

A strong endorsement by Sanders, who has already stated he will vote for Clinton, could well make the difference between a Clinton victory checked by continued Republican obstruction in congress, and a Democratic landslide which launches a new era of progressive change that improves the lives of millions of Americans. Providing the leadership needed to achieve the latter result would make Sen. Sanders one of the most influential political figures of our times.

As we observed the beginnings of leadership fights in both of the UK’s major parties, it gave pause to some of the disputes we’ve been having over the presidential nominating process here, and particularly in the Democratic Party. I offered some compare-and-contrast notes at New York:

In the U.K., the party leaders (i.e., those who will compete to be prime minister in national elections) are chosen by dues-paying party members. The Tories charge 25 pounds a year — with lower rates for youth and military — and Labour has a standard monthly dues rate of 3.92 pounds, though the party recently created a cheaper “registered supporter” option at 3 pounds a year that carries with it the right to vote in leadership elections. The system also includes the equivalent of the U.S. Democratic Party’s “superdelegates.” Members of Parliament (the House of Commons, and in the Labour Party also Members of the European Parliament) determine the field for leadership contests by a nomination process; Tory MPs have the responsibility to narrow the field to two candidates before members get involved. In both parties, MPs can trigger a leadership contest by a vote of “no confidence” in the leader and then the nomination of one or more challengers. That’s the process currently in motion in the Labour Party, where Jeremy Corbyn will soon face a challenge and a new leadership election even though he has only been leader since September of last year.

While the left in the United States tends to oppose closed primaries at present, and the right tends to favor them, both left and right in the U.K. have their base in the dues-paying party membership. Indeed, the socialist Jeremy Corbyn won his leadership election — in an upset, yet by a landslide — on the basis of a big surge in party membership (and/or “registered supporter” membership), and it remains possible that he will hang on to his position in a second election despite the extraordinary and bitter opposition to him among Labour MPs and signs that his leadership and issue positions are not that popular with Labour voters or the new voters the party needs.

If the British system for nominating leaders seems, well, anti-democratic, it used to be far more restricted. Before 1998, Tory MPs completely controlled their party’s leadership contests. And before Gordon Brown proposed a new “one member, one vote” system for Labour in 2010, that party used an “electoral college” in which MPs had one vote, party affiliates (mostly unions) had one vote, and then party members had the final vote.

The more grassroots-y process now in use in the U.K. still gives short shrift to loyal voters who may not be well represented by either dues-paying party members or by MPs. All they can do is vote or not vote for the party as led or misled, and hope things get better. Such people really do have a bigger role in the U.S. system.

So count your blessings, Democrats. Your indie friends may have trouble voting in Democratic primaries in some states, but so far no one is asking any of you to pay for the privilege.

At Sabato’s Crystal Ball Alan I. Abramowitz, author of The Polarized Public: Why American Government is So Dyfunctional, addresses a question on the minds of many political observers: Could Trump’s unique candidacy produce “major shifts in the voting patterns that have characterized recent elections?”

Abramowitz taps into data from the 2016 American National Election Study Pilot Survey, which queried 1,200 eligible American voters between Jan. 22-28, 2016. Read the post to review his methodology, and then evaluate his conclusions.

Abramowitz sets out to determine whether Democratic and Republican voters “remain sharply divided” on economic, cultural and racial issues. He also analyses the ANES data to see if there were “substantial divisions on major issues between supporters of different candidates within each party and whether these intra-party divisions were larger or smaller than the inter-party divisions.”

Among his conclusions:

The largest difference between Clinton and Sanders supporters was not on economic issues, as one might have expected given Sanders’ focus on income inequality, but on cultural issues. This may reflect the fact that Sanders did best in this survey, as in just about every other national survey as well as exit polls of Democratic primary voters, among Democrats under the age of 30 — a group that tends to be somewhat more liberal than older Democrats on cultural issues. However, Clinton supporters were far more liberal on cultural issues than supporters of any Republican candidate.

Not surprisingly, given Trump’s frequent attacks on immigrants and his questioning of Barack Obama’s citizenship and patriotism, the largest difference between Trump supporters and supporters of other GOP candidates was on racial issues. Trump supporters scored significantly higher than other Republicans on our racial resentment scale. However, even supporters of other Republican candidates scored far higher on racial resentment than supporters of either Democratic candidate.

Getting down to numbers, Abramowit devises a “liberal-conservative issues scale,” which “runs from 0 to 10, with a score of 0 representing consistently liberal attitudes and a score of 10 representing consistently conservative attitudes.” He notes:

…On the Democratic side, 89% of Sanders supporters were located to the left of center as were 77% of Clinton supporters. The average score on the scale was 3.0 for Clinton supporters compared with 2.5 for Sanders supporters. On the Republican side, 81% of Trump supporters were located to the right of center as were 78% of supporters of other Republican candidates. The average score on the scale was 7.3 for Trump supporters compared with 7.1 for supporters of other Republican candidates.

Noting the polarization and straight-ticket voting that has characterized presidential elections in recent years, Abramowitz crunches the data into an “ANES feeling thermometer scale” and finds,

…Democrats gave Clinton an average rating of 71 degrees and Republicans gave Trump an average rating of 65 degrees. But the data show that Democrats and Republicans gave the opposing party’s frontrunner extremely negative ratings — Democrats gave Trump an average rating of only 19 degrees and Republicans gave Clinton an average rating of only 12 degrees. Supporters of both parties, but especially Republicans, disliked the opposing party’s frontrunner more than they liked their own party’s frontrunner — a phenomenon that reflects the prevalence of negative partisanship in the contemporary American electorate.

Comparing the voting patterns of 2016 in the data with the 2012 presidential election, Abramowitz finds  “an extremely high degree of consistency in group voting patterns between these two elections. There is a correlation of .99 — an almost perfect relationship — between Obama’s margin over Mitt Romney in the [CNN/ORC] 2012 exit poll and Clinton’s margin over Trump in the 2016 CNN/ORC poll across these voter groups.”

“Based on these findings,” concludes Abramowitz,  “voting patterns in the 2016 general election should closely resemble those seen in recent presidential elections.” For Democrats, that’s reason for optimism, not an excuse for apathy. For the challenge of 2016 is not only to win the white house, but also to build a wave election that can give President Clinton a working majority in congress and Democratic take-overs of state legislatures nationwide.

Earlier this week Donald Trump gave a much-discussed speech on trade and globalization in Pennsylvania. I am not sure all Democrats understand how heretical the whole thing must seem to your average chamber of commerce member out in the heartland–much less to Wall Street and K Street Republicans. I wrote about that at New York.

[B]y and large, this candidate, who never really embraced systematic thinking, mostly talked of trade policy as something that he would improve via his personal negotiating genius. Uncle Sam might still play the trade game, but he’d no longer be Uncle Sucker, being constantly outmaneuvered by swarthy or sallow foreigners.

But now, in a speech delivered in the Rust Belt state of Pennsylvania, Trump has gone High Protectionist, rejecting not just this or that trade deal, but the whole idea of globalization, which he regards as a politician’s trick on the Folks, who have watched helplessly as Bill and Hillary Clinton sold out their birthright of manufacturing jobs for a mess of Wall Street pottage. Trump sounds like Bernie Sanders on a very bad, dyspeptic day:

“The legacy of Pennsylvania steelworkers lives in the bridges, railways and skyscrapers that make up our great American landscape. But our workers’ loyalty was repaid with betrayal.

“Our politicians have aggressively pursued a policy of globalization — moving our jobs, our wealth and our factories to Mexico and overseas. Globalization has made the financial elite who donate to politicians very wealthy. But it has left millions of our workers with nothing but poverty and heartache.

“When subsidized foreign steel is dumped into our markets, threatening our factories, the politicians do nothing.

“For years, they watched on the sidelines as our jobs vanished and our communities were plunged into depression-level unemployment. Many of these areas have still never recovered.

“Our politicians took away from the people their means of making a living and supporting their families. Skilled craftsmen and tradespeople and factory workers have seen the jobs they loved shipped thousands of miles away. Many Pennsylvania towns once thriving and humming are now in a state despair. This wave of globalization has wiped out our middle class.”

And on and on it goes. Trump’s narrative of an idyllic, prelapsarian America ruined by globalization has a few holes. It begins with virtuous protectionists George Washington and Alexander Hamilton (you know, the star of that Broadway musical), and then skips far ahead to the Clintons, who wrecked it all with NAFTA and China’s admission to the WTO. You wouldn’t know from listening to him that Ronald Reagan (mentioned by Trump only in connection with a highly uncharacteristic tariff he imposed on Japan) was talking favorably about something very much like NAFTA in 1980; that his successor George H.W. Bush actually negotiated and signed the agreement; or for that matter, that the TPP is as much a product of George W. Bush’s trade diplomacy as Obama’s.

More generally, Trump is ignoring a free-trade tradition in the Republican Party that dates back to the very post–World War II era that he identifies as an American golden age. Yes, Richard Nixon offered protection to the textile industry as part of his 1968 deal with Strom Thurmond (whose South Carolina Republican Party was a wholly owned subsidiary of textile baron Roger Milliken). Yes, John Connally bashed the Japanese during his unsuccessful 1980 presidential campaign. And yes, Pat Buchanan offered very much the same analysis and prescription of America’s economic challenges during his two unsuccessful presidential campaigns (curiously, he somehow saw America as ruined even in 1992, before NAFTA!).

But for the most part, Republican protectionism, rooted in the early 19th-century Whig protectionism of Henry Clay and his “American System,” expired with the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930, widely blamed for setting off a worldwide trade war that made a worldwide Great Depression significantly more painful. And far from being some Clintonian invention, Democratic support for trade liberalization is probably the longest-standing policy tradition in either party, dating all the way back to Martin Van Buren (his predecessor Andrew Jackson had a protectionist streak often attributed to his important political following in the selfsame Pennsylvania where Trump unleashed his protectionist thunder today).

Bernie Sanders represents an authentic and fairly widespread progressive backlash against the Democratic free-trade tradition, rooted in the labor movement, which obviously lost an awful lot in the demise of many traditional, often unionized, industries. Hillary Clinton’s decision to oppose TPP is a sign of that perspective’s power. But in Trump’s case, he’s reaching far back to a lost Republican tradition that is now the starkest heresy among most economic conservatives. On word of Trump’s speech in Pennsylvania, you can be sure knees jerked violently not only on Wall Street and the editorial rooms of its Journal, but also in chambers of commerce across the land where the pure gospel of free trade has been preached for eons. Trump has now declared that gospel pure evil, and the blowback may make the embarrassment-bordering-on-irritated-hostility that his immigration demagoguery produced in the same circles look very mild by comparison.

It’s really unclear any votes Trump can peel off with this rhetoric will offset that blowback.  We’ll see.

Bernie Sanders has some pointed advice for Democrats in his New York Times op-ed,  “Democrats Need to Wake Up,” including “The notion that Donald Trump could benefit from the same forces that gave the Leave proponents a majority in Britain should sound an alarm for the Democratic Party in the United States. Millions of American voters, like the Leave supporters, are understandably angry and frustrated by the economic forces that are destroying the middle class…In this pivotal moment, the Democratic Party and a new Democratic president need to make clear that we stand with those who are struggling and who have been left behind. We must create national and global economies that work for all, not just a handful of billionaires.”

Sam Stein reports on a strategy memo provided to HuffPo which indicates that “The RNC Plans to Turn Bernie Sanders Backers Against Hilary Clinton’s VP Pic.” Stein notes, “The goals, the memo says, are to “drive wedges between these top contenders and either Clinton and/or traditional Democrat constituencies, such as labor, environmentalists, and gun control advocates, and other traditional left-wing constituencies;” and “[w]here applicable, frame the choice as an insult to the large, deep base of Bernie Sanders supporters who are struggling with the notion of supporting Hillary Clinton as the presumptive Democrat nominee.”

The Upshot’s Nate Silver explains why comparing pre-election polls to exit polls doesn’t work and notes that “pre-election polls always show Democrats doing better among white voters than the exit polls.”

American Bridge, the firm which did such an effective job of providing fodder for attack ads against Republican senate candidate Todd Aikin in Missouri in 2012 is on Trump’s  case in a big way, report Maggie Haberman and Ashley Parker in the New York Times. “In 2016, the group is taking every opportunity to do the same thing with Donald J. Trump. It is maintaining an archive of digital video footage, with 6,500 clips of Mr. Trump speaking or being mentioned, going back to the 1980s, and 17,000 hours of footage over all. It has also compiled more than 5,000 pages of research on the presumptive Republican nominee and has 25 trackers monitoring him.”

In their Wall St. Journal article, “Democrats Launch Push to Regain North Carolina,” Colleen McCain Nelson and Valerie Bauerlein preview President Obama’s joint appearance with Hillary Clnton in the swing state.

Thomas B. Edsall discusses “The Changing Face of Urban Power” in his NYT op-ed and explores an under-reported demographic development, “the migration of African-Americans from center cities to the suburbs.”

Maya Rao reports at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune that Democratic “Party leaders are urging members to conduct similar sit-ins around the country as they try to sustain the flash of hard-core activism on the gun issue.” More protest against the enablers of gun violence would be good. But why limit it to sit-ins? Might it also be a good idea for gun safety advocates to picket the homes of the politicians who have taken the most money from the NRA?

Isn’t it pathetic when big media laps up spoon-fed tidbits from the Republicans’ Benghazi nothingburger? Erik Wemple nails the lapdogs and their GOP trainers, and dishes out this slam for Politico’s redolent role as their aggregate tipster: “…In his “Playbook” newsletter this morning, Politico’s Mike Allen alerted readers to a crop of pieces on the much-anticipated report of the House Select Committee on Benghazi: “….LOOK FOR embargoed scoops from Politico’s Rachael Bade, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, Fox’s Bret Baier and Catherine Herridge, and Weekly Standard’s Steve Hayes…’Playbook,’ in other words, had the exclusive scoop on spoon-fed Benghazi non-scoops.”

As a friend puts it, “This is the best thing I’ve seen since Ramsay Bolton got eaten by his dogs last week on Game of Thrones.”

The following article by John Russo, former co-director of the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University and visiting scholar at the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University, first appeared at cleveland.com:

In the latest Quinnipiac poll, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are tied in battleground Ohio. This suggests a very close race in Ohio in the fall.

Economic issues, especially trade, led many former Democrats to cross party lines to support Trump in the Republican primaries. Many who hadn’t voted in recent elections joined them. We’re likely to see a repeat of this in November unless Democrats change their trade policies.

None of this should surprise Democrats, especially those in Ohio.

A new Public Policy Polling survey of registered voters in six swing states — AZ, IA, NH, OH, PA and WI presents findings which are more interesting than the usual horse race polls. As the PPP memo on the surveys explains:

New Public Policy Polling surveys in 6 key battleground states where Republican Senators are up for reelection this year find that voters don’t trust Donald Trump and would rather have Barack Obama picking a new Supreme Court justice than him. As a result they overwhelmingly support hearings on Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court, and are inclined to punish the vulnerable Republican Senators who are holding up his selection.

…-Voters in all six states, by margins ranging from 5 to 23 points, say they don’t trust Donald Trump to nominate a Supreme Court justice. Voters in WI (34% trust Trump, 57% don’t) and in the home of Judiciary Committee Chair Charles Grassley of IA (35% trust Trump, 52% don’t) are particularly skeptical of Trump’s ability to name a Justice.

That puts all of the hand-wringing about Hillary Clinton’s “trust” problem in context. Further, the memo states “voters in all six states clearly say that they *do* trust President Obama with the responsibility of making a Supreme Court selection, especially in contrast to Trump. In the key Presidential battlegrounds of Iowa, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin Obama has at least a 9 point advantage over Trump on that question in every state.

Poll respondents said they trusted Obama more than Trump for selecting the next Supreme Court justice by the following margins in each state: AZ+1; IA+10; NH+14; OH+11; PA+9; and WI +17. In addition, “More than 60% of voters in each of these states supports hearings for Garland, by margins ranging from 38 to 46 points. That includes overwhelming support from critical independent voters, and even plurality support from Republicans in 4 of the 6 states”

The PPP surveys indicate that Republican senators in these six states are in trouble — “5 of the 6 have negative approval ratings and the one exception, Chuck Grassley, still has his worst approval numbers in years with them coming in only narrowly on positive ground at 43/40. Voter unhappiness about obstructionism on the Supreme Court issue could be what flips all these toss up races into the Democratic column and gives them control of the Senate next year…”
Even better,

One other thing serving as a drag on these vulnerable Senate Republicans is the unpopularity of their leader, Mitch McConnell. McConnell’s approval rating is under 15% in all six states, and being tied to him has the potential to damage the political standing of the members of his caucus. His net approval ranges from -26 at best to -45 at worst in this set of states.

Gratifying though it is to see Mitch McConnell paying a price for his obstructionist “leadership,” there are as many as five other swing/battleground states, including FL, MI, NC, VA and ME, and some of them show close margins in the presidential contest and/or senate races.

But the margins in the six states of the PPP surveys are nonetheless impressive and indicate that the public is tiring of the GOP senate leadership’s obstruction of an exceptionally well-qualified nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court. Put that together with the fallout following Speaker Ryan’s refusal to allow votes on popular gun safety measures, and the GOP looks even more like an elitist political party that thwarts the democratic process to block even moderate progress.

The following article by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, Leo Hindery, Jr. and Michael Wessel (author notes below), is cross-posed from HuffPo:

Last week’s Brexit vote was just the latest example — albeit a giant one — in this wild political year when workers have been sending the clear message that status quo economic policies are unacceptable. Politicians here in America and in Europe ignore the concerns of workers at their great peril. For the Democratic Party in this country in 2016, the lessons are especially clear.

In the 35 years since Ronald Reagan became president, we’ve seen a steady erosion in the attention political leaders have given to the economic and political concerns of the working class. From the dramatic decline of union membership to the excessive deregulation of Wall Street; from trade deals that enrich multinational corporations but not American workers to a lack of antitrust enforcement that’s allowed near-monopolies in too many sectors; from a lack of significant wage increases for all but the top 10 percent of Americans to ever-escalating inflation in the costs of health care, groceries and college, our political system breakdown and our persistent “trickle down” sense of economics have combined — and conspired — to weaken the well-being of most American working people and retirees.

And now they’re angry, in ways that once hardly seemed imaginable.

A ridiculous huckster and nativist named Donald J. Trump is only days away from officially being the Republican Party nominee for president. And in the United Kingdom, Brexit has just validated that working class anger isn’t only an American phenomenon and concern.

The Democratic Party and the Hillary Clinton campaign need to understand that this reality matters, and that — in spite of some national polls showing a significant lead right now — beating Donald Trump in 2016 will be no easy lift. For all the people Trump has offended over the last year and for all of his racism and misogyny, for all the mistakes he has made in recent weeks, he is in a near tie with Secretary Clinton in several key swing states, and is still within striking distance nationally. And don’t forget that Trump outperformed his polling numbers throughout much of his primary run.

Democrats at all levels are going to need a big turnout of our base, as well as a message that appeals strongly to working class swing voters.

The good news is that the Democratic Party Convention platform being developed in advance of Philadelphia is a sign of things moving very much in the right directions. On a wide range of economic issues, the current draft sections of the Party platform are more responsive to working families’ concerns than we’ve seen in decades. There is great language on toughening up our trade deals and making them more focused on workers and their continued fair employment and less focused on just further enriching big business. There are calls for a new Glass-Steagall Act, for breaking up “Too Big to Fail” banks, and for a Financial Transactions Tax. A $15 minimum wage indexed for inflation is demanded, as is, importantly, a new large-scale jobs program to include major spending on infrastructure through a new infrastructure bank with a ‘buy domestic’ demand and worker protections.

Read more…