At Politico Daniel Strauss reports on plans for a heightened role for Sanders in support of Democratic presidential nominee Clinton and other party candidates for congress, state and local offices. Strauss notes that the effort is being coordinated by Interim DNC Chairwoman Donna Brazile, former Sanders campaign head Jeff Weaver and state Democratic Party leaders, along with other DNC officials and Sanders aides.

Strauss reports that Brazile met with Weaver and Sanders’ top campaign adviser Mark Longabaugh, followed up by Brazile’s conference call with top Democratic National Committee officials including chief of staff Brandon Davis and state party leaders. The topics discussed “Sanders’ schedule as well as voter mobilization among former Sanders supporters,” notes Strauss, who adds,

Brazile told those on the conference call that Weaver had agreed to help her “through this election process and beyond.”

The call focused on a 50-state strategy for the November election to be implemented soon by members of Clinton’s campaign and Sanders’ former presidential team.

The close interactions between the interim DNC chairwoman and the Sanders campaign is in stark contrast to earlier in the presidential cycle when the campaign criticized now-former DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz as unfairly partial to Clinton.

“I know that sometimes in primaries there can be sharp elbows, and I hope I haven’t bumped into too many of you,” Weaver said on the call. “But as we go forward into the general election, I’m very happy to be working with members of the Clinton team in trying to get the secretary elected.”

Brazile affirmed her determination to strengthen the 50 Democratic state parties and support down-ballot Democratic candidates, and a fund-raising campaign in support of that effort is underway. “Marlon Marshall, the Clinton campaign’s director of states, and Brazile highlighted red states around the country where they thought Democrats could make immediate inroads, including Georgia and North Carolina,” notes Strauss.

“We’re continuing to look at places where we can expand opportunities to vote,” Marshall said. “We’re working to expand early vote sites in some of these places like Florida and North Carolina. And we’re starting our heavy push of recruitment of lawyers” to be at polling locations in battleground states.”

Looking beyond 2016, Brazile reiterated her strong commitment to the 50-state strategy. “We know what’s coming up in 2020. We know what’s coming up in 2018,” she explains. With the DNC, the Sanders and Clinton campaigns working together so well, improved Democratic voter mobilization and turnout should Give Dems an additional edge in 2016 and beyond.

Zach Carter, senior political economy reporter at HuffPo, has an interesting post about a promising new strategy being deployed by Zephyr Teachout, a progressive Democratic candidate for New York’s 19th congressional district in the Hudson Valley.

Teachout is “cutting out the middleman” with a new ad that targets “vulture fund” billionaire Paul Singer, who wrote a check for a cool half-million dollars to a super PAC supporting John Faso, her Republican opponent. Teachout points out that contributions to her campaign average about $15. Go to this link to see the ad.

Carter explains Teachout’s strategy:

…When Singer signed on in May, Faso had the firepower to challenge Teachout in the general election.

On Monday, Teachout decided to bypass Faso himself and go after his donor. In a video posted to her Facebook account, she criticized Singer and challenged him to a debate.

“This is very serious,” Teachout says in the ad. “Paul Singer, I challenge you to come here and have a debate with me … I think the people of the 19th District deserve to hear your actual voice when you’re putting so much money into trying to buy up representation.”

Teachout is an academic corruption expert who is building her campaign message around curbing the influence of large corporations and money in politics. So highlighting Singer isn’t just an attempt to dismiss Faso as a tool of big money interests ― it also draws attention to Teachout’s strongest issue.

It’s an interesting strategy. For too long, Republican PAC sugar-daddies have escaped scrutiny and paid no penalty for lavishing big money on their candidates. By calling a lot of extra attention to Singer’s outsize contribution, Teachout is forcing him to pay a price in his diminished image, making his candidate, John Faso, look like a hedge-fund puppet and, if she wins, providing an impressive example that can help other progressive candidates who are willing to go after those who try to buy elections with large donations.

Opinion polls show overwhelming public support for curbing the influence of big money on American politics. Teachout’s strategy may provide a powerful new way to check the corruption of our democracy by fat cat money.

Here’s the Clinton campaign’s first ad on the subject of Trump’s unavailble tax froms: 

The Associated Press report “Clinton Releases 2015 Tax Returns, Pushing Trump for His,” notes, “…The Clintons paid a federal tax rate of 34.2 percent in 2015 and made about $10.6 million combined that year. Pulitzer Prize wining financial and tax expert David Cay Johnston writes at The Daily Beast that “The average American pays 13.6 cents out of each dollar in federal income taxes, with those just below the 1 percent paying 18.4 percent and the top 1 percent paying 27 percent, IRS data show.” Further, according to the AP story, they gave more than $1,042,000 to charity, with $1 million going to the Clinton family foundation. That is the financial vehicle the family uses to give money to museums, schools, churches and other charitable causes…The Clintons have disclosed tax returns for every year since 1977…Trump has refused to make his filings public, saying they’re under audit by the Internal Revenue Service…”

Jenna Johnson notes at The Washington Post: “In January, Trump said he was almost ready to disclose his “very big . . . very beautiful” returns. But a month later, Trump reversed course, citing ongoing Internal Revenue Service audits of several years of his taxes…An IRS spokesman said that nothing, including an audit, “prevents individuals from sharing their own tax information.” And President Richard Nixon released his tax records while under audit.”

David Cay Johnston also explains in his thorough analysis, “Is a Crook Hiding in Donald Trump’s Taxes?” at The Daily Beast, that “Trump’s excuse—that he is being audited by the IRS—is as phony as the three-dollar bills Trump refers to in speeches. Besides which, Trump’s tax lawyers issued a letter saying audits of his returns for 2002 to 2008 were closed with no changes. So even by Trump’s own standard, no excuse exists for holding back those years or earlier ones, which would also be closed…” Johnston also cites numerous  Trump business interests and dealings in Russia, and believes hiding the damaging details may be a leading reason why Trump has not kept his promise about releasing his tax forms.

At NPR Politics Domenico Montanaro puts into perspective why we should care about Clinton and Trump’s tax history, and cites three important things we can learn from candidates tax filings, including: Are there conflicts of interest?; “Do they have heart?” (charitable contributions) and; “Are they like us?” (how much they earn, their net worth, tax rates and lifestyle).

It is highly doubtful that independent tax analysts would be able to say the same thing about Trump’s tax history, that this report by Rick Newman at Yahoo Finance says of the Clintons’ taxes: “…Almost nobody in that tax bracket pays the large portion of taxes the Clintons pay, because a slew of tax breaks sharply reduces the tax bite for most high earners…There are no tricks or gimmicks here,” says Stuart Gibson, editor of the weekly publication Tax Notes International. “These are white-bread returns.” The Clintons earn nearly all of their income from working rather than from investments, which leaves few options for exploiting the many tax loopholes that other wealthy taxpayers use.”

According to “How Much Does Donald Trump Pay in Taxes? It Could Be Zero” by James B. Stewart at The New York Times, “Mitt Romney was excoriated during the 2012 presidential campaign for paying $4.9 million in federal income tax, or an average of just 14 percent of his adjusted gross income, in the two years for which he released returns…No one should be surprised, though, if Donald J. Trump has paid far less — perhaps even zero federal income tax in some years. Indeed, that’s the expectation of numerous real estate and tax professionals I’ve interviewed in recent weeks…Even though his recent returns are confidential, the notion that Mr. Trump has paid little or no tax is not entirely speculative. It’s consistent with Mr. Trump’s returns from the late 1970s, which he filed with the New Jersey Casino Control Commission when applying for a casino license in 1981. Mr. Trump reported losses and paid no federal income tax in 1978 and 1979 and paid only modest sums — a total of less than $75,000 — for the prior three years.”

The Tax History Project at Tax Analysts has compiled an extraordinary archive of presidential tax returns going back to FDR, and includes links to presidential tax information from 1913 till today. Since the 1970s, notes the Project, most presidents have publicly released their tax returns.

And what does Mr. My taxes are “none of your business”‘ propose to do about tax reform for America?  From David Horsey’s L.A. Times post, “Trump’s tax scheme serves the rich, not working-class white guys“: Trump would get a nice payoff from his proposal to cut the top income tax rate. Then, he and his heirs would receive an enormous gift through the elimination of the federal tax on inherited wealth for couples who have assets of $10.9 million or more. As if that were not enough, Trump would receive enormous tax savings from the provision of his scheme that sharply reduces the tax rate for so-called “pass-through” entities, businesses that pay no corporate taxes but whose owners pay a personal rate based on the profits of their enterprises.” Columnist Clarence Page also notes “The “death tax” he promises to scrap actually is the estate tax, which effects only 0.2 percent of all estates. It doesn’t kick in until the estate exceeds $5.4 million for an individual or $10.9 million for a married couple…Call it what you want but it’s not a tax break for the poor, no matter how many upset waitresses or taxi drivers I run into who think it applies to them.”

At CNN Opinion Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington, explains why “Democrats must resolve economic identity crisis.” Marshall defines the central choice Democrats face;

No doubt Democrats are enjoying the GOP’s agonizing moment of truth, but their party also faces a big strategic choice. Will Democrats wage the fall campaign as pro-growth progressives or as angry populists?

Marshall sees a “huge opening” for Democrats, if they “offer anxious voters a hopeful counterpoint to Trump’s fearful narrative — a positive plan for parlaying our country’s strengths in technological innovation and entrepreneurship into stronger economic growth that works for all Americans. Trump’s  “retro vision of what makes America great — namely, low-tech, middling skilled, labor-intensive manufacturing jobs that are highly vulnerable to automation — is a major political liability.”

“Yes, it taps into the gnawing sense of economic and cultural dispossession felt by many blue-collar workers,” adds Marshall. “But it doesn’t speak to the aspirations of middle-class voters who now mostly work in offices, use digital technology to boost their productivity, and understand that their jobs depend both on keeping their skills up to date and on their companies’ ability to succeed in global competition.”

Marshall challenges “the conventional view among party elites” that Clinton must keep blasting “populist bogeymen,” like free trade and Wall Street  to energize  “white, working-class voters in Midwestern swing states”  and to placate Sanders’ voters. But “such calculations” are bettter focused on “primary and caucus voters rather than the national electorate” Further,

Nor does it make much sense for Democrats to compete with Trump in pushing blue-collar America’s hot buttons. In the first place, non-college-educated whites have been voting predominantly Republican for a generation…Instead, Democrats should recalibrate their primary message to appeal to aspirational voters across the middle of the political spectrum — independents, college-educated suburban moderates and a substantial slice of Republicans who can’t abide Trump…A business-bashing populism, on the other hand, would put Democrats on a narrower path to the White House, with a slimmer margin of error…To win in red states and competitive House districts, however, the party’s candidates can’t sound like Sanders.

Donald Trump’s domination of the headlines with mounting outrages has served as a highly convenient distraction for the GOP; Much of the media and the public believes it is all about him, and he is dragging his poor party down into the fever swamps. Thus the Republicans escape accountability for their Frankenstein.

But Jeet Heer, a senior editor at The New Republic, isn’t having it. He brings a moment of clarity to the 2016 presidential campaign in his TNR post arguing that “The Republican Party, no less than its nominee, is incapable of accepting the Democratic Party’s right to rule.” As Heer explains:

As shocking as it was, Donald Trump’s suggestion that “Second Amendment people” would be able to deal with Hillary Clinton and the judges she appoints—a clear appeal to political violence—should not be seen as the nadir of his candidacy. Rather, it was part of his larger pre-emptive attack on the legitimacy of Clinton’s presidency. The “Second Amendment” talk is of a piece with his claims that the election is being “rigged” against him. Trump is poisoning the well, so that even if Clinton wins, she’ll govern over a population in which a significant minority rejects the notion that she has the right to rule at all.

Yet the coming legitimacy crisis won’t be solely Trump’s fault, even if he’ll deserve the bulk of the blame. As in so many other areas, Trump is merely pressing to their logical conclusion ideas that have been advocated by the last generation of Republicans, albeit more subtly. In truth, the last time Republicans wholeheartedly accepted the legitimacy of a Democratic president was Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s. Since then, both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have faced repeated attacks from an opposition that refused to fully accept their victory as final. Clinton had to fend off ginned-up scandals that suggested he and his wife were crooks and murderers, while Obama has had to contend with birthers who think he has no legal right to be president and conspiracy theorists who believe ACORN stole the election on his behalf.

Heer adds that “It wasn’t Trump who created the bogeyman of voter fraud, which resulted in laws making voting more difficult. That’s a mainstream Republican position, advocated in the respectable pages of The Wall Street Journal and enacted into laws by Republican governors across America, in states like North Carolina and Wisconsin.”

Regretfully, it’s not only Republicans who are entertaining the bogeyman delusion, says Heer. “Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have gone out of their way to say that Trump is not a normal Republican, in the hopes that they can shake loose Republican votes. But after the election, this polite fiction has to end. We need to confront the fact that Trump, as extreme as he is, is all too representative of his party.”

And those who think that defeating Trump will end the GOP-driven “legitimacy” crisis are going to be disappointed. “If Trump isn’t the only cause of the legitimacy crisis, then his defeat in November won’t be the cure for it either. America has a political problem that goes deeper than Trump: The Republican Party refuses to accept the fundamental idea that when it loses an election, it has to accept the results.”

“The Republican Party has been recklessly playing with matches for more than two decades,” concludes Heer. “Now they’ve handed over a flamethrower to a pyromaniac. However scary Trump might be, the GOP desire to burn everything down long precedes him.”

It’s really about the modern Republican party’s core contempt for democracy. For them, it’s all about destruction of the adversary in the pursuit of absolute authority, even if their refusal to negotiate in good faith damages the health and well-being of millions of citizens. And when they lose, their strategy is to undermine the very legitimacy of the election and its consequences.

Today’s GOP would no longer be recognizable to Republicans who voted for Eisenhower, let alone Teddy Roosevelt or Lincoln. We can do our best, however, to insure that they will be so badly beaten in November that a few of the GOP survivors will see the folly of their party’s flirtations with anarchy, and return to the more patriotic  conservatism that once empowered their best leaders.

Even as Hillary Clinton takes what looks to be a sizable lead in the presidential contest, the impact down-ballot remains unclear. I discussed the possibilities at New York earlier this week.

[T]he idea that Republicans can save their congressional majorities, even as Trump goes down to a dreadful defeat, really does depend on a degree of ticket-splitting that has become less and less common in the 21st century. As the Washington Post’s Philip Bump notes, in 1992, 11 of the 34 states holding Senate elections produced different partisan results for the upper chamber and the presidency. In 2012, despite two Democratic Senate pickups in red states where the GOP candidate basically imploded, only six states split their results.

Reasons for this trend are well-known. In a process often called “the great sorting-out,” liberal voters have increasingly associated themselves with the donkey party, while conservatives have clustered in the shadow of the elephant. This “ideological polarization” has itself reduced ticket-splitting, as there are fewer opportunities for voters to find like-minded candidates on the other side of the partisan divide. But it has also increased “partisan polarization,” whereby voters prone to support one party (as self-identified partisans, or as independent “leaners” who almost always vote like partisans) tend to view those in the other party as enemies, or even as threats to the republic.

Democrats focused on down-ballot races this year are hoping that this pattern holds in 2016 — assuming Clinton wins, of course. But Republicans think (and certainly hope) that Trump’s exotic nature — amplified by the sheer number of GOP opinion-leaders who are keeping their distance from him — will send a signal to swing voters that the genial, glad-handing Republican pol who represents them in Congress or the statehouse has nothing to do with the rude, raging beast at the top of the ticket. There’s even a belief, more speculative than empirical, that if Trump really falls apart, it could make it easier for voters to split tickets — partly because everybody’s doing it, and partly because some will want congressional Republicans to act as a counterweight and safeguard against Hillary Clinton running wild, with her radical ideas of gender equality and access to health care and child care and so on. The last time there was any clear evidence of widespread “strategic voting” of this type, however, was all the way back in 1972: Democrats picked up Senate seats despite the debacle that George McGovern suffered at the presidential level. And back then, of course, it was very easy for voters in the South and parts of the West to vote for conservative Democrats down-ballot, along with the conservative GOP presidential candidate. In Georgia, where I lived at the time, there was even a ballot line where you could vote straight-party Democratic, right after you cast your presidential vote against the communistic McGovern.

There’s really not much clear evidence of how this is going to work out either way. Even as Clinton moves ahead at the presidential level, no one is seeing signs so far of a “wave election” which might sweep not only the Senate, but possibly even the House, into the Democratic column. Some vulnerable Republican senators (e.g., Rob Portman of Ohio and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania) seem to be running ahead of Trump in their states, but often voters make up their minds late on such contests. The best-case scenario for Democrats is probably for 2016 to be the mirror image of 1980, when a presidential-level landslide gave Republicans wins in just about every close Senate race. After the Republican victory in 2014, such an outcome would also almost certainly produce big House gains as well, if not necessarily a majority. But whatever happens, it’s clear that a lot of the talk from Republicans about Trump and Clinton is really aimed at keeping the GOP rank and file in line — for the benefit of Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell.

MSNBC correspondent Joy-Ann Reid shreds the Trump facade and does it better than anyone so far in her Daily Beast post, “Dear White Working Class, Your Man Trump Is Pretty Establishment After All.” An excerpt: “Far from offering something new that could rescue the white working class and restore their life chances, Trump is rolling with a bunch of Calvin Coolidge bluebloods who probably wouldn’t wipe their noses on a blue-collar worker, let alone have any interest in restoring the solid, middle-class jobs they used to count on, back when unions still had strength in the manufacturing world and the New Deal mostly helped people like them. Erect big trade barriers and resurrect the American steel industry? Who’s going to lead that initiative in the Trump administration? Cerebrus Capital Management CEO Stephen Feinberg or billionaire poker player Andy Beal? Good luck with that, Sheboygan…It’s no real surprise that Trump, the scion of a wealthy father who has stiffed so many U.S. banks none of them will do business with him anymore, leaving him to borrow money from Credit Suisse and the Russians, may have pulled the ultimate con: charming the working stiffs while the monocled Monopoly Men hid in the background, waiting to be broken out of CryoFreeze and put back in charge of the economy…So surprise, working-class white people. You thought picking Trump was your way of sticking it to the establishment? Apparently, the establishment has decided that you’ve had your fun, and now, they’re taking control of the Trump campaign.”

Former GOP congressman Chris Shays provides a good example of a Republican endorsement of Clinton:

Abby Phillip takes a peek at Clinton and Democratic longer-range strategy in her WaPo Politics post, “Is Hillary Clinton contesting Texas? Not really, but she is trying to expand Democratic influence into deep-red territory.”

Marc Caputo notes at Politico that “Democratic U.S. Rep. Patrick Murphy is catching up to Sen. Marco Rubio and is nearly tied with him in a new Quinnipiac University poll that suggests Donald Trump is a drag on the incumbent Republican.”

In addition to the growing exodus of GOP elected officials now denouncing their party’s presidential candidate, Brain Trust Republicans are also deserting at an accelerating rate, as post columnist David Ignatius reports: “Fifteen prominent Republicans who had served in past GOP administrations met Sunday for a private soul-searching session that one attendee described as “painful and empathetic.” The next day, eight of them joined in signing the public declaration by 50 top GOP former national security officials warning thatTrump would be “the most reckless President” in U.S. history.”

Nate Silver has a sobering FiveThirtyEight post explaining why Dems should not get too overconfident, despite Trump’s meltdown.

You may have noticed that TDS is not in the business of advising the Repubican Party. But, looking at the big, longer-range picture, a better GOP would be good for America and good for the Democratic Party, encouraging Dems to step up their game, which is also good for the US of A. In that spirit, here’s a worthy suggestion from Vicente Feliciano’s post, “If Trump loses, does GOP establishment lose its working-class base?” at The Hill: “…Two generations ago, the Republican leadership accepted that President Franklin Roosevelt’s Social Security program and unemployment insurance, which were initially fiercely resisted, were here to stay. Some years later something similar occurred with President Lyndon Johnson’s Medicare initiative. Now ObamaCare should be, however grudgingly, accepted…And the Republican business establishment should accept that it is time to climb down from their high horse of unfettered free-market policies and get on with the dirty task of advocating market-friendly government interventions that advance the interests of the working class. Otherwise, the “blue wall” of 18 states and the District of Columbia — which provides Democrats with 242 of the 270 electoral votes required to win the presidency, and which Democrats have won in each of the last six presidential elections — will reach the 270 mark. And rightly so.”

Also at Politico, Burgess Everett has some insights about Democratic strategy to stop Trump in the Rust Belt: “…Trump is threatening a serious play for voters in this part of the country with visits to Wisconsin Friday and Michigan on Monday — including this city in conservative Western Michigan where the state may be lost and won, top officials in both parties say…If Kaine and Clinton can help take these two states off the map now, it gives Democrats more resources to spend in Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania and even traditionally GOP states like Arizona and North Carolina as the general election draws near. That will not only help Clinton but Democrats in competitive Senate races in all five battlegrounds.”

Alas, in the state that hatched Priebus, Ryan and Walker, the hydra-headed voter suppression snake refuses to die. Ian Milhiser has the bad news at ThinkProgress.

Donald Trump’s latest outrage involved a statement–originally called a “joke” by his supporters but now being spun as an innocent call for high turnout by gun owners–that “second amendment people” might have the only solution to a President Hillary Clinton’s Supreme Court nominations. Trump is actually drawing on an old extremist meme that’s a familiar dog whistle to second amendment ultras, as I explained at New York.

[E]ven as they condemn the shocking utterance, a lot of observers seem to be missing the fact that Trump is adapting a dangerously common right-wing claim. It’s that the most important purpose of the Second Amendment is not to allow people to defend themselves from robbers and muggers and would-be murderers and rapists if the police cannot get the job done, but rather to create a heavily armed populace prepared to undertake revolutionary violence if the government tries to impose “tyranny.” Let’s be clear about this doctrine: It lets the gun-wielders decide for themselves whether high taxes or government surveillance or Obamacare is a sufficient threat to liberty to justify getting out the shooting irons and killing the police officers and armed-services members assigned the responsibility of enforcing the “tyrannical” laws in question. And conservative politicians have often made it clear they understand and are okay with that incredible risk, as when Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle referred cheerfully to “Second-Amendment remedies” for the liberal policies supported by her opponent, Harry Reid. Angle was hardly alone: During the Republican presidential primaries this cycle, Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz both endorsed the idea of gun rights being a safeguard against too much Big Government liberalism. During her successful Senate campaign in 2014, rising GOP star Joni Ernst of Iowa used to happily talk about the “beautiful little Smith & Wesson” she carried with every intention of using it to defend herself and her family from “government, should they decide that my rights are no longer important.”

The most common use of this “right to revolution” argument, however, is to threaten anyone who doesn’t bend the knee to the Second Amendment itself. So it makes even the blandest support for gun-safety legislation self-evident proof of “tyranny” justifying even more stockpiling of lethal weapons to be used against “government.”

In Hillary Clinton’s case, the “tyrannical” threat is apparently that she doesn’t approve of a 5–4 decision reached by the Supreme Court in 2008 (D.C. v. Heller) that first made the Second Amendment’s “right to bear arms” a personal instead of collective (i.e., in the sense of authorizing a “well-regulated militia”) constitutional right. I guess that means the four dissenting Justices were tyrants, too, and that Ronald Reagan presided over an era of government tyranny since Heller had not at that point been handed down.

Credit Donald Trump for doing us the service of taking a dubious dog-whistle argument for violence, always discussed abstractly (it’s the “government,” not cops and soldiers, much less presidents, who will become bullet-riddled when “patriots” revolt), and with his characteristic crudeness making it a joke about rubbing out his opponent. Maybe next time some conservative pol makes a similar argument for turning to the gun if politics fails, we’ll all recognize it for the thinly veiled sedition it is.

And we’ll scorn the “super-patriots” who only love the America of the distant past–or their imaginations.

Now that Sen. Bernie Sanders has enthusiastically endorsed the Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, his campaign has begun the transformation into a social change movement that has the potential to achieve significant reforms, as well as electing progressive Democrats down-ballot. In her Washington Post column, “The Sanders movement is only just beginning,”  Katrina vanden Heuval explains:

Last week, Pramila Jayapal, one of the rising stars of the Bernie Sanders movement, won a decisive victory in the primary race for Washington’s 7th Congressional District. She will advance to the November general election, where she is favored to win. She is not alone. Jamie Raskin, a progressive state legislator and leading constitutional authority on civil rights and voting rights, won his primary to fill an open Democratic seat in Maryland. Zephyr Teachout, who literally wrote the book on political corruption and challenged New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) in the gubernatorial race two years ago, is running a brilliant campaign in an uphill battle for a Republican-held seat in New York.

These are not corporate or Blue Dog Democrats. These are “small d” democrats running movement campaigns. They aren’t running for power’s sake; they are running to change America.

“The vision has to be to fundamentally change the system,” Jayapal says, carrying the Sanders message that “corporations and special interests have their voice in Congress, and they have too many members scared of their power. What Congress needs is a progressive voice who is unafraid to take on these powerful interests — who is willing to fight for all Americans, not just the wealthiest 1 percent.”

Added Sanders: “When you think of the political revolution, I want you to think about Pramila.”

Sanders supporters are also forging the organizational infrastructure needed to elect progressive candidates for years to come, reports vanden Heuval,

Sanders and his supporters are intent on giving these efforts institutional backing. The Vermont senator has announced the formation of Our Revolution, which will support progressive candidates up and down the ticket. Organizers from the Sanders campaign have launched Brand New Congress, an ambitious effort to run 400-plus populist candidates for Congress — including independents and Republicans as well as Democrats — in 2018, with “a single, unified campaign with a single plan,” and centralized crowd-sourced financing — small donors contributing to a national pool in a historic effort to transform a Congress that is corrupt and dysfunctional. These new efforts will augment progressive groups like the Working Families Party, MoveOn.org, Democracy for America, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and People’s Action, all of whom are growing in energy and ambition in the wake of the Sanders campaign.

Berniecrats.net, a website listing all active candidates at every level who endorsed Sanders in the primary, already has some 480 entries. Most of these are long shots running shoestring campaigns. But if the more than 2 million individual Sanders campaign supporters do move in large numbers to support Our Revolution and other offshoots in 2016, these challenges will get more serious in 2018 and 2020.

Vanden Heuval observes that “the Sanders revolution is only beginning…Now he and his supporters are moving to build the political revolution that too many in the media mocked at the beginning of this year.”

As a long-haul progressive warrior, Sanders understands better than most that empowering his movement to compel progressive change is going to take time. But, as vanden Heuval reveals, the Sanders movement has already created some impressive organizational vehicles. With adequate suppport, they will become a force for needed social reforms, as well as an enduring Democratic majority.

GOP nominee Donald Trump has built his presidential campaign around his image as an advocate of curbing trade to keep jobs in America. In reality, however, he has called for policies that do something quite different.

Dave Johnson’s post, “Trump Trade Position Is Opposite Of What People Think It Is” at Campaign for America’s Future clarifies Trump’s actual trade polcies:

One of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s stronger economic appeals to working-class voters is his position on trade. Trump understands that people are upset that “trade” deals have moved so many jobs out of the country and he offers solutions that sound like he is saying he will bring the jobs back so wages can start going up again.

But a deeper look at what he is really saying might not be so appealing to voters.

Trump says the U.S. is not “competitive” with other countries. He has said repeatedly we need to lower American wages, taxes and regulations to the point where we can be “competitive” with Mexico and China. In other words, he is saying that business won’t send jobs out of the country if we can make wages low enough here.

Trump even has a plan to accomplish this. He has said the way to make U.S. wages “competitive” is to pit states against each other instead of using China and Mexico to do that. He has said, for example, that auto companies should close factories in Michigan and move the jobs to low-wage, anti-union states. After enough people are laid off in one state, he has said, “those guys are going to want their jobs back even if it is less.” Then companies will be able to “make good deals” to cut wages. He says that companies should continue this in a “rotation” of wage cuts, state to state, until you go “full-circle,” getting wages low enough across the entire country. Then the U.S. will be “competitive” with China and Mexico.

Put another way, all of Trump’s bluster about bringing jobs back to America is a smokescreen to mask his   support of hammering wages down to Mexican and Chinese levels. Under his plan, workers in America’s pivotal auto industry, for example, would no longer make a living wage. They would be reduced to subsistence wages. Their unions would be crushed and the effects would reverberate throughout the economy.

Johnson quotes from a Detroit News interview with Trump, in which the GOP nominee “said U.S. automakers could shift production away from Michigan to communities where autoworkers would make less”: “You can go to different parts of the United States and then ultimately you’d do full-circle — you’ll come back to Michigan because those guys are going to want their jobs back even if it is less,” Trump said. “We can do the rotation in the United States — it doesn’t have to be in Mexico.”…He said that after Michigan “loses a couple of plants — all of sudden you’ll make good deals in your own area.”

Like most Republican leaders, Trump urges tax cuts for the rich, fewer regulations and lower wages. Johnson notes that Trump has recently learned to stop talking so much about his belief that wages are too high. Yet lower wages remain a cornerstone of his economic policy agenda, and a vote for Trump is a vote for gutting middle class jobs, cutting wages and swelling the ranks of the working poor — a message point Dems ought to emphasize between now and election day.