A brutal truth about political messaging from NY Times frequent commenter Mathew Carnicelli: “I think the Democrats are hideous at shaping message,” he said. “They try something for about 10 minutes and when it doesn’t poll well immediately, they drop it. With Republicans, they keep repeating the same message until people believe them.”
Alternet’s Kali Holloway explains “How Delusional Nostalgia Is Killing the White Working Class.” Holloway rounds up data from several public opinion surveys, including The 2015 American Values Survey, and notes “On “reverse racism,” half of white Americans overall agree “discrimination against whites is as big a problem today as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.” But the socioeconomic divide on this opinion is fairly vast. Among working-class whites, a solid majority, 60 percent, believe the tables have turned and anti-white discrimination equals that faced by other historically marginalized racial and ethnic groups. But just 36 percent of college-educated white Americans cosigned this idea. Blacks and Hispanics overwhelmingly reject the notion, by 75 and 71 percent, respectively.”
Just a few weeks before he leaves office, outgoing Democratic Governor Steve Beshear of Kentucky has issued an executive order that immediately granted the right to vote to about 140,000 nonviolent felons who have completed their sentences. As Erik Eckholm reports at the NYT, “Kentucky had been one of just three states imposing a lifetime voting ban on felons unless they received a special exemption from the governor. Florida and Iowa still carry the lifetime ban…Convicted criminals in Maine and Vermont do not lose their franchise in the first place and can cast ballots from prison….Despite the policy changes in many states, almost six million Americans are prohibited from voting because of felony offenses, according to the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group. The racial disparity is acute: Nationwide, the organization estimates, one in 13 black men cannot vote, a far higher rate than for other groups.”
At The Nation Juan Cole weighs in on the terminology dust-up regarding terrorists-who-claim-to-be-Muslims: “For Baghdadi to call his band of human traffickers, rapists, drug smugglers, and looters the “Islamic State” is rather like a Mexican drug cartel adopting the moniker “the Vatican,” and our adopting that term thereafter (“The Vatican kidnapped 30 people today”) when reporting on its violence. Journalists would resist such linguistic coercion in the case of Catholics; they should resist it in the case of Muslims as well.” Further, adds Cole, “The language of war elevates terrorists to the very status to which they aspire: that of legitimate combatants…The young men recruited by the late petty thief Abdelhamid Abaaoud were, it should go without saying, not soldiers; they were delinquents outfitted with bombs and machine guns instead of stilettos…Abaaoud and his partners in crime deserve no military stripes.”
Arit John of Bloomberg explains “How Snapchat fits into Bernie Sanders’s strategy,” and provides insight into how the platform can be used in political campaigns. “…There is some data to indicate that, while 2016 might not be the Snapchat election, it is, at least, a natural fit for a candidate such as Sanders. Thirty-seven percent of the app’s 100 million daily users are 18- to 24-year-olds, according to the company. After the Aug. 6 Republican debate, Snapchat said 18- to 24-year-olds were more likely to watch the platform’s five-minute “live story” of the debate than watch the debate live on television. Two-thirds of 18- to 34-year-old Snapchat users are likely voters and about a third of all 18- to 34-year-old likely voters use the app, according to an online poll commissioned by Snapchat and conducted by Global Strategy Group and Public Opinion Strategies from Oct. 15-25.”
AP News Wire’s “Democrats planning multi-year strategy to recapture seats” reports on the DNC’s 19-page comeback plan. “Across the nation, Democrats hold 3,172 of the 7,383 seats in state legislatures, or 43 percent. Of the 99 legislative chambers, Democrats only have a majority in 30…The report says the party needs to develop and deploy a “clear, values-based message,” strengthen state parties, protect the right to vote, prepare for redistricting after the 2020 elections and recruit a new generation of leaders.”
Ezra Klein and Alan Abramowitz engage in dialogue at Vox about Nate Silver’s contention that Trump most likely won’t win his party’s nomination. Abramowitz is not so sure, and cites indicators of Trump’s strength: “What I think is different is Republicans are tuned in to a much greater degree than they were at this point in previous nomination contests. You can see that in polling when you ask whether voters are paying attention, and you can see that in ratings for the debates. The idea that voters aren’t tuned in yet and won’t make up their minds till January or later may not prove as true as it has in the past…Because of the higher level of interest and attention this year, these early polls may be more predictive of what’s likely to happen…Trump isn’t only leading in national polling. He’s leading in every state poll I’ve seen. He seems to be ahead in Iowa, in New Hampshire, in South Carolina, Nevada.”
At Salon.com Heather Digby Parton addresses concerns about the term “fascism” being used too loosely in describing Donald Trump, and offers plenty of examples indicating he merits the term. Parton quotes CNN’s M.J. Lee: “”Trump is a fascist. And that’s not a term I use loosely or often. But he’s earned it,” tweeted Max Boot, a conservative fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who is advising Marco Rubio…”Forced federal registration of US citizens, based on religious identity, is fascism. Period. Nothing else to call it,” Jeb Bush national security adviser John Noonan wrote on Twitter…Conservative Iowa radio host Steve Deace, who has endorsed Ted Cruz, also used the “F” word last week: “If Obama proposed the same religion registry as Trump every conservative in the country would call it what it is — creeping fascism. Parton adds,”…In his book, “Rush, Newspeak and Fascism” David Neiwert explained that the dictionary definition of the word often leaves out the most important characteristics of the philosophy, which are “its claims to represent the “true character” of the respective national identities among which it arises; and its mythic core of national rebirth — not to mention its corporatist component, its anti-liberalism, its glorification of violence and its contempt for weakness.” If that’s not Donald Trump I don’t know what is.”
One shudders to think who will show for this.

In his National Journal article, “Forget the 2016 Polls: Nobody Knows Anything Yet,” S.V. Dáte writes, “At the same point in the 2012 race, just over two months be­fore the Iowa caucuses, pizza-chain ex­ec­ut­ive Her­man Cain had a clear lead in Iowa, while even­tu­al winner Rick San­tor­um was at 4 per­cent.”
Citing “large per­cent­ages of re­spond­ents who say they still have not settled on a can­did­ate,” Dáte notes some interesting technical reasons why early polling is less influential:

Layered onto this fun­da­ment­al lack of deep voter in­terest are the lo­gist­ic­al dif­fi­culties in mod­ern polit­ic­al polling. More and more Amer­ic­ans do not have home land­lines any­more, only cell phones. And those num­bers, by law, must be manu­ally dialed, driv­ing up costs. The ma­jor­ity of Amer­ic­ans, re­gard­less of what type of phone they have, do not an­swer in­com­ing num­bers they don’t re­cog­nize. These factors pro­duce a re­sponse rate in sur­veys of 8 per­cent, com­pared to 80 per­cent or so a few dec­ades ago.
And then there are the sample sizes, of­ten so small that the mar­gins of er­ror are lar­ger than the spreads among a host of can­did­ates. An ABC News/Wash­ing­ton Post poll re­leased this week­end had Trump lead­ing na­tion­ally with 32 per­cent, Car­son in second at 22 per­cent, and then 10 can­did­ates ran­ging from Sen. Marco Ru­bio at 11 per­cent down to Sen. Lind­sey Gra­ham and former Sen. Rick San­tor­um at 1 per­cent.
But be­cause the sample size of 423 Re­pub­lic­an re­spond­ents pro­duces a 5.5-point mar­gin of er­ror, those 10 can­did­ates from Ru­bio to San­tor­um were stat­ist­ic­ally tied.
John Dick, founder of the polling and re­search firm Civic Sci­ence, said such de­pend­ence on ob­vi­ously im­pre­cise sur­veys is ac­tu­ally do­ing voters a dis­ser­vice. “It is cat­egor­ic­ally ir­re­spons­ible, in my opin­ion,” Dick said.

As with church attendance and charitable contributions, notes Dáte, there is also the tendency of too many poll respondents to say they will vote, but don’t show up at the polls on election day. “A Fox News poll re­leased on Sunday sim­il­arly had 79 per­cent of re­spond­ents say­ing they are likely to vote…If 77 or 79 per­cent of re­gistered voters truly wind up vot­ing in their primar­ies, it would shat­ter turnout re­cords across the coun­try.”
The early polls are consequential in other ways. Dáte acknowledges the power of early polls in attracting contributions and in selecting those who get to participate in televised debates, which has played a significant role in the subsequent allocation of media attention.
The polls are of interest to the candidates themselves as a way to pinpoint weaknesses with different demographic groups, define the popularity of policy positions and geographic vulnerabilities. But for those following political campaigns, using the polls to determine who is actually leading the horserace is pretty much a waste of time.

Hip hop artist and social activist Killer Mike has endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders for President. Here is his introduction of Sanders at an Atlanta rally, at which he also called for free education, universal health care and restoration of the Voting Rights Act.

At The Daily Beast Michael Tomasky posts what may be the best article written anywhere about Donald Trump’s campaign, “Who in GOP Will Finally Stop Trump?: Party leaders could summon the courage of their predecessor Margaret Chase Smith, who stood up to Joseph McCarthy when it mattered. That is, if any of them have the stones to do it.”

I’m still not sure it’s 100 percent clear that Donald Trump really understands that he’s a neo-fascist. He may not know enough history to be fully aware of the now-undeniable odor of his rhetoric and campaign. He may think a member of a racial minority being beat up and called a “n***r” by his racial-majority supporters at a rally, and his own joking about it, is just a little incident; something for which there’s no larger historical context. I know he allegedly had the book of Hitler’s speeches by his bed, but I still think he’s doing most of this on instinct rather than with intellectual intention because I doubt he knows enough about fascism for it to be the latter.
But stop and think about this: I just wrote a paragraph musing on whether the leading candidate for president of the United States from one of our two major parties is knowingly fascist. We’re at the point where we’re debating whether the Republican Party frontrunner is or is not objectively a fascist.

Trump’s GOP opponents are either too intimidated or incapable of calling him out. Of the Republican candidates, notes Tomasky, only former Gov. Jim Gilmore has spoken out against Trump’s “fascist talk.” Where are the others, asks Tomasky? Do any of them have the mettle that it took to speak out against McCarthyism?

And that brings us to the question: Who in the Republican Party is going to step up here? Because this is A Moment for the GOP, make no mistake. It’s a historical moment, and when your leading candidate is joking about his supporters beating people up at rallies and musing about religious ID cards for around (ahem) 6 million of your citizens, it’s time to say something.
Reince Priebus, after the last election, called on his party to be more inclusive. Is this what you had in mind, Reince? How about the other leading candidates? Is this where you want your party to be taken? Karl Rove and others in the professional political class–will they say anything, if not out of moral principle then at least to try to protect their party’s candidates from down-ticket disaster?
And most of all, what about the party’s graybeards and elder statesmen? Looking at you, John McCain. How about a little “Straight Talk” now, about a man who proposes to come into your state, where there are an estimated 300,000 or so unauthorized immigrants, and break up families because one of them’s illegal and the other is not?

The GOP has deliberately pandered to and exacerbated the worst prejudices of their voters. As Tomasky notes, “this predicament raises the interesting question of how one-third of their voters came to admire a neo-fascist and open racist in the first place. Gee, it can’t have anything to do with the kind of rhetoric and “harmless jokes” about the current president and about the 47 percent that Republican leaders have winked at for seven years, can it?”
If the Republicans need a role model to end their groveling to bigotry, Tomasky has one:

There’s precedent for the courageous path, should anyone choose to take it. On Feb. 9, 1950, Joe McCarthy gave his famous speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, charging that communists were working in the State Department. The months that followed were very much like these last five months of the Trump ascendancy, as the official party stood mute in the face of the hysteria created by one of its number.
Then in June, one Republican senator said “enough.” Margaret Chase Smith of Maine was a freshman senator, having taken her husband’s seat. She took to the Senate floor and gave a 15-minute speech (PDF), which has gone down in history as her “Declaration of Conscience,” that all of us, starting with leading Republicans, ought to be reading this week. Two choice excerpts:
“As a Republican, I say to my colleagues on this side of the aisle that the Republican Party faces a challenge today that is not unlike the challenge which it faced back in Lincoln’s day. The Republican Party so successfully met that challenge that it emerged from the Civil War as the champion of a united nation–in addition to being a party which unrelentingly fought loose spending and loose programs.”
“The Democratic administration has greatly lost the confidence of the American people… Yet to displace it with a Republican regime embracing a philosophy that lacks political integrity or intellectual honesty would prove equally disastrous to the nation. The nation sorely needs a Republican victory. But I do not want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny–Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear.”

Tomasky notes that six of Sen. Chase’s fellow Republicans “signed with her a statement of principles that began: “We are Republicans. But we are Americans first.” So that’s what people can do in the face of extremism, if they want to.” Those seven Republicans stood up for American values and earned a place of honor in our history as genuine patriots who put their country before politics.
Where, we must ask, are their heirs?

You’ve read all of the good arguments for increasing the minimum wage to a living wage. But to win wider support for this long-overdue reform, we have to make people feel it. Sharing this young man’s testimony widely is a good start:

Here’s an excerpt from Democrat John Bel Edwards’ inspiring victory statement on winning the Louisiana governorship: “This election shows us that the people of Louisiana in a time of deep cynicism about our politics, and also about our future, that the people have chosen hope over scorn, over negativity,” Edwards told a crowd of supporters at his victory party at the Monteleone Hotel. “I did not create this breeze of hope that’s rolling across our beautiful and blessed state. But I did catch it…”This breeze has its roots in the songs of the Louisiana Hayride, the food of our cajun ancestors, the spirituals of our African-American churches and the faith of our Italian … strawberry farmers, and the energy of Native Americans and our Hispanic immigrants. No I didn’t start the breeze of hope, but I did catch it. And so did you.”
Wish we could say that Edwards’ win is a beachhead for Dems in the South. But, with benefit of hindsight, it’s hard to imagine a more beatable incumbent than Vitter, as The Fix’s Phillip Bump explains — nor a tougher candidate to take him on. Still the 12-point margin of victory is impressive, and Edwards deserves credit for relentlessly pounding Vitter’s scandal and shrewdly coupling it with Vitter’s failure to support veterans. Edwards won’t be sworn in as Governor until January. But don’t be surprised if he makes the short list of potential 2016 running mates.
Here is the “answering the call” ad that has been credited with helping Edwards:
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Perfect storm that it was, the reverberations of Edwards’ victory may indeed help Dems get some traction down the road, as Tim Murphy’s Mother Jones post “Louisiana Just Voted to Give a Quarter of a Million People Health Care” suggests. Matthew Yglesias adds at Vox, “This was the issue on which Edwards positioned himself as an orthodox Democrat and he won. It’s also the issue on which a number of Republican governors in the midwest and southwest have felt the need to compromise.”
The Republicans’ Medicaid expansion blockade is also starting to crumble in Georgia, reports Jim Galloway in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “On Dec. 4, up in the northwest corner of Georgia, Hutcheson Medical Center will close its doors for the last time….The Fort Oglethorpe institution, which once employed 900 and had an annual payroll of $29 million, will be the fifth hospital in Georgia to fail in the last two years. To describe the clientele that the 179-bed facility once served as overwhelmingly Republican is to dabble in understatement. The hospital’s obituary is sure to reignite the debate over whether the state should find a way to come to terms with Obamacare and extend Medicaid coverage to hundreds of thousands of Georgians who lack health insurance…”This greatly hinders the state’s hopes of ever bringing another industrial or IT firm or any other major employer into that area. It really hurts those efforts,” Robinson said. “All those jobs move to Chattanooga, at the closest.””
Already he’s waffling about a third party run, and that’s a good thing…for Dems.
Alec MacGillis’s NYT Sunday Review article “Who Turned My Blue State Red? is generating buzz with his explanation why “Parts of the country that depend on the safety-net programs supported by Democrats are increasingly voting for Republicans who favor shredding that net.” MacGillis presents Pew Research polling data indicating that “likely nonvoters” more often need or receive government assistance than do “likely voters.” Further, argues MacGillis, those who are doing a little better than aid recipients are often quite critical of government benefits and its recipients. But rather than voting against Democrats, it’s more the reality that they have “become profoundly disconnected from the political process” and don’t vote, which has turned some blue states and localities red. MacGilliss’s proposed policy remedies seem like very long-term solutions. Democrats may need to focus more on targeting their GOTV with a little more precision to reach the “profoundly disconnected” nonvoters.
CNN’s Eric Bradner reports that “Republicans split on guns for terror watch list members,” forcing GOP candidates to make a problematic choice: piss off the NRA or voters concerned about national security.
And the most unpopular governor in the U.S. is…

Tonight the premier Christian Right organization in Iowa, and hence an organization with national influence, the Iowa Family Leader is holding it presidential forum, with at least seven presidential candidates showing up. I wrote about the atmosphere surrounding this event at the Washington Monthly:

Word going in is that Ted Cruz, who was endorsed by Steve King earlier this week, might get endorsed “personally” tonight by Family Leader majordomos Bob Vander Plaats and Chuck Hurley, a move they made (albeit a bit later) for Rick Santorum in 2012. BVP, and his most simpatico national Christian Right warhorse, Tony Perkins, have been making a lot of noise about the need for conservative evangelicals to unite behind a single candidate before Iowa. Cruz does seem to be the best positioned. It would likely be a pretty deadly blow to Santorum and Huckabee, and at least a challenge to Ben Carson, who’s been polling very well among Iowa evangelicals.
But there’s a discordant voice at the edge of these Christian Right counsels, shouting “Not so fast!”–Southern Baptist Convention spokesman Russell Moore, who thinks it would be a terrible mistakes for Christians to identify with any candidate who has been demagoguing refugees.
Moore said so in a WaPo op-ed published yesterday.

[E]vangelical Christians cannot be the people who turn our back on our mission field. We should be the ones calling the rest of the world to remember the image of God and inalienable human dignity, of persecuted people whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim or Yazidi, especially those fleeing from genocidal Islamic terrorists.
We should remember the history of the 20th century, of Jewish refugees from the Holocaust and Refuseniks from the Soviet Union who were largely ignored by the world community. We can have prudential discussions and disagreements about how to maintain security. What we cannot do is to demagogue the issue.

Moore didn’t name names in the op-ed, but did upon sitting down with BuzzFeed‘s McKay Coppins for an interview:

“Donald Trump is saber-rattling about shutting down mosques in this country, which, as somebody who works every day on religious liberty, I’m astounded that we could have a presidential candidate of either party speaking in such a way,” Moore said. “Evangelicals should recognize that any president who would call for shutting down houses of worship … is the sort of political power that can ultimately shut down evangelical churches.”
Moore was also critical of candidates like Ted Cruz who are now arguing that the U.S. should only accept Christian refugees from Syria, not Muslims.
“I don’t think we ought to have a religious test for our refugee policy,” Moore said, adding that a rigorous vetting process could still make room for innocent Muslims. “We really don’t want to penalize innocent women and children who are fleeing from murderous barbarians simply because they’re not Christians,” he said, though he added that persecuted Christians in the region haven’t received enough attention from the U.S.

This is hardly the first time Moore has cut a very different figure from his predecessor, Ted Land, who was an old-school Christian Right agitator like Perkins and Vander Plaats. It’s also not clear how much if any political influence Moore has; he’s a guy who has criticized conservative evangelicals’ excessive ties to the Republican Party, and even questioned how high a priority conservative cultural issues ought to have for active Christians. Southern Baptists are not especially numerous in Iowa, but nor are they out of synch with the state’s conservative evangelicals, viz. 2008 Caucus winner Mike Huckabee, a Southern Baptist minister, and Cruz himself, who is a Southern Baptist.
We’ll see if Cruz starts to lock up some visible support this weekend, and then we’ll see of Russell Moore digs in.

It would be refreshing to have something emanating from the conservative Christian political world beyond the usual Kabuki Theater of demands for a better seat at the GOP table and then complaints about the chow.

Writing in The Nation, Eric Alterman has a blistering critique of the Republican Party presidential candidates and their operatives in his article, “The Crazier the Republican Candidates Sound, the More Popular They Become.” In one take-no-prisoners excerpt Alterman observes:

… The party is being led by a group of people with politics so extreme and explanations so silly–and often transparently dishonest–that one cannot help but question their sanity. Can Donald Trump really believe that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and that virtually all undocumented immigrants are potential rapists and murderers? Can Ben Carson truly consider Obamacare on a par with slavery? And which answer would be more comforting: shameless liar or lunatic fantasist?
… this same disease has infected the entire Republican field. In the hopes of appealing to angry, ill-informed, and xenophobic primary voters, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, and Carly Fiorina are all adopting positions that are not only beyond the boundaries of the beliefs of the vast majority of Americans, but also contrary to the laws of physics, economics, and, of course, common sense.

Among the causes of the GOP’s domination of the House of Reps, state legislatures and governorships, Alterman cites the Citizens United decision and gerrymandering. But Alterman doesn’t let Democrats off the hook, either:

The Democrats are also at fault. By failing to present a class-based appeal to Americans besieged by a pitiless global capitalism, they’ve allowed themselves to be defined as elitist snobs who view the everyday struggles of working-class Americans–especially white males–with contempt. At the same time, they have failed to protect vulnerable minorities from the consequences of the rage and fear felt by this class–manifested most obviously in oppressive patterns of policing that victimize people of color, impoverishing their families, weakening their communities, and ensuring their lifelong alienation from mainstream society.

Yet few objective observers would deny that the policies of individual Democratic leaders that affect both white working class and African American voters are substantially more progressive than anything the Republicans propose. In fact, everything Alterman says about Democrats is far more true of Republicans. Yet the image he describes persists.
It may have to do, in part, with expectations — many African Americans and white workers want a stronger voice for reforms that can benefit their lives, and they are not getting it. So the more progressive, but not progressive enough party gets stigmatized as betraying its ideals. For some voters, that is worse than open opposition.
Most Democratic elected officials are far more progressive than their party’s image, which is sort of a tribute to the GOP’s superior message discipline. Even when the message is rooted in lies and distortion, their echo chamber functions efficiently. Democrats are all over the place.
One possible remedy: more Democratic ad campaigns directed at defining the difference between the two parties, instead of just the usual yada-yada from different candidates. Republicans understand “brand identification” a lot better than their opponents. We almost never see that. It’s time Dems got a clue.
Alterman provides an equally-blistering take-down of the false equivalence default position of much of the mainstream media:

Liberals like yours truly spend a lot of time obsessing over Fox News and talk-radio. But no less a significant factor in the success of the irredentists has been the willingness of so many members of the mainstream media to run interference for–and therefore legitimize–the same dangerous nonsense in the guise of allegedly objective reporting. The mainstream media’s coverage of every Republican debate so far has had the effect of subordinating reality to fantasy. Jonathan Martin’s front-page New York Times report on the most recent debate deemed that fib-fest to be a “robust seminar on the issues.” In an article devoted to the lies dominating the election cycle, the Times’s Michael Barbaro could not bring himself to go further than to say that Carson “harshly turned the questions” about inconsistencies in his life story “back on the reporters who asked them,” and that Fiorina “refused” to back down from a story about Planned Parenthood that was “roundly disputed.” And in what read like a parody of the idiotic “both sides do it” meme, Barbaro equated all this with the fact that Hillary Clinton once described herself as being the granddaughter of four immigrants when, in fact, one was born shortly after her family arrived in the United States–something she quickly corrected. Beyond that, he found a few (largely personal) fibs from Democrats who ran for president in the late 1980s and ’90s, as if these were somehow equivalent to the lies that Republican candidates are telling today. (Barbaro also appeared unimpressed with Clinton’s explanations about her e-mail accounts, as though these might qualify as lies.)

A great deal of the reporting Alterman describes is very deliberate. But I get the feeling that a lot of it is simply lazy reporting by writers who fall back on “on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand” formulas to cover their asses. It might help if J-schools did more to stress critical thinking. Other than that, calling them out more energetically will have to do.
Dems can hope with some reason that the GOP is headed for disaster in 2016. But counting on it would be foolish and dangerous. What Democrats must do over the next year is shore up their GOTV, because it sure looks like Republicans have done so, and hone a compelling message that distinguishes their party as the best option for voters who are paying attention.

Black Lives Matter is increasing its involvement in electoral politics, reports John Eligon in The New York Times: “Two groups have started political action committees to back candidates who support ideas espoused by Black Lives Matter activists. One, Black Lives Matter Political Action Committee, started by a St. Louis radio host, plans to raise money for voter education in races for law enforcement-related offices, including for district attorney and judgeships. The second, Black Lives Matter Super PAC, was started by New York activists who hope to raise large donations from celebrities to influence campaigns for a variety of offices…”At this point, marching and protesting, it’s not going anywhere,” said Tarik Mohamed, treasurer and a founder of the super PAC. “So we’re trying to find new avenues of engaging people for change.””
At The Upshot Brendan Nyhan explains why “It’s Easy to Overestimate Effect of Paris Attacks on 2016 Race.”
It appears that the Administration has a tough sell ahead regarding bringing more Syrian refugees tot he U.S. At NBCNews.com Allison Kopicki, John Lapinski and Hannah Hartiga report that a “Majority of Americans Oppose Accepting Syrian Refugees.” The authors write, “The latest NBC News/SurveyMonkey online poll shows that 56% of Americans disapprove of allowing more migrants fleeing violence in Syria and other nations into the country, while 41% approve and the issue divides sharply across party lines…About 8 in 10 Republicans disapprove of accepting more Syrian refugees – including 64% who strongly disapprove. Nearly two thirds of Democrats support the president’s policy, while more independents disapprove (59%) than approve (40%).
The New York Times editorial board nonetheless makes a case against the House GOP’s “the American Security Against Foreign Enemies (SAFE) Act of 2015” as “election-year pandering to the xenophobia that rears up when threats from abroad arise.”
William Saletan provides a Slate.com take on the political ramifications of the GOP’s Muslim-bashing.
Unless this poll is an outlier, Democrats have work to do in this swing state.
At Huffiest Pollster Political scientists Keith Gaddie and Kirby Godel chart “The Donkey’s Narrow Path” to victory in the Louisiana governor’s race, which will be decided this Saturday, November 21st. “Analyses of early voting in Louisiana indicate that turnout will likely be higher than in the primary, increasing from 39 percent to 44 percent. And the electorate will be more Democratic and more African-American, according to early voting data, These are ominous signs for David Vitter. Runoff turnout surges are more common in Louisiana, and usually result from increased black voter participation in the second round. The Louisiana Troopers Association endorsement of John Bel Edwards likely solidified the frontrunner’s level of support among whites — which has run between 34 percent and 38 percent across public polls and in private tracking polls…For Democrats in running deep red states, there is a lesson here. Republican divisions may create opportunities for victories, but the path is narrow requiring both a flawed Republican nominee and a divided GOP.” The authors also credit Edwards messaging, citing his “military experience, pro-life identity, and moderate politics out in stark contrast to Vitter’s known associations.”
Karen Bruggeman provides additional analysis in National Journal’s “Democrats Stunned They Could Win Louisiana Governor’s Race.”
Democrats interested in media outlets to reach the white working-class with ads should check out Ken Tucker’s Yahoo post, “‘The Middle’ Is TV’s Top Working-Class Comedy.”

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, who spent many months trying to outflank the rest of the GOP presidential field to the Right, finally packed it in today, and I had a lot to say about it at Washington Monthly.

It seemed like every time you turned around Jindal was relaunching or rebranding himself. Indeed, it tells you everything you need to know that I was mocking his eternal shape-shifting back in February of 2014, several incarnations ago:

His first big national audition, a universally panned State of the Union response in 2009, was a large whiff, given the drama of that moment, which exposed his signature talk-down-to-the-dummies problem as the smartest guy in the room trying to connect with the Unwashed. His next foray into national politics was to become the most conspicuous 2011-12 surrogate for Rick Perry just before the Texan’s once-formidable candidacy headed straight down the tubes.
Then, after a brief stint on Mitt Romney’s short-list for the vice presidency (before being elbowed out of the way by his rival whiz-kid Paul Ryan), Jindal was among the first Republicans out of the box with a big “rebranding” speech to an RNC audience in January of 2013. It created a slight buzz, but since its thrust was to tout the policy genius of state governments (while implicitly disrespecting all of his congressional rivals), it did not survive Jindal’s subsequent patch of very poor luck back in Baton Rouge, where his big tax proposal (phasing out the income tax in favor of higher sales and business taxes) was shot down by his own Republican-controlled legislature, while the courts sidelined his private-school voucher initiative.
By last autumn, Jindal was running in low single-digits in early 2016 presidential polls, and was pretty much being shoehorned into a small “diversity” box alongside fellow Indian-American Gov. Nikki Haley of SC….
But then Jindal finally caught a break, when the vagaries of the culture wars suddenly made one of his constituents, Duck Dynasty‘s Phil Robertson, a national conservative icon of the highest order. Bobby clung to the grizzly homophobe like a life jacket, and now seems inclined to make his latest, and perhaps final pitch to a national conservative audience posing as the maximum defender of “religious liberty” against the politically correct hordes of secular elitism.

But he probably picked the wrong year for this gambit, what with far more authentic and credentialed Christian Right figures like Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, Ted Cruz and Ben Carson in the field.
Like other candidates, Jindal suffered through the summer of 2015 being completely thwarted by the Donald Trump phenomenon. So he then chose his penultimate persona as a parasite on the bloated political body of The Donald. In a September speech that could have been entitled, “You Have to Cover This!” Jindal called Trump an “egomaniacal madman,” and kept the barrage up for a good while, with no impact on his target and little benefit to himself. His last gambit, deployed in several “undercard” debate appearances, was to position himself as a sort of Ted Cruz doppelganger, supporting ever-more irresponsible hostage-taking behavior on behalf of culture-war priorities like “defunding” Planned Parenthood. But again, why support a Ted Cruz doppelganger with Ted Cruz in the field, particularly since Cruz is slightly (if only slightly) more adept at hiding his contempt for the “base” audiences that His Exalted Genuis was being forced to demagogue.
Speaking of contempt, the big piece of collateral damage of Jindal 2016 has been the state of Louisiana, which he has alternatively ignored, abandoned and abused. The most telling thing about today’s development is that Jindal pulls out of the presidential race with four days left in the jungle-primary runoff to choose a successor to him, and you’d have to guess what extremely embattled Republican candidate U.S. Sen. David Vitter fears most is “help” from the sitting GOP governor of the state….
It would be richly appropriate for Jindal to deep-six Vitter, deliberately or not. You get the sense that his bags have been packed in Baton Rouge for a good long while. Everything about his resume screams “Cabinet post,” but the question is whether the nasty piece of work he’s proven himself to be in this campaign might disqualify him if Republicans win the White House. He might fit in better on K Street.