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.

The following article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Imagine that you and your family have been displaced from your homeland by an oppressive government. Imagine that if you are forced to return to that homeland you will likely be subjected to persecution — and potentially death.
Now imagine that the world’s democracies close their doors and refuse to give you asylum.
That is exactly what happened to thousands of Jews who were targeted for persecution and ultimately extermination by Hitler’s Germany.
In November 1938, the Nazis organized a systematic attack on Jews called Kristallnacht. That event escalated the growing anti-Semitism in Germany to a new level, and many Jews decided they must leave the country.
On May 13, 1939 some 900 Jews fled Germany aboard the cruise liner SS St. Louis. They had hoped to reach Cuba and then travel to the United States and safety.
But when they arrived in Cuba they were not allowed to land. Then the captain steered the St. Louis towards the Florida coast, but U.S. authorities refused to allow the ship loaded with desperate refugees to dock.
In the end, the ship was forced to return to Europe — and 250 of those on board were ultimately killed by the Nazis.
Most Americans look back on our refusal to admit the Jewish refugees from Europe as a shameful blot on American history. We must not allow it to happen again.
Today the flow of refugees are Muslim, Christian, and Yazidi. They are fleeing ISIS and the horrific civil war in Syria.
Our most fundamental moral precept is “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” — the Golden Rule. When fellow human beings are fleeing their homes in fear of their lives, we must do our best to help provide them help and safety or we won’t be able to look at ourselves in the mirror.
What if we found ourselves on the other side of that equation? What if that child’s body on that Greek beach were one of our children? What would we expect and hope for from our fellow human beings?
It certainly is not the unforgivable demagoguery that flooded the airwaves on Monday from 24 GOP governors who issued statements saying they would “not take in” Syrian refugees in their states and would deny any aid to resettle them.
New Jersey Governor and long-shot GOP presidential contender Chris Christie said he wanted to keep out Syrian refugees even if they are children.
Another presidential candidate, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal said he would use “all lawful means” to block Syrian refugees from coming to Louisiana.
Rick Snyder, Governor of Michigan, which has a large Syrian community, said he would do everything he could to keep Syrian refugees out of the state.
Illinois Governor, Bruce Rauner announced he had “suspended” taking refugees in Illinois.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) signed a letter to Obama that begins “As governor of Texas, I write to inform you that the State of Texas will not accept any refugees from Syria in the wake of the deadly terrorist attack in Paris.”

Read more…

In his Washington Post op-ed, “Why 2016 could be shattering for Republicans,” Democratic strategist Stan Greenberg predicts that “Election Day 2016 will produce a shattering crash larger than anything the pundits anticipate.” The reason, says Greenberg, is “because the revolutionary economic and social changes occurring in the United States have now pushed both the burgeoning new majority and the conservative Republicans’ counterrevolution beyond their tipping points.”
Greenberg provides a vivid picture of America’s demographic changes:

The United States is being transformed by revolutions remaking the country at an accelerating and surprising pace. Witness the revolutions in technology, the Internet, big data and energy, though just as important are the tremendous changes taking place in immigration, racial and ethnic diversity, the family, religious observance and gender roles. These are reaching their apexes in the booming metropolitan centers and among millennials.
As the revolutions interact, they are accelerating the emergence of a new America. Consider that nearly 40 percent of New York City’s residents are foreign-born, with Chinese the second-largest group behind Dominicans. The foreign-born make up nearly 40 percent of Los Angeles’s residents and 58 percent of Miami’s. A majority of U.S. households are headed by unmarried people, and, in cities, 40 percent of households include only a single person. Church attendance is in decline, and non-religious seculars now outnumber mainline Protestants. Three-quarters of working-age women are in the labor force, and two-thirds of women are the breadwinners or co-breadwinners of their households. The proportion of racial minorities is approaching 40 percent, but blowing up all projections are the 15 percent of new marriages that are interracial. People are moving from the suburbs to the cities. And in the past five years, two-thirds of millennial college graduates have settled in the 50 largest cities, transforming them.

Political attitudes dynamics are no less striking. Greenberg explains that “diversity is becoming more central to our multicultural identity” and “Shifting attitudes were underscored in this year’s Gallup Poll when 60 to 70 percent of the country said gay and lesbian relations, having a baby outside of marriage, sex between an unmarried man and woman, and divorce are all “morally acceptable.”
He cites a “a new majority coalition of racial minorities, single women, millennials and seculars” which comprised 51 percent of voters in 2012, but will account for 63 percent of voters in 2016. he adds that the Republican Party brand “has probably not been as tarnished since the Watergate era.”
Greenberg notes that the GOP downhill slide accelerated in 2004, when Bush strategist Karl Rove decided to prioritize winning evangelical voters, while writing off swing voters. As a result the Republican demographic mix has been distilled down to “mostly married voters, as well as the oldest, most rural and most religiously observant voters in the country.” Greenberg argues that the GOP’s new demographic reality “creates formidable odds against its winning an electoral college majority.”
Further, there is a “shrinking proportion of people who think of themselves as conservative, down to 37 percent from 46 percent during the November elections.”For Republicans,” adds Greenberg 2016 “will confirm that the new America is here and that the counterrevolution has lost. That is why I expect the result to be shattering for the Republican Party as we know it.”
Greenberg believes it is possible that the Republicans can learn from their 2016 defeat and re-emerge with less bashing of immigrants and more tolerance for “the sexual revolution and the new gender roles and work to help the modern working family.” They might even be more open to investing in infrastructure upgrades and education.
Such a transformation, says Greenberg, could set the stage for “a different kind of debate within the Republican Party and, perhaps, a different kind of politics in the country,” just as Dems “modernized” their policies after their 1984 defeat. And that would be a welcome change for those who want to see America moving forward again.

How Will the terrorist attacks in France affect U.S. politics? It seems logical that Ben Carson might get a bump, if it is only temporary, since he seems to be riding a crest of Islamophobia. But I’ll be surprised if the other Republican candidates don’t try to top Carson’s fear-mongering. Watch what happens with Marine Le Pen’s campaign to be elected President of France. Trump and the neocons will be monitoring her tone for tips about xenophobic pandering.
“In Presidential Campaign, It’s Now Terrorism, Not Taxes,” as the lead issue of the 2016 campaign, writes Jonathan Martin at The New York Times. Further, says Martin: “Much is not known about the attack’s impact on the race, given short attention spans in politics and the news media and the fact that it did not occur on American soil…” However, notes martin, “Further, the scale of the assault, its direct link to the Islamic State and the fact that one of the attackers appeared to have been a Syrian refugee who came to Europe through Greece is also pushing the Republican candidates to speak more loudly about keeping Middle Eastern migrants out of the United States.”
At The Washington Post Jenna Johnson reports on what the candidates are saying about bringing Syrian refuges into the U.S. Johnson reports that some Republicans are advocating more liberal immigration policies toward Christian refugees, and further “Lavinia Limon, the president and chief executive of the U.S. Commission for Refugees and Immigrants, said she is surprised that the once-nonpartisan cause of helping refugees fleeing violence has become so politicized. She noted that it takes about three years for refugees to go through stringent security screenings — a process that she doubts terrorists would wait through when there are other ways to get into the United States.”
Republican Governors Robert J. Bentley of Alabama and Rick Snyder of Michigan are now refusing Syrian refugees, according to Rick Rojas, reporting in the New York Times.
In the Democratic presidential debate on Saturday, Former Secretary of State Clinton and former Maryland Governor O’Malley stressed the importance of coalition intervention against ISIS. O’Malley also emphasized he need for Americans to stand by their Muslim neighbors in the U.S., who may experience unjust treatment in the wake of the Paris atrocities. Sen. Bernie Sanders differentiates his views on the U.S. “regime change” from those of his fellow presidential candidates: “”These toppling of governments, regime changes have unintended consequences,” he said. “On this issue I’m a little bit more conservative than the secretary and I am not a great fan of regime change.”
“The Associated Press contacted all 712 superdelegates to the Democratic National Convention next summer, and asked them which Republican they thought would be their party’s strongest opponent in the general election…Of the 176 superdelegates who answered the question, 65 said Rubio, the first-term senator from Florida, would be the Democrats’ strongest opponent.” After Rubio, the delegates said Kasich and Bush would be the next strongest opponents for the Democratic nominee.
“GOP Candidates Suck Up to Hatemongers: Ted Cruz, Bobby Jindal, and Mike Huckabee fete a man who thinks the Bible says we should execute gays,” writes David Boaz at The Daily Beast.
Sena McElwee explains why “Higher voter turnout could limit the far right” at Aljazeera America, and notes that data indicate that “Liberal Republicans” are the least likely self-identified group on the political spectrum to cast ballots. He concludes from his analysis of the data that “Increased voter turnout would bring more moderate, center-right and left-leaning voters into the electorate…Policies such as automatic voter registration, which would work to bolster turnout, could therefore reduce polarization and make our politics more representative of the popular will.”
Harold Meyerson addresses an important political topic that merits a lot more attention in his post “Why America Needs Another Trust-Busting Movement” at The American Prospect.

With the second Democratic presidential debate on tap for tomorrow night, there were two very good observations today at the New Republic for how the candidates might make the proceedings more relevant and urgent. I offered commentary at Washington Monthly:

The first [TNR piece], by Suzy Khimm, involves the actual choices a Democratic president would face given the extremely high likelihood that Republicans will hang onto the House and perhaps the Senate. That will heavily be influenced by the appetite and aptitude of said president for taking executive actions, especially in immigration and criminal justice policy. Khimm notes that some especially difficult decisions will have to be made in the latter area, since (a) bipartisan legislative action is a lively if not easy prospect, and (b) Democrats are not completely united about what to do at the federal level on, say, marijuana legalization. And then there’s this problem:

Some on the left…disagree, fearing that going too big on executive action could come back to haunt Democrats over the long haul. As University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner has argued in the New Republic, Obama’s turn to executive action on immigration could end up empowering future Republican presidents to push for non-enforcement of many other laws and regulations–and there are plenty, including environmental regulations and labor protections, that Republicans would love to get their hands on.

Meanwhile, Brian Beutler looks at the same partisan landscape and deduces quite logically that the possibility of a Republican trifecta should make electability–specifically HRC’s electability–a much bigger issue in the Democratic contest than it has been up until now.

Sanders earned a lot of good will in the first debate by absolving Clinton of Republican attacks on her handling of State Department email. O’Malley has been consistently critical of Clinton not for being unelectable, but, if anything, for thinking too calculatingly about staying electable. “History celebrates profiles in courage, not profiles in convenience,” O’Malley said when Clinton endorsed a right to same-sex marriage earlier this year.
That’s the wrong approach for a serious candidate in the political climate Democrats face. If either Sanders or O’Malley can mount a convincing argument that Clinton–despite a vast name-recognition advantage, and unique appeal to female voters–isn’t the most electable Democrat, they are doing both themselves and their party a disservice by not airing it.

In other words, the enormous constraints facing a Democratic president that Khimm outlines make the implicit arguments of Sanders and O’Malley that HRC is not ideologically trustworthy could be a bit beside the point–especially if you adjudge Clinton as more willing or able to pursue executive action.
Beutler does not tell us how Clinton’s rivals can make electability a concern without being perceived as piling onto Republican attacks on her that (a) have no credibility among Democrats but (b) seem to be affecting indie perceptions of her. Indeed, he views this as a challenge so difficult–especially given Democratic fears of sexism in any left-bent criticism of HRC–that it might well push Sanders and O’Malley into conceding early if they cannot solve it. We’ll have to see if either rival to Clinton can begin to thread that needle in the next debate.

If fears of a Republican trifecta–and hence the urgency of electability–subside, then things will be looking up for Democrats sho nuff.

Some Headlines that reveal the state of near panic of the GOP about their presidential candidate front-runners:
“Time for GOP panic? Establishment worried Carson or Trump might win” by Phillip Rucker and Robert Costa of the Washington Post.
Then there’s Maggie Habermans’s New York Times article, “Donald Trump Asks Iowans: ‘How Stupid’ Are They to Believe Ben Carson?”
At Politico Ben White describes the latest Trump meltdown in “What Trump’s bizarre Iowa tirade looked like up close.”
From “The Note: Trump Gone Wild” by Michael Barone at ABC News

–‘HOW STUPID ARE THE PEOPLE OF IOWA TO BELIEVE THIS CRAP’: On a contentious day in the GOP race, frontrunner Donald Trump didn’t shy away from calling out his rival “in second place” Ben Carson, asking the 1,500 Iowans in the crowd today about Carson’s “pathological stories” in his book and saying “How stupid are the people of Iowa to believe this crap?” Trump focused on a story from Carson’s books where he writes about stabbing someone with a knife, ABC’s JOHN SANTUCCI and JOSH HASKELL note. “It hit the belt. And the knife broke. Give me a break,” Trump told the crowd at Iowa Central Community College. Trump then stepped away from the podium and demonstrated what Carson stabbing a friend in the belt would look like. “He hit the belt buckle? Anybody with a knife wanna try it on me? Believe me it ain’t gonna work,” Trump said…

“Panic in the GOP elite! Is this a job for Mitt?!?!?” by Joan McCarter at Daily Kos, who notes,

The fact that Donald Trump and Ben Carson are still around and are still sucking the oxygen out of the primary race is causing real panic among Republican elites. All their hopes that either of the two would self-destruct are not materializing, because no matter what these guys say, people seem to like it, and that makes it very difficult for another candidate to try to destroy them. What’s more, there’s not a lot of time to do something about it.

So how long can a political party remain competitive when its front-runner generates such headlines?
I’ve got to believe that Trump’s teflon is going to wear thin, very thin, before too long, when the GOP field narrows and his egomaniacal rants are no longer enough to carry the day in the polls. When that moment comes the power of the GOP establishment will kick in hard, as John McQuaid writes at Forbes:

The establishment’s sprawling networks of politicians, campaign personnel, donors, interest groups, and Fox News may be “paralyzed” right now, but they still hold powerful cards in the nomination fight, most yet to be played. So make no mistake. At some point, we will be bidding farewell to Donald Trump and Ben Carson.

But Trumpism may not go away from the GOP so quietly. As Fareed Zakaria notes: “A poll this week found that half of Republican voters think Trump is the presidential candidate best able to handle the immigration issue — almost five times the share any other candidate received.
Whether he wins or loses his party’s nomination, however, every day Trump can be called a “front-runner” helps brand the GOP as a chaotic circus — no matter who finally drives the clown car.

It looks like the GOP has a new poster-boy for voter suppression, even though he was demoted to the ‘kiddie table.’ This despite the fact that “New Jersey currently ranks 39th in the country in both percentage of eligible voters who are registered and percentage of voters who actually cast a ballot” and the fact that the “2015 elections likely saw lowest voter turnout in N.J. history.”
Regarding the abysmal voter turnout in Kentucky’s gubernatorial election, Benjamin Knoll writes at Kentucky.com: “One clear option is Election-Day registration (EDR) where voters can show up and register on the spot before going into vote. Studies have shown that it boosts turnout by anywhere from three to four percent. There is very little downside and 11 states plus the District of Columbia have already implemented it…Another option would be to extend poll closing times past 6 p.m. After all, Kentucky has one of the earliest poll closing times in the entire United States. One piece of research by three political scientists at the University of California found that states with poll closing times after 7 p.m. have about a three percent higher turnout rate than those that close before 7 p.m…Perhaps the most effective option would be to consolidate state and federal election cycles in Kentucky, a practice currently done by 45 other states (only Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Jersey and Virginia hold state-level officer elections in odd-numbered years).”
Duke University Political Scientists John B. Holbein and D. Sunshine Hillygus present evidence in the American Journal of Political Science that preregistration of 17-year old voters increases youth voter turnout.
As reported in The Connection, an Arlington, VA-based newspaper, here’s a voter turnout template which may merit replication: “The turnout drive by VOICE (Virginians Organized for Interfaith Community Engagement), a multi-faith citizens power organization, cited a 24 percent increase in voter turnout in Precinct 30 (Nauck neighborhood) from the November 2011 election — the last off-year election with a comparable ballot. It also led to a 12 percent increase in turnout in Precinct 43 (Arlington Mill neighborhood), VOICE leaders said…The voter turnout campaign targeted primarily infrequent voters, enlisting more than 100 volunteers to knock on doors, talk to voters at bus stops, and call voters Nov. 1-3. The aim was to raise turnout by at least 5 percent from November 2011 in these two precincts…Noting that VOICE exceeded its goal almost five-fold in Precinct 30 and more than doubled it in Precinct 43, the Rev. Dr. James E. Victor, Jr., of Mount Olive Baptist Church said, “We learned that, when you make the effort to truly engage people around their hopes and dreams, Arlington’s residents will respond and vote.”
National Journal’s Josh Kraushaar argues that “Donald Trump’s Huge Debate Blunder: By embracing lower wages, Trump risks losing some support from his rock-solid working-class base.”
A few final thoughts regarding the GOP’s last presidential debate: Tony Monkovic reports some bad news for Rubio at The Upshot that “Of the 12 general election winners in the last 100 years who weren’t already president, every Republican was older than the oldest Democrat.” And, I hope Democratic ad makers are doing a good job of compiling Trump’s bully-boy rants, a rich motherlode for Democratic ads, should he get the GOP nomination. Best quote about the GOP debate came from E. J. Dionne, Jr.: “The GOP hopefuls often sounded as if they were addressing a convention of Mercedes owners.”
Kyle Kondik, Managing Editor, Sabato’s Crystal Ball explains their “Ratings Change: Louisiana Gubernatorial Race Now a Toss-Up.”
Sanders scores “landslide margins” iover Trump, Bush in McClatchy-Marist poll, reports Brent Budowski at The Hill. “Sanders has a lead over Trump that could be so huge that he would win a landslide victory in the presidential campaign, with margins that would almost certainly lead Democrats to regain control of the Senate and could help Democrats regain control of the House of Representatives…”
A chuckle from The Onion.

At this juncture I would tend to agree with MSNBC’s Nicole Brown that, rightly or wrongly, “Rubio is the GOPer Democrats fear most…” Tuesday’s debate did nothing to diminish his stature, relative to his admittedly mediocre competition. Ed Kilgore notes at the Washington Monthly, “Marco Rubio was the “winner” according to most Republican assessments (e.g., Politico’s “Caucus” of early-state GOP insiders), partly on style points and partly because he got in the most telling shots at Rand Paul’s heterodoxies on national security.”
James Hohman notes at The Washington Post, “The critical reviews of the Florida senator’s performance are positive across the board, with some dissenters saying he sounded too canned.” Hohman rounds up some other pundits on Rubio’s performance in Milwaukee:

The Fix’s Chris Cillizza: “Rubio knocked it out of the park when debating military spending and the right role for America in the world with Rand Paul. He got a meatball of a question when asked by the moderators about Hillary Clinton’s résumé as compared with his own; he, unsurprisingly, answered it well and easily. Time and time again, he oozed knowledge while appearing entirely relaxed.”
Conservative Post columnist Jennifer Rubin: “Rubio once again had the strongest performance. He shot down Paul’s suggestion that spending on the military makes one ‘liberal’ and repeatedly spoke up in favor of strong U.S. leadership. … Asked about running against an experienced Clinton, he went into his effective riff about representing the future while she represents the past.”
The New York Times’ Jonathan Martin and Patrick Healy: “Rubio was not only able to avoid being drawn into the contentious immigration debate, but also repeatedly received questions that allowed him to answer with versions of his stump speech. Even he seemed unable to believe his good fortune when he was asked to make his case against Clinton. He chuckled for a moment before unspooling a well-rehearsed argument: why he can prosecute a ‘generational’ case against her.”

Rubio does show sporadic flashes of passion and eloquence in presenting his conservative arguments, even though most Democrats probably still visualize him clumsily grasping for a glass of water with shifty eyes. And, as Brown quotes former Obama administration White House communications director, Dan Preiffer, “Rubio is also the most broadly appealing GOP candidate and would have the best shot to close the non-white vote gap with the Democrats.”
Rubio has been hovering around third place, behind Carson and Trump in the most recent polls. Trump drew some boos, or at least groans, from the debate audience last night. It may be that his bully-boy act is beginning to wear thin. Looks to me like Carson is not going to wear well either, when we get to the primaries. He needs a more substantial menu of policies, despite having the least annoying persona of the GOP field.
Democrats will have plenty of material to face down Rubio, if he gets the nomination. As the U.S. Senator with the worst attendance record, Rubio has been able to dodge a lot of criticism by laying relatively low on the most contentious issues for Republicans. Those days are now over. His GOP adversaries will be coming for him in a big way from now on.

From Greg Sargent’s Plum Line post, “Here’s Hillary Clinton’s big 2016 challenge, in one chart”:

The new poll, which was commissioned by Women’s Voices Women Vote Action Fund and conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, shows that members of the Rising American Electorate — minorities, millennials, and single women — are significantly less tuned in to next year’s election than GOP-aligned voter groups are.
The poll has some good news for Democrats. The survey, which was taken in four key battleground states — Colorado, Florida, Ohio, and Wisconsin — suggests that in those states, the demographics do favor Dems. That’s because the poll finds that RAE voter groups — who helped drive Obama’s wins — now make up a “majority or near majority of the vote” in all those states. The poll also finds Dems leading in Senate races in two of those states and tied in two others.
But members of the RAE are insufficiently engaged in next year’s election when compared to Republican-aligned voter groups:

Sargent adds, “Unmarried women, minorities, and particularly millennials are less interested in next year’s voting than seniors, conservatives, and white non-college men are. Non-college women — a group the Clinton camp is reportedly eyeing as a way to expand on the Obama coalition — are also less interested.” However, “If Clinton wins the Democratic nomination, and the prospect of electing the first female president seems increasingly within reach, you could see engagement kicking in much more substantially. (It will be interesting to see how non-college, unmarried, minority and millennial women respond.)” Further,

But Greenberg’s pollsters are sounding the alarm now, warning that Democrats need to take more steps to tailor their message towards boosting the interest level among these voters. As Stan Greenberg outlines in his new book, America Ascendant, the key to engaging these voters is two-fold. It isn’t enough to simply outline bold economic policies to deal with college affordability, child care (universal pre-K), workplace flexibility (paid family and sick leave), and so forth, though those things are crucial. What’s also required to engage these groups, Greenberg argues, is a reform agenda geared to reducing the influence of the wealthy, the lobbyists, and the special interests over our politics. Today’s new poll suggests the same.

The reason is that “many Americans don’t believe government can or will actually deliver on those policies.” However, writes Greenberg, “when voters hear the reform narrative first, they are dramatically more open to the middle-class economic narrative that calls for government activism in response to America’s problems.”
Sargent notes that Clinton’s campaign has embraced the need for reforms to reduce the political influence of the wealthy in politics. It’s important that other Democratic candidates do so as well — down ballot as well as presidential candidates.

The next Democratic President should do this:

From M.J. Lee’s “Strong economy could help Hillary Clinton, Democrats” at CNN Politics: “The Labor Department announced Friday that the U.S. economy added 271,000 jobs in October, pushing the unemployment rate down to 5%. To put that figure in perspective, the last time the jobless rate was 5% was in April 2008…The most striking bright spot in Friday’s report was wage growth. After remaining stubbornly stagnant, average hourly earnings rose 2.5% — the best gain since 2009″…”This is a very good report. And it’s not just the headline number but the fact that average hourly earnings are up,” said Gus Faucher, a PNC senior economist. “If I were a Democrat I would be making a lot of hay out of it.”
Austerity’s fruits even worse than progressive economists predicted, writes NYT columnist Paul Krugman.
At The New Yorker Margaret Talbot’s “The Populist Prophet: Bernie Sanders has spent decades attacking inequality. Now the country is listening” provides one of the best 2016 presidential candidate profiles to date.
“The presidential race is the main event. It has everything: It has glamour, it has money, it has power — it’s showbiz. It’s an attraction,” Pelosi said Thursday. “And off years are like the lounge act. Who goes there — right?” — from House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, as reported in Eric Bradner’s CNN Politics post, “The Democrats’ off-year election crisis.” Some other observations from Bradner’s post include the suggestion that “the DNC launch and fund a national training program for state parties — which would then train local parties. A particular focus: Teaching the new voters the party has attracted in recent years the importance of voting in every race — not leaving the polling place with the first few boxes filled in an a massive “undervote” by failing to vote down-ballot. That problem reached record levels in 2008.” Other Democrats pointed to messaging…”I think it’s communicating a clear message on policy and policy differences,” said Holly Shulman, a Democratic strategist and former DNC official…The now nearly nine-month-old DNC task force document suggested a “national narrative project” to advance the premise that electing Democrats everywhere — not just to top national offices — is what’s necessary to promote some policy priorities.”
Bradner’s article also contains a clue that the Kentucky governor’s race may not have been just a spanking for Democrats: “Some Democrats said Kentucky’s results aren’t a useful check on where the two parties stand a year away from the presidential election…Their argument: The Democratic candidate, Attorney General Jack Conway, shied away from taking any Democratic-sounding positions. And two other statewide candidates, including failed 2014 Senate nominee Alison Lundergan Grimes as secretary of state and another Democrat as attorney general, actually won.” — despite a 31 percent turnout.
The Guardian’s Washington political correspondent Ben Jacobs praises Rachel Maddow’s forum with Democratic presidential candidates: “The forum may not sway many voters. It lacked fireworks and the type of “gotcha” moments that have defined the most widely seen presidential debates. However, the format did lend itself to substance and serious discussion. It may not have altered the arc of the Democratic campaign, but it left voters knowing a lot more about all three candidates who appeared.
Patrik Jonsson’s Monitor post “Do Democrats have a viable strategy to win back the South?” explores the possibility that Democrats are doing poorly in the South in large part because they have neglected the white working class in the region, as well as nation-wide. Johnson quotes Andrew Levison, who notes “The “harsh reality for Democrats is that they cannot achieve … [their] objectives without increasing their support among white working class Americans,”… it’s impossible to write off working Americans in all of the Red states or in all non-urban areas and still have a stable and enduring Democratic majority…”
in Politico’s ‘Democrats look to ride Clinton wave to Senate control:The party is angling to expand the electoral map by fielding strong recruits in red states like Missouri and Arkansas,” Burgess Everett and Kevin Robillard survey the Democratic senatorial field for 2016 and find some unexpected opportunities and a couple of problem races. The most glaring weakness for Dems seems to be the lack of a formidable candidate in NC to beat Sen. Richard Burr, who currently has dismal approval ratings.