With so much attention paid to determining “who won” the Iowa Caucuses, and how irregularities may have affected the outcome, it’s important not to forget about what we did learn about the striking and entirely complementary strengths and weaknesses of the two Democratic candidates. I looked at some of the numbers and their implications yesterday at New York:

As Eric Levitz noted in the wee hours of Caucus Night, Sanders won the under-30 portion of caucus participants by an astonishing 70 points, 84 to 14. That’s unprecedented, best we can tell. Barack Obama, the model for Bernie’s campus-based youth-mobilization effort in Iowa, won only 57 percent of the under-30 crowd in Iowa, albeit against more opponents.
Unfortunately for Sanders, his overwhelming strength in this one demographic was fully offset by his weaknesses elsewhere. There was, in fact, a direct correlation of age to likelihood to caucus for Hillary Clinton, who lost those aged 30 to 44 by a 37/58 margin, but then won the 45 to 64 cohort 58/35 and those 65 and over by 69/26. And as Ron Brownstein observes, older folks tend to show up:

[W]hen it comes to piling up votes, one of these demographic advantages is much more useful than the other. Across all of the 2008 contests, according to [Gary] Langer’s calculations, voters older than 45 cast fully 61 percent of Democratic votes, while those younger than 45 cast 39 percent. That’s an advantage for Clinton. And it’s a slightly worrisome note for Sanders — a cloud passing on an otherwise sunny day — that young voters cast a slightly smaller share of the total Iowa Democratic vote in 2016 than 2008.
And Sanders’s potential weakness in post-New Hampshire primaries was evidenced by his nearly two-to-one loss in the small segment of Iowa caucus participants who were not white.

What Brownstein calls the “Grand Canyon-sized” generation gap in the Democratic nomination contest is likely to significantly erode Hillary Clinton’s advantage among women, much as Barack Obama’s appeal to African-Americans did in 2008. But in the later primaries, in both the South and big states like New York, California, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, minority voter support for Clinton will, unless something changes, significantly erode Bernie’s advantage among younger voters as well.
The question in the long run is whether these disparate intraparty bases of support will hang together in a general election on behalf of the eventual nominee. Certainly similar cleavages in 2008 did not keep Barack Obama from assembling what we now know as the Obama Coalition of young and minority voters and certain categories of women. Since young voters are the most marginal electoral participants of them all, Team Clinton should be especially worried that under-30 voters won’t turn out for her in a general election. Indeed, some Republicans fantasize about stealing the youth vote behind a candidate like Marco Rubio, with his whole new-generation, aspirational message (offset, to be sure, by a Reagan-era economic outlook and a Cold War zest for militarism). This is another reason Hillary should be careful about letting her competition with Bernie Sanders become too savage.

It later occurred to me that Sanders and Clinton were like two people holding ends of a wishbone representing the Obama Coalition. Where exactly they divide it may well determine the nomination. But putting it back together in the fall will matter most.

Now that the Democratic presidential nomination contest is winnowed down to two candidates, both of whom have strong appeal to different constituencies, it is useful to consider strategies for each of them. At Vox David Roberts has a post, “Give a little thought to what a GOP campaign against Bernie Sanders might look like,” that merits a sober reading and discussion.
If Sanders wins the nomination, Democrats will be challenged by a range of strategic considerations. As Roberts explains:

… The left insurgent candidate, Bernie Sanders, has also had a mostly free ride…If you say something like this on social media, you’ll be beset by furious Sanders supporters. (If there’s one thing it’s easy to do on social media, it’s get yourself beset by furious Sanders supporters.) But it remains true that Sanders has faced very few serious attacks.

Sanders supporters will respond by noting the criticism by Clinton and other moderates has been pretty tough. Yet he has had a pretty easy ride compared to what is coming, should he win the nomination. “But c’mon,” says Roberts. “This stuff is patty-cakes compared with the brutalization he would face at the hands of the right in a general election…His supporters would need to recalibrate their umbrage-o-meters in a serious way.”
Roberts reminds Dems that the Republicans are highly-skilled at criticizing Democrats. That’s why they continue to hold their House majority and dominate a healthy majority of governorships and state legislatures. They have been relatively easy on Sanders so far because they hope he wins, believing, wrongly or rightly, that he will be easier for them to defeat. Further, says Roberts,

But if he wins, they will rain down fire.
And the organs of the right will feel absolutely no obligation to be fair. They’re not going to be saying, like Sanders’s Democratic critics, “Aw, Bernie, you dreamer.”
They’re going to be digging through his trash, investigating known associates, rifling through legal records…They’re going to ask struggling middle-class workers how they feel about a trillion dollars in new taxes to fund a grand socialist scheme to take away everyone’s health care insurance and hand them over to government doctors.
They’re going to ask when he stopped being a communist, and when he objects that he was never a communist they’re going to ask why he’s so defensive about his communist past, why he’s so eager to avoid the questions that have been raised, the questions that people are talking about.
And when Sanders and his supporters splutter that it’s inaccurate and unjust and outrageous, the right will not give a single fuck.

Roberts reviews Sanders’ vulnerabilities, including his age. The Republicans will relentlessly characterize him as a tax-loving Socialist Boogeyman, because they believe, not without some evidence, that meme repetition eventually sinks in, regardless of the validity, especially when it is not well-challenged. Dems need to be ready for this.
“…Based on my experience,” adds Roberts, “the Bernie legions are not prepared. They seem convinced that the white working class would rally to the flag of democratic socialism. And they are in a state of perpetual umbrage that Sanders isn’t receiving the respect he’s due, that he’s facing even mild attacks from Clinton’s camp…More vicious attacks are inevitable, and that no one knows how Sanders might perform with a giant political machine working to define him as an unhinged leftist…His followers should not yet feel sanguine about his ability to endure conservative attacks. Also they should get a thicker skin, quick.”
If Roberts is overstating the naiveté of the Sanders campaign, he is surely right about the viciousness of attacks yet to come. The viciousness will also be amplified if Clinton wins the nomination. But Clinton is battle-tested and she has amassed a very tough and experienced team of political operatives, who could help Sanders, should he win the Democratic nomination.
Sanders is a smart, tough guy and he didn’t get this far by being a pussycat. But he’s going to need all of his personal strengths to overcome the Republicans’ disciplined messaging and bottomless economic resources, if he is nominated. Equally important, argues Roberts, he will have to make sure his staff is not too thin-skinned nor unprepared for the tsunami of vitriol, onslaught of distractions and dirty tricks that would be headed their way.
Properly prepared, Sanders can beat any of the Republicans, all of whom all have glaring weaknesses begging to be exploited. No matter which Democratic candidate wins the nomination, the talents, manpower and economic resources of the Democratic adversary in the coming primaries will be essential for victory in November.

Facebook may be rife with bickering between the supporters of Sanders and Clinton, but the candidates displayed impressive civility at last night’s Democratic forum, even as they put the heat on each other. Eric Bradner’s “6 takeaways from CNN’s Democratic town hall” at CNN Politics provides a good synopsis.
Looking forward to tonight’s Democratic debate in NH, Trip Gabriel, among other NYT political reporters, observes: “After Mrs. Clinton overwhelmingly — even shockingly — lost millennial voters in Iowa by 70 points to Mr. Sanders, I’ll be watching to see if she turns the focus from her résumé — a misty past beyond the recall of voters under 30 — toward the future, offering an optimistic vision of what she hopes to accomplish. Conversely, because Mr. Sanders lost seniors in Iowa by 43 points, I want to see if he tailors his message to try to bridge some of the gap.”
The Republican presidential candidate field just shrunk by two more candidates, with Sen. Rand Paul and former Sen. Rick Santorum bailing out, eliminating the need for a “kiddie table” going forward.
Trump and Rubio crank up the shameless Muslim-bashing in NH, blasting the President for daring to affirm religious tolerance and freedom at a Baltimore Mosque.
At U.S. News Matthew Dickinson writes, “In the pivotal state of New Hampshire, which holds its first-in-the-nation primary on Feb. 9, roughly 44 percent of voters are not affiliated with either major party. This makes them eligible to vote in either party’s primary – but not in both. In contrast, Democrats make up about 26 percent of registered voters, and Republicans 30 percent. While Sanders’ core constituency is the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, New Hampshire polls indicate that he runs particularly strong there among younger voters, those who did not vote in the 2008 or 2012 New Hampshire primaries and among independents. Trump tends to do better among lower-educated blue collar workers, but like Sanders polls indicate he also does slightly better among undeclared voters and among those who did not vote in the two previous New Hampshire presidential primaries. In short, both candidates are positioning themselves as political outsiders running against the party establishment, and as a consequence, they are partly trying to appeal to the same group of independent voters.”
WaPo’s Phillip Bump addresses an interesting question, “Should Bernie Sanders get credit for making the Democratic party more liberal?” I agree with Bump that the trend was well underway before Sanders’s candidacy, but credit him with driving the party’s policies a notch or two to the left.
Hats off to one of the greatest Democratic House members, Rep. Elijah Cummings, for putting the cause of safe, affordable medicine before advancing his political career. His continued service in the House insures that Democrats will have a uniquely strong and eloquent voice challenging Republican extremism on all major issues.
Scott Keyes has an important read at ThinkProgress, “Study Finds Republican Voter Suppression Is Even More Effective Than You Think.” As Keyes expliains, “In a new paper entitled “Voter Identification Laws and the Suppression of Minority Votes”, researchers at the University of California, San Diego — Zoltan Hajnal, Nazita Lajevardi — and Bucknell University — Lindsay Nielson — used data from the annual Cooperative Congressional Election Study to compare states with strict voter ID laws to those that allow voters without photo ID to cast a ballot. They found a clear and significant dampening effect on minority turnout in strict voter ID states…the researchers found that in primary elections, “a strict ID law could be expected to depress Latino turnout by 9.3 points, Black turnout by 8.6 points, and Asian American turnout by 12.5 points.” And that’s just one of their voter suppression techniques.
His campaign has $100 million, and this is the best he can do?

Sasha Issenberg, author of The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns, explains “How Ted Cruz Engineered His Iowa Triumph” at Bloomberg.com. Issenberg discusses how Chris Wilson, the Cruz campaign pollster and director of analytics, targeted the pivotal group needed to win, following the Palin fiasco and Gov. Terry Branstad’s dismissal of Cruz as a worthy candidate:

Wilson swiftly recalibrated the challenge as a matter of numbers. On his phone, he summoned a report that counted 9,131 individual Iowans whom Wilson’s statistical models had identified as choosing between the two leading candidates. Those people existed at the overlap of likely caucus-goers who were seen as considering both Cruz and Trump; anyone who also ranked Marco Rubio highly was pushed out of the group. “These aren’t people you want to contrast with Trump and push to Rubio,” explained Wilson. (There were, separately, 6,309 voters then choosing between Cruz and Rubio but not Trump.) Those who remained were a remarkably homogeneous group: 91 percent male, two-thirds of them likely to self-associate as evangelical Christians.
For the closing days of the Iowa campaign, Cruz’s campaign had defined such pools for each of his major opponents as part of what was known internally as the Oorlog Project, named by a Cruz data scientist who searched online for “war” translated into different languages and thought the Afrikaner word looked coolest. It was just the latest way that Cruz’s analytics department had tried to slice the Iowa caucus electorate in search of an advantage for its candidate. They had divided voters by faction, self-identified ideology, religious belief, personality type–creating 150 different clusters of Iowa caucus-goers–down to sixty Iowa Republicans its statistical models showed as likely to share Cruz’s desire to end a state ban on fireworks sales.
Unlike most of his opponents, Cruz has put a voter-contact specialist in charge of his operation, and it shows in nearly every aspect of the campaign he has run thus far and intends to sustain through a long primary season. Cruz, it should be noted, had no public position on Iowa’s fireworks law until his analysts identified sixty votes that could potentially be swayed because of it.

Wilson, notes Issenberg, has “the most expansive brief of any pollster in either party’s 2016 field: his surveys not only guide Cruz’s strategy and define his message, but drive targeting decisions both online and off, including digital fundraising appeals.”
All targeting technology wizardry aside, Cruz, had a lot of assets going for him as the shiny new kid on the block, including a clear strategic sense about how to win the tea party’s ultra-right conservative evangelicals. More than any other GOP candidate, he really is one of them, and the authenticity surely shows. No doubt, he will move toward the center, if nominated. But it’s hard to see how he can shake some of his right-wing bonafides enough to make a credible pitch to political moderates. For the Democratic nominee, he may be more beatable than Trump.
The Cruz campaign developed a sophisticated method for shaping messaging to different sub-groups. Issenberg notes that the campaign “brainstorming sessions generated a master list of 77 local issues for Iowans,” with micro targeting exercises including Facebook trial balloons. The campaign also deployed Cambridge Analytica, which set out “to profile every American voter along each of the five dominant personality factors: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.” Further, adds issenberg,

Yet the 32 different personality types into which Cambridge Analytica segregated voters would be unmanageable if layered onto other divisions in the electorate. Wilson pushed the company to simplify its framework by pushing voters into just five clusters, including Timid Traditionalist, Relaxed Leader, and Temperamental. At the same time, he deployed the two full-time analysts that Cambridge had embedded in Cruz’s headquarters to work on building statistical models more directly relevant to political attributes…
…More than 300,000 Iowans were potential targets, having participated previously in at least one Republican primary, though Wilson spent 2015 expecting fewer than half that number to actually attend the caucus in February. Based on that turnout, Wilson had set a vote goal of 39,585, a number he expected to reach by both persuading likely caucus-goers and mobilizing new ones predicted to support Cruz. When he took those different behavioral buckets, split them by issue preference, and then again by personality groups, Wilson ended up with more than 150 segments in Iowa alone.

It’s hard to imagine Trump utilizing such micro targeting and message development, given his shoot-from-the-lip approach. In this sense the Iowa GOP Caucuses were, for the GOP, a telling contest between charisma and hard-headed political science, and charisma was decisively out-played. It paid off at crunch time, as issenbereg explains:

A few hours before the caucuses began, Wilson sat in the hotel lobby and looked at his final projections and all the different ways Cruz could exceed his vote goal of 35,178. As of that day, 39,541 Iowans had directly confirmed their intention to caucus for Cruz, with nearly 4,000 of them doing so over the web site. At the same time, the campaign had 29,830 turnout targets, infrequent voters whom statistical models predicted were likely to support Cruz if they did end up choosing to caucus. It was a slice of that group deemed the least likely to turn out–with less than one-in-four odds of doing so–who received a controversial get-out-the-vote mailer that essentially shamed voters into turning out in the closing weekend of the race. Rubio, Trump, and Iowa’s secretary of state slammed the move as “not in keeping in the spirit of the Iowa Caucuses.”
About three thousand of Cruz’s turnout targets were selected to receive the mail, an aggressive version of a common technique refined through dozens, possibly hundreds, of different social-science experiments confirming that the “social pressure” of shaming non-voters can in fact serve to motivate them. The “Voting Violation” design evoked an official government document, and the inclusion of neighbors’ supposed voting records had been shown to be far more potent than merely letting voters know their own records were public. Cruz’s campaign had to send the mail out under its own name–as opposed to that of a super-PAC or other outside group, as is preferred with such tactics liable to incite blowback–because it was the one with the most current list of the people Cruz needed to mobilize. (Some other campaigns, notably John Kasich’s, have effectively outsourced all their highly targeted voter contact to allied super-PACs.)

In his concluding paragraph Issenberg adds “Cruz advisers anticipated the cynical media response, but accepted the risk.” If Democratic micro targeting provided an edge in 2008 and 2012, the safe assumption is that it will not be the case in 2016. The respected Des Moines register poll was right that the Democratic Caucuses result would be close, but they were significantly off about the GOP tally, which is a credit to the Cruz campaign.
Whether Cruz wins or loses his party’s nomination, it’s likely that his targeting and message teams will be on board with the GOP presidential nominee. Dems need to make sure their team is at least as sharp.

Hillary Clinton has narrowly edged Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Iowa caucuses. But her razor-close margin of victory is being called a “virtual tie” in media post-mortems, as well the Sanders campaign. It’s really a win-win for both the Clinton and Sanders campaigns, and their respective teams are brimming with excitement, going into New Hampshire.
For former Maryand Governor Martin O’Malley, it was the end of the trail, and he “suspended” his campaign. Credit O’Malley with running an upbeat, issue-oriented campaign and setting an example of admirable civility. In another year, he might have done better and the seriousness of his policies probably deserved better media coverage.
The close race between Clinton and Sanders helps both of them, and perhaps more importantly, the Democratic Party. An overwhelming Clinton victory would likely have revived the potentially-toxic “coronation” meme. The close margin insures that both campaigns will get more attention from voters as we move into the primary season. Up till now the Republicans, energized by Trump’s outrage du jour, have hogged media coverage. We’ll see more balance now, especially since he has been whipped pretty bad by Ted Cruz.
The same goes for the dignified tone of civility set by both the Clinton and Sanders campaigns. If they can sustain this spirit of mutual respect and a refusal to mud-wrestle, Democrats will be the adult party in the eyes of thoughtful swing voters in November.
Sen. Ted Cruz’s impressive upset, contrary to the findings of even the respected Des Moines register poll, holds a couple of instructive lessons about him for Democrats. First, his team has a solid ground game, and he is evidently a capable hands-on strategist and organizer. His successful campaign turn-out techniques merit some attention.
Second, Cruz apparently has little hesitancy about playing dirty, as the controversy about his late-campaign “report card” mailer indicates. Trump and Paul complained about it, as did the Iowa Secretary of State. The Cruz campaign also allegedly implied that Carson had dropped out of the race. It is noteworthy that none of the other Republican campaigns tried anything quite so sleazy.
Third, offending the ethanol industry, as did Cruz, is not political suicide in farming states in 2016. It may not even be risky.
Going forward, expect Trump to roll like a wounded whale. As for the rest of the Republican field, they are coming for front-runners Cruz, Trump and Rubio in a big way, and their field has only been winnowed by one drop-out, Huckabee, as of this writing.
The Clinton and Sanders campaigns will have to sharpen their offense, now that it is clear that theirs is a close race. But surely both campaigns “get it” that maintaining a high tone — and a unified party — will serve them well in November

The respected Des Moines Register’s final poll before the Iowa Caucuses has Sanders and Clinton in stat tie, and Trump only one point above m.o.e. with Cruz. The poll has a good track record. Wining the IA Caucuses doesn’t necessarily mean all that much in terms of primary momentum, although it sure helps with contributions — as much as $50 million for the victor, according to NBC commentator Chuck Todd.
Charlie Cook argues at national Journal that “Both the GOP and Demo­crat­ic races will turn on wheth­er emo­tion tops or­gan­iz­a­tion.” Cook shares a sobering perspective: “nom­in­a­tions are about del­eg­ates, and very, very few are se­lec­ted in Iowa, New Hamp­shire, or, for that mat­ter, South Car­o­lina and Nevada, the oth­er two Feb­ru­ary con­tests. March is the month that is the moth­er lode of del­eg­ates; then the pro­cess ex­tends at a more muted level un­til the Cali­for­nia primary on June 7.”
So, how often does the winner of the caucuses become a party nominee or president? As Thomson/Reuters notes, “Since 1976, there have been seven contested caucuses in the Republican Party. Of those contests, three winners have become the party’s nominee…Since 1972, there have been nine contested caucuses in the Democratic Party. Of those, the winner of the caucuses has gone on to be the Democratic nominee five times…As those numbers show, Iowa picks the eventual nominee only about half the time.”
Dan Balz argues at The Washington Post that the iowa Caucuses do matter, because they begin the winnowing out of candidates. NYT’s Trip Gabriel agrees and cites the just “three tickets out of Iowa” saying.
Jason Noble of the Des Moines Register explains why the complex “Caucus night math matters in close Democratic race.”
Key statistics to note tonight: Will the Democratic winner’s percentage and raw numbers totals match Obama’s totals in 2008?
In his Washington Post, column on “The monumental fall of the Republican Party,” E. J. Dionne, Jr. nails the disastrous tilt of the GOP in recent years: “The fixed smile on Donald Trump’s face as Sarah Palin unleashed her free-association, who-knows-what-she’ll-say-next harangue endorsing him on Tuesday sent its own message. “How long do I have to stand here?” it seemed to say. But of all the developments in the astonishing Republican presidential contest, this moment told us what we need to know about the state of a once-great political party…Today’s Republican crisis was thus engineered by the party leadership’s step-by-step capitulation to a politics of unreason, a policy of silence toward the most extreme and wild charges against Obama, and a lifting up of resentment and anger over policy and ideas as the party’s lodestars.”
Meanwhile, a new Bloomberg News poll indicates former Mayor Bloomberg isn’t getting much traction: “A poll of likely caucusgoers conducted for Bloomberg Politics and The Des Moines Register and released on Saturday night found just 17 percent of Democrats and 9 percent of Republicans had a “favorable” view of Mr. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York.”
“58 percent of Americans currently favor Medicare-for-All once they learn more about it, and 81% of Democrats already believe it is the best solution. So, rather than demonize it with lies and scare tactics, we should be educating more and more people who are disillusioned with their current healthcare so that more and more of us can demand something better from our representatives.” from “The Real Healthcare Debate Democrats Should Be Having” by Paul Y Song, MD at HuffPo.

The Fox News GOP presidential debate from Iowa, boycotted by Daniel Trump, did not resolve a lot, as I explained last night at New York:

[N]obody who could have scored a real victory that mattered actually did. Ted Cruz had his worst debate by far, as Megyn Kelly and the other candidates basically called him a slick liar — not what you want when you are trying to convince Iowa evangelicals you are young King Josiah sent to cleanse the land. Speaking of slick: Cruz may have been the champion college debater, but Marco Rubio sounded like one with his determination to pack two minutes of stock speech into every minute of talk. His own flip-flopping on immigration was cast in sharp relief, and his gratuitous shout-outs to Jesus Christ were exceeded only by Cruz’s to Iowa nativist Steve King.
Meanwhile, some of the better performances were by candidates who are going nowhere in Iowa and are struggling to survive in New Hampshire. The last thing the Republican Establishment needs is for Chris Christie or John Kasich to get a second wind, since neither is going to win in New Hampshire or the states immediately following it on the calendar — but could take votes away from a more viable candidate like, say, Marco Rubio. Jeb Bush, who has just enough money left to run another $10 to $20 million in attack ads aimed at Rubio, had a pretty good night, too.
All of this is pretty good news for the guy who wasn’t there. But maybe I’m wrong. As I write this, Frank Luntz has one of his focus groups warbling about Marco Rubio. I seem to recall that Luntz’s focus group after the first Fox News debate thought Megyn Kelly had all but destroyed Donald Trump’s candidacy. So we’ll have to let Monday night’s caucusers have the last word.

Most discussions of political strategy center on national and state politics — how to elect presidents, senators, House members and governors. Attention is even more narrowly focused in contentious election years like 2016.
But while the media and public are all yammering on about those high-profile electoral contests, a powerful progressive transformation is accelerating in America’s cities. Claire Cain Miller addresses the trend in her NYT Upshot column, “Liberals Turn to Cities to Pass Laws and Spread Ideas“:

If Congress won’t focus on a new policy idea, and if state legislatures are indifferent or hostile, why not skip them both and start at the city level?
That’s the approach with a proposed law in San Francisco to require businesses there to pay for employees’ parental leaves.
It might seem like a progressive pipe dream, the kind of liberal policy that could happen only in a place like San Francisco. But Scott Wiener, the city and county supervisor who proposed the policy, sees it differently.
“The more local jurisdictions that tackle these issues, the more momentum there is for statewide and eventually national action,” he said.

Miller cites Baltimore’s ‘living wage ‘ law enacted in 1994, along with “soda taxes, universal health care, calorie counts on menus, mandatory composting and bans on smoking indoors” as examples of the phenomenon. Many cities, she adds, are well-positioned to serve as “incubators of ideas” and policies to fill the void left by a gridlocked federal congress.
There is significant opposition to the cities taking the lead, coming from conservative organizations like ALEC, the NRA and the tobacco lobby, which have had some success in blocking reforms passed by cities, including “gun control, plastic bag bans, paid leave, fracking, union membership and the minimum wage.”
Yet the reforms enacted by cities have sometimes take root as causes gaining national support. As Miller notes,

Paid sick leave is an example. The first city to require it was San Francisco in 2006. It is now the law in 23 cities and states, and President Obama last fall required federal contractors to provide it. (Meanwhile, more than a dozen states have pre-emption laws to stop cities from requiring paid sick leave.)
Minimum wage is another example. SeaTac, Wash., passed a $15 minimum wage in 2013. Nearby Seattle followed, and then so did San Francisco, Los Angeles, Mountain View, Calif., and Emeryville, Calif.
Fourteen states have since changed their minimum wage laws, two bills in Congress would do the same nationally, and all three Democratic presidential contenders have said they would raise the federal minimum wage.

Democrats are driving the reforms in the cities and in some key states, like California. What has changed most significantly is the severity of gridlock in congress, which gives added incentive to the cities to lead the way in building America’s future. If the cities can meet daunting challenges like eliminating traffic jams, pollution and crime, their examples will prove irresistible to national politicians, rendering the GOP’s gridlock strategy inoperative.

In this era of gridlock in Congress, enforced by a policy of Republican obstructionism, there has been one bright flickering hope: for criminal justice reform, which has been promoting by a fragile but wide-ranging left-right coalition convinced that the mandatory minimum sentences and mass incarceration associated with the “war on drugs” and other law-and-order measures of past decades has been a failure with massive human and fiscal costs. But now that initiative is under fire from the Right, as I explained this week at New York:

The temptation of law-and-order politics is pulling more and more conservatives away from the carefully cultivated, Evangelical-blessed, libertarian-influenced, bipartisan criminal-justice-reform movement, which was moving toward fruition in Congress.
The immediate flash point is in the Senate, where a bill to allow for reconsideration of federal sentences imposed under the idiotic regime of mandatory minimum sentences had been considered a very good prospect for enactment in this legislatively barren election year. Two of its most prominent backers were hyperconservative senators John Cornyn of Texas and Mike Lee of Utah, and it had overcome its supposedly most difficult obstacle when Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley approved it.
But now a backlash — I am using the term very deliberately — is building, led by freshman Republican senator and conservative superstar Tom Cotton of Arkansas, supported by backbenchers who pretty clearly want to show off their law-and-order credentials. Politico‘s Seung Min Kim reports Cotton’s efforts could convince Mitch McConnell to deep-six the legislation for this Congress:

Cotton, the hawkish upstart who’s already made waves on the Iran nuclear deal and government surveillance programs, is now leading a new rebellion against a bipartisan effort to overhaul the criminal justice system — hoping to torpedo one of the few pieces of major legislation that could pass Congress in President Barack Obama’s final year.
GOP tensions over a bill that would effectively loosen some mandatory minimum sentences spilled over during a party lunch last week, when Cotton (R-Ark.), the outspoken Senate freshman, lobbied his colleagues heavily against the legislation, according to people familiar with the closed-door conversation. The measure passed the Senate Judiciary Committee last fall with bipartisan support….
Cotton isn’t alone. Other Senate Republicans, including Sens. Jim Risch of Idaho and David Perdue of Georgia, also registered their strong opposition during the lunch, even as Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) vigorously defended the bill, which he helped negotiate. Risch stressed this message, according to one Republican source: Shouldn’t the GOP be a party of law and order?
Risch declined to elaborate on his concerns over the bill, saying he was displeased that his private remarks made during a party lunch were made public. But the deepening Republican split over reforming key elements of the criminal justice system — an effort years in the making that has been powered by an influential right-left coalition — may imperil whether Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell ultimately will take up the measure later in this election year.

It’s easy to laugh at Risch’s displeasure at being caught in mid-demagoguery, but he is unquestionably articulating views that are in the air. Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump, after all, likes to talk about an immigrant-driven “crime wave” that requires a new crackdown on the lowlifes and losers who are challenging police authorities in the cities. And his attitude seems to have softened the commitment to criminal-justice reform of his sometimes Mini-Me and now-deadly rival, Ted Cruz.
But what may most be animating this collapse of bipartisanship is not the 2016 presidential election, but the next one or the one after that: whenever it is that Tom Cotton makes his inevitable move toward the White House. Possessor of a mile-long pre-political résumé (two Harvard degrees, circuit court clerkship, military service in Afghanistan and Iraq, a stint with McKinsey & Company), and already distinguishing himself as the hawkiest of hawks, Cotton is the purveyor of a grim, Calvinist, old-school conservatism that still has a lot of support in the GOP. As a House member he talked about the prospect of a debt limit breach and an ensuing recession as though it might be a good, bracing tonic for a nation too accustomed to easy credit. He’s just the guy to slam the prison door shut on those who might have gotten a tardy but life-saving reprieve from hammer-headed sentences.

I’d hate to guess when this rock might be pushed back up the Hill again if Cotton rolls it down.

There are good reasons why running as a third party candidate should be a non-starter for an astute business leader, even one richer than Trump. Brendan Nyhan explains at The Upshot. Conservative columnist George Will agrees, albeit for different reasons.
What can American workers learn from worker organizing in other countries? Eric Dirnbach addresses the issue in is Labor Notes article reviewing “New Forms of Worker Organization: The Syndicalist and Autonomist Restoration of Class Struggle Unionism,” edited by Immanuel Ness. See also Ness’s newer book, “Southern Insurgency: The Coming of the Global Working Class.”
For an in-depth look at the thinking of angry white working-class voters, read “Why I’m voting for Trump: CNN talks to more than 150 people in 31 cities to explore what’s driving the Trump phenomenon.”
Americablog’s Jon Green reports that “Virginia Republicans take aim at absentee voting in latest voter suppression push.”
Carl Hulse explains at The New York Times how Dems plan to leverage the GOP’s Planned Parenthood fiasco.
AP reports that “More white Americans now share the view, long held by minorities, that racism is a national problem and should be confronted, according to an analysis of recent public opinion polling…The review, compiled by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation in conjunction with the Northeastern University School of Journalism, concludes that a majority of Americans across racial groups think more should be done to end racism.”
In RawStory’s “Trump’s battle with the GOP pits ‘silent majority’ against conservative establishment,” University of Oregon political science professor Joseph Lowndes has an insightful take on the devolution of the Republican Party.
In addition to the horrific human cost of the Flint water crisis, the economic costs and scope of needed repairs are astounding. Rachel Maddow continues her superb reporting on the Flint water debacle with an illuminating interview with a master plumber on what it will take to restore safe drinking and bathing water to the city.
Both Trump and Megyn Kelly have to be thinking that tonight’s GOP presidential debate ratings will be higher still if he changes his mind and shows. Either way, Trump has played the MSM again, despite Kelly’s assertion that “the truth is, he doesn’t get to control the media.” If Trump shows, credit him, once again, with clever ratings manipulation. If he skips out, he will be roundly lambasted as a wimp. Hey didn’t John McCain lose cred for a no-show threat late in the ’08 campaign? Trump’s critics, particularly cartoonists, are already having a glorious snarkfest (see here, here and here).