Helaine Olen’s Salon.com post, “How Elizabeth Warren Wields Power: Even without running she’s forcing the Democratic candidates to look out for consumers” reveals one way a leader who is not a presidential candidate can set her party’s economic policy agenda. Olen’s article also provides a solid rebuttal to the GOP meme that the Democrats’ “bench” is weak. Sen Warren is already amassing an impressive record and wielding considerable influence
But Olen’s post also provides an intriguing idea to help Democrats get a bigger bite of the high-turnout senior demographic on election day, 2016. As Olen explains,

…In late March, Warren–along with West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin–thrust Social Security into the spotlight by adding an amendment to a congressional budget resolution calling for an increase in benefits. The move seemed like so much political theater. After all, there was zero chance the measure would pass the Republican-controlled Congress. But the deft legislative maneuver forced Senate Democrats to take a stand on the issue. As Mother Jones enthused prophetically, “Warren just turned Social Security expansion–once a progressive pipe-dream–into a tough-to-ignore 2016 issue.”
No kidding. Now, all three Democratic candidates are competing to expand the program. Martin O’Malley and Bernie Sanders are calling for increasing retirement benefits, while Hillary Clinton is advocating a tax credit for those who take time out of the paid workforce to manage family responsibilities. On the other hand, with the exception of Donald Trump, all the leading Republican contenders are campaigning on promises of raising the retirement age or taking other steps to cut back on Social Security payments, likely setting up a clear contrast for voters in the general election next year. (Marco Rubio, for example, supports raising the retirement age and would increase benefits for low-income retirees by reducing the growth in benefits for wealthier seniors.)
Warren also contributed to breaking a five-year logjam over a Department of Labor effort to expand investor protection for retirement accounts. At the beginning of the year, the effort appeared to be foundering, derailed yet again by fierce financial services industry pushback.

There are no recent polls which show whether or not most seniors would favor a hike in Social Security benefits financed by lifting the cap on wages taxed for SS. But studies have indicated that most seniors have inadequate assets for a comfortable retirement, so it’s hard to see much downside in Democrats making it more of a campaign issue.
Half of all Americans “say they can’t afford to save for retirement,” and one-third “have next to no retirement savings at all,” according to a recent Frontline report. The Retirement Income Deficit, “the gap between what American households have actually saved today and what they should have saved today to maintain their living standards in retirement,” is currently estimated to be about $7.7 trillion, according to the Center for Retirement Research.
It’s not about securing a ‘sea change’ in senior voting trends in 2016. That’s a longer-term project. But if Democrats can reduce by just 2 or 3 percent the proportion of seniors who vote Republican, it could make a big difference down-ballot, as well as in electing the next president.
Democrats simply have to do a more effective job of messaging to seniors, making the case why voting Democratic is good for the living standards of older Americans. A campaign including youtube videos, TV ads, ‘message du jour statements’ and soundbites by all Democratic candidates, particularly in battleground states, could help persuade enough seniors that Democrats have more to offer them.
During the last year, it’s fair to say that Republicans demonstrated more relentless ‘message discipline’ than did the Democrats. 2016 would be a good time for Dems to reverse that trend, starting with our presidential candidates focusing more on measures to improve retirement security.

Paul Krugman’s “Challenging the Oligarchy” in the New York Review of Books provides a perceptive review of former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich’s Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few. Of current progressive economists, Krugman and Reich are the most skilled at framing “the dismal science” for time-challenged readers who want a better understanding of economic policy options in the context of today’s political realities. In the concluding section of his favorable review, Krugman explains:

…Like a number of other commentators, Reich argues that there’s a feedback loop between political and market power. Rising wealth at the top buys growing political influence, via campaign contributions, lobbying, and the rewards of the revolving door. Political influence in turn is used to rewrite the rules of the game–antitrust laws, deregulation, changes in contract law, union-busting–in a way that reinforces income concentration. The result is a sort of spiral, a vicious circle of oligarchy. That, Reich suggests, is the story of America over the past generation. And I’m afraid that he’s right. So what can turn it around?
Anyone hoping for a reversal of the spiral of inequality has to answer two questions. First, what policies do you think would do the trick? Second, how would you get the political power to make those policies happen? I don’t think it’s unfair to Robert Reich to say that Saving Capitalism offers only a sketch of an answer to either question.

Krugman adds that Reich “calls for a sort of broad portfolio, or maybe a market basket, of changes aimed mainly at “predistribution”–changing the allocation of market income–rather than redistribution. (In Reich’s view, this is seen as altering the predistribution that takes place under current rules.)” Specific reforms would include “fairly standard liberal ideas like raising the minimum wage, reversing the anti-union bias of labor law and its enforcement, and changing contract law to empower workers to take action against employers and debtors to assert their interests against creditors.”
But Reich also urges reforms to “move corporations back toward what they were a half-century ago: organizations that saw themselves as answering not just to stockholders but to a broader set of “stakeholders,” including workers and customers.” Noting that the New Deal was “remarkably successful at creating a middle-class nation,” Krugman asks,

But how is this supposed to happen politically? Reich professes optimism, citing the growing tendency of politicians in both parties to adopt populist rhetoric. For example, Ted Cruz has criticized the “rich and powerful, those who walk the corridors of power.” But Reich concedes that “the sincerity behind these statements might be questioned.” Indeed. Cruz has proposed large tax cuts that would force large cuts in social spending–and those tax cuts would deliver around 60 percent of their gains to the top one percent of the income distribution. He is definitely not putting his money–or, rather, your money–where his mouth is.

As Krugman concludes, “Still, Reich argues that the insincerity doesn’t matter, because the very fact that people like Cruz feel the need to say such things indicates a sea change in public opinion. And this change in public opinion, he suggests, will eventually lead to the kind of political change that he, justifiably, seeks. We can only hope he’s right. In the meantime, Saving Capitalism is a very good guide to the state we’re in.”
All three Democratic presidential candidates will find much to agree with in Reich’s book and Krugman’s analysis. None of them favor wholesale nationalization of the economy, as the Republicans suggest they do. And though Senator Sanders has awakened broad interest in the ideas of democratic socialism, he too envisions a robust role for the private sector, especially small business entrepreneurs.
As the Republicans double down on government-bashing, increasing tax breaks for the rich and their war to obliterate the labor movement, Democrats have a unique opportunity and a clear field ahead as the party of reason and moderation. Indeed it is increasingly clear that the Democrats are the only American political party capable of negotiating and navigating the way to reduce economic inequality. That’s a pretty good brand for 2016.

At The Minneapolis Star Tribune, Allison Sherry’s article, “Rep. Keith Ellison hones new voter-turnout strategy for Democrats: Democrats around the country have high hopes the new effort will lead to more victories in nonpresidential elections” explores an interesting idea. Sherry quotes Ellison: “As a fifth-term Minneapolis Democrat who routinely wins his elections by more than 65 percent, Ellison is increasingly convinced that the future of Democratic victories is hiding in apartment buildings and low-income urban areas across the country. Trust me, there’s 3 percent in every congressional district in the United States,” Ellison said. “If we had a good turnout strategy across the country, you could really turn things around.” To do this, Ellison has workers fanning out to apartment buildings and low-income communities to reach potential constituencies in more personal ways. His idea is that through more one-on-one contact, Democrats can drive more people to the polls and cement lifetime allegiances to the party.”
Maxwell Tani of Business Insider explains “Here’s how badly Democrats have to screw up to lose the election.” Tani quotes Whit Ayers on the challenge Republicans face: “Un­less you count on the Re­pub­lic­an getting Ron­ald Re­agan-like num­bers among whites, you’re go­ing to have to be some­where in the mid-forties with Hispanics.” Tani also quotes Ruy Teixeira, who notes that Dems will win of they hold an “11-point deficit among white college graduates, a 22-point deficit among white working-class voters, and a 64-point advantage among minority voters”
Matt Viser reports at Boston Globe Politics that “Number of GOP polls jumps 90 percent in four years.” Viser notes, “The number of polls of Republican voters in the first three primary and caucus states — Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina — has skyrocketed nearly 90 percent compared with the 2012 GOP primary, according to a Globe review of polls tracked by the news website Real Clear Politics…The trend toward saturation polling shows little sign of abating, with online polls now cheaper than ever and polling firms and universities competing to satisfy an insatiable media appetite for the latest upticks and downturns, the trends in the minute-by-minute drama of the contest.”
The question is “Would an independent Jim Webb candidacy pull more votes from the Dem nominee or the GOP opponent? Or does it even matter, since Webb has a history of getting very little national traction? It does indicate that Webb was not much of a committed Democrat to begin with and he appears more interested in pursuing his personal ambitions than leading the Democratic party to achieve meaningful reforms.
Albert R. Hunt explains why “Democrats See Chance to Reclaim Senate Majority” at Bloomberg View. Says Hunt: “This time, half of the seats are in states carried by President Barack Obama, and some of the most competitive are in solidly blue states.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders has developed an assertive pitch to win working-class voters away from Trump, including reminding them that Trump says the minimum wage is too high. Both Gallup and Pew Research polls show support for a significant minimum wage hike is over 70 percent.
“Trump is pushing the racial and cultural resentment button a lot harder than he’s pushing the economic button,” argues Heather Digby Parton at Salon.com (and Alternet). “In fact, he’s pushing the resentment button so hard that it’s activated some very serious racists who truly had been pushed to the fringes of the right wing fever swamps…This is not to say that all Trump supporters are white supremacists.” But it does appear that he is courting the racist vote.
A new Democracy Corps poll of LVs found that “72 percent favor a law to provide candidates with “limited public matching funds for small contributions they raise from constituents,” with 39 percent favoring it strongly. Only 21 percent oppose it, and of those, only 7 percent oppose it strongly…Support was strong across the political spectrum, with 76 percent of Democrats, 74 percent of independents, and 66 percent of Republicans favoring such a law.,” reports Jon Schwarz at The Intercept.
Krugman updates The Chart:

Political analyses of the future prospects of the two major parties vary according to a lot of variables. But to over-simplify, some observers stress long-range trends while others focus on short-term events that could significantly bend future trends. A good example of the former has just been published by Peter Beinart at The Atlantic, and I discussed my misgivings about it at New York today:

Excessive faith in the inevitability of progress is one of the hazards of being a “progressive”…. Peter Beinart has written an election-year table-setter that political people left of center will be forwarding to one another to ward off fears of a Ted Cruz presidency or worse. Its title is “Why America Is Moving Left.” I wish I were sure he is right.
Beinart’s jumping-0ff point is his belief that though conditions might seem right for an old-fashioned law-and-order backlash to phenomena like #blacklivesmatter, liberalizing forces in both parties will prevent that from happening. Again, I’d feel better about that prediction if it rang true a few years from now.
One big factor preventing a shift to the right, says Beinart, is that the “centrist” forces in the Democratic Party, which in the ’80s and ’90s pushed for accommodation of conservative ideology, are largely gone. He speaks as the former editor of one such institution, The New Republic. I feel qualified to respond not only as a fairly substantial contributor to TNR for a while, but also as a former staffer at two other “centrist” institutions he mentions, the Democratic Leadership Council and the Washington Monthly. In Beinart’s view, the center-left discredited itself by enabling George W. Bush’s domestic and international agenda. While his account is oversimplified — the DLC, for example, attacked the Bush tax cuts pretty aggressively, though some of its congressional allies voted for them anyway — I’d say there’s some truth to it. But it’s also true that Democrats absorbed enough “centrist” common sense in the 1990s to make it possible to exploit the implosion of conservatism under Bush. And some of the ideas Beinart writes about as “centrist,” such as the neoliberal advocacy of means-testing big social programs (associated with WaMo), were not accommodations of conservatism but rather efforts to make more funds and political energy available for the truly needy. Unlike the kind of split-the-differences “centrism” that really has expired, there could be a future for means-testing, as suggested by Hillary Clinton’s habit of looking in that direction for new social initiatives like pre-K and paid family leave….
All quibbling aside, Beinart is obviously right that the Democratic Party is more consistently liberal than it has ever been. But the idea that it’s all part of a leftward trend that is invincible even within the Republican Party is much more problematic.
Yes, ultimately, the more progressive views of millennials mean that a GOP that has been trending pretty steadily rightward for four decades will have to adjust to reality, at least on cultural issues. And yes, the fact that many of the conservative movement’s most fervent causes — such as fighting universal health coverage or same-sex marriage or any sort of gun regulation — are not exactly sweeping the country means they will not have a cakewalk in presidential contests where the electorate is not skewed in their favor.
But that’s an influence, not a trend. Beinart believes any GOP general election candidate this next year will smell the coffee and appeal to millennials and minority voters by repudiating the hard-core conservatism that’s characterized the nominating process for so long. You sure would not guess that from the electability theories of candidates and analysts alike, who believe a supercharged turnout by the same old conservative coalition could prevail if reinforced by natural fatigue with a two-term president, a sluggish economy, and terrorist fears. Beinart also believes a Republican president would turn the page to the left. Yet the most profound reality the country faces is that a GOP president with a GOP Congress could, via the budget reconciliation process, repeal almost all of Obama’s accomplishments. The nascent and in many respects faint progressive impulses of the Reformicons are to a considerable extent just too little and too early.
Yes, in the long run there are forces that will build a wind to the back of progressives. But today’s conservative-movement-dominated GOP is too radical and too close to total power for anyone to take that to the bank. Some very reactionary days could be just ahead.

It really is going to depend on what happens next year.

Harold Meyerson’s Washington Post column, “The right’s war against the spirit of Christmas” calls out the toxic stew of xenophobia, bigotry, resentment, fear and greed that the GOP is serving up for the holiday season. Meyerson raises interesting questions:

Who’s really waging a war against Christmas in 2015? Secular multiculturalists who, stealthily and nefariously, have somehow rendered Starbucks’s coffee cups a tad less festive? Or the self-proclaimed culture warriors on behalf of traditional values, who demand we leave refugees — even small children, as New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) has made pitilessly clear — at the mercy of the latter-day Herods? Who condemn entire religions? Who fear and loathe strangers?

Put another way, can you even imagine any of the Republican presidential candidates actually quoting Christ’s teachings about love, forgiveness, charity and peace? Meyerson continues,

It’s been a banner year for fear and loathing, xenophobia and racism. What has made the year genuinely ominous is the emergence of fictions presented (often, but hardly exclusively, by Donald Trump) as facts that legitimize a sense of both grievance and hatred: New Jersey Muslims celebrating 9/11; the quarter-million Syrians that the Obama administration is planning to bring in; a wave of black-on-white homicide. Concoctions all, but credible enough to the sizable share of Republicans who also believe the president is a Kenyan Muslim. Fed by talk radio, Fox News and paranoid websites, millions of our compatriots dwell in a parallel universe of alternative realities. My colleague Dana Milbank has noted that the fashion among conservatives is to dismiss hard facts that clash with their alternative realities as “politically correct.” That’s Republicanese for “empirically correct” — verifiable by research, but at odds with the stories they’ve created to justify their rage.
Such right-wing fictions have always hovered on the fringes of the body politic, but what has enabled them to go more mainstream is the sense of displacement — from their previous position as a majority race, a thriving class, a dominant religion — that is now widespread among the white working class Trumpites and the evangelical Christians flocking to Ted Cruz’s banner. The mission of right-wing media and pols has been to exaggerate some of that displacement (the threat to white America), play down other parts of it (the evisceration of blue-collar living standards by corporate America) and lay the blame for it all on minorities, foreigners, liberals, feminists, gays — you know the list.

There’s nothing new about politicians pandering to the worst instincts and most irrational fears of voters. But in 2015 Republicans hit a new low, as Meyerson explains, “…Enmities, and most certainly not love, have become the core of the right’s appeal and message this year…They may well sweep Trump or Cruz to the Republican nomination; they have already infused the entire party with bigoted perspectives that will be hard to disclaim.”
It’s a sad turn for a political party that once tempered its conservatism with appeals to “bind up the nation’s wounds,” instead of inflaming them with expressions of contempt and exclusion. As Meyerson concludes, “They are most surely at odds with the spirit of Christmas. Walls on the border, religious tests for admission, despising the poor — good thing Joseph and Mary didn’t have to encounter our modern-day defenders of the right as they scrambled from one country to another, desperate to save their son’s life.”
It would be good if Democratic candidates and office-holders everywhere craft their holiday and New Years messages in stark contrast to the Republicans sour spirit by presenting a more healing and hopeful vision of shared prosperity, peace, brotherhood and sisterhood. These are the values that can lift up and unify all Americans of good will, and this is the brand that can inspire the best in voters and move America forward.

Greg Sargent’s post at the Plum Line, “Republicans are caught in a brutal demographic trap. But they can still win in 2016” features an interview with TDS founding editor Ruy Teixeira, Sargent sets the stage for the interview:

…A comprehensive new analysis from the Center for American Progress…concludes that while the demographic trends are clearly moving in the Democratic Party’s direction, giving Democrats a “clear advantage,” the 2016 election remains “wide open.”
To win, the report concludes, Democrats need to replicate something close to 2008 and 2012 levels of enthusiasm among the core Democratic voter groups that powered Barack Obama’s two victories. That’s hardly a slam dunk, given widespread voter dissatisfaction and a historic pattern that has shown that “time for a change” sentiment works against the party that has held the White House for eight years.

Sargent adds that Democrats are expected to benefit from growth projections of a 2 percent “minority share of the vote,” while non-college white voters share of the vote is projected to drop by 2.3 percent. An excerpt of Sargent’s interview of Teixeira follows:

PLUM LINE: You define the central question of 2016 as: “Can the Obama coalition survive?” Can you explain what you mean?
RUY TEIXEIRA: The Obama coalition in 2012 consisted of the minority vote (blacks, Latinos, Asians, and those of other races); the millennial generation; and more educated white voters. If you look at the support rates these groups gave to Obama in 2012, and walk those support rates into the probable representation of these voting groups in 2016, the Obama coalition would deliver a third victory for Democrats. It would probably increase their popular vote margin from four to six points. The question is to what extent can Democrats absorb a certain amount of attrition among those groups.
…PLUM LINE: You set forth three major variables as determinants for 2016: How much of the minority vote the Democrat loses compared to Obama; and how the college educated white vote and the non-college white vote break down. You conclude that the shifts in vote share give Democrats more leeway to lose ground among whites.
TEIXEIRA: In the last two elections, the Democrats got 81 percent of the minority vote. That can’t be assumed for 2016. So we are conservative about the minority vote, giving the Democrats in 2016 the average of their share of the minority vote in the last four elections — 78 percent.
In 2012, in our assessment, Democrats lost the white non-college vote by 22 points. We estimate the Democrats’ deficit among the white college vote was 11 points.
Let’s say the Democrats do get 78 percent of the minority vote. We find that the white non-college support for the Republican could actually go up substantially — to the 30 point margin Republicans won in 2014 — and the Democrats would still win the popular vote nationally, if they held their white college support.

Despite the implicit warning in the phrase ‘the popular vote,’ demographic trends look increasingly favorable for Democrats. “There are a lot of moving parts here,” Teixeira adds. “If the white working class support for Republicans goes up in a big way, and minority support levels for Democrats go down, and in addition to that, turnout among minorities tanks enough, then you’re getting very close to tie ball game.”
Teixeira calls Republican prospects for replicating Reagan’s 63-64 percent share of the white vote in 1884 “implausible.” It would require “a one-sided mobilization of whites.” to overwhelm the demographic projections.
There is also a growing possibility that the GOP nominee will run off many white, college-educated political moderates. Teixeira warns, however, that “If Republicans could get Democratic support among minorities down to 75 percent — and work both sides of the equation — there are more ways to win.”
That’s a lot of “ifs,” especially in light of the current front-runners in the GOP presidential primaries. As for younger voters, Texieira explains,

…The harder data among millennials is, what do they think about the Democratic Party and President Obama? On Obama approval, the millennial generation is still way above other age groups. There’s about a 16-point party identification advantage among them for Democrats. If Democrats can hit roughly 60 percent among them, the way they did in 2012, they can lose a bit of support among other age groups and still win. Because the millennial generation should add 16 million more eligible voters.

Teixeira concedes that down-ballot Dems still face tough battles ahead despite the favorable demographic transformation. Yet, “the contours of the Democratic presidential majority that we outlined a number of years ago are pretty much coming into being…”
As for whether the Obama coalition can survive to help deliver a Democratic victory in 2016, he concludes, “The potential is there. But whether it becomes an actuality depends on a variety of other factors: How Hillary Clinton campaigns if she’s the nominee; how the Republican nominee campaigns; what happens with the economy. There are no guarantees. But the shifts in the structure of the electorate are a kind of thumb on the scale.”
Barring no major surprises, Dems have reason for optimism, not overconfidence, heading into 2016. Translating that edge into a landslide victory that can produce a working congressional majority is the overarching challenge of Democratic strategy.

The following article by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, author of The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, is cross-posted from Huffpo.
I wanted to close my blogging for the year by looking at the big picture for the future of the Democratic party. The 2016 cycle feels like it started even earlier than usual, and not just because Donald Trump’s bloviating got the media so worked up so fast. The Republicans, following old Dick Nixon’s Southern strategy to its horrifically logical conclusion, have become the party of open racism and violence: as Karen Tumulty suggested in the Washington Post, Trump can’t go over the line because there are no lines, they’ve all been obliterated. And Democrats are still in a debate over how to respond to the increasing nastiness and cynicism of their opponents.
One camp believes everything is okay, at least in presidential years, because the demographic trends favor us and because the Republicans are so damn good at alienating people. Another camp thinks we need to panic because the numbers of Democratic elected officials are so low and Hillary has weaknesses as a candidate. Both of these scenarios have some truth in them, but they get some big stuff wrong too. Demographic trends do favor us, and the Republicans are driving many of the demographic groups in the new American majority our way, but unless we have a serious strategy for taking advantage of these trends, we can and will still lose the majority of elections — as we have been in startling numbers two of the last three cycles. But given that Democrats have won more votes for president in five of the last six presidential elections, and three of the last five elections in general, the panic thing seems a little far-fetched. More on this in a moment.
Meanwhile, there is the Third Way position, which argues that we should drop all this talk of economic fairness entirely, especially when delivered in a populist tone, and focus instead on policies that are pro-business investments for growth. The paper they recently published, Ready For A New Economy, is an interesting document, actually presenting a few thoughtful policy ideas (once you get past all the corporate HR jargon about modernizing everything and unleashing everyone’s potential) while getting all the big stuff astoundingly wrong.
I will give Third Way credit for one important notion: that Democrats do need to address how technology disrupts key sectors of the economy and destroys thousands of jobs in the process. They make the point that strong profitable businesses with lots of workers (Kodak is their signature example) went out of business not because of bad policy or an uneven playing field, but because technology just changed. It’s not a unique point — plenty of commentators on all sides of the political spectrum, for many decades, have talked about technology changing markets and eliminating jobs — but there is no doubt that Democrats need to address this dynamic in their economic policy and message. However, where Third Way goes with that thought is to suggest a political message that only pro-big business Democrats would like: they want us to stop talking about fairness and inequality entirely. The irony is that even the Republican candidates for president are talking all the time about fairness and income inequality, although the proposals they are putting out would grow the problem exponentially.
President Jon Cowan made the following statement when they released their report:
“The left’s retro economic populism does not work substantively or politically and has cost Democrats the House and the Senate. To regain majorities and boost middle class prosperity, Democrats must move past populism and embrace a modern, pro-growth economic message and agenda. It’s time for Democrats to be Democrats, not Socialists.”
And former JP Morgan Chase Midwest President Bill Daley had this to say on behalf of Third Way:
“I am concerned about where the Party is today. Democrats have lost the middle class in three consecutive elections by an average of 7 points and a combined margin of 20 million votes. Economic populism is not the answer.”
Seriously? You guys are going to join the Republicans in calling most of the Democratic party socialist, and then suggest that will help Democrats win elections? You are going to suggest the entire Democratic Party marched to a unified populist message and that has been the reason for their downfall in 2010 and 2014, while enlisting former JPM exec Bill Daley to buttress your case against populism? This kind of argument is why Third Way has a hard time being taken seriously outside the corporate board rooms in which they raise their money. Here’s the thing: a majority of the candidates who lost the big competitive elections in 2010 and 2014 were running as the kind of centrist “New Democrats” that Third Way loves. Third Way favorites Mark Pryor, Mark Begich, Alison Grimes, Michelle Nunn, and Kay Hagan all went down to defeat in big Senate races both parties targeted. Third Way’s most beloved prototype senator, Mark Warner, was supposed to sweep easily to victory and came within an inch of losing. Meanwhile, the Democratic candidates who won in swing states and tough races, even those running against huge spending by the Koch brothers and GOP, tended to be — wait for it — populists: Jeff Merkley, Al Franken, Gary Peters in the Senate, and Dan Malloy and Mark Dayton in tough governor races.

Read more…

At The New Republic Brian Beutler notes that the Democratic debate revealed that all three of the Dem candidates talked about Trump as if he was the likely nominee. On the other hand, adds Beutler, the notion that Trump is “more reactionary than other candidates in the Republican primary” won’t stand up to intellectual scrutiny.
With its impressive civility, Saturday’s Democratic presidential campaign debate provided a stark counterpoint to any of the GOP debates thus far. Sanders apologized for his campaign’s abuse of database security and Clinton responded “I very much appreciate that comment, Bernie…It really is important that we go forward on this.” Imagine how such a conflict might have played out between Trump and Bush.
Bush on September 10: “You can’t insult your way to the White House.” Bush on December 15: “Donald, you’re not going to be able to insult your way to the presidency.” Bush on December 19: “Just one other thing — I gotta get this off my chest — Donald Trump is a jerk.”
At The Upshot Nate Cohn explains “How Donald Trump Could Win, and Why He Probably Won’t.” Basically, argues Cohn, Trump’s GOP opposition is weak and scattered, but polls indicate that he has “a high floor and a low ceiling,” a bit like Buchanan in 1996.
Perhaps the most telling indication that the budget omnibus agreement reflects well-played Democratic strategy is that the wing-nut press is livid about it, as ‘exhibit a‘ makes clear.
The GOP candidates are tripping over each other, exaggerating their respective working-class narratives as if significant numbers of voters cared all that much. They ignore examples such as FDR and JFK who had strong support from white working-class voters, even though they were from extremely wealthy families. Dems would be wise to avoid such ploys. Most voters, working-class and otherwise, know it’s more about who you are than what you were. How candidates communicate to the working-class may be more relevant. In 2004 Bush II and Kerry both came from big money. But Bush II had a more convincing “regular guy” persona, even though his economic policies were tailored by big bankers and oil barons to screw working people, while Kerry advocated progressive economic reforms.
Larry J. Sabato, Kyle Kondik and Geoffrey Skelley of Sabato’s Crystal Ball weigh “10 Factors That Will Determine the Next President.” Lots of pertinent insights here, including this nugget: “Without a major independent ticket and assuming a close election, there’s a high probability that about 40 states can effectively be called by Labor Day. The campaigning will thus concentrate on the closest swing states: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Virginia. Republicans will make some effort yet again to win over Pennsylvania and Wisconsin (and possibly a few others) while Democrats will try to replicate Obama’s 2008 win in North Carolina. Maybe the VP nominees will add a state or two to the competitive category.”
At Daily Kos Dave Jarman targets “The most vulnerable House members in 2016, in two charts.”
Stuart Rothenberg writes at Rothenblog that “While 81 percent of Democrats responded that they had a positive view of their own party in the late October 2015 survey, only 65 percent of Republicans had a positive view of their party. And while only 5 percent of Democrats had a negative view of the Democratic Party, a considerable three times that of Republicans, 15 percent, had a negative view of the GOP…And among independents, whom you probably assumed were the decisive group? More independents did have a more positive view of the Democratic Party than the GOP (24 percent to 15 percent), but neither number was very good. And just as important, independents had almost identical negative views of the two parties, with 38 percent having a negative view of the Democratic Party and 40 percent having a negative view of the GOP…Just as I reported in that March 2014 column, the Republican brand is now dramatically worse than the Democratic brand because Republicans have a much more negative view of their party than Democrats have of theirs.”

After months of watching Donald Trump seize and maintain almost constant media coverage via out-there rhetoric and policy proposals, we have to wonder what’s next. I thought about that and reached a startling conclusion at New York yesterday:

Trump’s first big leap into the badlands of previously unmentionable policies was to embrace a “deport ’em all” posture on undocumented immigrants that others had hinted at and argued toward but never quite came out and articulated. More recently, he’s placed himself beyond the outer bounds of acceptable discourse on national security by suggesting the families of terrorists should be targeted and killed, and then by calling for a temporary ban on entry into the United States by Muslims (other than those employed, of course, by the Trump organization). With every such step, Trump seems to have found hitherto unplumbed depths of extremism among Republican primary voters, even as he shocked progressives, Establishment Republicans, and the mainstream media into giving him attention, often in the increasingly irrational hope that he has finally gone too far.
But where can he go next? I have an idea of where that might be, and it’s frighteningly consistent with what he (and his doppelgänger Ted Cruz) has said about national-security challenges generally, and the fight against ISIS specifically. It’s “Kaboom! Nuke ’em ’til they glow!”
Trump has shrewdly occupied that niche in conservative foreign-policy thinking populated by people who simultaneously oppose what George Washington called “entangling alliances” and the “no-win wars” America has engaged in since World War II — but who favor retaliatory military action against the country’s enemies so long as it is swift, certain, and as lethal as possible. Often called “isolationists” by their enemies because they mistrust diplomacy and drawn-out military engagements, they are naturally drawn to air power as the way to project force with a minimal risk of U.S. casualties or of the kind of quagmires that Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq turned out to be. And when pressed, these nationalists with an intense antipathy for “limited war” are prone to flirt with the idea of waging nuclear war. It’s the tradition that led many “isolationist” Republicans who backed Robert Taft’s opposition to NATO to support Douglas MacArthur’s proposal to use nuclear weapons against China during the Korean War. (In turn, MacArthur endorsed Taft’s 1952 presidential campaign against the conventional anti-Communist Dwight D. Eisenhower.)
It’s also the tradition that motivated Barry Goldwater’s criticism of LBJ’s “no-win war” in Vietnam in 1964, even as he supported letting field commanders launch tactical nuclear weapons. Nukes are the best and ultimate friend of American exceptionalists who hold the lives of foreigners in low regard and cherish the idea of the United States as a peace-loving country that will tolerate no restraints on its righteous use of arms once it is provoked into action. And even more obviously, the threat to go nuclear is the toughest posture a potential strongman president could possibly take.
Does that sound like Trump and his supporters? It sure does to me. The willingness to use nukes to make it clear messing with America is suicidal is entirely consistent with what some have called the “Jacksonian” tradition in American foreign policy, which has long exerted an emotional pull among the conservative white working-class Americans who arguably form Trump’s base. When he talks about destroying ISIS without getting into the kind of “mess” he says we created in past Middle Eastern interventions, and without respect for civilian lives, it’s a short if audacious jump to the tip of a warhead as the tip of the American spear.

Ted Cruz, who’s already talked about finding out “if sand can glow in the dark,” would probably follow Trump in this direction if he takes it. And if either does, another healthy inhibition in American politics would have fallen by the wayside.

Miles Mogulescu’s “Message to Bernie: Transform Your Campaign Into a Permanent Movement or Fail” suggests how Sen Sanders can make an enduring contribution to progressive long-term strategy, whether he wins the presidency or not. Mogulescu begins with a challenge made by Sanders himself:

What this campaign is about is not just electing a president, it is transforming America. To do that we need millions of people–people who have given up on the political process, people who are demoralized, people who don’t believe that government listens to them. We need to bring those people together to stand up loudly and clearly and to say ‘Enough is enough.’ This country belongs to all of us, not just wealthy campaign donors.

Mogulescu responds:

..I suggest you utilize your campaign organization to create a permanent national organization of the democratic/socialist/social democratic left, even as you campaign for the Presidency.
If you win your unlikely campaign for the presidency, such an organization will be necessary to force our politicians to enact at least some of the change that you advocate. If Hillary gets the Democratic nomination and wins the presidency, such an organization will be necessary to pressure her against her natural inclination to move to the corporate center. And if a Republican should win the presidency, it may be necessary to literally put its bodies on the line to block the dismantling of the social safety net and the initiation of new foreign wars.
Yes, I realize that running a Presidential campaign is an immense effort which leaves little time or energy for anything else. Building a permanent mass political organization parallel to a national electoral campaign is something that’s never been done before, at least in recent times. (The Populist Party in the late 19th Century and the Socialist Party under Eugene Debs and then Norman Thomas may be historical exceptions, and though neither gained national political power, they were influential in bringing the changes of the progressive era and the New Deal.)

Mogulescu notes that President Obama “effectively dismantled the movement” his campaign might have become after he became President. Apparently he had a different job to do. As a consequence, Organizing for America morphed “into an email list run by his supporters” the “sole aim” of which was “to back his cautious policies, not push him and Congress to act more forcefully.” Further, adds Mogulescu,

Obama’s failures to support an independent mass movement that could push him and Congress to go farther and faster has resulted in the disillusionment of millions who worked in his campaign and, in many cases, low voter turnout from the “Obama Coalition” of young people, minorities, women, and progressives, which disillusionment helped right-wing Republicans gain control of Congress and many states, which in turn has strengthened Washington gridlock and led to further disillusionment.

That’s a lot of blame for a President who faced the unprecedented challenges Obama had to address when he took office, including economic catastrophe, war and the most obstructionist opposition in U.S. history. Thats not to deny the urgent need for a progressive mass movement and broad-based coalition, nor that maybe Obama could have appointed someone to make OFA a more effective force.
If Sanders does get elected president, however, he will certainly inherit a better situation than did Obama, thanks to Obama’s leadership. He may have a lot more wiggle room to create the progressive mass movement Mogulescu describes. If Sanders loses, however, Mogulescu argues that “your campaign will likely be little more than a blip on the historical map like Howard Dean’s or Gary Hart’s insurgent campaigns against the Democratic establishment unless you leave behind an organized movement.” Mogulescu adds,

So Bernie, here’s my proposal: Even as you campaign for president, set up a parallel organization as the precursor to a permanent national democratic/socialist/social democratic organization that would engage in both electoral and activist politics.
Use some of your millions in small dollar donations to hire organizers in most states and many cities and towns, and/or use your fundraising list to raise separate contributions to fund the founding of a new, permanent progressive organization. Build local, city and state chapters from activists in your campaign and others. Sign up members and solicit more contributions online. Hold a national organizing convention this summer to parallel the presidential nominating conventions.

Getting down to specifics, Mogulescu has some good ideas:

…A big focus would be a grassroots campaign to drive voter turnout…If you’re the nominee, much of the work would be aimed at winning the Presidential election, as well as supporting progressive candidates nationally and locally, all while developing a program to push for if you’re elected. If Hillary is the nominee, the organization would critically back her and mobilize your base to go to the polls to prevent a takeover by reactionary Republicans. (You’re old enough to remember that in 1964, when LBJ ran against Goldwater, much of the civil rights and anti-war movement critically backed LBJ under the slogan “Part of the Way With LBJ”, mirroring LBJ’s own campaign slogan of “All the Way With LBJ”. How about “Partly Ready for Hillary”?)
After the November election, the organization would engage in both electoral and activist politics. It would train, run or back sympathetic candidates in primaries and general elections at all levels of government…it would work to move the Democratic Party to the left, even running against centrist Democrats in appropriate primaries, much as the Tea Party has moved the Republicans to the right…
It would also engage in activist politics, demonstrations, and where appropriate, even non-violent civil disobedience. It would have its own publications…It would join alliances with other sympathetic organizations and movements including the new civil rights movement, the environmental movement, and labor unions. It would hold local, state, and national conferences.

It’s a challenge that fits with Sen. Sanders progressive left agenda better than President Obama’s progressive centrist focus in the early years of his presidency. As Mogulescu concludes, “Bernie, you have an historical opportunity to use your Presidential campaign — win or lose — to help birth the organized political movement you call for. Please don’t blow the chance.”