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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Like a master stage magician’s best “sleight of hand” trick, Ruffini makes MAGA extremism in the GOP disappear right before our eyes.

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A Democratic Political Strategy for Reaching Working Class Voters That Starts from the Actual “Class Consciousness” of Modern Working Americans.

by Andrew Levison

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The recently published book, Rust Belt Union Blues, by Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol represents a profoundly important contribution to the debate over Democratic strategy.

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Why Don’t Working People Recognize and Appreciate Democratic Programs and Policies

The mythology of “Franklin Roosevelt’s Hundred Days” and the Modern Debate Over “Deliverism.”

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The American Establishment’s Betrayal of Democracy

The American Establishment’s Betrayal of Democracy The Fundamental but Generally Unacknowledged Cause of the Current Threat to America’s Democratic Institutions.

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Immigration “Chaos” Could Sink Democrats in 2024…

And the Democratic Narrative Simply Doesn’t Work. Here’s An Alternative That Does.

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The Daily Strategist

March 29, 2024

First Results

At 7:00 EST, polls closed in VT, IN, KY, GA, and VA. The networks called VT for Obama and KY for McCain, but nothing else. This is a actually a very good sign for Barack Obama. If a McCain Comeback was truly developing, he’d be romping in IN and GA.


Fergit, Hell!

Like most Democrats, I’m in a pretty good mood today, and expecting a very good evening. But I did read something this morning that set my teeth on edge, which I might as well get out of my system before the inevitable reconciliatory post-election period sets in.
In an article laying out a variety of scenarios going forward, the venerable Carl Cannon includes this one:

The nation experiences another relatively close election, its fifth in a row if you factor out the muddying presence of Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996. In the end, Barack Obama wins a clear-cut victory. The Electoral College follows the popular vote, which most likely would mean that Obama wins in the neighborhood of 52-46, with Bob Barr and Ralph Nader picking up 2 percent between them, and with at least 350 Electoral College votes going to the Democratic ticket. In a gracious concession speech, McCain does not allege that media bias defeated him, and extends a hand of friendship to Obama. During the transition, President-elect Obama reciprocates by offering McCain a cabinet position. On Inauguration Day, Sarah Palin announces her 2012 presidential bid.

What bugs me isn’t the electoral forecast, or the Palin ’12 reference, but instead, the idea that Barack Obama should make the gracious gesture of offering John McCain a cabinet post. Perhaps as a Christian and a national unifier Obama should forgive the nasty and borderline-racist tone of the McCain-Palin campaign down the stretch, but none of us should forget it. I certainly won’t.
I know that some Democrats, many pundits, and most Republicans wouldn’t agree with my assessment of McCain’s campaign, particularly the attribution of race-baiting. Maybe I’m just a race-sensitive white southerner of a certain age who always hears echoes of George Wallace in a certain kind of Republican rhetoic. But by the very end of this campaign, the racial undertones were pretty hard to ignore.
Through early September, when McCain was refusing to run ads on Jeremiah Wright, I thought maybe he really was the decent guy I’d always thought him to be on subjects other than war and peace. But then, when the financial crisis broke out, he embraced the obnoxious right-wing conspiracy theory that the whole mess was the result of an unholy combination of Wall Streeters, congressional Democrats, Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac, and ACORN, all under the aegis of the Community Reinvestment Act, who were determine to give shiftless poor and minority people mortgages they couldn’t or wouldn’t pay.
Turns out that was just an appetizer. The entire Joe the Plumber minidrama–sort of a campaign within the campaign–was linked to McCain’s attacks on Obama’s “socialist” and “redistributionist” tax plan, which McCain finally began describing as “welfare” because low-income working families without income tax liability (but with payroll tax liability) would benefit, echoing a favorite tirade of Tom DeLay.
Now some people, even some Democrats, don’t think that was race-baiting, but rather some sort of rational argument about the macroeconomic effects of marginal tax rates on small business people. If that’s all it was, then it certainly didn’t make any political sense, as Matt Yglesias has pointed out:

It’s fascinating to me how McCain, who spent so much of 1999-2005 at loggerheads with elements of the conservative base, keeps forgetting the distinction between things that make the base excited and things that help his campaign. Sarah Palin is the obvious example, but Joe is in some ways a deeper and truer example. The idea behind the Joe the Plumber saga is that Barack Obama would be bad for people like Joe, a small business owner who is (putatively) prosperous enough to be hit by Obama’s tax hikes on people with over $250,000 in annual income. Of course Joe doesn’t actually earn that much. But if he had, Joe would just be the very model of a hard-core Republican. Whites are more Republican than non-whites. Men are more Republican than women. Small business owners are more Republican than any other occupational group. High-income people are more Republican than are middle-class and poor people. And among white people, those with no college degree are more Republican than those with college degrees.

If, on the other hand, you think the Joe the Plumber gambit was not really about economics, but about race, it makes a lot of sense, as appealing to the ancient fear of a certain type of white (and usually male) working-class voter that Democrats want to tax them to give “welfare” to “those people.” At a time when virtually everyone figured McCain’s strategy was to peel off the kind of white working-class voter who famously spurned Obama in the Democratic primaries, with race clearly being a factor, it’s amazing to me that more observers didn’t make the obvious connection, particularly when McCain did the full monty of racial appeals by caterwauling about imaginary “voter fraud” threats.
Now maybe it’s all a coincidence, and John McCain happened to be simultaneously concerned about poor and minority people getting mortgages they didn’t deserve, poor and minority people getting “welfare” through the tax system, and poor and minority people stealing elections–all at the expense of the hard-working white man from the swing state of Ohio, Joe the Plumber. McCain never even mentioned race, after all. But for those of you old enough to remember the heydey of racial politics, that means nothing. George Wallace used to rant about “bureaucrats” forcing businesses to “hire a certain number of Chinese.” Everybody understood he wasn’t talking about Chinese.
So for my money, count me out on support of any immediate post-election love for John McCain, Sarah Palin (who went down this road before McCain, possibly encouraging him to follow), the McCain-Palin campaign staff, and the conservative commentators who encouraged the worst innuendoes of the Joe the Plumber theatrics. There are plenty of decent and honorable Republicans and conservatives in this country; let Obama and Democrats reach out to them first.


Voting Problem News

If you’re interested in following reports from around the country on screwups, skullduggery, and sheer chaos at voting places, check out One Vote Live, a blog maintained by the Election Protection Coalition. There’s already quite a backlog of Election Day entries.


GOP Whistling Nervously in Dixie

One of the more interesting questions that will be answered tonight is whether the southeast will come home in terms of electoral votes. Of the four southeastern states with the most EV’s, one is trending blue (VA), two are toss-ups (FL and NC) and one (GA) is tilting red, but only slightly.
Among poll analysts, the pollster.com map projects the south staying red as a region, with the exception of VA. Chris Bowers’ final poll-averaged projection map at Open Left is a little more optimistic, coloring FL baby blue and NC pink, although his VA is baby blue. The TPM Election Central‘s map shows a blue VA, but toss-ups for the other three. Nate Silver’s map has VA safely blue, with NC and FL light blue, but GA red. Chuck Todd’s MSNBC map has a baby blue VA, a pink GA and toss-up gray for NC and FL.
The November polls suggest a blue tide may indeed be rising in Georgia. The final Insider Advantage poll, taken 11/2 and reported in the Southern Political Report, is calling a “dead heat in Georgia.” FiveThirtyEight.com reports that the Pew, Survey USA and Strategic Vision Polls all taken 11/1, a day earlier, have McCain leading in GA by 2, 7 and 4 points, respectively.
And clearly, the four largest southeastern states are very much in play in terms of candidate visits and ad investments by the Obama campaign.


Prop. 8 and Other Ballot Initiatives

Another good election night resource is a guide published yesterday by The American Prospect. Among its virtues is a section on ballot initiatives written by Dana Goldstein.
As Dana notes, there are two ballot initiatives on the subject of abortion. One, in CO, is so extreme an abortion ban that even cultural conservatives are divided on it; it won’t pass. But another, in SD, is a revised version of the abortion ban statute overturned by a ballot intiative two years ago. It incorporates some of the exceptions whose absence was the centerpiece of the successful campaign to repeal the earlier ban. And polls show a very close vote is likely. It’s mainly symbolic until such time, if ever, that Roe v. Wade is overturned. But it could be a dress rehearsal for what we’ll see across the nation if Roe ever does succumb to a slightly more conservative Supreme Court.
Other ballot initiatives include two (in CO and NE) representing Ward Conerly’s endless franchise operation aimed at banning affirmative action programs. And there are even, believe it or not, some progressive ballot initiatives, including a clean energy mandate in MO, and an animal cruelty ban in CA.
But as always in recent years, the biggest ballot initiative topic is on gay marriage. In AZ, in a parallel development to the abortion ban in SD, conservatives lost a ballot initiative in 2006 because its gay marriage ban would have also denied domestic partnership rights for gay and straight couples alike. Today’s initiative sticks to gay marriage, and may well pass. And in FL, a ban on both gay marriage and domestic partnerships appears to have majority support, but may well fail since the state constitution requires a 60% vote.
The huge ballot initiative fight, of course, is over California’s Proposition 8, aimed at reversing the state supreme court decision that legalized gay marriage in that state. Richard Kim has a good summary of that fight in The Nation today. Here’s a sample:

Right now, polls show the measure as a toss-up. The money is dead even too. When all is said and done, both sides will have raised more than $35 million each–more than $70 million in all–making it the second most expensive race of 2008, second only to the presidency. A sizable minority of this money has come from out of state: from gay activists, celebrities and business leaders on the No side; and from the holy alliance of Mormons, Catholics (the Knights of Columbus) and Christian evangelicals (Focus on the Family, American Family Association, Concerned Women for America and Elsa Prince, mother of Blackwater founder Erik Prince) for the Yes team. As California goes, so goes the nation.

We’ll see about that, but in any event, if the presidential race is called early, and you get bored with congressional results, keep a sleepy eye on the Prop. 8 results.


Long Lines Persist

Despite record levels of early voting (roughly double what we saw in 2004), Election Day is already replete with accounts of long lines at voting places all across the country.
In Washington today, anecdotal reports of extremely heavy turnout in northern Virginia are everywhere. It should be noted, of course, that Virginia is not a particularly strong early voting state, since it requires the fiction of absentee voting. But since election administrators typically adjust their expectations based on early voting levels, it won’t be surprising if we see long lines even in states where something like a majority of registered voters have already cast ballots in person or by mail. And before long, we’ll be hearing plenty of stories about foul-ups at voting places, and eventually, some dirty GOP tricks. It would be nice if they don’t matter.


32 Years

As David Paul Kuhn of Politico notes, 13 of 14 national polls released yesterday show Barack Obama winning over 50% of the popular vote (the exception being the exceptionally unreliable IBD/TIPP poll).
Lest we forget, it’s been thirty-two years since a Democratic presidential candidate won a majority of the popular vote. I’m sure President Jimmy Carter will be happy to see this long streak since his 1976 victory broken.


Grieving and Victory

With all of the day before the election polls in, Pollster.com’s Steve Lombardo is hanging tough with a 311 EV projection for Obama (270 wins), with 227 for McCain. Lombardo is also forecasting a 6 point popular vote edge for Obama, nationwide, close enough to the 7-point lead predicted by Nate Silver and the final Greenberg Quinlan Rosner poll of LV’s (GQR believes it could be +9 points by tomorrow). Lombardo’s forecast is less optimistic than Bowers’ 338 EV’s, but all of the data points to a comfortable Democratic margin of victory.
It’s hard to imagine the emotional roller coaster the Obama family is experiencing with the sad news today of the death of his grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, who was so important in shaping his character. But she died knowing she raised, not only a future president, but a leader who has given hope and inspiration to millions.


Setting the Stage for State Legislative Elections

Note: This item is crossposted from the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee site.

Heading into Election Day, Democrats control 27 state senate chambers and 30 state houses chambers. On the other side of the aisle, Republicans control 20 state senate chambers and 19 state house chambers. The state senates in Tennessee and Oklahoma are currently tied, and as always, Nebraska elects a unicameral, nonpartisan legislature.
In 2006 and 2007, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee helped Democrats pick up 12 new legislative majorities. This year, Democrats in many states will be focused on consolidating control of the chambers we currently hold.
That said, experts currently list 11 chambers as pure toss-ups — seven or which are held by Republicans and only four of which are held by Democrats. We believe November 4th presents an excellent opportunity to continue to expand upon our success.