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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

The Rural Voter

The new book White Rural Rage employs a deeply misleading sensationalism to gain media attention. You should read The Rural Voter by Nicholas Jacobs and Daniel Shea instead.

Read the memo.

There is a sector of working class voters who can be persuaded to vote for Democrats in 2024 – but only if candidates understand how to win their support.

Read the memo.

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.

Read the Memo.

Democrats should stop calling themselves a “coalition.”

They don’t think like a coalition, they don’t act like a coalition and they sure as hell don’t try to assemble a majority like a coalition.

Read the memo.

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.

Read the Memo.

Democrats ignore the central fact about modern immigration – and it’s led them to political disaster.

Democrats ignore the central fact about modern immigration – and it’s led them to political disaster.

Read the memo.

 

The Daily Strategist

April 27, 2024

Big Surge, Edge for Dems in FL Registration

Today’s edition of The Orlando Sun-Sentinel has a headline that should gladden the spirits of Dems: “Voter Registrations in Florida Show ‘Huge Swing’ Toward Democrats.” Political writer Anthony Man reports that the latest tally shows 106,508 Dems added to the FL voter registration rolls from Jan-May, compared with 16,686 for Republicans.
Man quotes Broward Democratic Chairman Mitch Ceasar, “The Democratic brand has cycled back.” And you gotta love his quote from Marian Johnson, political director for the Florida Chamber of Commerce — “It’s a huge swing…I looked at that and said ‘wow.”
Democrats may find yet more encouragement regarding their FL prospects in David Rieff’s Sunday New York Times Magazine article “Will Little Havana Go Blue?,” which discusses Dem gains among greater Miami’s Cuban-American community. (See also our staff post below, noting that, for the first time, more FL Latinos are now registered as Dems than Republicans)
As always, there is a cautionary note. Man reports that state GOP leaders are already responding with a call for a more energetic registration campaign from their party. And of course the FL Republican establishment has never been shy about cranking up their voter suppression efforts, which will be at full tilt going forward. Hopefully, FL — and national — Democratic Party officials are also strengthening their voting rights legal teams.


Learning to Live with the “New” Obama

(Note: this is a cross-post from Salon.com’s War Room, where I’m guest-blogging this week)
Amidst the anguish being expressed in the progressive netroots about Barack Obama’s vote for FISA legislation (and to a lesser extent, his recent positioning on the death penalty, Iraq, abortion, and faith-based initiatives), there’s an interesting subtext of resignation about the presumptive Democratic nominee’s basic ideological nature.
This is nowhere more evident than at the influential site OpenLeft, whose founders, Chris Bowers and Matt Stoller, have long argued that Obama is a centrist pragmatist rather than a reliable progressive.
Stoller was particularly blunt in a post yesterday entitled “Why It’s Important to Note that Obama is NOT liberal or progressive.”
After assesssing Obama’s policy positions, Stoller has this to say about the attitude progressives should have towards his candidacy going forward:

Obama isn’t ours, he never was, and we shouldn’t pretend he is or else we are throwing away the opportunity to have real progressive policies enacted sometime over the next few years.
Once you absorb this state of affairs, it’s a fairly optimistic path forward. All of the work going into getting Obama elected is helping to build the progressive movement and teaching millions of people to get involved, give money, run for office, etc. These people have progressive sympathies and are attaching themselves to important political networks. Some of them paid attention to FISA who were not paying attention in 2006, which is good. The network is just bigger and stronger.

Today Bowers reinforces the point, playing off my War Room post from yesterday questioning the assumption that Obama’s FISA vote was a matter of political calculation:

[O]verall I have to conclude that Obama’s position back in December, not his position today, was the actual political calculation. As Matt argued yesterday, we should consider the strong possibility that Obama isn’t moving to the center at all, but rather that he was in the center all along. Maybe it is the nomination campaign where we saw the political calculations, not the general election. Obama isn’t moving anywhere: he is simply reasserting himself.

DailyKos founder Markos Moulitsas comes at the issue from a different, less ideological perspective, but winds up in a similar place, as illustrated by his July 1 post explaning a decision to withold a financial contribution, but not his support, from Obama:

Ultimately, he’s currently saying that he doesn’t need people like me to win this thing, and he’s right. He doesn’t. If they’ve got polling or whatnot that says that this is his best path to victory, so much the better. I want him to win big. But when the Obama campaign makes those calculations, they have to realize that they’re going to necessarily lose some intensity of support. It’s not all upside. And for me, that is reflected in a lack of interest in making that contribution.

What Markos was really getting at here is that he thought netroots activists needed to adopt a more distant and critical posture towards Obama without going over the brink into hostility, trying to influence his “behavior” without illusions about his underlying ideological nature.
To understand where Stoller, Bowers, Markos and other netroots leaders are coming from, it’s important to remember that there have long been concerns in those quarters about Obama’s positions on a variety of issues: his “bipartisan” rhetoric; his claim that Social Security is in “crisis”; his support for a residual troop commitment in Iraq; his relationship with anti-gay ministers; even his health care plan; have all drawn fire. He didn’t become the preferred candidate of the progressive netroots until the contest became a one-on-one fight with Hillary Clinton.
Even then, netroots enthusiasm for Obama was mainly attributable to appreciation for his revolutionary use of internet technologies to raise money and organize volunteers, and his early opposition to the Iraq war (compounded by hostility towards Clinton), rather than any general approbation of him as a progressive stalwart.
So all the current talk we are hearing, much of it from chortling conservatives, about the netroots love affair with Obama coming to an end, should be tempered with the understanding that for many, it was always a complicated relationship. Maybe some love has now been lost, particularly for netroots activists who did back Obama from the beginning. But what’s really emerging, or re-emerging, now is a partnernship based on cold political realities.


Rapid Growth in Naturalized Mexicans to Help Dems

Teresa Watanabe reports in today’s L.A. Times that the number of Mexican-born immigrants who became U.S. citizens increased by nearly 50% in 2007, as a result of citizenship campaigns coordinated by Spanish-language media and immigrant activist groups. Watanabe explains further:

Despite Mexicans’ historically low rates of naturalization, 122,000 attained citizenship in 2007, up from 84,000 the previous year, with California and Texas posting the largest gains. Salvadorans and Guatemalans also showed significant increases at a time when the overall number of naturalizations declined by 6%
At the same time, the number of citizenship applications filed doubled to 1.4 million last year, the report by the U.S. Office of Immigration Statistics found….The report cited the campaign by Spanish-language media and community groups, along with a desire to apply before steep fee increases took effect, as two major reasons for the jump in naturalizations

The surge in enfranchised Latinos may have significant political benefits for Dems, even in FL, Watanabe explains:

Louis DiSipio, a UC Irvine political science professor, said one of the biggest impacts could be in Florida, a key battleground state that posted 54,500 new citizens last year. Although the ethnic Cuban population there has dominated the Latino political landscape and tended to vote Republican, he said, more of the newer immigrants are coming from South America and trending Democratic. For the first time this decade, more Latinos were registered as Democrats than Republicans, 35% to 33% as of this spring, according to Gold.

But Dems will have to work for it:

Gold said that new Latino citizens have higher voting rates than longtime Mexican Americans and that their political allegiances are shallower. As a result, she said, their votes are still up for grabs for those elected officials willing to work hard to reach them. In addition, she said, the proportion of Latino voters identifying themselves as independents is growing.

In any event, the naturalization movement is picking up speed:

Erica L. Bernal-Martinez, senior director of civic engagement for the association of Latino officials, said grass-roots organizations planned to continue their push to encourage naturalizations among the estimated 4 million to 5 million eligible Latinos. Mexicans have historically had low rates of naturalization — 35% compared with 59% for all immigrants — but that appears to be changing as media and community organizations pour unprecedented resources and energy into their civic engagement campaigns, Bernal-Martinez and Gold said.
More than 400 community organizations across the country, along with major Spanish-language media, have joined forces in a “Ya Es Hora” (It’s Time) campaign to help eligible voters become citizens and register to vote. The campaign plans to hold naturalization workshops in 10 cities Saturday.

Latino naturalizations soared last year despite an overall drop in the number of naturalizations, caused by expired funding for processing citizenship applications. Watanabe reports that “After Mexico, the largest number of new citizens came from India, the Philippines, China, Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, South Korea and El Salvador.”


Behind Jackson’s Gaffe

It’s now pretty clear that Jesse Jackson’s exploitation by Fox News for saying some crude and angry things about Barack Obama during a commercial break will if anything help Obama politically, while deeply humiliating Jackson himself (how bad is it to be publicly denounced by your own son?).
But via TNR’s The Stump, it’s interesting to read an African-American take, from Ebonyjet.com, about the mixed sentiments behind Jackson’s outburst:

When Obama uses a Black church pulpit to send his message of responsibility, he is preaching to the choir both literally and figuratively. The people who need to hear that message are neither on the choir nor in the church, which of course, is part of the problem.
But that particular speech was not in just any church. It was in the first Chicago church Obama attended after repudiating Jeremiah Wright and after resigning Wright’s Trinity Church after incendiary comments made by Father Micheal Pfleger. The press and the world was watching and hanging on every word.
The fear among critics is that the real audience that day was not the Black people in the pews at all, but the white people in middle America looking for a strong signal that Obama was rejecting the politics of racial division and animosity. By choosing that moment to castigate Black fathers, some worry that Obama gave public voice to what white people whisper about Blacks in their living rooms and cemented his image as a post-racial savior at the expense of Black men.

If that worry is true, then Obama wasn’t “talking down to black people,” as Jackson suggested, but talking past them to a different audience. And the irony is that Jesse Jackson ensured that message got through loud and clear.


A GOP Plan For Reclaming the ‘Burbs

(Note: this item is cross-posted from Salon.com’s War Room, where I’m guest-blogging this week).
One of the firmly established theories about contemporary partisan political dynamics is that Republican strength among white working-class voters has been offset by Democratic gains among upper-middle-class suburban voters. The relative value of these categories of voters was the explicit subject of the smartest recent Democratic take on political demographics, the Ruy Teixeira/Alan Abramowitz Brookings study titled “The Decline of the White Working Class and the Rise of a Mass Upper Middle Class.”
Interestingly, the two young conservative theorists most thoroughly identified with the argument that Republicans need a new, pro-public-sector strategy to consolidate their white working-class vote have now come out with a parallel strategy to reclaim the upper-middle-class surburbs.
Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, authors of the recent book “Grand New Party,” focused on “Sam’s Club” voters, have now offered an analysis at National Review of how GOPers can appeal to upper-middle-class suburbanites.
Their prescription suggests four policy/message thrusts: support for public-school choice (as opposed to vouchers), a nonregulatory approach to alternative energy sources, an agenda to encourage telecommuting, and a more-cops response to reemerging violent crime trends.
As with the Douthat/Salam argument for appealing to “Sam’s Club” voters, their pitch to Starbucks voters is long on message but less compelling in policy proposals. It’s not clear to me that any of their four policy prescriptions can really be clearly distinguished from Democratic policies.
But it is refreshing to see a proposed conservative appeal to suburbanites that is not focused on tax-cut bribes or national security fear-mongering. Unfortunately for Douthat and Salam, but fortunately for Democrats, most GOP politicians are still addicted to selfishness and fear as all-purpose political messages.


Rove Advises Obama

The strangest article of the day has to be Karl Rove’s Wall St. Journal piece “Barack’s Brilliant Ground Game,” in which he compliments the Obama campaign. Says Rove:

Sen. Obama’s organizational emphasis wisely avoids the Democratic mistake of 2000, when Donna Brazille’s plea for a stronger grassroots focus was ignored by the Gore high command. It also avoids the mistake of 2004, when Democrats outsourced their ground game to George Soros’s 527 organizations. The latter effort paid at least $76 million to more than 45,000 canvassers – many hired from temp agencies – to register and turn out voters. It was the wrong model: Undecideds are more likely to be influenced by those in their social network than an anonymous, low-wage campaign worker.

Rove’s central argument, however, is that Obama’s campaign strategy owes much of its success to “the Bush-Cheney playbooks of 2000 and 2004,” which were designed by you know who. For example:

Barack Obama’s manager admitted to the New York Times that he wanted an “army of persuasion” modeled explicitly on the massive Bush neighbor-to-neighbor “Victory Committee” of ’00 and ’04. Those efforts deployed millions of volunteers to register, persuade and get-out-the-vote…The Obama campaign is trying to catch up with the GOP’s “microtargeting” program, which uses powerful analytical tools and extensive household consumer information to focus on prospects for conversion and extra turnout help. Another Obama adaptation of a 2004 Bush campaign technique is a stepped-up, rapid response effort. Charges do not go unanswered, the campaign stays relentlessly on the offense, using every channel of communication.

While there is a grain of truth to that part of Rove’s argument, low-tech versions of such GOTV tactics have been around for a while. Rove is on even shakier ground in claiming credit for pioneering the use of internet tools, and when he critiques elements of Obama’s strategy, you have to wonder if he’s really afraid it is working.

Mr. Obama’s people admit they want to sucker Mr. McCain into spending money. To be successful, a bluff must be credible. In places like Nebraska and North Dakota, Mr. Obama can’t rely on local issues – like Mr. Bush did with coal in West Virginia in 2000 – to unexpectedly win a critical state. Organization alone won’t suffice. And putting Obama dollars into Texas, for example, to help win five state House seats may simply cause Texan Republicans – not Mr. McCain – to raise money and work harder to counter…Instead of consistency, Mr. Obama has followed Richard Nixon’s advice, to cater to his party’s extreme in the primaries and then move aggressively to the middle for the fall.

The article concludes, predictably enough, with a barrage of cheap shots about the perils of flip-flopping, as if McCain was immune to the charge. Coming from the architect of the GOP’s ’06 debacle, it’s another encouraging sign that the Obama campaign is on the right track.


Progressives Push Healthcare

(Note: this item is cross-posted from Salon.com’s War Room site, where I’m guest-blogging this week)
Progressive healthcare wonks are haunted by memories of 1994, when the last major effort in Congress to enact something approaching universal healthcare, the Clinton health plan, went down in flames.
Some blamed the plan’s design, or the secretive process that created it, for the fiasco. But there’s no question another key factor was that the Clintons and their allies were outgunned on the public relations front, thanks to an insurance-industry-funded campaign that famously filled the airwaves with those “Harry and Louise” ads.
As Ezra Klein explains in his blog at The American Prospect today, an impressive array of progressive labor and advocacy groups are already coming together to plan and execute a pre- and post-election push for universal healthcare. Called Health Care for America Now, the coalition is broad and deep:

The primary partners — which is to say, those who put up $500,000 to join — include The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, Americans United for Change, Campaign for America’s Future, Center for American Progress Action Fund, Center for Community Change, MoveOn.org, National Education Association, National Women’s Law Center, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Service Employees International Union, United Food and Commercial Workers, and USAction. Within that list are old guard groups like Labor and new wave organizations like MoveOn. Both Change to Win and the AFL-CIO are represented. Standing behind them are a much larger list of coalition partners that include the American Nurses Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the National Women’s Law Center. It’s about as broad a progressive coalition as you can imagine, and exactly what didn’t exist in 1994.

They’ve already raised $40 million, have already run one major political ad and have already begun to deploy organizers in key congressional districts. Just as important, they plan to continue the initiative long after the electoral dust settles; totally aside from Health Care for America Now, SEIU has already pledged $75 million to long-range efforts to enact universal healthcare.
As Klein notes, the campaign for universal healthcare won’t necessarily be any easier than it was in 1994. But “you’re looking at a simply fearsome organizing drive. It may, of course, prove insufficient. But unlike in 1994, it won’t be non-existent. And that’s a huge, and promising, difference.”


Refusing to Honor Senator No

On Monday, North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley ordered all flags at government agencies throughout the state to be flow at half staff in honor of former Sen. Jesse Helms, and L.F. Eason III — a laboratory manager in the state Department of Agriculture — refused to comply with the directive at the facility he supervised.
His superiors then gave him a choice: Eason could change his mind or he could retire from the only job he’d ever held, effective immediately. Eason chose to resign:

The brouhaha began late Sunday night, when Eason e-mailed eight of his employees in the state standards lab, which calibrates measuring equipment used on things as widely varied as gasoline and hamburgers.
“Regardless of any executive proclamation, I do not want the flags at the North Carolina Standards Laboratory flown at half staff to honor Jesse Helms any time this week,” Eason wrote just after midnight, according to e-mail messages released in response to a public records request.
He told his staff that he did not think it was appropriate to honor Helms because of his “doctrine of negativity, hate, and prejudice” and his opposition to civil rights bills and the federal Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

While I have a hard time bringing myself to say something bad about the dead, I appreciate a certain degree of symmetry here. For 16 days, Helms — standing alone — manage to thwart the passage of a holiday honoring the memory of Dr. King. For most of the time that it mattered, Eason managed to delay an action honoring Helms. How’s that for a tribute to Senator No?


The Women of Counterinsurgency Theory

Spencer Ackerman of The Washington Independent has been writing an extensive series of articles about counterinsurgency theory, a relatively new defense “movement” that is rapidly gaining adherents throughout the military (viz. Gen. David Petraeus) and in policy and political circles. His installment yesterday focused on an interesting phenomenon: the striking number of women among counterinsurgency theory’s leading lights.

While women are still underrepresented in the national-security apparatus — and at the Pentagon specifically — counterinsurgency, more than any other previous movement in defense circles, features women not just as equal partners, but leaders.
There’s no one answer for why that is. In a series of interviews, leading woman counterinsurgents, and some of their male colleagues, discussed how the unconventional approach to military operations calls for skills in academic and military fields that have become open to women in recent decades. Others contend that counterinsurgency’s impulse for collaborative leadership speaks to women’s “emotional IQ,” in the words of one prominent woman counterinsurgent. Another explanation has to do with coincidence: the military’s post-Vietnam outreach to women has matured at the same time as counterinsurgency became an unexpected national imperative.

Ackerman introduces us non-defense-experts to such luminaries of counterinsurgency theory as Erin Simpson of the Marine Corps University at Quantico; Janine Davidson, until recently at the Pentagon’s Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict and Special Capabilities unit; Sarah Sewall of Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights (and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense); Michele Flournoy and Tammy Schulz of the Center for a New American Security; and Montgomery “Mitzi” McFate, who’s worked at the Institute for Defense Analysis and the Office of Naval Research.
Though much of Ackerman’s piece involves discussion of why women are so prominent in this particular field, there’s no question it’s a very welcome trend. As Erin Simpson said to Ackerman:

The reason we need women working national security is the same reason we need women in medicine and engineering: this stuff is really hard. And we aren’t going to win by telling half the population they can’t play. It’s always important that we have the sharpest, most creative minds working on defense and security issues as possible.


Head to Head With Latinos

In a rare occasion, John McCain and Barack Obama both appeared today before the United League of Latin American Citizens’ convention in Washington. Here’s Dana Goldstein’s take on their speeches over at TAP:

John McCain enjoyed a friendly reception here at the Washington Hilton, but the crowd went absolutely wild for Obama, who greeted them with an enthusiastic “Si se puede!” and shouted out his “homies” from LULAC’s Illinois chapter. And unlike McCain, who gave a tired speech on conservative tax policy, Obama focused on civil rights, frequently leaning into the microphone and shouting with passion. This was one of the best deliveries I’ve seen from Obama since early in the primaries. Toward the end of the speech, he even did a bit of call and response with the audience of states where Latino votes can make a difference in November.

Sounds like McCain and Obama were equally befriended by the audience, but Obama wound up a lot more equal.