#but in those midwestern new states even if everyone person there could have voted. white people would still be the vasy majority.

[lwcina]

the fact that the us government can continue funding and arming a genocide despite massive public opposition really highlights how inherently non-democratic the united states is

[dislocatedskeleton]

Elizabeth Warren Had a Good Run. Maybe Next Time, Ladies.

So much for the most diverse presidential field in history.

Talk about a head-spinner. Just a few days ago, Joe Biden’s candidacy was being prepped for burial, while Bernie Sanders’s revolution was considered unstoppable. But after the Biden blowout in South Carolina, Super Tuesday voters decided to shake things up.

As the results came rolling in, from east to west, political anchors delivered a breathless play-by-play of how Mr. Biden and Mr. Sanders were divvying up the map and turning this into a two-man race. Their remaining major rivals, Elizabeth Warren and Michael Bloomberg, registered as little more than afterthoughts. Ms. Warren came in third in her home state of Massachusetts, behind both Biden and Sanders.

And so, after all the tumult, the Democratic race has come down to this: two straight white septuagenarian men fighting over the soul of the party — whatever that turns out to be.

Let us state that Mr. Biden and Mr. Sanders have many fine qualities. Either would make a better president than the unstable man-child currently degrading the office. That said, for the party of progress, youth and diversity, a final face-off between two lifelong politicians born during World War II leaves much to be desired. And it says something depressing about the challenges women candidates still confront in their quest to shatter the presidential glass ceiling.

In the early days of this race, voters had a range of women to consider, some more conventionally qualified than others. There were four senators, a congresswoman and a self-help guru who varied in age, race, personal background and professional experience. They hailed from different regions, had different political styles and visions and espoused different policies.

One by one, these candidates fizzled and fell away: Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, who had pitched herself as a champion of women’s issues; Senator Kamala Harris of California, the tough talking former prosecutor; Marianne Williamson, with her premonitions of dark psychic forces; and Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, the Midwestern moderate who hit her high point with a third-place finish in New Hampshire. Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii is hanging on but has never been more than a curiosity (though she did come in second to Mr. Bloomberg in the caucuses in American Samoa on Tuesday).

For a while last fall, Ms. Warren was the candidate with the mojo. But she came under heavy fire from her rivals, seemed to flip-flop on Medicare for all, stumbled and never recovered. Faring poorly in the early contests, she all but vanished from the discussion. Even before Tuesday, her campaign acknowledged that a path to the nomination would require her to somehow triumph at a brokered convention.

Put more simply: She’s done.

It’s impossible to know the degree to which gender factors into a candidate’s political appeal, or lack thereof, especially at the presidential level. Man or woman, winning the presidency is not merely — or even largely — a question of merit. Americans are forever seeking that indefinable spark — a secret blend of strength and likability, authority and relatability, a talent for inspiring and connecting with voters.

Ms. Warren is thought to have struggled in part because she was too professorial — too schoolmarmish, if you will — to connect with anyone beyond white college-educated women like herself. But had she focused on her up-by-the-bootstraps biography, who’s to say she wouldn’t have been slammed as inauthentic or as trying too hard? As for complaints that she was too strident or shrill or hectoring or inflexible, have any of these critics seen Bernie Sanders? Come on.

This is one of the vexing realities that plague highly accomplished female candidates like Ms. Warren or Hillary Clinton, women whose résumés outstrip those of many of their male rivals. They have been told their whole lives that they have to outwork and outperform the men in order to be taken seriously — only to discover that it’s not enough. It was one thing when Mrs. Clinton lost the 2008 nomination to Barack Obama. Despite his relative inexperience, he was a rare political talent with the added appeal of making history as America’s first black president. But to lose in 2016 to Donald Trump? Winning the popular vote is cold comfort in a race that should never have been close.

Or consider Amy Klobuchar’s conspicuous irritation with Pete Buttigieg’s precocity. On multiple occasions she noted that a woman with his résumé — a 38-year-old former mayor of the fourth-largest city in Indiana — would never be taken seriously. “Women are held to a higher standard,” she said at the November debate. “Otherwise we could play a game called ‘Name Your Favorite Woman President,’ which we can’t do because it has all been men, including all vice presidents being men.”

Whatever your feelings about Mayor Pete, Ms. Klobuchar was not wrong.

It’s hard for any candidate to get the formula right. For women, it is harder because of a host of unconscious biases.

As often noted, there have been reams of research on this topic, most of it discouraging. The problem goes beyond voters who hold traditional views of gender roles or admit that they wouldn’t be comfortable with a Madam President. More subtly, ambitious women are viewed more negatively than men, while women leaders are often considered less legitimate than men, in the United States, at least.

Studies also show that, whatever their particular pros and cons, women candidates are regarded as inherently less electable. You see this in polls where a high percentage of respondents claim that they are ready to elect a female president, but far fewer believe that their neighbors are.

That perception has had particular resonance in a cycle where a candidate’s ability to beat Mr. Trump has been the overriding concern for most Democrats. And with the sting of Mrs. Clinton’s defeat still painful, many in the party were hesitant to take a chance on another woman.

Last summer, a poll on perceived electability by Avalanche Strategies found that gender appeared to be a bigger issue than “age, race, ideology, or sexual orientation.” When voters were asked whom they’d pick if the primaries were held today, Mr. Biden came out ahead. When asked whom they would make president with the wave of a magic wand, without the candidate needing to win an election, voters went with Ms. Warren. Women were more likely than men to cite gender as a concern.

Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight lamented that such anxiety can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. “So there are a lot of women who might not vote for a woman because they’re worried that other voters won’t vote for her. But if everyone just voted for who they actually wanted to be president, the woman would win!”

Early on, there was speculation that this time the dynamic would be different. With multiple women in the running, perhaps the discussion could move past the tired trope that says: Of course, I’d support a woman for president, just not that woman.

It’s something to think about over the next few months as we’re watching two old guys fight for the privilege of taking on another old guy in November.

[movietvtechgeeks]

Latest story from https://movietvtechgeeks.com/donald-trump-ready-different-america/

Is Donald Trump ready for a very different America?

President-elect Donald Trump has a penchant for the 1980’s, but as his inauguration looms closer, it’s very noticeable that America is very different than it was back in the days of Reaganomics.

The week after Donald Trump was elected president, Dr. Mai-Phuong Nguyen and two dozen other Vietnamese-Americans active in liberal causes gathered in a circle of folding chairs, consoling one another about an America almost beyond comprehension.

Now, days before Trump takes the oath of office, Nguyen sits in a restaurant booth in Orange County’s neon-lit Little Saigon and studies perhaps the most confounding face of the divide exposed by the election – her father’s.

“All I know is, if a man makes $100 million he is really something,” Son Van Nguyen, 76, says of Trump.

Here in a county transformed by waves of newcomers, the elder Nguyen – a government translator airlifted from South Vietnam with his family in 1975 as Communist forces pressed in on the capital – built a new life as a record-setting life insurance salesman, watching people strive and struggle.

“And I know a lot of people out there sit there and wait for welfare,” he says, explaining his hopes that Trump will rein in such spending and create jobs.

“But he is trying to prevent other people from coming in and enjoying some of the same things you came here for, Dad,” says his daughter, a 47-year-old physician who pushed for health care reform and fears Trump will take away the medical coverage it extended to millions of Americans. “If he does wrong, are you going to support him?”

Their disagreement is a reminder that for Orange County, just as for the rest of the country, there has never been a moment quite like this one.

When Hillary Clinton won this county of 3.2 million in November, it marked the first time the OC had backed a Democrat for president since Franklin Roosevelt. Best known for Disneyland, and long a hothouse of conservatism in a blue state, it was the largest county in the country to flip.

The shift was expected eventually. Orange County’s citrus groves turned to tract housing decades back to welcome a mostly white influx from Los Angeles and Midwestern states. Today, though, Santa Ana’s quinceanera shops reflect a county that is a third Latino. One in five Orange Countians is Asian.

The hopes and anxieties stirred by Trump’s inauguration spotlight even more complicated tensions.

Most Vietnamese traditionally voted for Republicans, viewed as opponents of communism. But many of their adult children, also refugees, see Trump as rejecting American ideals and people like them.

Local Republicans, who once embraced the John Birch Society and recently erected a statue of Ronald Reagan in the park where he launched two White House bids, long espoused a muscular conservatism. Most voted for Trump, but not without soul-searching.

At Jimmy Camp’s house, a “No Trump” sign made by Camp’s son still hangs in the window. Heading out to feed his family’s a goat and potbellied pig, Camp recalls his start in Republican politics three decades ago – knocking on doors for candidates to earn cash.

Camp played guitar in a rock band then and embraced platforms calling for government to stay out of people’s lives. He’d always loved the outdoors in a county that stretches from the ocean to the Santa Ana Mountains. After meeting county native Richard Nixon, he read up on the disgraced president’s often forgotten chartering of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Camp became one of the state’s busiest Republican political consultants. Then, last summer he emailed fellow Republicans, renouncing his party membership because of his disgust with Trump.

“If you go through and look at everything Jesus said in the Bible, this guy is opposite of it,” says Camp, 52, a pastor’s son.

Camp, who has friends from Iran and Egypt, cringes at a president who would castigate Muslims as supposedly tied to terrorists, though he doubts Trump will fulfill his most extreme rhetoric.

“I hope he doesn’t drive us off a cliff,” Camp says. “I hope that we survive the next four years. I think we will.”

Others voice confidence in Trump.

Gloria Pruyne says her family had reservations about Trump’s morality early on. But the conservative activist ended up knocking on more than 500 doors to get out the vote. Now Pruyne, 78, says she wants Trump to install a conservative Supreme Court justice, revoke an Affordable Care Act she blames for a $500 increase in her family’s monthly insurance bill, and back Israel.

“We’re looking forward to a radical change with this president,” she says.

With the inauguration approaching, Ron Brindle has no plans to remove the 5-foot-square portrait of Trump from his oil well fronting a main road in Huntington Beach. Brindle bought this land for his tree nursery business more than 40 years ago. Today, it is surrounded by tract homes, many owned by Asian families.

“Now I don’t have anything against any of them, but what happened to the country?” Brindle says.

The first thing Trump should do, he says, is close the border so Americans no longer have to foot the bill to care for foreigners. But Brindle also hopes that Trump will reach out to skeptics.

Steven Mai is ready to listen. Mai, a 42-year-old registered Republican, rejected Trump for criticizing the Muslim parents of a slain American soldier.

But Trump will be his president, Mai says.

Still, if Trump really wants to lead, he should come to places like Orange County, says Mai’s wife, Tammy Tran. He could work in a sandwich shop for a few hours or see what it’s like to care for an elderly person. Maybe then, the couple say, Trump will understand his responsibility to the many Americas.

“I just hope he’s going to be the president that my parents were thinking,” Mai says. “If he can be a good president, then we all benefit.”

The Big American Party Switch

Towns along the Susquehanna River are filled with people whose grandparents worked in coal mines, garment factories and small manufacturing companies. But those jobs are long gone in Luzerne County, and Wilkes-Barre, the county seat, has seen its population drop by more than half. Dozens of public officials have fallen to scandal.

All of which helps explain how Ed Harry – who, at 70, has spent most of his working life as a union president and a Democratic party activist, running phone banks for candidates and even serving as a delegate for Bill Clinton in 1992 – became an unlikely apostle for Donald Trump.

When the billionaire businessman and reality TV star entered the presidential race, “I laughed, like everyone else,” Harry says. Then he took note of Trump’s opposition. “The Rs said they hated him, the Ds wanted no part of him, the lobbyists didn’t like him. China came out against him, India came out against him, Mexico came out against him.

“And I said, ‘I think I might have a candidate.'”

Harry, who had grown disillusioned with what he saw as Washington’s broken and corrupt politics, switched parties, publicly endorsed Trump and resigned his labor post. He expects the new president to renegotiate trade deals and reduce corporate taxes, which he believes will help lure back manufacturing jobs. And he is not alone.

In Luzerne County, Trump crushed Hillary Clinton by 20 points – in no small part because lifelong Democrats like Harry believed she was the candidate of Wall Street, ignoring the working class while taking its vote for granted. As Trump enters office, these largely older, white, blue-collar voters want him to keep his promise on manufacturing jobs, rebuild deteriorating roads and bridges, crack down on illegal immigration and “drain the swamp.”

“There’s no hope the way things were,” Harry explains. “It had to be something different.”

And listen to Tom Pikas, who is also counting on Trump to bring change. The 61-year-old Wilkes-Barre native remembers a time when you could easily get a decent-paying job right out of high school. He worked in a shoe factory, then for an electrical contractor, and downtown Wilkes-Barre pulsed with life. “This used to be a nice town,” Pikas says.

More recently, Pikas has toiled in a series of temp jobs, the last one paying $8 an hour. Now looking for work, he found himself at the unemployment office this month, enrolling in a jobs program for seniors. The waiting area was packed.

He has faith that Trump will find a way to turn things around but also counsels patience. “Some people expect he’s gonna do miracles the first month,” Pikas says. “No. No. You gotta at least give the guy a year.”

At a bar up the street, William Chase, 55, a construction foreman recovering from surgeries to his back and both knees, says most of the people in his circle are as hopeful about the future as he is.

“I want to be proud of my area again,” he says.

But just 90 minutes or so down the road, one hears a very different set of voices.

In the wealthy Philadelphia suburbs, where million-dollar homes are advertised for sale and luxury cars fill the parking lot of an organic grocery, the pocketbook issues raised in Luzerne County take a back seat for many.

As Inauguration Day draws near, many people in Chester County – Pennsylvania’s richest, where Clinton won by roughly 9 points despite a Republican majority – remain unsettled by Trump’s volatility, demeanor and offensive comments about women, immigrants and others.

“He kind of frightens me,” says business owner Keely Comstock Shaw, 34, who voted a straight Republican ticket, except for the top office.

“I see him as really breaking all the rules, throwing them all aside, and that’s what is scary to me,” adds Kate Young, a 43-year-old Democrat and stay-at-home mom who lives in West Chester, a bustling college town.

The 2016 election compelled Young to become politically active for the first time. Upset that her candidate won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College vote, she joined an organization that’s fighting to end gerrymandered legislative districts.

Young predicts Trump will ignore global warming, roll back environmental protections and create a hostile environment for women and minorities. She also doubts he will be able to produce the manufacturing jobs that voters in places like Luzerne County say they want, citing the rise of automation.

“If that’s what people were hoping to get,” she says, “I just think the world economy is moving in a different direction.”

Movie TV Tech Geeks News

[patrick-watson]

How to Stop Elizabeth Warren’s Wealth Tax

Wealthy Republicans—and even some Democrats—are worried about Elizabeth Warren. Specifically, they fear her wealth tax idea.

That makes sense. Their wealth is important to them. They don’t want to lose any of it.

But they will, if the Massachusetts senator wins the presidency and convinces Congress to pass her idea, or something similar.

I am not here to endorse any candidates. You can vote however you like.

But tax policy is a matter of economic interest, and the fear Warren inspires tells us something important. So does the haphazard effort to stop her. It’s not working and may even be backfiring.

And that could bring big changes that affect everyone.

Limited Recovery

Conventional wisdom says Donald Trump won the 2016 election, despite losing the popular vote, because he appealed to Midwestern voters for whom globalization hadn’t worked out so well.

Other things mattered, too, but economics was certainly a big factor. The post-crisis recovery hadn’t reached everyone in 2016 (and still hasn’t reached them today).

We’ve seen some improvement. The unemployment rate is historically low. Wages have finally started to move up. That’s good.

But keep it in perspective. A 3% real wage increase for a full-time worker making $15 an hour is about $18 a week—helpful, but not a game-changer.

Inflation is considerably higher for the items average people need just to survive. And if you’re unlucky enough to get a serious illness, there’s a good chance you won’t be able to pay your insurance deductible (if you even have insurance) and the hospital will sue you into bankruptcy.

The people who face these problems have no wealth but they do have votes, so the wealthy are rightly concerned.

Bread and/or Circuses

An aristocracy worried the masses will rise up against it is nothing new. The usual answer, dating back to ancient Rome, is to offer “bread and circuses.”

That works pretty well, too, until it doesn’t, as numerous monarchs learned the hard way.

Note, however, the formula is bread and circuses. It takes both. In present US context, the masses are getting mostly circuses and little bread. Hence the discontent that led to Trump.

If wealthy Republicans—whose party controlled the presidency, House, and Senate for two full years—had fixed this imbalance, they might not need to worry about Warren winning the election and taxing their wealth.

That’s not what happened. So it should be no surprise average people are considering alternatives.

Republicans have their own theory: Economic growth will solve everything, and cutting taxes is the way to produce it.

There are two problems with that idea.

First, they did cut taxes in 2017, and it didn’t generate much growth—at least not yet.

Second, GDP growth won’t address some important structural     issues like inadequate healthcare, housing, transportation, and income instability.

Those are key reasons ideas like the wealth tax are getting traction.

A laissez-faire response that consists mainly of billionaires going on TV to say (paraphrasing), “You people don’t know how good you have it! Hands off my wealth!” probably won’t work.   

That doesn’t mean Warren’s wealth tax is a good idea. It means those who oppose it need a better strategy.

Here’s a radical suggestion: fix the problems Warren talks about.

These struggles aren’t imaginary. People really are hurting. So if you at least try to help, they might vote for you.

Will solutions be expensive? Yes. But if you, Mr. Wealthy Person, don’t implement them yourself, somebody else will, and you probably won’t like their methods. And you really won’t like the funding mechanism.

Blue Wave?

The 2020 election is a year away, and a lot can change by then. We don’t know what will happen but we can speculate.

For business-oriented Republicans, the best-case outcome would be a Democratic president plus a GOP Senate. The trade-war craziness would ease and taxes wouldn’t go up. 

Consider, though, that Democrats recaptured the House last year and just this month made major gains in states like Kentucky, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.

Consider also, Trump barely won in 2016. He is president now only due to 78,000 votes in three key states. Millions of his older voters have died since then. The younger ones who have reached voting age don’t lean Republican (to say the least).

So, there is a significant and growing chance a blue wave will put a Democrat in the White House, and his or her party will control both House and Senate, too.

That would mean a good chance a wealth tax, national health care, and other liberal policies will pass. Whether they will work is another question. But we’ll get to find out.

There are things Republicans can do to prevent that outcome. They aren’t doing those things.

Which means, unless the GOP changes course in the very near future, a blue wave could build momentum, and eventually reach the shoreline. Best not to get in its way.

The Great Reset: The Collapse of the Biggest Bubble in History

 New York Times best-seller and renowned financial expert John Mauldin predicts an unprecedented financial crisis that could trigger in the next five years. Most investors seem completely unaware of the relentless pressure that’s building right now. Learn more here.

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Everyone is talking about electability —and that’s totally understandable, considering how badly Democratic voters want to beat President Trump. But it’s not totally clear from the polls which candidates can win a general election and, perhaps more importantly, which can’t. One set of polls released last week found former Vice President Joe Biden would only narrowly defeat Trump in six key swing states while the other top-tier candidates would be underdogs. Other polling finds all the top-polling Democrats — Biden, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Kamala Harris, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders — would be very likely to defeat Trump.

So we’re left to mostly speculate. I’d expect electability talk to continue to be one of the defining features of this primary. But in my view, that conversation is lacking both nuance — at times veering too close to “Candidate X obviously can’t win” — and sophistication. Based on the coverage, you would think Medicare For All is the only policy position that really matters in terms of a candidate’s electability.

So I’m hoping, with less than 100 days before the Iowa caucuses, for a somewhat better discussion of electability. What might that sound like? Here are my three suggestions:

We should acknowledge and emphasize the uncertainty around electoral outcomes

Put simply, the amount we do know about the likelihood of different Democratic candidates defeating Trump may be greatly outweighed by what we don’t know.

Start with the polls, which have sparked much of the recent electability conversations. Surveys testing the eventual nominees conducted about a year before Election Day missed the actual margin by a huge amount, on average, in elections from 1944 through 2012.4 Year-out polls in 2016 and 2012 were closer to the mark, likely because partisan polarization has made presidential voting more predictable. Polls are inexact enough this far out that I just don’t think it’s worth making much of one candidate doing a few percentage points better than another against Trump in this or that poll.

That polarization, meanwhile, also probably limits the electability advantages or disadvantages of particular candidates. To put this bluntly, many voters are looking to back either a Democrat or a Republican — and that person’s party matters way more than their gender, race, sexual orientation or other individual factors.

“Electability is certainly still a thing, but the effect size has probably shrunk,” said Robert Griffin, an expert on voter demographics and the research director of the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group. He estimated that various presidential nominees from the same party would earn the same vote share, plus or minus 2 to 3 points, in a general election — although he emphasized that there is limited research on this question.

As Griffin’s estimate shows, there are surely some candidate effects on electability. Political science studies, particularly at the level of congressional elections, for example, have found that candidates closer to the political center do better in general elections. But even if that is true, I suspect that a fairly extreme candidate can still win in 2020 just by rallying co-partisans. Take 2016. It’s likely that a less controversial Republican, like former Ohio Gov. John Kasich or Sen. Marco Rubio, would have done better than Trump in the general election. But Trump still won.

Indeed, given Trump’s fairly low approval ratings and the high level of partisan polarization, Trump’s vote share likely has both a clear floor and ceiling. The 2020 Democratic nominee will probably enter the general election limited by a similarly narrow bound. Given this floor, Sanders and Warren are electable, even if they might be marginally less electable than Biden.

“It might make sense to talk about things in terms of a threshold, that someone is ‘electable enough,’” said Hans Noel, a Georgetown University professor and expert on party politics.

I’m not arguing that voters should disregard arguments about electability. I get why it matters. But I worry that some of the coverage in the press reads close to, “Candidate X can’t beat Trump.” Indeed, polling shows lots of Democratic voters have come to think about electability in those kinds of absolute terms. We need the coverage to hew more towards, “We don’t have much certainty about electability. Lots of candidates could win or lose. That said, Candidate X may have a slightly better chance against Trump than Candidate Y.”

It’s worth contextualizing electability

In addition to recognizing uncertainty, the electability conversation could use a lot more specifics, too. Democratic candidates could be “more electable” in different ways. Here are some common ones, all of which stem from areas where Hillary Clinton fell short against Trump in 2016:

Winning more white, working-class voters in the Midwest (the much-discussed Obama-Trump voters, especially in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, the states Clinton narrowly lost) by taking more centrist policy positions.

Winning more white, working-class voters in the Midwest by being more populist.

Winning 2012 Obama voters, particularly blacks, who stayed home or voted for a third-party candidate in 2016 in the Midwest and in Florida in particular. I don’t think this strategy necessarily has an ideological bent — these voters might be reached by policy positions and perhaps just a candidate they connect with more, like Obama.

Winning states with big Latino (Arizona, Florida, Texas) or black (Georgia, North Carolina) populations by maximizing turnout among people of color .

Much of the electability coverage in the news media revolves winning the white working class. It assumes that Biden, in particular, is best positioned to win the general election because his more moderate ideological positioning will better appeal to white Obama-Trump voters in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. That might be correct. But the evidence we have now doesn’t totally support that conclusion: Biden (+10) is doing best in head-to-head polls against Trump, followed by Sanders (+8), then Warren (+7), then Harris (+5) and Buttigieg (+5), according to averages of national polls from RealClearPolitics. That doesn’t line up with being more moderate on policy making you more electable, since the candidates are probably Biden-Buttigieg-Harris-Warren-Sanders, in terms of who is most centrist, at least on the policy positions they have proposed in this campaign.5 It should also give some pause about relying so much on early polls. Since Buttigieg in particular is less well-known than Biden, that probably hurts the mayor’s numbers right now.

And the electability discussion mostly ignores the other options: being more populist, or winning over more black and Latino voters. (It also ignores other, more speculative ways to gain an electoral advantage, like, say, a surge in youth turnout.) Take running a more populist campaign or appealing to black voters, respectively: Casting Warren and Sanders as less electable than Biden essentially assumes that the two most populist candidates in the primary won’t be able to appeal to white working-class voters, and that the two most liberal candidates can’t win over Jill Stein voters or inspire young blacks who might have stayed home over backing Clinton. Those assumptions might be true, but I’m not sure.

Even the conversation about winning the Midwestern white working class may be missing the mark. I think it’s entirely possible that Biden is perceived to be a better general election candidate because of factors unrelated to ideology and harder to talk about in public. He may be perceived as more “likable” or relatable than other candidates, a quality that might carry gender or racial undertones. Is that perception because of his actual policy stances, or because he is an older straight white man? (Also, even perceptions of his ideology might be affected by his race and gender. Research suggests that voters view women and people of color as more liberal than their actual issue positions.)

Here’s another way that electability and policy might be being linked too closely. The news coverage I read about Warren often casts her as a risky general election candidate largely because of her left-wing positions. But when I talk to Democratic voters, they often worry that her gender is the problem and that some voters won’t back her because of sexism. This is a challenging subject to talk about — but if a big part of the election is electability, it’s worth being more explicit and detailed. In assessing Warren, Democratic voters are weighing policy positions but also gender and sexism. Why is this important? Because if Warren doesn’t win the nomination and a big factor was Democratic voters felt that her Medicare for All position was a potential general election killer, that’s Warren’s fault. If we learn that voters were wary of nominating Warren because she is a woman, that’s not really Warren’s fault and speaks to more general societal challenges.

We should talk more about trade-offs

In the context of a Democratic primary, some types of electability may come at a price — a price many Democratic voters might not want to pay. That price should be more of a factor in the electability debate.

Democratic candidates trying to maximize electability, for example, may be more cautious on policy, particularly by taking stands on racial issues that prioritize America’s white majority over its people of color. In his 1992 campaign, for example, Bill Clinton went out of his way to criticize a black rapper and activist named Sister Souljah at an event put on by Jesse Jackson Sr.’s civil rights group. Black scholars bemoaned how little President Obama spoke about poverty or racial issues from 2009-12, as he positioned himself for reelection.

When Biden was asked about the “legacy of slavery” in a debate earlier this year and segued into talking about black parents needing to play records to their children, that was covered as a gaffe by the candidate. It was. It was also Biden invoking racial language that might be more appealing to Obama-Trump voters than Black Lives Matter activists.

In this campaign, several candidates are supporting a proposal to study the idea of reparations for black Americans as restitution for slavery and Jim Crow-era discrimination. Biden, though, has been noncommittal about the proposal. Reparations aren’t popular: Only 29 percent of Americans support the idea, according to a recent Associated Press-NORC poll. (So that explains Biden’s wariness.) But there’s a huge racial split on the issue — 74 percent of black Americans support reparations, compared to 15 percent of white Americans.

When we’re talking about electability, it’s worth explaining this trade-off (“Biden is wary of embracing a reparations study, likely to preserve his electability”), particularly since the 2020 campaign has focused a lot on the reverse version of this dynamic (essentially, “Sanders embraces Medicare For All, potentially reducing his electability”). In other words, to maximize electability, what liberal goals are considered expendable by Democratic candidates? Some Democrats want a female president. But is that desire outweighed by the desire to beat Trump?

To conclude, I think it’s natural that, because Democrats desperately want Trump out of office, the Democratic nomination battle has turned into a debate over electability. I just want that debate to be more appreciative of the complexity and uncertainty around all of this.

[thisdaynews]

Buttigieg’s inside-out 2020 strategy: Viral, then local

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/buttigiegs-inside-out-2020-strategy-viral-then-local/

Buttigieg’s inside-out 2020 strategy: Viral, then local

Democratic candidate Pete Buttigieg, left, poses for a selfie at the Iowa State Fair. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

2020 elections

The Democratic mayor is trying to catch up with rivals who have spent more time and resources organizing in Iowa this year.

TIPTON, Iowa — Pete Buttigieg burst into the 2020 presidential race by building national excitement on social media and cable news shows. Now, pork chop in hand, he’s playing catch-up in the all-important first caucus state.

The 37-year-old mayor has yet to snag a single in-state endorsement in Iowa, and while his campaign has 57 staffers on the ground, it expanded to that number only recently. It’s a sharp contrast to other top Democratic candidates, who made investments in Iowa last winterto try to identify supporters and build a foundation for 2020, knowing the results here will shape the rest of the fight for the Democratic nomination.

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But Buttigieg — who swung through Iowa this week for a series of packed town halls, meet-and-greets and impromptu conversations at the state fair — hopes his strategy, which he says was partly borne out of modern necessity, has given him the resources to run an accelerated Iowa campaign ahead of next year’s vote.

“You’ve had to tell a national story quicker,” said Buttigieg, who caught fire advertising himself on TV and with donors as an unconventional choice: a gay, millennial mayor who served in Afghanistan, earned a Harvard degree and won a Rhodes scholarship. “You couldn’t just sneak up on people by showing up in an early state, and then explode on to the scene later.”

“But I still think it’s the case that local interaction and organization matters,” Buttigieg continued, noting that some of his rivals have been organizing in Iowa for a year now. The South Bend, Ind., mayor, for his part, began as a long shot after losing a race for Democratic National Committee chairman in 2017, coming into the presidential race largely unknown and with thin financial resources.

“We had to very quickly scale up and bring the resources through the door that we are now plowing into the ground in order to have that kind of campaign capability,” Buttigieg added.

The national enthusiasm Buttigieg attracted has popped in Iowa, too; at a town hall in Tipton, a woman told Buttigieg that she has “been impressed with you from the first cable show I saw with you,” adding, “it’s nice to finally meet you.”

But Buttigieg’s rise — sparked by his viral CNN town hall in March — hit unexpectedly, and his “momentum outstripped his organization, so now he’s playing catch-up,” said David Axelrod, a Democratic strategist who led President Barack Obama’s campaigns and has advised Buttigieg. “During the first six months of his campaign, [Buttigieg] spent a lot of his time on fundraising and media appearances because he had to, but that left less time for the early states, so I think they’re readjusting that focus now.”

Meanwhile, Sen. Elizabeth Warren has built an army in Iowa of more than 65 people, snapping up top in-state talent as soon as she announced her bid in January. Sen. Cory Booker seeded Iowa with organizers in February, earning a glowing headline this week from the Iowa Starting Line blog: “It’s not if Cory Booker breaks out in Iowa, it’s when.”

“Building an organization takes time. Building staff capacity takes time. And if you’re bringing in a lot of staff in August, there’s a pretty good chance they’re not from Iowa,” said Jeff Link, an Iowa-based Democratic strategist who is not working with a presidential campaign. “The fact that Warren and Booker moved in early — [you] can’t underestimate how much a difference that makes.”

Sarah Backstrom, a teacher from Hardin County, Iowa, who saw Buttigieg speak at the Iowa State Fair on Tuesday, said she was first drawn to Buttigieg on social media. “Honestly, that’s what everyone’s watching these days — Facebook or Twitter or Instagram,” she said. “Maybe he needs to show up more in person, too, but he’s always on my news feed.”

In Iowa polling, Buttigieg regularly lands in Democrats’ top five. But he didn’t crack double digits in Monmouth University’s August poll, unlike former Vice President Joe Biden, Warren and Sen. Kamala Harris. Harris got a late start of her own in Iowa, and like Buttigieg, quickly staffed up over the summer.

“A lot of people got to know him on Twitter, on Facebook and on TV, which is a great way to reach people, but I know there’s a lot of voters who aren’t plugged in that way and they need to see you out on the trail, doing retail politics,” said Penny Rosfjord, the Democratic chairwoman of Iowa’s 4th District. “Has been here in Iowa? Yes. Would we like to see more of him? Yes.”

Buttigieg made up for lost time this week with a three-day sweep through southeastern Iowa, hitting several counties that flipped from President Barack Obama in 2012 to President Donald Trump in 2016. Buttigieg believes he can grab those swing voters back, since he, too, hails from the middle of the country.

Standing before a red barn at the Cedar County fairgrounds, Buttigieg rolled out a policy plan for rural America and recounted Harvard classmates who “could not remember if I was from Indiana, Iowa or Idaho” to laughter from the crowd.

Buttigieg leans into his mayorship and the story of his Indiana hometown on the trail. But some voters said they “worry that he’s too cerebral” for Midwestern voters to “hear his strong story,” said Brenden Lyman, a 27-year-old law student from Madison, Wisconsin, who drove to hear many of the presidential candidates stump at the state fair.

Appearing distant is a criticism the mayor has heard before. When Buttigieg returned to South Bend after a black man was fatally shot by a white police officer, some observers criticized him for being someone who “speaks like someone analyzing a problem rather than empathizing,” Axelrod said. “But it’s a growth process for new candidates, and he’s showing signs of that growth.”

There was no shortage of traditional handshaking politics for Buttigieg this week. He grinned for hundreds of pictures, throwing an arm around voters who waited for him after every event. He took a selfie of his own at the butter cow, an Iowa State Fair staple, followed by a turn on a giant slide with a voter’s son, who had held up a homemade sign, requesting the ride with the mayor.

Buttigieg signed Iowans’ covers of Time and Out magazines, then chowed down on pork-on-a-stick, fried Oreos and a red, white and blue slushie. He even took a question on the designated hitter in Major League baseball in Burlington, Iowa: “I feel you ought to have to play both parts of the game,” Buttigieg said.

Buttigieg said that the Democrats who “have been most successful in places like the Midwest and with swing voters, really over the past half century — J.F.K., Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama — every single one of them an intellectual.”

But, the mayor added, “You also have to speak plain English. And it’s what comes to you naturally as a mayor who cannot get through a grocery store unless you are prepared to explain to residents and voters what your decisions are, why they matter, how it’s going to impact them.”

It’s clear that Buttigieg, like most 2020 candidates, still has work to do in introducing himself to Iowans. Striding through the state fair on Tuesday, a woman shouted to him, through a pack of reporters, camera crews and security guards, “Now, who are you?”

“My name’s Pete, and I’m running for president,” Buttigieg said.

“You’re such a young man,” the woman replied, appearing shocked. “We need some young blood.”

Read More

[avanneman]

O My Democratic Party, Where the F*ck Art Thou?

Well, good question. If Happy Days aren’t here again, and they aren’t, life is better, definitely. To have the House of Representatives back in Democratic hands after eight long years is definitely a pleasure if not a treasure. As one representative put it “Being in the majority is a thousand times better.” Furthermore, the party’s position at the state level, particularly in the Midwest, except for Ohio, has improved from Obama disaster levels to “not terrible”.

The fantasized “blue wave” failed to materialize, of course, but the thirty-plus seat gain in the House is more than gratifying. It was beginning to seem that Republicans had a lock on the House similar to the Democratic lock that prevailed, with only two interruptions, from 1932 until 1994. But now it appears that the Democrats can win the House without both a hurricane and a war. And it also appears that the party has made significant, though still limited, progress from the woeful downticket performance of the Obama years, to which, as I’ve frequently complained, Obama himself contributed himself to a painful degree, both in terms of policy and administration. Now we’re starting to look like a normal party again.

So what’s next? I recently opined that Old Lady Pelosi held most of the cards, if not the answers, in the upcoming power struggles. It’s true that a number of new reps made it a talking point that they wouldn’t vote for Pelosi, but luckily for Pelosi if no one else, she faces divided forces. A lot of the talk against Pelosi is that she’s “too California” and that we need some Midwestern blue-collar muscle rather than Silicon Valley slickness to win in Trump’s America. But there’s another big batch of energy coming against Pelosi from the new kids, saying she ain’t woke, or at least she’s so old you can’t tell if she’s woke or dead. I confess I’m not up on which wave of feminism we’re up to these days, but obviously Nancy ain’t current with the current current, you know what I’m sayin’? So some are sayin’ she’s too coastal, and others are sayin’, not enough. And if you give an old war horse like Nancy an opening like that, she’s liable to run right through it, which is precisely what she is doing.

As I also previously opined, Nancy’s strongest card is the one she never flourishes in public, money. Decades of successful politicking have given her a whatever it is the kids call a Rolodex these days to die for. Nancy knows moolah, and she knows how to dish it out, but will her cash “moderate” the Democratic Party enough to keep Neoliberal Nancy in control? And even if it does, how much can Nancy do as a mere faute de mieux (aka “lack of a better”)? I think the big issue for the Democrats to address is income inequality, but the “answers” suggested by Bernie Sanders in 2016, and very popular with both the “blue collar” and “woke” wings of the Democratic Party, strike Neoliberal Alan as absolutely the wrong way to go.

The “unifying factor” for Democrats on the campaign trail in 2016 largely seemed to be “Medicare for All,” the original Bernie riff, which appeals to old Paleolibs like Thomas Frank and Michael Moore, who think they’re helping the party return to its New Deal roots, as well as the new kids, like the famously famous (and no doubt privately envied and resented) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who would be rockin’ that socialism, if they knew what it was. The problem is, as representatives who actually represent blue-collar districts know, real blue-collar folks don’t want Medicare for All. They want Medicare for themselves, for those who have “earned it” and not for those who haven’t—you know, the “Government, hands off my Medicare” crowd, who love “white socialism” but hate “welfare”.1

“White socialism” includes employer-provided health insurance, which is, of course, highly subsidized, because it’s effectively tax free income, though most people tend to think of it as entirely free—at least it ought to be.2 I think, when push comes to shove, that voters with employer-provided health insurance will not be enthusiastic about either giving up what they have for whatever “Medicare for all” would be, nor do I think that those on the current Medicare program will be interested in “sharing”. Certainly, the Republican “war” on the Affordable Care Act should be reversed, and the Act itself strengthened, but the Democrats need to address the broader issue of income inequality, and income stagnation, beyond health care alone, if the Democrats are going to reclaim a respectable share of the “less than college” white vote. But how?

The Democrats’ dilemma is discussed, not too intelligently, in a recent post appearing in Slate, written by an unenthusiastic Jordan Weissmann, “Kamala Harris’ Big Policy Idea Is Even Worse Than I Thought”, going after the “LIFT The Middle Class Act” being pushed by California Senator Kamala Harris. Okay, the name’s not catchy, and it’s scarcely more than an expanded version of the Earned Income Tax Credit, and it’s too generous, providing as much as $6,000 a year to couples with an income of less than $100,000 a year, but, to my mind, it’s very much a step in the right direction.

Weissmann’s first complaint–and his take is not nearly as “outraged” as the headline would suggest–is that too many U.S. households–almost 30% of them–are above the $100,000 a year figure to make this a winner. Bernie Sanders, he says, was smarter, promising free college tuition for everyone, even if your daddy is a billionaire. My reaction is just the other way–that we shouldn’t be boosting the income of households who are making more than the national average. Catering to kids who think that socialism means that everything is free isn’t going to win back blue-collar workers in the Midwest.

A bit surprisingly–and showing how the Democratic Party has “drifted”–Weissman doesn’t emphasize what would be an “old Democrat’s” immediate complaint–that the bill wouldn’t do anything to help the non-working poor, the group that so many liberals insist on always going to bat for–see, for example, the recent “outrage” over proposed changes in the food stamp program voiced by Paul Krugman.

It’s certainly “arguable” that the food stamp proposal, if it had passed, which it did not, could have been administered in a punitive manner at the state level, but the main criticism voiced by Krugman and others was the mere idea that poor people should be forced to do anything, that cutting benefits to an able-bodied person simply on the grounds that they refused to look for a job3 was the ultimate in Republican villainy. Many Democrats continue to insist on throwing themselves into the “welfare trap” that Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan dug for them so long ago, while Weissman wants to dig a new welfare trap–welfare for the upper-middle-class. Harris, at least, is trying to craft something that will reach the “real” middle class.

Working to expand the notion, and respectability, of outright income redistribution should be a major Democratic endeavor over the next two years. The Earned Income Tax Credit, because it’s tied to employment, because it provides people with cash, because it’s “invisible” (unlike food stamps), and because it “travels” across state lines, unlike eligibility for most assistance programs, all make the EITC a near perfect vehicle for addressing the “shocking” fact that the free enterprise system, while the only system capable of creating the kind of economic growth that can actually provide a decent standard of living for all people, is not in any sense of the word “fair”. I subscribe, at least in part, to the various theories floating around arguing that the “happy times” of declining income inequality following the two world wars until recently were the product of a variety of factors extraneous to capitalism itself. Today capitalism is continuing to better the lives of millions, and even billions, around the globe, but while the globalizing of capitalism is great for the Third World folks,4 it’s “disruptive” here, now that U.S. corporations can no longer get away with charging monopoly (or at least oligopoly) prices and thus can no longer afford to pay monopoly wages.

The decline in wages for many Americans is popularly regarded as the result of imports, but in fact it’s the decline in bargaining power for American workers now that they are competing with a global work force almost as skilled and ten times larger. Automation, not imports, is destroying the old manufacturing jobs that paid union wages—wages that were high because of the unions, not because there is some magic to manufacturing jobs that lets blue-collar workers earn white-collar salaries. As the manufacturing jobs disappear, workers find new ones, but they aren’t joining unions. Unions have nothing to offer private-sector workers these days because they can’t protect them from international competition.

Hatred of international competition and immigrants drove the Bernie boom in the Democratic primaries in 2016.5 Pelosi’s California money, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s New York money, won’t fund a Democratic Party that runs on Bernie’s issues. If Democrats are going to be competitive in the big Midwestern states that they lost to Trump in 2016, they have to address the issue of income inequality, and a massive expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit, so that it pushes millions into the middle class, is the most direct and effective way to do it, a way that is politically acceptable to lower- and middle-income whites, and a way that is compatible with coastal priorities—i.e., a globally competitive economy, which, if you actually care about reducing poverty worldwide, instead of engaging in moral posturing, is absolutely the only way to go. Unfortunately, “the left” is much more inclined to posture.

Income stagnation and growing inequality strike me as the great domestic issue that the Democrats need to address to recover some ground in the Midwest, particularly the rural areas, where we’ve been losing by massive margins, as I’ve discussed earlier. I obviously don’t think the party can win by going further left, which would only increase our margins where we’re already winning. Health care is closely related to income stagnation, since people are paying more and more for it. Whether cutting the rate of increase for health care costs—correctly identified by President Obama as the “real” crisis, rather than the increases in entitlement costs—can be dealt with in a politically palatable is a (very) open question. But at least proposing a meaningful plan of income redistribution tied to employment would put the Democrats in good position for a decent shot at unseating President Trump. And, barring nothing but good luck as a result of well-deserved investigations into this grossly corrupt presidency, we’re going to need all the good positioning we can get.

Afterwords I’m going to skip moaning about the dangers of getting into fights over impeachment (a terrible idea no matter what, because the Republican Party is as corrupt as Trump is, or rather as corrupt as Trump needs it to be) and engaging in excessive “wokeness”, since I have a general aversion to culture wars. There are a variety of other policies for increasing incomes for lower and middle income folks, which I’ve discussed here, and here. A particular policy, to be pursued at both the federal and state level, is the diminution and (dream on) eventual end to the “War on Drugs”, which gives hundreds of thousands of young black and Hispanic men criminal records while wasting billions on police, prisons, courts, etc. This is the best thing Democrats can do to improve the situation of blacks and Hispanics in this country.

I discuss “white socialism”—the deliberate tailoring of all the major New Deal programs to exclude as many blacks as possible—here in the course of a beatdown administered to poor, pitiful Paulie Ryan and here, in the course of an extended beatdown administered to the poor, pitiful Democratic Party. ↩︎

AARP has an ad showing old folks talking about the issues, and what this country “really” needs, and the closer is provided by an old broad who says in a grandly self-satisfied voice “affordable health care!”, as though the viewer is supposed to exclaim “Affordable health care! Affordable health care! Of course! Why didn’t I think of that?” Because of course what people mean by “affordable health care” is free health care. ↩︎

The bill, which passed the House but never would have passed the Senate, had a number of waivers that made the bill sound much more “reasonable” (though, again, the impact of these provisions would likely depend on administration at the state level). But what enraged Krugman et al. was the notion that self-sufficient employment was considered a more desirable outcome that unrestricted welfare dependency. Because for Krugman et al. the real purpose of these programs is to allow “us” to prove how generous “we” are, not to improve people’s lives. ↩︎

Great, but, uh, massively destabilizing, for both First and Third World countries, which is why virtually everyone is seeking protection of some sort from global economic forces, often with strong nativist overtones. ↩︎

Sanders was, of course, not at all racist, but he did originally advocate shutting off immigration—an easy position to take in Vermont, one of the whitest states in the union, and very few immigrants, legal or no. Pressure from Hillary drove Bernie to the left on immigration. ↩︎

[takebackthedream]

Inauguration Day: Letter to a Trump Voter by Richard Eskow

We don’t know each other. But today, on the occasion of Donald Trump’s inauguration, there were some things I wanted to say to you as one American to another. (I’m willing to listen, too.)

Let’s get this out of the way first: I think Donald Trump is dangerously unstable, morally objectionable, and has tendencies that represent a threat to our democracy. You may be starting to feel the same way, like this Trump voter, but chances are you still feel pretty good about him.

I’ll be honest about something else, too: It’s hard for me to accept the idea that so many of my fellow Americans voted for somebody who bragged about sexual assault, especially when so many women came forward to say that he assaulted them. It’s hard for me to accept that so many of you voted for somebody who made fun of a disabled person, who threatened to ban people because of their religion, and who maligned immigrants — or the children of immigrants — just because of their background.

But here we are. Like the saying goes, we’re in the same boat now.

Who are you?

We don’t know each other. It’s possible that you come from the relatively small percentage of Latinos and African Americans who voted for Trump, but chances are you’re white.

You may be wealthy. If so, we don’t have much to discuss. Your vote can’t be excused by fear, or deprivation, or desperation. But if you’re a lower-income person, especially in a rural area or small town, your fear is understandable.

If you’re from the industrial Midwest, political scientist Josh Pacewicz believes that your vote helped put Trump over the top. He wrote:

“Donald Trump won the 2016 election largely because he carried Rust Belt states such as Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, doing especially well in small cities and towns.”

Pacewicz also said:

“Until this election, this group of voters had not followed other regions’ rural, uneducated whites in moving Republican. In overwhelmingly white Iowa, for example, Barack Obama swept the industrial corridor in 2008, winning 53 of the state’s 99 counties and some factory towns by almost 2 to 1.”

I come from a Rust Belt city myself. The manufacturing jobs that made it prosperous when I was a kid are long gone. The house where I spent my early childhood is boarded up and collapsing. Whole sections of the city look bombed out and abandoned.

Neither party has come up with a good plan for my hometown. To be honest, neither party seemed very interested in trying.

You could be thinking, “Maybe Trump will do something about that.”

He’s going to let you down.

It gives me no joy to say this, but no, he won’t. You’ve been conned. Trump hasn’t come up with a single concrete proposal to create jobs. His Carrier factory deal in Indiana is likely to give away billions of dollars in corporate tax breaks in return for less than 1,000 jobs. The government could have used to billions to create a lot more than 1,000 jobs.

If you’ve been watching the Senate confirmation hearings for Trump’s appointees, your positive feelings may have started to fade. They should. His nominees are politically extreme, most are clueless, and at least one of them should be criminally investigated.

There were many different reasons why people might have voted for a populist candidate, even one I dislike as much as Trump – especially when the experts were telling us that Hillary Clinton had an 85 percent or even a 99 percent chance of winning. You might have thought, why not use this vote to tell the elites exactly what I think of them?

And now you’re probably still thinking, “Why not give him a chance?”

Here’s why: I’m pretty sure you didn’t vote for a government that’s run by Goldman Sachs and other Wall Streeters, people who care more about their own wealth and self-interest than they do about your well-being. (Some of them are already reaping the profits). But that’s what we’re getting.

By deregulating Wall Street and hiring the bankers who looted the economy, Trump could very well be setting the stage for another financial crisis. We already know that banks will be able to shaft customers like you and me out of billions of dollars more, once Trump and his team have gutted the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

You won’t hear about any of this on Fox News, the most popular news outlet among Trump voters, because they’re lying to you. You deserve the truth, so you might want to change the channel.

If you’re a woman, you may have been one of the female Trump voters who said “you get through the bad and you focus on the good,” or the woman who wrote, “my vote for Trump was not a vote against Planned Parenthood,” or the woman who hoped that Trump’s daughter’s prominent role in the campaign meant he wasn’t as sexist as he seemed.

But his policies are going to hurt women in many ways, leaving them with less control over their bodies and less ability to provide for themselves and their families. Don’t take my word for it. Tragically, you’ll find out soon enough.

I don’t assume that I understand you.

I don’t agree with the people who want to judge or dismiss you without knowing you. Anyone who’s ever fallen on hard times knows that people will do unexpected things, and will sometimes take big risks, trying to provide for their families.

I don’t assume you’re racist, either. To be sure, a lot of you are. A surprisingly large percentage of several candidate’s voters, including Clinton’s, expressed racist sentiments to pollsters last year. But Trump voters were far more likely to express those racist opinions.

Still, racism doesn’t explain the shifts Pacewicz described among Midwestern voters. They weren’t too racist to vote for an African-American candidate, after all, so how does racism explain their abandonment of Hillary Clinton?

I am particularly offended by commentary like this, from blogger Markos Moulitsas, who contemptuously dismissed coal miners because they voted for Trump and now stand to lose health coverage. “Be happy,” he wrote of the miners, many of whom suffer from the horror of black lung disease. “They’re getting exactly what they voted for.”

That’s indefensible and brutal, but please understand: people like that don’t speak for the great majority of us. You may hear harsh things from other Americans too — voters, not commentators or activists — but then, a lot of people are hurting right now.

Moulitsas’ commentary has already been ably dissected by Adam Johnson, Sarah Jones, and Dan O’Sullivan. I will only add that people who dislike large groups of voters – especially when those voters are people we should be fighting for, like coal miners – are temperamentally unsuited for either politics or activism.

Dr. King’s lesson.

They should learn from the example of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whose legacy we celebrated just last week. Dr. King said:

“Black and white, we will all be harmed unless something grand and imaginative is done. The unemployed, poverty-stricken white man must be made to realize that he is in the very same boat with the Negro. Together, they could exert massive pressure on the government to get jobs for all. Together they could form a grand alliance. Together, they could merge all people for the good of all.”

Dr. King knew that everyone who struggles under an unjust economic system – and that’s millions of us nowadays – could benefit from that kind of alliance. And he knew that the politics of identity were inseparable from the politics of economic justice.

What do we do now?

You should know that even harder times are coming. Trump’s administration is planning deep government cuts that will hurt millions of Americans. You may be excited about his victory now, but you’re facing some big disappointments in the coming months and years.

Trust me, I’m speaking from experience. Barack Obama was a far better president than Trump will be, but he was not nearly as good as he might have been. Whether we backed him in the primaries or not, many of us felt our own disappointment when Obama began appointing Bill Clinton’s Wall Street allies to serve in his administration.

But at least Obama got us out of a ditch, while Trump’s headed toward another one. I’ll be honest about something else, too: Some of us will be fighting the new president from the get-go.

Here’s the kicker: I think there’s a chance you’ll join us eventually.

You see, Dr. King understood economic pain. He said:

“… (T)he rapid rise in long-term unemployment is a portrait of human loss, the outline of human beings cast out of productive, wage-earning lives into an existence of hopelessness and deprivation.”

If we create a movement that addresses that kind of pain, you’ll have something better to believe in. And if politicians run on that agenda, it’s likely to bring out a lot of the voters who stayed home this time around.

We’ve spent a lot of years in this country, on both the sides of the aisle, waiting for someone to come along who’ll save us. Maybe now it’s time to realize we need to do the work ourselves, by organizing that “grand alliance” Dr. King spoke about all those years ago.

Please think about that in the months and years to come.

Here’s one thing we can already agree on: With this inauguration, our nation and our world are about to change forever. Good luck to you, and to all of us. We’re going to need it.

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

We’re less than two weeks from the Democrats’ first debate in Miami on June 26 and 27. I’m looking forward to the occasion — not so much because I’m eager to hear Bill de Blasio trying to drop some too-clever-by-half insults on the front-runners, but because the debates should help us exit a doldrums phase of the Democratic primary in which not a lot has been happening.

Until then, we’re left with some pretty slim pickings for Silver Bulletpoints. So I want to focus this week’s edition around the recent Selzer & Co. poll of Iowa, which was conducted on behalf of CNN, the Des Moines Register and Mediacom. While I’m a little bit reluctant to give that much attention to a single poll, this is one of the only recent high-quality polls of Iowa — and Selzer & Co. is pretty much as good as pollsters can get.

Bulletpoint No. 1: Things are looking up in Iowa for Warren and Buttigieg

The Selzer poll shows a closer race in Iowa than what we’ve been seeing nationally, with Joe Biden on top with 24 percent of the vote, followed by essentially a three-way tie for second with Bernie Sanders at 16 percent, Elizabeth Warren at 15 percent and Pete Buttigieg at 14 percent. Kamala Harris is next at 7 percent, with no one else above 2 percent.

That’s already a pretty decent result for Warren and Buttigieg — but, in fact, the poll is a bit better than it looks for them on the surface. Selzer also asked voters for favorability ratings on each candidate; I translated those ratings to a 5-point scale in which 5 means “very favorable” and 1 means “very unfavorable,” throwing out voters who didn’t know enough about a candidate to formulate an opinion.

On average, Buttigieg had the highest favorability ratings on the scale (4.1), with Harris (4.0) and Warren (4.0) close behind him. Biden’s (3.8) and Sanders’s (3.7) favorability ratings were decent but behind the top three. Meanwhile, while Cory Booker (3.7), Amy Klobuchar (3.6) and Beto O’Rourke (3.6) have little first-choice support, they retain decent favorables.

Buttigieg, Harris, Warren are viewed most favorably in Iowa

Favorability ratings in the Selzer & Co. Iowa poll, June 2-5, 2019

Candidate Very fav. Mostly fav. Mostly unfav. Very unfav. Favorability score* First-choice support Buttigieg 32% 29% 7% 5% 4.1 14% Harris 30 33 8 5 4.0 7 Warren 37 34 10 7 4.0 15 Biden 36 37 14 9 3.8 24 Sanders 32 38 17 8 3.7 16 Booker 20 36 13 6 3.7 1 Klobuchar 12 32 13 4 3.6 2 O’Rourke 15 39 13 8 3.6 2 Castro 7 27 10 4 3.5 1 Inslee 5 16 7 3 3.4 1 Bullock 5 14 8 2 3.4 0 Swalwell 5 17 9 4 3.3 0 Gillibrand 7 31 17 6 3.3 0 Hickenlooper 6 18 12 4 3.3 0 Bennet 3 16 9 3 3.3 1 Delaney 6 21 12 5 3.3 1 Yang 5 14 10 5 3.1 1 Moulton 3 9 8 3 3.0 0 Ryan 2 14 10 4 3.0 0 Gabbard 5 18 11 9 3.0 1 Williamson 2 7 11 7 2.5 0 de Blasio 2 14 27 13 2.4 0 Messam 1 1 6 3 2.2 0

* Calculated based on a weighted average of favorability ratings, giving a candidate 5 points for a “very favorable” rating, 4 points for “somewhat favorable,” 2 points for “somewhat unfavorable” and 1 point for “very unfavorable,” and ignoring voters who don’t know or don’t have an opinion about the candidate.

Favorability ratings were calculated by a weighting of 90 percent of the responses from those who plan to caucus in person and 10 person of responses from those who plan to participate in the caucuses virtually.

I don’t have any hard-and-fast rule about how much to emphasize favorability ratings against first-choice support. It’s probably worth noting that President Trump’s favorables were often mediocre in polls of 2016 Republican voters, but he won the nomination anyway. Still, the Selzer poll is consistent with a story where voters who are paying more attention to the campaign are ahead of the curve on Warren and Buttigieg. And Warren and Buttigieg are good candidates for Iowa with a legitimate shot to win there.

Bulletpoint No. 2: Who makes for a good Iowa candidate, and who’s campaigning there?

What do I mean by a good candidate for Iowa? If I designed a candidate in a lab to win the Iowa caucuses, I’d want them to have four characteristics:

Perform well with liberal voters, since voters in the Iowa caucuses are pretty liberal.

Perform well with white voters, since Iowa is pretty white.

Be strong retail campaigners with good organizational skills.

Be from the Midwest.

Warren checks three-and-a-quarter boxes: She polls well among white liberals, she has a strong organization in Iowa, and she sorta counts as Midwestern if you think of her as being from Oklahoma rather than Massachusetts (and if you count Oklahoma as Midwestern). Buttigieg checks at least three boxes: He overperforms with white voters (and underperforms with minorities), he’s Midwestern, and by most accounts he’s a good retail campaigner. Sanders also checks three boxes (everything except the Midwest one).

But are the candidates who are the most Iowa-appropriate actually campaigning there more often? Last month, my colleague Nathaniel Rakich looked at which candidates have campaigned the most in Iowa and New Hampshire. I’m going to provide a twist by accounting for how long a candidate has been in the race. For instance, John Delaney has spent the most days in Iowa, but he’s also been campaigning for president since July 2017 (!).

Bullock, O’Rourke and Ryan are focusing the most on Iowa

Share of days with an Iowa event since campaign launch for the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates, through June 12, 2019

Candidate First day of CAMPAIGN No. of Days Days with Iowa events Share of days with Iowa events Bullock 5/14/19 30 7 23.3% O’Rourke 3/14/19 91 19 20.9 Ryan 4/4/19 70 12 17.1 de Blasio 5/16/19 28 4 14.3 Swalwell 4/9/19 65 8 12.3 Williamson 1/28/19 136 15 11.0 Klobuchar 2/10/19 123 13 10.6 Warren 12/31/18 164 17 10.4 Sanders 2/19/19 114 11 9.6 Bennet 5/2/19 42 4 9.5 Gillibrand 1/15/19 149 14 9.4 Booker 2/1/19 132 12 9.1 Hickenlooper 3/4/19 101 9 8.9 Delaney 7/28/17 685 57 8.3 Biden 4/25/19 49 4 8.2 Buttigieg 1/23/19 141 11 7.8 Gabbard 1/11/19 153 11 7.2 Inslee 3/1/19 104 6 5.8 Yang 2/10/18 488 28 5.7 Castro 1/12/19 152 8 5.3 Harris 1/21/19 143 7 4.9 Moulton 4/22/19 52 1 1.9 Gravel 3/19/19 86 0 0.0

The five leading candidates in the most recent Selzer & Co. poll of Iowa are highlighted.

Campaign launch dates reflect when candidates formed an exploratory committee, even if they hadn’t formally launched their campaign, since candidates generally do engage in campaign-style events during the exploratory phase. However, events only count if they occurred on or after the launch date listed in the table.

Source: Des Moines Register Candidate Tracker

Measured by the proportion of days with an Iowa event since their campaigns began, the most Iowa-centric candidates have been Steve Bullock, O’Rourke and Tim Ryan. Among the top tier, Harris has spent a notably lower share of her time in Iowa than the others. Perhaps that makes sense — she doesn’t check a lot of the boxes I described above. But it may also explain why she isn’t converting high favorability ratings into much first-choice support.

Bulletpoint No. 3: Biden is falling back to the pack

Six weeks ago, amidst Biden’s polling surge, I put him an extra step ahead of the other Democrats in my periodically updating, not-to-be-taken-too-seriously presidential tiers, demoting Sanders, Buttigieg and Harris from tier 1b to tier 1c and leaving tier 1b blank to indicate the distance between Biden and everyone else.

But we’ve promised to make these tiers fairly polling-driven, and while the decline in Biden’s national numbers is predictable — pretty much all the previous candidates to get bounces have also seen them fade — I err on the side of paying more attention to Iowa and New Hampshire polls than to national ones. So that Selzer poll in Iowa is enough for me to repromote Sanders, Buttigieg and Harris back to tier 1b and to move Warren to there for the first time.

Nate’s not-to-be-taken-too-seriously presidential tiers

For the Democratic nomination, as revised on June 13, 2019

Tier Sub-tier Candidates 1 a Biden b Warren ↑, Sanders ↑, Buttigieg ↑, Harris ↑ 2 a O’Rourke b Booker, Klobuchar 3 a Yang, Castro, Abrams* b Inslee, Gillibrand, Gabbard c Bullock, Hickenlooper, Ryan, Bennet, de Blasio, Williamson

* Candidate is not yet officially running but may still do so.

For Sanders, Warren and Buttigieg, the case for promotion is reasonably clear. They’re all plausible Iowa winners — and if they win Iowa, they’ll have a pretty good shot at New Hampshire. I continue not to be super-duper impressed by Sanders’s polling, but he’s fairly consistently held on to second place nationally, and I’m not going to try to overthink things too much. Warren has some momentum, even if it’s a little overstated by the national media. Buttigeg’s modest name recognition could give him room to grow later, as he already seems to be doing in the early states.

Harris is the trickiest case, but her favorables remain pretty good, she’s a decent bet to do well at the debates, and it seems unlikely that a party in which 40 percent of voters are nonwhite is going to be entirely content choosing between three or four white candidates. All that said, Harris could also have a Marco Rubio-esque problem of being broadly acceptable but few voters’ first choice.

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

You’d be forgiven for not knowing, or at least not knowing how to pronounce, Pete Buttigieg’s last name (it’s boot-uh-judge). His political experience to date includes two terms as mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and … well, that’s pretty much it.

But on Wednesday Buttigieg became the second mayor to throw his hat in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary ring, and he might not be the last. Buttigieg’s age — he’s 37 now, and would be the youngest U.S. president ever if elected — and Midwestern background could help him stand out against a quickly crowding field of aspirants. But it’s also possible that Buttigieg, who wasn’t even included in a recent Politico/Morning Consult poll of 20 potential candidates, won’t be able to get on voters’ radars or build a base of support.

On paper, Buttigieg is impressive. The son of an immigrant father from Malta, Buttigieg graduated from Harvard, earned a Rhodes Scholarship, and worked as a consultant at McKinsey before moving back home to Indiana at age 29 to become the mayor of South Bend, making him the youngest mayor of a city with more than 100,000 people. While still serving his first term, Buttigieg took a seven-month leave of office to serve with the Naval Reserve in Afghanistan in 2015. Less than a year later, Buttigieg came out as gay. Buttigieg’s sexuality didn’t stop South Bend voters from re-electing him to a second term with more than 80 percent of the vote.

All that success didn’t go unnoticed. In a 2016 New Yorker interview, Barack Obama name-dropped Buttgieg as a potential leading light for the party. And the New York Times (“The First Gay President?”) and Washington Post (“Could Pete Buttigieg Become the First Millennial President?”) have both published profiles of Buttigieg in the last three years.

Now, though, Buttigeg faces the challenge of turning that attention and potential into a campaign. How might that happen?

How Buttigieg could win

When FiveThirtyEight editor-in-chief Nate Silver wrote about how Democratic longshots might build constituencies in 2020, he identified Millennials as Buttigieg’s core base.

And if Buttigieg can become the preferred choice of young voters, though there’s no guarantee of that, it would give him a powerful toe-hold in the race — Millennial voters could account for about a third of all primary voters in 2020. Even in his announcement video, you can see Buttigieg leaning into his youth and the need for new generation of leadership:

I launched a presidential exploratory committee because it is a season for boldness and it is time to focus on the future. Are you ready to walk away from the politics of the past?

Join the team at https://t.co/Xlqn10brgH. pic.twitter.com/K6aeOeVrO7

— Pete Buttigieg (@PeteButtigieg) January 23, 2019

An enthusiasm for board games and Instagram-friendly rescue dog might be a start, but Buttigieg will need to make inroads with more than one group of voters to win. Where does he go after Millennials?

One way forward might be to model his run after the 2016 bid by Bernie Sanders, a man who figured into the beginning of Buttigieg’s political career. When Buttigieg was 18, he won a prestigious award for an essay he had written about Sanders. He cited the then-Vermont congressman as an “outstanding and inspiring” example of integrity, writing that “… few others like him have the power to restore principle and leadership in Congress and to win back the faith of a voting public weary and wary of political opportunism.” At the awards ceremony, Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts offered Buttigieg a summer internship in his office, which helped kickstart Buttigieg’s career of public service.

At this point, it’s hard to pinpoint where Buttigieg falls on an ideological spectrum, but we do know he’s pushed to raise minimum wages and supports Medicare for All. If the Sanders campaign were to fail to launch or falters, Buttigieg could find an opening. Just as Sanders ran on a platform focused on economic populism and working-class revival, Buttigieg can and will point to the role he played in leading South Bend’s Rust Belt transformation (you can already see the theme in his announcement video).

South Bend lost thousands of jobs in 1963 when the the local Studebaker plant shut down. Between 1960 and 2012, when Buttigieg first took office, South Bend’s population had decreased by more than 30,000 people. During his first term, Buttigieg set out to change that, promising to raze or refurbish 1,000 vacant houses in 1,000 days. Sixty-two days before the deadline, Buttigieg announced that the goal had been met.1 He also oversaw a downtown revitalization project that some attributed to increased development in the area. The latest Census estimates show a slow and steady increase in South Bend’s population since 2013. How much of South Bend’s upswing should be credited to Buttigieg is a more complicated question, but he’ll certainly be able to point to the city’s new trajectory as he makes a pitch to voters.

Moreover, as Nate pointed out, much of the Left (or at least the subset that attends Democratic Socialists of America conventions) is white and male, so someone like Buttigieg could package himself as a younger version of Sanders.

Where Buttigieg goes next is a little trickier. There’s no reason to think he wouldn’t be acceptable to Party Loyalists. Along with support from Obama, former Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod has praised Buttigieg as having “limitless potential.” But if fellow-Midwesterners Amy Klobuchar or Sherrod Brown decide to run, Party Loyalists may support the more experienced politicians ahead of Buttigieg. And, of course, there’s former Vice President Joe Biden.

Buttigieg also has more experience appealing to minority communities than you might think. Forty-six percent of South Bend’s population in 2017 was non-white, according to Census estimates. OK, that number is more than 70 percent for Julian Castro (San Antonio), Eric Garcetti (Los Angeles) and Mitch Landrieu (New Orleans), but South Bend is more diverse than Minnesota or Massachusetts or Vermont.

The challenges Buttigieg faces

Beyond standing out in a crowded field and finding footholds with key Democratic constituencies, Buttigieg’s campaign also raises the question of whether Democrats are ready for an openly gay nominee.

Among adults who identified as Democrats, 73 percent of respondents supported gay marriage, according to a 2017 Pew Research Center survey. Independents were close behind at 70 percent. But the same research found support for gay marriage at 51 percent among black adults, an important part of the Democratic coalition. Support was even lower among Republicans at 40 percent. So you can expect to see “electability” questions raised about Buttigieg. The last time Gallup tested Americans’ willingness to vote for a “generally well-qualified” gay or lesbian candidate for president — way back in 2015, unfortunately — 14 percent of Democrats and 24 percent of Americans overall said they would not be willing to vote for a such a candidate.

Who would Americans NOT vote for in 2015?

Share of people in 2015 survey who would not vote for a “generally well-qualified” person nominated from their own party if they had each of the following characteristics

Democrat Republican Overall Socialist 38% 73% 50% Atheist 35 55 40 Muslim 27 54 38 Evangelical Christian 33 14 25 Gay or lesbian 14 38 24 Mormon 21 16 18 Hispanic 6 9 8 Woman 3 9 8 Black 4 9 7 Jewish 6 5 7 Catholic 5 7 6

Source: GALLUP

Those numbers are likely lower now, but while many voters will surely rally to the idea of the first openly gay president, it’d be naive to assume everyone will.

Mayors also have a dismal record when it comes to presidential races (see Rudy Giuliani in 2008). Plus there’s a potentially large cohort of former municipal leaders in the 2020 candidate pool. “I fixed potholes; I can fix America’s potholes,” could become a common refrain and a hard way to distinguish oneself as a candidate.

Given the odds against him, it’s possible a presidential bid is another way for Buttigieg to win by losing. Buttigieg’s first campaign was for state treasurer in 2010. He won 37.5 percent of the vote. But the experience raised his profile among Indiana Democrats and helped him lock up the South Bend mayoral race. His aborted run for Democratic National Committee chair served a similar function, generating media attention and signaling wider ambitions. Buttigieg may not get close to the nomination, but he’ll begin to hone a national message and help normalize the idea of an openly gay president. That alone makes him worth keeping an eye on.