The December 20, 2016 Thread

A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds 54% of adults saying that they are either uncertain (25%) or pessimistic and worried (29%) about how Trump will perform during his presidency, compared with 45% with either an optimistic and confident view (22%) or a satisfied and hopeful view (23%).

Josh Marshall:

The fact that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by almost 3 million votes makes it very hard to see the 2016 election as a referendum on the Democratic party or Democratic governance or a rejection of either. This isn’t just a matter of salving hurt feelings or looking on the bright side. The import is more concrete and unforgiving. All politics involves trade-offs. One bundle of issues gets you one coalition of voters. If you toss that bundle overboard you’ll probably lose some or possibly a lot of the voters you have. That’s difficult when you’re still pretty close to winning majorities of votes. It’s especially tough when you’re actually already winning majorities, at least of the two party vote. (This does not even get into the infinitely consequential issue of the political morality of potentially abandoning your most vulnerable and political loyal supporters.)

The consequences of the 2016 election are devastating. But it is important to distinguish causes and outcomes. The mechanics are not the same. I’ve already discussed that not only does the Democrats’ economic messaging need work but their policies do. Messaging is important. Policies drive messaging. Just as much, there is a failure of political organizing at the state level and local level. Some of that atrophy at the local level is a recurrent pattern that afflicts the party that holds the presidency for two terms in a highly partisan era (see what happened to Republicans in 2005-2009). But it is also the product of Democrats’ fixation on the presidential contest and a misplaced belief that demography is a sufficient driver of election wins. It is not. If 2016 teaches us anything it is that singular message.

There is a huge amount of work for Democrats to do. But a key part of that work is resisting the demand from the supercilious center that Democrats don sackcloth and ashes and repent of their ideals and even of themselves. Demography and ideology are critical. But require a politics and relentless organizing to give them force. That is where Democrats should be focusing their attention.

More:

Some Democrats argue that Bernie Sanders would have done better against Trump than Clinton did. I doubt whether that’s true. Clinton’s campaign was abysmal, but Sanders’ proposals for Medicare for all and free tuition at public colleges, which played well in the Democratic primaries (and I supported him and these proposals enthusiastically), would have hit a tax-and-spend brick wall in the general election. Most voters who are not on the liberal/left wing of the Democratic Party will not support anything that calls for higher taxes, even if the proponents argue that in the long run these proposals will save them money.

In Colorado this November, voters had to decide whether to back a single-payer system for the state, dubbed ColoradoCare, that was a state version of Sanders’ Medicare for all and that he came to Colorado to campaign for. Worried about the tax bill, leading Democrats as well as Republicans opposed the initiative, and it lost by 79 to 21 percent in a liberal state that went for Hillary Clinton. Trump would have hung Sanders out to dry on proposals calling for higher taxes. Vice President Joe Biden might have beaten Trump by winning Pennsylvania and Ohio, but I doubt Sanders would have stood a chance.

This general election wall on taxes is something we will have to contend with too. Both Clinton and Sanders had big ticket items on their policy platforms. Also, a thought from talking to some of those evil millenials in my own family: none of them are too keen on the free college idea because they think it will devalue their diplomas if everyone can go to college. They are recent college graduates. That is an interesting angle that I had not thought about before.

Nate Cohn: “Liberals say Mr. Trump’s victory is proof that the Electoral College is biased against big states and undemocratically marginalizes urban and nonwhite voters. Conservatives say the Electoral College serves as a necessary bulwark against big states, preventing California in particular from imposing ‘something like colonial rule over the rest of the nation,’ as the conservative analyst Michael Barone put it. California sided with Mrs. Clinton by a vote margin of four million, or 30 percentage points.”

“Both sides have a point. But in the end, Mr. Trump won for a simple reason: The Electoral College’s (largely) winner-take-all design gives a lot of weight to battleground states. Mr. Trump had an advantage in the traditional battlegrounds because most are whiter and less educated than the country as a whole.”

“When he campaigned for president, Donald Trump made repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act a signature issue. Polling suggests that such a move would have the biggest impacts on communities that gave Mr. Trump some of his highest levels of support, potentially complicating the politics of a repeal effort,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“More than 20 million Americans now depend on the ACA, also known as Obamacare, for health insurance. Data from Gallup indicate that a lot of those people live in counties that favored Mr. Trump.”

Good. I hope their suffering is tremendous.

NBC News provides a profile of West Virginia and why this once Dukakis state has become so red: “The American political landscape has changed a lot over the past 25 years but there is no more dramatic shift than the one that has pushed this state from deep blue to ruby red. In the 1992 presidential election, Democrat Bill Clinton won West Virginia by a solid 13 percentage points. In November, Republican President-elect Donald Trump captured the state in a walk — winning it by more than 40 percentage points. The forces behind that turnaround are complex. The decline of the coal industry and the changing demographics of the political parties explain part of it. But underneath that are the peaks and valleys of the Appalachian Mountains that make West Virginia what it is: picturesque, resource-rich and remote.”

President Obama told NPR that Democrats suffered stinging electoral losses in last month’s vote because they failed to campaign in hard-hit rural areas.

Said Obama: “You’ve got a situation where they’re not only entire states but also big chunks of states where, if we’re not showing up, if we’re not in there making an argument, then we’re going to lose. And we can lose badly, and that’s what happened in this election.”

He added: “There are clearly failures on our part to give people in rural areas or in exurban areas a sense day-to-day that we’re fighting for them or connected to them. Part of the reason it’s important to show up…is because it then builds trust and it gives you a better sense of how should you talk about issues in a way that feel salient and feel meaningful to people.”

Eric Sasson:

If Democrats still believe that Trump is a threat to democracy—which was the overriding theme of the Hillary Clinton campaign—and that his cabinet picks only confirm this characterization, then they need to act accordingly. A campaign that focuses only on the individual shortcomings of each candidate isn’t going to sway a public that needs an overarching storyline. The Russia hacking story has so much traction precisely because it is that kind of story.

Democrats have an opportunity to package it all together, to claim that the Putin-enabled, popular vote–loser is trying to radically dismantle our government institutions with his outrageous choices. They can rally against the Wall Street friendly millionaires and billionaires Trump has nominated as proof that Trump is not draining the swamp but expanding it. They can point out, far more vociferously, how his picks demonstrate a wholesale disregard of his campaign promises. After all, how does a president who ran on a vow not to touch entitlements nominate Tom Price to lead Health and Human Services? He is a leading proponent of plans to overhaul Medicare and Medicaid.

Progressives shouldn’t hold their breath for Senate Democrats to announce that they’ll be voting against the cabinet picks en masse. But at the very least Democrats should present a clear, convincing vision of the nightmare that the Trump presidency is already shaping up to be.

Jesse Singal on what Democrats can learn from the Tea Party:

[T]he most important thing progressives can do is play united defense against Trump and the GOP rather than get into squabbles about which affirmative policy proposals are best. The tea party, after all, was successful in large part because it understood itself as primarily a defensive group. It was “focused on fighting against every proposal coming out of the new Democratic Administration and Congress,” note the authors. “This focus on defense rather than policy development allowed the movement to avoid fracturing. Tea Party members may have not agreed on the policy reforms, but they could agree that Obama, Democrats, and moderate Republicans had to be stopped.”

Progressives should follow the same tack, the authors argue: “[W]e strongly recommend focusing on defense against the Trump agenda rather than developing an entire alternative policy agenda,” they write. “This is time-intensive, divisive, and, quite frankly, a distraction, since there is zero chance that we as progressives will get to put our agenda into action at the federal level in the next four years.” Given the amount of left-liberal infighting that has raged since the election, it feels like important advice.

Emphasis mine. I feel that has been the number one piece of advice for us as the Opposition moving forward.

Graham Vyse says Dems need to start fighting.

We know, thanks to the Republicans, that [total opposition and obstruction] works. Still, many Democrats have seized on the president-elect’s few policy proposals, like infrastructure investment, that depart slightly from traditional Republican orthodoxy, signaling a willingness to work together. Some, like Indiana Senator Joe Donnelly and West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, are likely suspects—Democrats from Republican and swing states that Trump won, for whom bipartisanship is a political imperative.

“I am committed to working with President Trump and his Administration to find commonsense solutions to pass the Miners Protection Act, solve our opioid crisis, rebuild our infrastructure, reform our broken tax code, keep faith with our veterans and build an economy that works for all Americans,” Manchin said in statement Tuesday.

Yet even some of the party’s left wing and in its leadership have offered Trump overtures, albeit conditional ones. “To the degree that Mr. Trump is serious about pursuing policies that improve the lives of working families in this country, I and other progressives are prepared to work with him,” Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders said in a statement immediately after last month’s election. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and incoming Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer have said similar things. The latter, while critical of Trump’s infrastructure plan, nonetheless has spoken of forging a bipartisan compromise, bidding for a combination of public and private funding.

And Schumer isn’t the only Democrat in Washington pitching collaboration, as was evident Wednesday in a forum titled “Drain the Swamp? Regulatory Reform Under President Trump.”

Will Marshall, president of the centrist Progressive Policy Institute, touted “a moment of opportunity” for bipartisanship, calling for Democrats to get on board with sensible solutions to regulatory reform—measures like a proposed Regulatory Improvement Commission to get rid of old, outdated rules. “This is a ready vehicle for action,” he said. “It’s already got bipartisan support. We have bills in the House and Senate with sponsorship from both parties. If we were to get into that vehicle and drive it forward I think we could get an early win—a bipartisan advance.”

Such thinking misreads how Republicans are going to approach total power.

The Warren, Schumer and Sanders statements have been the most disappointing. Reaching out to the white working class does not require working with Trump, because guess what: Trump is not looking out for the white working class, he is looking to screw them and everyone else.

The Cook Political Report compiles 56 interesting observations about the 2016 presidential election.

Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton carried the popular vote by more than 2.8 million votes, and 2.1 percentage points. But while she narrowly improved on President Obama’s margin in non-swing states (4.1% vs. 4.0%), she vastly underperformed in the 13 swing states that actually mattered: Obama’s 3.6-percent margin in those states morphed into a 1.8-percent Trump lead.

Trump won the White House by winning 76 percent of counties with a Cracker Barrel Old Country Store and 22 percent of counties with a Whole Foods Market. This 54-percent gap is the widest ever recorded. When Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, it was 19 percent; when George W. Bush was elected in 2000, it was 31 percent; and when Barack Obama was elected in 2008, it was 43 percent.

New York Times: “After all the allegations of rampant voter fraud and claims that millions had voted illegally, the people who supervised the general election last month in states around the nation have been adding up how many credible reports of fraud they actually received. The overwhelming consensus: next to none.”

“President-elect Donald Trump has continued employing a private security and intelligence team at his victory rallies, and he is expected to keep at least some members of the team after he becomes president,” Politico reports. “The arrangement represents a major break from tradition. All modern presidents and presidents-elect have entrusted their personal security entirely to the Secret Service, and their event security mostly to local law enforcement, according to presidential security experts and Secret Service sources.”