This Biden Age Conversation Is Really Getting Old

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Tuesday September 12, 2023 · 10:22 AM PDT

2023/09/12 · 10:22

There has been a lot of talk about the Biden age issue lately. Pundits love going on and on about this – particularly erstwhile FiveThirtyEight polling guru Nate Silver, who has spent the last week saying things like “Biden is one McConnell moment away from losing to Trump.” Well, yeah, but so would any 45 year-old running for president. If a candidate has a brain freeze or serious meltdown of any kind, yes – shocker – they could lose their election. All this hand wringing even though Trump is close to the same age, is unfit (in so many ways), and says things that make one question his mental acuity pretty much every day. What people rarely talk about is how it is Biden’s experience and judgment tempered by his long and productive life that have led to him being an incredibly effective president.

I have some perspective on this topic. When a youthful Bill Clinton swept into the White House in 1993, he brought with him a very young and energetic staff (I was a 32 year-old Special Assistant to the President, and there were plenty of people at my level and higher who were just as young or younger), and big margins of control in both the House and Senate, and very, very big plans. We were working 20 hours a day, seven days a week, running from one meeting to the next trying to pass an ambitious agenda. In terms of major legislation in those first two years, we got one big budget bill through, and a NAFTA bill the Republicans and Big Business liked a lot more than working people and Democrats. The Republicans then swept to power for the rest of the Clinton presidency and very few other good pieces of legislation got passed to help working families.

When a youthful Barack Obama swept into power with huge margins in both houses of Congress, he had an ambitious agenda as well. Obama did get the Affordable Care Act passed (which was indeed “a big effing deal”) and the Dodd-Frank bill tightened up some Wall Street regulations in the aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse, but everything else on his agenda fell by the wayside as Republicans crushed Democrats in the 2010 election, controlling Congress for the rest of Obama’s presidency.

Joe Biden entered the White House with big ambitions, too. The moment he entered was even more perilous than the financial crisis Obama faced. Like Obama and Clinton, he had a trifecta, but his Congress was the most closely divided in modern history -- a 50/50 Senate with Vice-President Harris breaking the tie, and a four seat margin in the House.

But because of his age and experience, Joe Biden had far more success in getting things done than any president in modern history. After two years in office, President Biden's legislative and executive action track record engendered a debate among historians: was it the most sweeping and transformative administration in 60 years or in 90?

Joe Biden and the Democratic trifecta got more than 80% of Americans immunized from COVID despite the worst public health disinformation campaign ever. They revived our economy from the depths of the COVID recession faster than any other major country, got Americans much needed money to keep them going in the hardest times, and saved state and local governments from having to make massive cuts in police, fire, and desperately needed public services. They delivered the first gun safety bill in over 30 years. They delivered the biggest infrastructure bill since the interstate highway system was built in the 1950s. They revitalized American manufacturing with Buy in America policies, the CHIPs Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act. They passed legislation to force Big Pharma to negotiate on drug prices and bring the cost of insulin down right away. They made the biggest investment any country has ever made in clean energy.

The four trillion dollars in investments in the American economy and American people will transform the economy for generations to come.

The whole age thing is such a red herring anyway. People age vastly differently from each other. Every family has stories of older family members who can out-think, out-negotiate, and do many more things than the younger folks in the family. We all know plenty of older folks who are still going strong, still tough as nails, still getting great things done deep into their 80s and 90s.

In their 80s, Mick Jagger still has his swagger and Harrison Ford is still making Indiana Jones movies. Norman Lear was still producing popular, award-winning music and TV shows in his late 90s. William Shatner has gone into space. And Nancy Pelosi in her late 70s and early 80s ran rings around Donald Trump, led her party to a 40 seat pick-up in the House in 2018, and passed the biggest agenda any Speaker has passed in at least 60 years with only a tiny margin of control.

I’m weary to the bone from hearing people talk about how he’s too old. Yeah, he’s 80. He walks a little more slowly than he used to, he’s got gray hair and wrinkles. And in terms of the great things he got done, he kicked the ass of every other president in modern times.

Path to a Democratic Victory in 2022

Michael Lux

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Thursday July 28, 2022 · 5:40 AM PDT

2022/07/28 · 05:40

Path to a Democratic Victory in 2022

The DC chattering class convinced themselves a remarkably long time ago that the Democrats were doomed, doomed, doomed in the 2022 elections. The pundits happily ignore any actual facts contradicting this narrative in their rush to judgment.

In this memo, we intend to offer a contradictory view, supported by real data.

The Pundits Are Usually Wrong

The first thing to note is that the DC purveyors of conventional wisdom, the pundits and prognosticators, are usually wrong. They were wrong in July 1992 when they said Bill Clinton could never win. They were wrong on election morning 1998 when they said the Democrats would lose 20-30 seats in the House, and we picked up four that night. They were wrong when they accepted Karl Rove’s pronouncements about a “permanent Republican majority” in 2005, and then we swept to control both houses of Congress the next year. They were wrong when they said Hillary Clinton could not be beaten in the Democratic primary in 2008, and when they said there was no chance a Black man with the name of Barack Hussein Obama could ever win the presidency. They were wrong when they said Hillary would easily beat Trump in 2016.

The DC pundits just don’t get what is really going on in America. But let’s discuss the reasons they give for their certainty of Democratic losses this year.

History. The first is history, that a president’s party usually loses big in the midterms. The reliance on this historical likelihood is problematic because too much weight is given to the past, ignoring the unusual times we are currently living in… an attempted coup by Donald Trump, the coverup by his enablers, the stripping of reproductive rights from women by an increasingly radicalized Supreme Court, the escalation of gun violence, an ongoing pandemic that was exacerbated by the rule of the GOP, … you get the point.

The party of the sitting president winning the midterms is unusual, but certainly not impossible. It’s happened four times since 1934, close to 20% of the midterms since, and twice since 1998, a third of the midterms since that year. The party in power tends to do better in the midterms when it is an unusual year historically, when the opposition party has overreached and been discredited, and when there has been a historically significant event threatening our democracy. Check, check, and check.

The other thing to note: since 2016, every election has been counter to long term historical trends. 2016 was the election of Trump, the kind of candidate who would have never won in previous cycles, and a candidate who lost the popular vote by a bigger margin than any Electoral College winner ever. 2018 had the highest turnout surge in history: the 13.6% surge above the historical average was almost twice as high as the previous highest surge in history (which, by the way, was in that 1934 election where Democrats gained seats in the midterm.) And 2020 saw the first president lose re-election since 1992, another record-breaking turnout by a huge margin.

Biden’s approval rating. The second thing the pundits say spells doom and gloom for the Democrats is Joe Biden’s approval rating, which is stuck in the high 30s. Historically, the sitting president’s approval rating tracks closely with how that president’s party does in the midterms.

But again, we live in ahistorical times. Neither major party and very few politicians are popular right now. Voters are discouraged with, and cynical about, both parties and most politicians. Elections are a choice between candidates on a ballot, not an up or down vote on whether you like someone.

Think about the recent presidential election in France. On Election Day and in the lead-up, Macron’s approval rating was as bad as Biden’s, ranging from 37% to 41% in the polls -- yet he beat Le Pen 59-41. Why? Because the large majority of voters knew she was a right-wing lunatic.

Here’s another thing to look at: most of the loss in Biden’s approval number has come from Democrats, Democratic-leaning Independents, and demographic groups that have historically leaned Democratic. There is no evidence to suggest that those voters are going to vote Republican. They may not vote if they feel like our party has let them down, but we need to be laser focused on turning discouraged Democrats out to vote. It is also clear that recent events are motivating them: Democrats have been trailing Republicans in enthusiasm for most of this election cycle, but the latest polling now shows Democrats with a three-point lead in thinking that voting in 2022 is very important (92-89).

Inflation. Finally, pundits note that inflation is the number one issue for voters, and that will doom the Democrats. They are right about the first part of that sentence, but wrong about the second.

In polling and focus groups, it is clear that voters are very upset about inflation and that the issue is the number one thing about which they are thinking. But their first instinct is not to blame Biden: they understand that the supply chain problems caused by Covid and the war in Ukraine are major causes of the problem. They also blame big businesses that are profiteering and price gouging, and they believe that the Democrats are more likely to do something about it than Republicans.

Democrats must focus on the price gouging inflicted by oil companies, food companies, and prescription drug companies; and that Republicans will do nothing to stop it .

The polling is far more competitive than the narrative saying the Democrats will get swamped.

As we know well, polling is not the end all and be all: polls are wrong quite a bit these days. But they are one source of information, and can at least tell us whether we are in the hunt.

In the four Senate races with vulnerable Democratic incumbents, according to the latest public polls, we are currently ahead in all four:

In AZ, Kelly is ahead 48-39 over the leading Republican candidate
In GA, Warnock is ahead 48-44 over Walker
In NH, Hassan is up 49-40 over Bolduc
In NV, Cortez Masto is up 46-43 over Laxalt

In the Senate races for open seats or those held by Republicans, we are also ahead or very competitive:

In PA, Fetterman is up 50-44 against Dr. Oz
In WI, the Democratic frontrunner is ahead 46-44 over Ron Johnson
In OH, Ryan is up 46-36 against JD Vance
In NC, Budd is ahead of the Democratic candidate Beasley only 44-40
In FL, Demings was behind 50-44 in a poll taken before the Roe decision
In MO, the leading Democratic contender, Lucas Kunce, is in a statistical dead heat with the leading Republican, Eric Greitens 45-44, with a long time Republican who just announced he is running as an Independent.
In Iowa, the 300-year-old Chuck Grassley (okay, only 88) is ahead only 49-44

On the generic ballot test for House races, where we had been averaging three points behind, since Roe those numbers have been moving in our direction, we are now in a statistical dead heat. Some polls, such as this Morning Consult poll have Democrats with a big lead in the Congressional number.

In the meantime, since May, the generic rating for the Republican Party as a whole has dropped 10 points, and is now 39-56, with Independents dropping even more dramatically, a -24 shift in the same time period. The generic rating for the Democrats has stayed more steady and is currently at -8 (it was -5 in May).

This data is taken from a poll commissioned by the Research Collaborative and ASO Communications, Lake Research Partners conducted a nationwide survey of 800 likely 2022 general election voters from July 13-17.

The Democratic Agenda versus the MAGA Republican Agenda

The Republican agenda is stunningly extreme and highly unpopular. Think about what Republican leaders are saying what they want to do:

Pass a national law banning abortion with no exceptions
Give more tax cuts to millionaires, billionaires, and wealthy corporations
Slash regulations on Wall Street, Big Oil, and the Big Food companies
Sunset all government agencies and programs including Social Security and Medicare
Raise taxes on 100 million low and moderate income people
Stop all action to combat climate change
Make it more difficult to vote
Make it easier to buy assault rifles
Ban contraception
Ban books

All of these proposals are opposed by at least 60% of the American people, many of them by a lot more.

The Democratic agenda is a whole lot more popular:

Guarantee the right to abortion, birth control, and to marry whomever you love
Ban military style assault rifles
Lower the prices of prescription drugs, health care, and child care
Make wealthy corporations and individuals pay their fair share in taxes
Crack down on corporate price gouging
Bring jobs home by buying American and boosting American manufacturing
Make it easier for workers to join and form unions
Raise the minimum wage

All of those policy ideas have over 60% support, some of them much more.

So if we keep reminding voters of the unpopular things Republicans want to do, while reminding them of the popular things we will do if Democrats keep control of the House and add to our majority in the Senate, we can win this election.

Keep in mind this fundamental dynamic: voters hate it when you take away things they like. The Republicans on the Supreme Court have taken the right to abortion; Republicans in Congress, if they were in control, are planning to take away many more things voters love. The contrast in agendas is a powerful factor. Democrats want to save the right to abortion and birth control; they will fight to stop any attempts to sunset Social Security and Medicare.

The Outrageous Awfulness of Republican Candidates

The large majority of the people winning Republican nominations in Senate, governor, and House races love Donald Trump and have truly extreme agendas, but it’s not just that: a lot of them are truly awful candidates.

Don’t take it from me; read this quote from a leading Republican strategist quoted by the Washington Post: “there are massive problems on the candidate front.”

Here’s just a small sample:

GA Senate candidate Herschel Walker lied about serving in law enforcement, and lied to his own staff as well as the public about the children he fathered. His answers to questions on a wide range of issues have been comically incoherent.
WI incumbent Senator Ron Johnson has a long list of outrageous rightwing quotes, and only had a 37% approval rating even before recent evidence that he was helping further the president’s coup attempt.
PA governor candidate Doug Mastriano is a Christian Nationalist who brags about being at the Capitol riot on January 6, and says he will use the power of the governor’s office to overturn any presidential election results he doesn’t like. Meanwhile, celebrity Senate candidate Dr. Oz had to move in with his mother-in-law because he does not live in PA, and after a brutal primary has been running a terrible campaign.
Ohio Senate candidate JD Vance is the worst possible combination of a Bain Capital style hedge fund millionaire and Trumpian stooge enthusiastically supported by Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz. He has called abortion the equivalent of slavery.

These are only a few examples, there are so many more running all over the country in races all over the ballot. Democrats should be able to make up all kinds of ground running against these jokers.

The January 6 Committee Dynamic

The January 6 hearings have been watched by far more people than anyone initially predicted: 86% have heard a lot or some about the hearings, an extraordinary number for congressional hearings. Independent and surge voters are among the groups that are paying extra attention.

20% of Republicans, along with a vast majority of Democrats and Independents, now believe the January 6 riot was a criminal conspiracy, and that Trump shares a big part of the blame. More and more voters believe that Republicans who supported or enabled Trump should not win reelection. 70 percent agree, 60 percent strongly that they would not vote for anyone who supported or encouraged the attack on our country on Jan 6, including 97 percent of Democrats, 73 percent of Independents, and 39 percent of Republicans -- which is significant given the number of Republican candidates who have bragged about being at the insurrectionor aligned themselves closely with Trump and the Big Lie. (All poll numbers come from polling done by Celinda Lake.)

Democrats’ messaging still needs to make the link between Republican extremism on Jan 6 and their extremism on the issues, but there is no doubt that the hearings are moving voters more in our direction, and have opened up space for us to make these arguments in a compelling way.

What Democrats Need To Do To Win the 2022 Elections

The number one thing is to stop listening to the DC chattering class and get focused on organizing and turning out the vote.

Let’s do a quick review:

The Republican Party approval rating has dropped 10 points since May, 24 among Independents.
The generic Democratic horserace number has been moving in the right direction ever since the Roe decision, and is now in a dead heat.
The Democratic enthusiasm-for-voting number now exceeds the Republican number.
All four incumbent Democratic senators lead in their races, and three of our Senate challenger candidates are ahead, while four others are in or close to a statistical dead heat.
The Republican issue agenda is horribly unpopular, while ours is highly popular.
A great many of the Republican candidates running this year are extremist goofballs.
On the Republicans’ strongest issue, inflation, we have a strong, credible counter message.

So why exactly are we hanging our head and bemoaning our chances? Let’s get over that bullshit. Folks, Democrats are in a position to win this election. Here’s what we need to do:

Always remind voters of the choice they have in this election: the extremist Republican MAGA agenda vs the common sense Democratic agenda. This election between two starkly different visions for America.
Economic populism should be at the center of our message. Working-class voters, both in the Democratic base and among swing voters, have a strong dislike for the wealthy corporations, CEOs, and individuals that don’t pay what they owe in taxes; that use inflation as an excuse to jack up prices and make huge profits; that ship jobs overseas and screw workers out of their pensions; that bust unions and force small businesses to close down. They know that Republicans are in the pocket of wealthy corporations and the 1%, and they want Democrats to fight for them. A new Democracy Corps poll https://democracycorps.com/national-surveys/battling-to-a-democratic-win-in-2022/ shows that if our message on inflation is a strong populist one, we have the potential to win on the issue and build a solid lead in the congressional vote.
Keep reminding voters of the lengths Trump and his Republican allies went to, and are going to, in order to illegally and violently stay in power.
GOTFV. Get Out The Fricking Vote. There are more Democrats and Democratic leaning Independent voters than there are Republicans and Republican leaners. We win when we get out our vote, especially in a midterm. Period. As soon as you are done reading this memo, go make some damn calls.

Democrats, we can win. There are challenges to overcome, choppy seas to navigate, but there is no doubt this victory is within reach. Fight the good fight, and we will prevail.

Something Bubbling in the Heartland

Michael Lux

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Tuesday July 12, 2022 · 1:49 PM PDT

2022/07/12 · 13:49

Beautiful polish meadow with fence in late spring

The conventional wisdom of the DC pundits in 2022 is that the Democrats are doomed, and that the biggest reason for their impending downfall is working-class voters outside of urban America. But the DC pundits are almost always wrong, especially when they are pontificating about working-class voters who don’t live in the coastal metro areas that pundits almost never leave. I would suggest to you that it is too early to tell, and that in fact something really interesting is bubbling in the heartland of America.

I have been spending much of the last year talking with activists and voters in Pennsylvania outside of the Philly metro area, and the Midwestern states that some people disparagingly refer to as the Rust Belt. I am the board chair of American Family Voices, a nonprofit where we launched the “Factory Towns Project.” With Lake Research Partners and TargetSmart, we have commissioned polling, focus groups, and in-depth analysis of voter files, census tracts, economic, and health care data of the working-class voters in small and midsize counties in this region. In addition, part of our project is conducting one-on-one and small group discussions with hundreds of activists and organizers.

What we have discovered might surprise all those Beltway purveyors of conventional wisdom. Yes, there are tough challenges for Democrats in these counties, but it is not the hopeless landscape that many people assume. The worst approval ratings in our polling were not for Democratic politicians or the party, they were for wealthy corporations and corporate CEOs. Voters are upset about inflation, but more likely to blame price gouging monopolies than Joe Biden. A messaging strategy that combines economic populism with a focus on kitchen table economic solutions, and an organizing strategy that builds local communities, can help bring back these voters -- both swing and base voters who have been less inclined to go to the polls lately.

All of that, plus the simple idea of making sure Democrats pay enough attention to these kinds of voters and counties, is the path to winning back working-class voters who live outside of big cities.

The even better news is that Democrats are beginning to use this kind of approach in a lot of places in the region right now, and it seems like it has the potential to pay off. Look at what is going on in the states:

In the local elections held in Wisconsin in April, despite a widely predicted “red wave” in a low turnout election, which traditionally favors Republicans, Democrats won 53% of the 276 contested local elections on the ballot, holding their own in the purple areas in the state. Meanwhile, Wisconsin Governor Evers is leading both Republican candidates fighting it out in the primary, one of them by four and the other by seven percentage points. Ron Johnson -- who has a trail of controversies and damaging quotes a mile-long -- trails three of the four Democrats running in the primary for the Senate seat.
In Pennsylvania, Republicans are fleeing their far-right extremist gubernatorial nominee as fast as they can, while Democratic Senate nominee John Fetterman is running a great populist campaign, and currently sports a 9-point lead in the public polling.
In Ohio, where Republicans presided over what the Columbus Dispatch called the biggest scandal in the country, the Republican governor is sitting at only 45% in the polls in spite of having universal name ID after a 46-year political career in the state. Meanwhile, the latest public poll has Tim Ryan leading by 44-41 for the open Senate seat, and Democrats had a great year in mayoral races there last year.
In Iowa, Democratic primary voters surprised the DC Democratic establishment by rejecting former Congresswoman Abby Finkenauer, who had much higher name recognition and a big fundraising start, and picking former Navy Admiral Mike Franken 55-40. Franken’s background and strong presence on the stump is making a big impression on Iowa voters. Given that only 27% of voters wanted 88-year-old Chuck Grassley to run again in an earlier poll, this could be a sleeper race.
In Missouri, Republicans look likely to nominate Eric Greitens, the former governor forced to resign by the Republican legislature over multiple scandals. Democratic candidate Lucas Kunce, a 13-year Marine veteran who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan and has a powerfully populist message, is leading in the Democratic primary. There is polling showing him essentially tied with Greitens right now. In the meantime, an added twist to the race is that a heavyweight Republican lawyer who was a clerk for Clarence Thomas, is entering the race as an Independent, saying he can’t stand the idea of Greitens becoming a senator. So Republicans will be splitting their votes.
In Nebraska, there was a special election a couple of weeks back that was a huge surprise in historically Republican CD 1. In a special election ignored by the DCCC and most Democratically aligned groups, where the Republican heavily outspent the Democratic candidate, Democratic candidate Patty Pansing Brooks lost only 53-47. While this district still leans Republican, it actually got four percentage points more Democratic due to redistricting, and the district includes Lincoln, where the University of Nebraska is located and where Brooks is very strong. A big turnout of young people in the district could put Brooks in the winner’s seat.

The other point I want to make about the region as a whole is that Democrats are leaning into the Factory Towns strategy. John Fetterman, Tim Ryan, Nan Whaley, Mike Franken, and Lucas Kunce are all from medium-sized factory towns, and they are all running strong economically populist campaigns against far rightwing candidates who have embraced Trump and all his bullshit.

The working-class industrial heartland -- the Midwest plus Pennsylvania -- has historically been the biggest battleground region in the country. It moved strongly toward Reagan in the 1980s, toward Clinton in the 1990s, to Obama in 2008 and 2012, and then veered toward Trump in 2016. There is something bubbling out there this year that is going to surprise a lot of people.

Abortion is a Great Issue for Democrats, as Long as It’s Not the Only Issue

Michael Lux

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Tuesday December 07, 2021 · 1:28 PM PST

2021/12/07 · 13:28

Wikimedia: Jill and Joe Biden. Credit: Gage Skidmore.

With the awful but unsurprising news this week that the Supreme Court is likely to overturn Roe, we are faced with one of those situations that often happens in politics, where some really bad news spurs activists, voters, and donors to engage in more political activity in order to push back. Democratic strategists and candidates are already preparing to use the abortion issue a lot in their campaigns, which is a good thing: access to safe and legal abortions is both a great issue to appeal to women swing voters in the suburbs, and a great issue to motivate more voter turnout among young and unmarried women voters who tend to be heavily Democratic. All those votes will be desperately needed if we are to compete in the 2022 elections.

As good an issue as abortion is for Democrats, though, we need to avoid the temptation of talking mostly or only about abortion. The McAuliffe campaign made this mistake, and it cost him badly: besides tying Youngkin to Trump, the main issue in its advertising was abortion.

Democratic campaigns need to have a broader narrative about the issues that matter in people’s everyday lives. Abortion is one of those issues for many women voters: even if you’ve never had an abortion, the idea that politicians and judges might take that right away from you or tell you that they have control over your most personal medical decisions, is weighted with all kinds of symbolic and substantive dismay.

But it can’t be the only thing voters hear from Democrats. Voters want to know who politicians and political parties are, what they stand for, what they are going to do to help people in their daily lives. Voters care about the here and now, about kitchen table issues that hit their pocketbooks and add to their quality of life. The problem with only talking about any one issue is that voters care about a lot of things, and they don’t like politicians who are one dimensional. They care urgently about whether they can find good jobs with a decent wage; whether they can afford health care, child care, groceries, and gas; whether they can dream of sending their kid to college; and whether they can retire with dignity. Those core economic issues are the highest priority for the large majority of voters, especially including both Democratic base voters and working-class swing voters.

Way too often, though, people don’t hear Democrats talking about the kitchen table economic issues that impact on people’s lives every day. There are a variety of reasons as to why, it’s a mix of different things with different candidates. Sometimes it is because other issues are the bright shiny object that attract more attention, social media notice, and online donors. Sometimes it’s because big donors you are trying to raise money from don’t want you to talk about economic issues that might affect their corporate bottom lines. Sometimes it is because their consultants think attacking Trump or the local Republican candidate is better than talking about plain vanilla issues like jobs and health care that are loved by most voters.

Beyond the issues they talk about in their ads, mail, social media, and stump speeches, Democratic candidates desperately need to tell a better story about who they are, why they are Democrats, what their values are, and who they are fighting for -- hopefully that is the voters in their district, but with some campaigns it’s hard to tell. I’m not really talking here about the classic candidate biographical ads that most campaigns open their TV ad campaign with, although if they are good ads they will contribute to telling that story. Candidates need to weave their personal story into the broader narrative of their entire campaign. That story shouldn’t be purely personal: it needs to tell a bigger story about what is going on in America right now, and what is at stake in the election. In this moment of our country’s political history, all political races have become more and more nationalized, and that is not going to change because it’s a non-presidential cycle. So voters need to know not only about the candidate running in their district or state, they need to know how this election relates to what is happening in our country right now.

We are in a different kind of historical moment right now. Tip O’Neill used to say that all politics is local, and in his era it was true. But with the decline in local news, the spread of nationalized online messaging, and the hardening of partisan polarization, Democratic candidates can’t just run as a good local person who cares about one or two big issues. They have to make the case for why they are Democrats. And while it’s great to emphasize your common sense and political independence when running in more reddish states or districts, I would argue that it is especially important in those places to tell people why you are a Democrat in a broader way than just focusing on a single issue or on your personal bio.

Here is an example of the heart of the stump speech I would give:

The stakes in this election are higher than most people realize. There are two paths we might go down, and they couldn’t be more different.

The reason I’m a Democrat running for office this year, is that Democrats want to get things done for working families on the issues that most impact their lives: their jobs; their wages; the prices they have to pay for essentials like health care, housing, and child care; and whether we are protecting our country by following the science on Covid. That’s why Democrats have worked hard to pass legislation cutting prescription drug prices and other health care costs; why they got us a $1400 Covid relief check and got our local governments more money for public safety and education at the height of the pandemic; why they are creating millions of new jobs in solar and wind power; why they made the biggest investment ever in rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges; and why they gave us the Child Tax Credit, universal Pre-K, and a reduction in child care costs. All of this paid for by taxes on the wealthiest Americans.

That is the path I want to keep going down. Down the other path, most Republicans voted no on everything I just talked about -- the only one any of them supported was roads and bridges, and even there most of them voted no. Republicans instead have have cheered for the rioters that stormed our sacred Capitol refused to discipline their members who called for assassinating Democratic members of Congress; tried to make it harder to vote and impossible for women to get abortions; and have opposed making millionaires and billionaires pay their fair share in taxes.

Down one path we can have a better country where working families have economic security and a better quality of life, where scientists are listened to, and where most people have the freedom to build good lives for themselves and their families. Down the other path, we will have more chaos and our freedoms will be shut down. Join me and the Democrats this year.

Democrats should definitely talk about abortion in 2022: it will help us a lot to do so. But we can’t convince people to vote for us based on only one issue: we need to have a narrative that tells more about the fundamental choice this country is going to make next year and in 2024.

Democrats Need to Wake Up. They Don’t Need to Panic.

Michael Lux

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Friday November 05, 2021 · 12:13 PM PDT

2021/11/05 · 12:13

WIKIPresident_Joe_Biden_gives_a_speech_on_Covid_relief.jpeg — Wikimedia, The White House: President Joe Biden gives a speech on Covid relief.

Oh, yeah, that election thing was sobering. A big wake-up call. And every other cliche you want to use after you get stung in an election. But panic and pessimism are the opposite of where we should be going. Democrats are fully capable of winning more seats in the House, Senate, and statehouses across the country. They just have to deliver some good things for America’s working class, and not fall into the same old conventional wisdom that keeps us from winning elections.

I know. I’ve been in the middle of some surprising wins in big fights before.

In 1998, Democrats seemed destined for major losses. We went into the cycle knowing that no president’s party had gained seats in the sixth year of his presidency since 1822 -- a year where there was no opposition party to James Monroe actually in existence, so I’m even sure that time counts. To add to those daunting odds, the Lewinsky scandal broke early in 1998 and dominated the news all through that year.

All the pundits, and our own party professionals, were predicting losses of 25-30 seats in the House and 4-6 in the Senate. The strategy coming from the party committees was to try and protect vulnerable members against the coming onslaught, and to avoid at all costs talking about Clinton and the Republican push for impeachment, which the GOP talked about incessantly. But there was a coalition of groups led by People For the American Way (and joined by the brilliant people who founded MoveOn.org, Wes Boyd and Joan Blades) that pushed back and created a campaign with a message that directly took on the Republican impeachment, that said it was time to move on and do something about the real issues that mattered in working families’ lives. In the end, Democrats picked up five seats in the House and didn’t lose any in the Senate. And we would have won the house back if the party committees had listened to us on this strategy.

Fast forward a few years. After Bush won the 2004 election, Karl Rove was confidently predicting a “permanent Republican majority,” and many Democrats were equally pessimistic. I remember an analysis from a widely respected Democratic data analyst that said we had almost no chance of winning either the House until redistricting after 2010, or the electoral college anytime in the near future. Meanwhile, I had written a paper that suggested we had a good chance to win the House back in 2006, and I was called by a top person at the DCCC who was mad that I was unrealistically getting people’s hopes up. But in spite of this pessimism, AFSCME and a group of progressive donors worked with us to build a major campaign to expand the House map and build a strong Democratic narrative. We proved the doubters wrong and won both the House and the Senate back.

On the other side of the docket, Republicans unfortunately also defied the historical patterns to gain seats (and control of the Senate) in the first midterm of the Bush presidency. People were scared about 9-11 and terrorism, and thought Bush would be able to protect us. Just to note: historical norms do not always play out- that was two midterms in a row where they didn’t.

So, yeah, midterms are historically tough for a president’s party, but the odds are defied sometimes, too, especially when you live in a-historical times. The Democrats gained seats in the 1934 midterms during FDR’s presidency because he was moving the country out of the worst economic crisis in our history. Democrats picked up seats in JFK’s midterms because they appreciated JFK’s calm, steady leadership in an international crisis (the Cuban missile crisis), and because the economy was strong and growing. In 1998, voters appreciated Clinton’s stewardship of the economy, and thought the Republicans were over-reaching with all the impeachment talk.

If Covid and the economy are moving in the right direction, and voters are seeing good things in their lives due to Democratic policymaking, we can win the 2022 elections. We have to have a message and some tangible accomplishments that focus on getting the working-class voters -- the ones in our base and the ones who are swing voters -- what they need. We need to actually talk about things like creating new jobs, lowering health care and child care costs, and making sure they have the money they need to raise their children. And we need to excite voters everywhere, not just in big cities and suburbs.

No Democrat should be consoling themselves about the Virginia and New Jersey elections with lines like “well, the president’s party usually loses the elections.” I don’t care. We live in a-historical times, with an opposition party that has embraced the idea of overturning our democracy, and we need to beat the historical odds. I know we can do it, because we’ve done it before. So don’t lose heart, Democrats. Just get your shit together and pass some legislation we can all go campaign on.

The Powell Memo to the Biden Administration

Michael Lux

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Wednesday October 20, 2021 · 12:13 PM PDT

2021/10/20 · 12:13

President Donald Trump nominates Jerome Powell to chair the Federal Reserve in November 2017

Joe Biden’s presidency is building its foundation upon the revitalization of America’s working and middle classes, and the reversal of the growing power of the wealthy and big business. The fate of the Biden administration, the Democratic Party itself, and I daresay America -- in a time when democracy is under attack -- hinges on this.

Biden’s Build Back Better agenda taxes millionaires, billionaires, and big business in order to make major investments in low and middle-income families. His bipartisan infrastructure plan focuses on rebuilding America’s roads, bridges, railroads, schools, and water systems. He has become the most vocal and aggressive advocate for the labor movement an American president has been since FDR. And his set of appointees in economic and regulatory policy have been the toughest on Wall Street, Big Tech, and monopolistic big business in at least three generations.

The president has made a big bet: that he and the Democratic Party can reverse the decline in fortunes for so many families by working for them instead of Wall Street and Big Business. The passing of the president’s budget and economic plan is the single most important thing that needs to happen for that bet to pay off.

Second in importance to winning that legislative fight, though, is his next major appointment: the Federal Reserve Chair. The Fed Chair is the second most powerful job in the American economic system, second only to the presidency itself. The Fed Chair not only is the prime mover on questions of interest rates and how hard to push for full employment, but is the most powerful regulator of the financial industry, which shapes the rest of our economy.

I was in the Clinton White House when President Clinton had to decide whether to reappoint Alan Greenspan as Fed Chair. I remember well the debate inside the White House in those days. Greenspan had been appointed initially by Reagan, and he was a follower of Ayn Rand’s hyper-libertarian, pro-Wall Street philosophy, but he had been helpful to us getting our big 1993 budget package passed. The Clinton officials close to Wall Street loved working with him, so Clinton reappointed him. That decision, along with the financial industry deregulation bill passed in 1999, left President Clinton’s legacy with much of the blame for the financial collapse in 2008.

Joe Biden has already made clear he wants a different kind of legacy.

To be fair, Powell is not a hard right libertarian the way Greenspan was. He has some pluses in his favor, especially for standing up to Trump’s pressure on some key issues. He’s not panicking about the short-term inflation spike, though his record suggests he’ll tighten monetary policy faster than necessary (more on that below). But Powell is every bit the pro-Wall Street deregulator that Greenspan was, which goes in the exact opposite direction that the Biden administration has shown they want to go with their other appointees.

There is no reason to think Powell won’t turn on a dime on other policies once reappointed: Brad DeLong, an economist who was for a long time sympathetic to Wall Street-y Democrats, has warned forcefully that Republicans like Powell will do exactly that, and that Biden should appoint Lael Brainard instead. DeLong noted:

Without Trump in office, and without the fear that tight money will erode vote margins in the short run, Republicans are about to unite overwhelmingly behind the talking point that monetary policy needs to be substantially tightened immediately. Powell, being a Republican worthy, will listen and toe this line.

Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader, is already out in front here with his inflation scaremongering. This will continue through November 2022 at least. If McCarthy is speaker of the House by 2023, it will only fortify Republican determination to push for monetary policy that would squeeze the Biden economy. Under these circumstances, would a newly reappointed Powell sway with the wind, or hedge his bets?

Simon Johnson, a former IMF chief economist and MIT professor, argues that Powell’s roots as a dove aren’t exactly deep. Back when he was on the Fed board just after the Great Recession, Powell belonged to the flock of hawks that wanted to start tightening policy, which then-chair Ben Bernanke managed to forestall.

Powell’s attitude toward the intersection between Fed policy and racial justice is also a damning reveal about how willing he is to tighten monetary policy. In the summer of 2020, with the nation having a more honest conversation about structural racism in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, Powell gave a statement in St. Louis that seemed to move the Fed toward a commitment to help address racial inequality, one that would be central to any easy-money policy under the Fed.

Historically, the Black unemployment rate has consistently been double the white unemployment rate. When the Fed makes decisions based on aggregate metrics of unemployment, it risks raising interest rates before marginalized communities have fully recovered. The Fed needs to be open to innovative ideas, including a particular focus on the Black unemployment rate, for commitments to easy money to be credible.

Powell’s 2020 statement now looks like a head fake. In a recent interview, Powell invoked the “famously broad and blunt tools” notion – the idea that all the Fed has is interest rates, which is wrong – to beg off responsibility for addressing racial disparities. That line could have come from Alan Greenspan himself 25 years ago.

Additionally, Powell has presided over a growing scandal at the Fed involving high ranking officials, including himself, making stock trades that sure look like they violate the spirit of the Fed’s stated goal of avoiding “the appearance of impropriety.” Add to that the fact that he’s a multi-millionaire former private equity executive with The Carlyle Group (a symbol of Wall Street and Washington collusion if there ever was one), and it will all make for a very messy confirmation fight.

One very bad idea floating around has been to put a good regulator at the Fed as vice-chair for supervision and give Powell another term. But this would not solve the fundamental dynamics at play. First, Powell, the chair, presided over and voted for the deregulation that the now-ex vice-chair of supervision, Randall Quarles, spearheaded. Second, there is a Republican majority on the Federal Reserve Board, and one of them is Quarles, who gets to stay because his term as Fed governor is not up, even though his time as vice-chair is. If Powell is there, Quarles can lock arms with him to prevent a repair of the damage of the Trump years.

In 2022 and 2024, the Democratic Party will hopefully be able to run on having creating millions of good paying jobs, increasing wages, and stopping Big Business from screwing over working families.The Fed Chair has way too much power over the economy to risk reappointing a conservative like Jerome Powell, with a long history of deregulating Wall Street. Memo to the Biden administration: Powell threatens the success and viability of your agenda.

Carpe Diemocrats

Michael Lux

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Friday February 19, 2021 · 10:05 AM PST

2021/02/19 · 10:05

ScreenShot2021-02-19at10.52.23AM.png — Source: Instagram, Joe Biden.

So far so good. President Biden has signed about 50 executive orders overturning awful things Trump did, and has put in place new policies to address the COVID crisis, protect workers and the environment, and expand health care coverage. The impeachment managers brilliantly won in the court of public opinion, as Mitch McConnell’s bizarro speech after his vote to acquit proved. The party so far remains unified on getting a big COVID/economic relief bill passed, and the Biden administration and progressive movement are working very constructively together.

I want to push back on the news reports that all that has been done so far is “the easy part.” That notion is in every news story about the Democrats’ early success and unity. But there is nothing easy or automatic about steady progress or party unity. Every Executive Order has to be painstakingly thought through, researched, and written. Every decision in the impeachment trial had to be carefully weighed, knowing full well that every decision would be criticized, whether by some in the party, the base, or the press. With the paper thin margins the Democrats have, almost every Democrat in the House, and every Democrat in the Senate, has to be consulted, cajoled, and brought on board. With progressives demanding more and party centrists demanding caution, keeping everyone together is enormously taxing work.

Having been a part of the Clinton transition and White House, and the Obama transition, I can tell you for sure that team Biden’s early days are going so much better than the last two Democratic presidencies. Our early days in the Clinton White House were very rocky, with Georgia Senator Sam Nunn and the Republicans tormenting us as we made a mess of the gays-in-the-military issue, multiple top appointments not being confirmed for one reason or another, and our early attempt at a (very small) stimulus being easily stopped by the Republicans. In the Obama White House, the appointments of Rahm Emanuel as chief of staff and Larry Summers as the head of the National Economic Council signaled right away that the administration wouldn't be very interested in working constructively with the progressive movement. And the early decisions to allow Wall Street execs to keep their bonuses after crashing the economy and go easy on Wall Street in general outraged pretty much everyone except Wall Street execs.

By contrast, the early days of the Biden administration have been steady, solid, and strategic. They have rolled out their cabinet and sub-cabinet nominations, along with their White House staff, with only a couple of bumps in the road. As I mentioned above, they have executed a well run executive order process, getting a remarkable amount of things done quickly and effectively; and they have worked with House and Senate leadership to, so far, keep progressive and more conservative Democrats on board with their ambitious relief package.

All this has taken a lot of work and been more difficult behind the scenes than they are getting credit for. But as challenging as things have been to date, yes, it will keep getting harder. How do we keep this sense of Democratic unity in the all-important mission of getting important things done for regular people going?

Here are my guide posts:

1. Understand that Democrats hang together or we hang separately. That old line of Ben Franklin’s at the time the Declaration of Independence was signed was not meant as a joke or clever word play: it was quite literally true and deadly serious. Unfortunately, this moment in history finds us in a similar moment, as that gallows the insurrectionists were building at the Capitol are a deadly sign that the threat is real. We Democrats need to deliver real things for real people over the next two years, or we are going to lose control of the government to a political party which just overwhelmingly rejected the idea that a president who encouraged a coup should not be punished for it.

We need to work together to get anything done, and we need to get substantial things done in order to win in 2022. With the margins we have now, there is literally no choice in the matter. We all know that opportunities for compromise with the Republicans will be few and far between, but compromise between Democrats is mandatory if we want to get anything done. So for my progressive comrades, we need to get everything we can on every bill we can, and then compromise and move on to the next chance. If we can convince the last few swing votes on at least reforming the filibuster, that should work out reasonably well for us, and even if not, there should be a lot we can get into the second reconciliation bill as well as more executive action.

2. Substance over symbolism. Progressives and Democrats need to focus on getting substantial things done to help people in their daily lives. It was critically important to go through the impeachment trial to lay out the case to the American people over how linked to the right-wing mob that Trump really was, but dragging it out with witnesses would have been purely symbolic, and would have slowed down the desperately needed COVID and economic relief we need to get passed.

There will be other moments where we need to choose between moments of symbolism, and seizing the day to get really critical policies passed. I am heavily in favor of getting real stuff accomplished, and the more the better, the sooner the better. Symbolism is important sometimes for sure, especially when you don’t have governing power -- but when you do, you have to deliver on real stuff that matters and will be noticed.

3. Keep advocating, but don’t be so focused on what you are not getting that you don’t celebrate what you are getting. We haven’t yet won passage of the $1.9 trillion COVID and economic relief package, and we have to stay focused on getting that done because the stakes are so high. But right now we are on track to win it, and it would be a phenomenal achievement. The scope of this package is bold and ambitious, and the things in the relief bill are policy items the progressive movement has been pushing for ever since COVID hit, including unemployment insurance extension, emergency paid family leave, rental assistance, funding for schools to safely reopen, money for COVID testing and vaccine distribution, and direct payments to individuals.

But like all legislation that needs 50 senators and 218 House members to pass, this bill will be far from perfect. I know some people are upset that the personal relief checks will be $1,400 rather than $2,000, and it isn’t yet clear whether we can get the $15 minimum wage into a reconciliation bill. I agree with those concerns, and am working very hard on figuring out ways to include the minimum wage in the bill. And I know there are plenty of other things many of us would love to see in it.

Progressives should work hard in solidarity to make this bill as good as possible, to get the minimum wage and every other thing we can. The best we can do right now is to do grassroots organizing in the home states of Manchin and Sinema, who are the two senators we are having the toughest time bringing over to our side.

But even if we don’t succeed at getting all that done, if we can get the overall relief bill passed, strategically progressives should celebrate all the good things in this bill in a big way. We need Americans to know that Democrats can get good things done that improve their lives. We need to tell the story that the government they elected in 2020 is working to save people’s lives, get through the COVID crisis, and rebuild the economy from the ground up, not the top down.

4. Let’s take a break from gratuitous attacks on fellow Democrats. One of the positive things I am seeing right now is the relative lack of gratuitous Democrat-on-Democrat attacks since we won in Georgia. People seem genuinely focused on figuring out how we can pass legislation, rather than scoring cheap political points against other factions in the party. Things didn’t look like they were starting out that way after the November election: two days after Election Day, a couple of the more conservative members of the House Democratic caucus lashed out at progressives, blaming them for the losses we suffered in the House. Progressives pushed back, naturally, although I was impressed with this statement from AOC in response:

"There are, at least in the House caucus, very deep divisions within the party, and I believe that we need to really come together and not allow Republican narratives to tear us apart... [With a slimmer Democratic majority] it’s going to be more important than ever for us to work together and not fight each other.”

That attitude is exactly what all of us Democrats should embrace right now.

Since that early outburst, there has been relatively little in the way of personal attacks, and that is how we need to keep it. My progressive allies should do everything they can to organize in West Virginia and Arizona, and to persuade Manchin and Sinema, but aggressive personal attacks on them are not the way to go right now, as they will just dig in further. And centrists who love to go out of their way to take swipes at AOC, Bernie Sanders, and various unnamed leftists need to take a break as well. We need everyone in the Democratic Party to stay on board right now.

Conclusion

Passing legislation with the narrow margins in the House and Senate is going to be an intense challenge, requiring Democrats to stay together and requiring everyone to compromise and work things out in good faith. Biden has started off in much stronger political shape than the last two Democratic presidents, and we are on the verge of passing the biggest and boldest recovery package in the history of the republic. We need to methodically get that done, and then build on the success with another reconciliation bill where we can do bigger long-term things.

Will there ever be bipartisan legislation? I could see that potentially happening on an infrastructure bill, an opioid relief bill, a bill to rein in Big Tech, maybe a couple of other things. But we can’t count on much cooperation at all from the Republican Party, so us Democrats need to work things out amongst ourselves for the most part, getting done whatever we can. And when we do pass legislation, we need to celebrate it, to tell the story of what we passed, why we passed it, and what it will do for voters.

Carpe diem, Democrats. It’s time to seize the damn day.

As the Election Smoke Clears, What Are We Learning?

Michael Lux

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Wednesday November 25, 2020 · 3:19 PM PST

2020/11/25 · 15:19

Current vote totals as of 11/25/20. Many experts predict Biden will finish with a 5-point margin.

It’s also important to keep history in mind. While the uncertainty and slowness caused by the huge numbers of mail-in ballots made this election seem nail-bitingly close, and the big polling lead in the public polls made the final margin a disappointment, the final popular vote margin looks pretty solid compared to recent history. Since the last real landslide in 1984, only twice has one party’s nominee won by more than 6 points: Clinton won in 1996 by a little over 8 points, and Obama won by a little over 7. Twice the margin has been about 6, 1988 and 1992. In 2000, 2004, 2012, and 2016 -- four of the last five elections -- the margin has been less than 4 points. In that context, Biden being projected to win by about 5 looks pretty damn good.

All that said, I know that we all hoped -- hopes reinforced by all the pre-election public polling -- that because Trump was so obviously terrible, incompetent, corrupt, venal, offensive, overtly racist and sexist that this year would be different and we would break the recent historical pattern and win by a landslide. And since that didn’t happen, we want to know why the hell it didn’t.

I have lots of theories, but most of them are not yet backed by much data: we just don’t have accurate numbers yet. I don’t think there is much doubt that the polling industry is deeply flawed. It seems obvious that our Latino strategy needs continued work and attention. I feel confident in saying that we could have and should have figured out how to safely door knock far earlier so that, among other things, we could have done more in-person persuasion at the doors, and so that the Republicans would not have beaten us badly in some battleground states on voter registration. But more research is needed on those and many other subjects.

However, there are two very big areas where I feel like I have enough information to make a very informed case.

The Republicans and right-wing infrastructure are cleaning our clocks on social media, and it is hurting us badly.

Democrats were outspending Republicans on both the presidential race and in key Senate races by huge amounts on TV down the stretch, which was one reason so many people thought the public polling was right and that we would win going away. Clearly, it didn’t work out that way. Nothing else was going on in terms of the atmospherics of the race -- no October surprise scenario from the Trump White House, no last minute gaffe by Biden, no bizarre Comey-style news that changed any fundamentals of the race despite how hard Rudy Giuliani and Ron Johnson might have tried to push the Hunter Biden non-story. In the meantime, the COVID crisis was getting steadily worse, and Trump and much of the White House staff were getting sick.

Based on looking at all the data available and conversations with dozens of really smart political strategists, I am convinced that two main things explain this strange phenomena.

First, Republicans and the high-powered, right-wing media infrastructure are beating us badly on social media. This is a long-term problem, which most Democratic Party strategists only became aware of after the Trump campaign killed us on Facebook in 2016. There were some improvements over the last four years, one key one which I’ll talk about below, but mostly they are still overwhelming us here.

Just to be clear, because too many Dem campaign people don’t get this at all: I am not talking primarily about digital advertising. Digital advertising is important in campaigns, and thankfully Democrats are finally beginning to do more of it. But where the Republicans are beating us badly is organic social media: the content that moves from one Facebook page to the next without an ad being bought. This is where the disinformation campaigns, the crazy conspiracies, the ugly racist memes live. Research has shown that content that moves organically from friend to friend is far more credible than ads or mail or calls from strangers or any of the other ways campaigns communicate.

The Republicans don’t just have the meme factories and the bot farms that everybody’s heard about, although they certainly traffic in such things. Their real power is that they have millions of grassroots true believers who spread the crap they are getting from those right-wing pages to all their friends, and few people believe that their friend or family member would send them something untrue. Those grassroots Republicans move out so much more content on social media than our side does, and that imbalance gives the Republicans enthusiasm and determination, especially in the closing days of a campaign. Their surge at the end of this election and in 2016 was fundamentally tied to their dominance in social media.

We need a long-term solution to this, a solution that includes creating more pages and content that appeals to working-class folks, including people living in rural areas and small/medium sized towns; and organizing a widely distributed network of credible activists willing to share social media content with their friends.

But in the short term, including the runoff election in Georgia, we as a party can still do far better.

Fortunately, the Biden campaign figured out that organic social media really mattered, and partnered with Occupy Democrats, the biggest political Facebook page in the country, to create a consortium of most of the biggest progressive pages in the country. That partnership succeeded at expanding the organic reach and engagement of the Biden campaign exponentially over what the Clinton campaign had done in 2016. It was exactly the kind of breakthrough the campaign needed to survive the surge of right-wing social media working to beat them. I am convinced that one of the big reasons Biden held off the late Trump charge and Clinton didn’t was because we actually competed with the right in the social media trenches. Their network is still far too deep and expansive to compete evenly with, but our side was at least competitive this time around.

Now we need to go all out with an aggressive social media strategy in Georgia. Fortunately, Occupy Democrats is leading the same kind of consortium to help flip those crucial two Senate seats blue.

It’s the Economy, Stupid

Even in a pandemic, even with a sociopathic president, at the end of day, a whole lot of voters prefer whichever candidate they trust more with the economy. Poll after poll showed that the economy was our one big issue weakness in this race. We were winning on just about everything else, but swing voters still thought Trump was more trustworthy on the overall economy.

Donald Trump’s one consistent message in this campaign was that because of him, we had a strong economy before the pandemic hit, and we would have a strong one again once it was over. We never really made the counter-argument, at least not in a consistent or compelling way. We blamed Trump for mismanaging the COVID crisis, and thus hurting the economy, and we were generally believed on that score, but we never managed to convey that he didn’t know what the hell he was actually doing to the economy long-term, i.e. screwing over workers Without an answer to his basic argument, too many people, especially working-class swing voters, believed him. The idea that Trump was better on the economy is one of the core reasons we lost so much ground compared to Hillary with the Latino community. It is one of the core reasons we lost ground with young Black men. It is the core reason that we weren’t able to make up much ground among working-class voters in mid-sized Rust Belt towns in states like Iowa and Ohio.

The Biden closing argument was number one, he is a more decent guy than Trump, which was easy to believe; two, he would fix COVID and Trump wouldn’t -- again, very believable; three, he would protect health care coverage and pre-existing conditions, again easy to believe; and four, Biden would build the economy back better. But because Biden’s economic message was the least discussed; because it was talked about more in general than in specifics; and most importantly because people still believed Trump’s framing; too many swing voters didn’t find our economic message credible. We never established a lead on Trump on the overall economy.

What I believe we should have done was more ads like this one from Americans for Tax Fairness, which unfortunately was done late and didn’t have much money behind it. This message gets to the core argument we needed to be making: you say the economy is the best in history, and it is great for billionaires, but working families are still struggling.

Once that argument was engaged, I think voters would have been far more open to hearing Biden’s economic message about buying American, reviving manufacturing, solving the climate crisis by creating green jobs, controlling drug prices, lowering student debt, and raising taxes on the super-rich. These are electorally compelling ideas which should have gotten more play in campaign ads.

Since those of us on the Clinton campaign in 1992 won that election by focusing on the economy, Democrats haven’t talked nearly as much as they should about economic issues as they should, and that has created a much bigger opening for the Republicans than they should have given that most of their specific policy ideas are wildly unpopular.

Winning in Georgia, and winning the next midterms.

Both of those things will be challenging for sure, but I am convinced that Democrats can win those two Georgia Senate seats and win the 2022 midterms. In Georgia, I have full confidence in the Stacey Abrams strategy of winning by inspiring, mobilizing, registering, and turning out people of color and young voters. But I also think that tactically, we have to invest the resources we need to compete with the right-wing infrastructure on social media, because if we are not going toe-to-toe with them, they will swamp us in the end. And message-wise, we need to show voters we are fighting for working families on the economic issues that matter the most to them. We have to showcase Mitch McConnell as the barrier to all the good things we want to do, the same way our Clinton team successfully showcased Gingrich in the 1990s. Remember: in most midterms the president’s party loses seats. But in 1998, we picked up seats by building our campaign around Gingrich blocking everything good on the issues people cared about in their lives.

Republicans have been running ads with spooky music saying Democrats want to change things. We should say: damn right we do. We want to give you a $15-an-hour minimum wage. We want to create millions of new infrastructure and green energy jobs. We want to tax people worth more than $50 million dollars and use the money for jobs and child care. We want to rein in drug prices and student debt. We want to make government work for the people again -- not Wall Street billionaires -- and that’s not socialism, it’s just good governance.

We can win in Georgia, and win the midterms. We just have to show the people which party is fighting for them and which isn’t.

What Democratic Unity Would Look Like

Michael Lux

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Thursday November 12, 2020 · 4:04 PM PST

2020/11/12 · 16:04

As we watch Donald Trump flail and his sycophants fade into irrelevance, it’s good to begin thinking about what Democrats might accomplish if the different factions decide to work together and get things done. After all the sturm und drang, Trump has lost, and we now have to deliver whether we have total control of Congress or not, so that we can build stronger majorities in the 2022 midterms.

There is plenty we can do regardless of whether we win those two Georgia Senate seats, but it sure would be a gamechanger to win them to prevent the GOP from stonewalling progressive legislation. I believe those two races will rise or fall together there, and I believe right now that we will win. The entire progressive movement will do whatever we can to help. Whatever Stacey Abrams wants in terms of support, she should get, as it is her and her network of allies’ efforts that have gotten us this far.

Democratic Unity That Gets Something Done

Today, though, I want to spend a moment envisioning what Democrats might be able to do if we united and pushed for change together.

First, I want to talk about what the kind of unity that actually gets shit done looks like. True unity is not the absence of vigorous debate on policy or on political strategy. What it is instead is having all those debates play out in the legislative and governing process, and then bringing everyone together through mutual respect and a willingness to work out our differences, so that we actually pass legislation. It is also working with the Biden administration to enact new executive orders and regulations that make a tangible difference in people’s lives.

We can have vigorous debates without backbiting... Let me pause here a moment to talk about the fighting that is already going on. Centrist Democrats like Abigail Spanberger and Kurt Schrader -- before the election had even been called for Biden, before we knew the final results on a lot of House races and those two Senate races, before we had a chance to really dig into the data -- immediately began attacking progressives for everything that went wrong in an election where we had just won the presidency and kept the House. AOC fired back quickly in an interview in the NYT, where she talked about the work she had done supporting swing district colleagues, all of whom won their races, and where she pointed out that the losing candidates often had a deficit of investment in digital organizing. Thankfully, proving what a smart and strategic person she is, Con. Ocasio-Cortez followed up with this great statement in The Hill, which I agree with 100%:

"There are, at least in the House caucus, very deep divisions within the party, and I believe that we need to really come together and not allow Republican narratives to tear us apart... [With a slimmer Democratic majority] it’s going to be more important than ever for us to work together and not fight each other.”

I am more on AOC’s side on the specifics of her argument -- progressive groups and activists did more to turnout the voters we needed in this election than anyone else -- but more importantly, her unity perspective should prevail. The internal finger-pointing (as opposed to the healthy issues debate mentioned above) should stop, at least right now when we don’t even have good data to analyze the results. In any case, can’t we all just acknowledge that Republicans are going to call us all socialists no matter what? That to hurt Democrats, they might seize on any ill-advised slogan some activists throw out in a demonstration, or simply just make stuff up about us? There is plenty of time for analysis, positioning, and debates on where the party should go, primary fights, etc. down the road.

The Democratic Economic Agenda

What we should be focused on right now instead is figuring out what we can accomplish together that would make working people in this country believe in the Democratic Party again.

I know COVID and short-term economic relief is top of the agenda, as it should be. I’m guessing McConnell will finally agree to some kind of relief package around December 11, when the government shutdown will happen without getting an agreement done. McConnell won’t agree to very much, but at least some recovery money will be moving after that deal is struck.

After we do the early work on COVID and economic relief, the first big economic issue we should focus on is a big ‘Buy America’ infrastructure package. I know it doesn’t sound very sexy, but there are a lot of things for Democrats to love in a well-crafted infrastructure package:

It will be very difficult politically for McConnell to block it. Infrastructure bills have a long history of being bipartisan, and Trump promised repeatedly (without ever doing anything to move it) that he would make it a priority and invest a trillion dollars into it. You add to that the fact that Republican senators are going to like spending money on things like roads, bridges, and airports in their states. It will put McConnell in a hell of a box to block it.
You can put a lot of things to mitigate the climate crisis in an infrastructure package. Weatherizing and insulating all government buildings, and converting many of them to green sources of energy. Starting the conversion of military bases and equipment to being more carbon neutral. Changing government procurement and contracting policies to prioritize the greener companies. Adding more mass transit services. Government spending can drive the conversion to solar and wind in a very big way.
An infrastructure package can deliver a lot for the labor movement, and not just new jobs. Making sure all jobs are prevailing wage is a big thing. Putting teeth into the Buy America provisions of government contracting is another thing that Joe Biden has already promised. Rebuilding schools that are falling apart is a priority for teachers. Here’s another major example: if there were language in the bill, or in an accompanying executive order by the president, that all government contractors had to make it easier for unions to organize to get those contracts, it would be a major boon to the labor movement -- and it would be really important if McConnell ends up blocking the confirmation of new National Labor Relations Board commissioners.
An infrastructure bill can be a big plus for racial justice as well. You can structure it to make sure minority-owned businesses get a lot of the contracts, and you can make investments in the schools, roads, and bridges that will be the most important to helping communities of color.

Putting Mitch McConnell in a tough political box and doing great things for climate change, labor, and racial justice at the same time would be a powerful opening bid on getting something big done for the American people. And it would be a great way to build Democratic Party unity, bringing together labor, environmentalists, and communities of color, and providing aid to some sectors of the business community as well.

There are two other areas where we can put McConnell in a box as well: criminal justice and immigration reform. Both have long histories of bipartisan support. Trump bragged extensively about the modest criminal justice bill passed during his term. George W Bush, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Marco Rubio have all made efforts at getting immigration reform passed in the last two years. DACA can be revived with an executive order on January 20, but pushing for major new bills in those areas will be a great way to show Biden wants to deliver on behalf of the multi-racial coalition that won him his presidency. Both issues should be things that the entire Democratic Party can get behind.

Finally, I would argue that with McConnell threatening to block so much of Biden’s agenda, the new president should go into overdrive in signing a whole new set of aggressive executive orders. If McConnell wants to play hardball on appointments, fine. Biden can still govern via laws already passed that keep the opposition party from stopping appointments. But even more importantly, Biden should call McConnell’s bluff and raise him. The American Prospect published a brilliant set of executive order ideas in its Day One Agenda article, which were good ideas even if we had won the Senate, but now are the best ways to govern. Forcing government contractors to allow easier union organizing is a great example: if McConnell wants to play games in terms of Biden’s ability to help the labor movement, there are big things he can do through executive orders.

Delivering for the American People Will Deliver Us More Power

There’s an important political point here. Midterm elections are, even more than the election we just went through, all about turnout. We have to energize and motivate Democratic voters to vote, and we won’t have Trump around to do that anymore. But we will have Mitch McConnell, whether as Majority Leader or as a huge barrier on everything in a 50-50 Senate.

Joe Biden is a centrist who likes to reach across the aisle in a bipartisan fashion. He is an honorable man for wanting to reach out and give the Republicans a chance to do the right thing. But Mitch McConnell is not going to be conciliatory, and we should harbor no illusions that he will work with us in good faith on anything. Biden must stand up to McConnell, face him down on some issues, and govern aggressively in spite of McConnell’s attempts, which we know are coming, to block just about everything we want to do. Biden’s executive orders can do a great deal for working people, a great deal for our voters, and for all voters; and they will show him to be a leader ready to take big actions no matter what McConnell tries to do to block us.

Such a political dynamic going into 2022 is far more appealing than letting McConnell decide what Biden will do as president. Watering down the Democratic agenda to appease Republicans looks like weak sauce to American voters and signals that the establishment is still in control of the government. We have to position our party as the fighters for the people.

Joe Biden will be such a relief to see as president. Decency, empathy, humanity, integrity -- shit, the COMPETENCY -- versus the hot mess of a president we just had. It will be a delight to see Biden in the role instead of Trump. But there has to be more than that: he has to show that he can be a president who delivers tangible benefits to the American people, whether McConnell tries to stand in the way or not.

The Working-Class Kid from Scranton

Michael Lux

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Thursday November 05, 2020 · 12:39 PM PST

2020/11/05 · 12:39

ScreenShot2020-11-05at3.25.40PM.png — Source: JoeBiden.com

Democrats are relieved and delighted that Biden is almost certain to win: beating Donald Trump was considered by many of us to be among the most important accomplishments of our lives. But there are also lots of questions on why it has been so close, and why we didn’t win back the Senate.

In the weeks to come, there will be a lot of us, myself included, who will be chewing over questions such as, is the polling industry truly broken? (Seems likely.) What could have the Biden campaign done better on its Latino strategy? Was it a good decision by the Biden team to forego door knocking until the very end of the campaign? Should Biden have hit the campaign trail more often? And what the hell happened to the much hyped Lincoln Project-led strategy of winning over more Republicans? There will also be the inevitable analysis by Democrats from various segments of the party suggesting that (a) the Biden campaign, the DSCC, and DCCC were all run perfectly and everyone should just STFU about it, (b) if only Biden had run more to the center he would have picked up all those extra centrist votes, and (c) if Biden had made more gestures to the young progressives and people of color out in the streets, he would have done better.

I have my early takes on all those topics, but before we get into all those debates, I want to encourage everyone to breathe deeply, and in the immortal line from “Desperately Seeking Susan” "take a valium like a normal person." Wait for the actual data to come in. There is always such a rush to judgment after an election, but exit polls tend to be a pile of crap, and what actually happened in a race like this is way more nuanced and complicated than most partisans with an axe to grind want to admit.

Why was it so tough to beat Trump and his loyal minions?

So instead of weighing in IMMEDIATELY like I really want to, instead, today I am going to focus on a couple of closely related topics that I think are profoundly important to the future of our country and the Democratic Party. First, why is it that the Democratic Party has had such trouble, in two presidential elections in a row, dispatching the creepiest man in the world and his band of sycophants to the trashcan of history where he so desperately deserves to go? And second, given the current lay of the political land, how do we make Joe Biden’s first two years the kind of political success we need it to be to win big in 2022?

On the first of those: we can thank our lucky stars that we have beaten this man. And thank not just our luck, but even more so, all the hard work done by millions of people around the country from the top of the campaign, to all those independent progressive efforts out there by hundreds of national, state, and local groups, to the millions of activists who made calls and texts, wrote postcards, knocked on doors, and had conversations with their friends and family about getting out to vote. Thank goodness for all of you, because we needed everyone to pitch in to pull this off. The Democratic Party and progressive movement were united in our efforts to end this terrible man’s terrible presidency, and we can all look back on this effort the rest of our lives and say, “I was part of one of the most important political efforts in history.” Makes me proud.

But we also have to look at the closer-than-expected results, and the fact that the rest of the Republican Party paid no price for backing Trump’s bullshit these last four years. We need to squarely face the fact that in spite of the horrendous job he did on managing the coronavirus; in spite of his overt racism and sexism and all-around narcissistic insanity; in spite of his out-in-the-open corruption and links to foreign dictators; in spite of his leaked tax returns, attack on health care, denial and exacerbation of climate change, in spite of all his rottenness and all our great efforts; we almost lost to this guy again. We should be happy and proud that we won, but that fact should also shake our party to its core and cause us to take a genuine reassessment of our standing in this country.

I don’t have all the answers for sure. Part of it, as I said above, needs to wait until we really have a chance to look at the data. But this goes beyond data to something deeper and more profound: why is our country so dysfunctional that more than 68,000,000 and counting voted for this abject failure? I think the party needs to look closely at two big things. First, how do we penetrate the media bubble that the right wing propagandists have built up? In small towns and blue collar neighborhoods around the country, how do we get heard, how do we get listened to, how does our message penetrate? We need answers and I suspect it is not running another billion dollars of “Trump is an asshole and we are the nice people” TV ads.

Second, we really do need to take an honest look at ourselves: why do we have so much trouble relating to working-class people? And not just white working-class folks, by the way, although of course that is where our biggest problem continues to be. But we lost more young African-American men and Latinos than we have in a long time. Are we too obsessed with well-to-do people in the suburbs? Are we too worried about what big donors think, softening our message enough, so that working-class folks don’t believe we are really going to fight for them?

Do those working-class folks in the exurbs and small-town America who feel forgotten by their government think that “well, Trump may have a lot of faults, but at least he stands up to the establishment in DC and fights for me?” Have those people out in middle America decided that all politicians are corrupt and on the take, but at least Trump flips the elites the bird enough to shake things up?

And yes, absolutely, race has a whole to do with Trump’s appeal: the politics of resentment is still powerful in a dysfunctional system.We need to figure out how to reach across racial lines and build a truly multicultural, multi-racial movement that can effectively challenge Trumpian race baiting.

Again, I’m not claiming I have all the answers, but until we as a party do some deep self-examination, we are going to keep losing elections we should have won and barely escaping when we should have blown them away. Too often, when parties win the presidency, the leaders of those parties proclaim themselves geniuses, and the people who want something from the new administration suck up to those in power rather than asking questions. But I am convinced that in order to survive and thrive in the future, Democrats need to break that usual pattern and do some soul searching right now.

What does all this mean for a Biden administration?

The last two times a Democrat won the presidency, we lost the next midterm by a crushing margin and -- even after winning re-election -- spent the rest of that presidency in the minority in Congress. We can’t afford to repeat that pattern, especially with McConnell probably still in charge of the Senate.

Democrats need to learn one important lesson from Donald Trump: how to be an outsider while still being the president of the United States.

Many will say that is impossible for the ultimate DC insider, Joe Biden. But what Biden needs to do is to resist the temptation to be the insider, establishment president, and embrace instead his working-class roots as that kid from Scranton whose beloved dad lost his job. The campaign’s best message had the theme of Scranton economics vs Park Avenue economics, and that is what we need from Biden over the next two years.

The economy is going to be in serious trouble and McConnell, except for the occasional business bailout, is going to resist any efforts to rebuild it -- both because he doesn’t want Biden to get the political credit for an improving economy, and because of his and his caucus’ right-wing economic policy views. What Biden and our party must do is to lead a campaign to make McConnell the poster child for nothing getting done. Rather than repeating the insider-oriented playbook from 1993-4 and 2009-10 that led Democrats to political disaster, we need to repeat the playbook from 1996 and 1998, where we made Newt Gingrich, with his right-wing policies and all-around arrogance, the poster child for everything that was wrong with the Republican Party. For those of you who don’t remember, we in the Clinton campaign spent far more time in the 1996 cycle attacking Gingrich than attacking our actual opponent Bob Dole, and it worked. It worked again in 1998, where in spite of the Lewinsky scandal, the president’s party picked up seats in Congress for the first time since 1962 and only the second time in the last 90 years.

We are going to need that kind of campaign, because if McConnell remains in charge of the Senate, DC is going to look like a pretty dysfunctional place with nothing much happening to rescue everyday Americans from a sour economy.

We must make Scranton economics vs Park Avenue economics our theme. New jobs with an infrastructure package focused on roads and bridges and schools and green jobs, taxes on the super wealthy, as Biden’s ads talked about. Taking on Big Tech, Big Pharma, the insurance industry, Wall Street, and the billionaire monopolists who get richer and richer at the expense of the little guys and the real economy.

We need to make 100% clear who we as Democrats are fighting for: those working families from Scranton and Flint and Houston and Atlanta who are fighting to survive in this screwed up economy. If Joe Biden channels those families’ anger at dysfunctional DC, we can win a strong victory in 2022, and again in 2024, and finally, finally start to change this country for the better.

The False Choice Media Elites Push Onto Democrats

Michael Lux

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Saturday October 17, 2020 · 10:08 AM PDT

2020/10/17 · 10:08

I admire the reporters I know. They have hard jobs and are attacked constantly by the president for just reporting the news honestly. The great investigative journalists are some of my favorite people ever, in history and in current times.

But there are certain narratives establishment reporters and pundits on the cable news talk shows love to repeat which don’t hold up to any scrutiny at all. One of those narratives is that the Democrats have to make a choice between targeting progressives and targeting the middle. That narrative has always been wrong, but is even more wrong in 2020, and the Biden campaign is proving the case. They are winning big precisely because they are campaigning on issues embraced by both progressives and swing voters.

The thing that prompted me to write this column was this classic article in the Washington Post this week by Sean Sullivan, who argues that the Biden campaign in the endgame is mainly targeting moderate voters:

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is making an increasingly aggressive pitch to moderate voters, seeking to capitalize on anger at President Trump and cement a broad base of support anchored in the center of the political spectrum.

The former vice president’s strategy was apparent on Tuesday in Florida, where he delivered a speech aimed directly at seniors, and on Monday in Ohio, where he tried to appeal to White working-class voters who propelled Trump to a decisive win there four years ago. In the last few weeks of the campaign, Biden is trying to convince these swing voters that Trump let them down amid signs that the president’s support has eroded.

Biden’s emphasis on moderation, a hallmark of his decades-long political career, comes after a spring and summer in which he made concessions to his party’s liberal wing as he aimed to consolidate its support.

This either/or narrative is actively promoted in the press by some DC Democrats for their own reasons. For those Democrats who have been corporate lobbyists or PR people, or who work for think tanks getting huge amounts of money from corporate special interests, getting the media focused on this either/or narrative can be very advantageous, because they want to divide progressive movement forces from Democratic Party leadership. But here’s the deal, as Joe Biden would say: when you look at the strategies, tactics, and specific ads, there is no real evidence to support this narrative.

Look at the ads the Biden campaign has been running the last few weeks. Right now, they are running a touching ad from George Floyd’s sister about Biden’s empathy and racial justice. They are running an ad on the urgent importance of preserving and protecting Social Security. They have run ads on how Biden is going to pay for health care and climate change investments by taxing the “super wealthy” (that is the term they are using), and other ads denouncing Trump’s tax cuts for the rich. They are running an ad about a farm family worried about climate change hurting their crops. There’s a great ad that’s been heavily in rotation on the values of Scranton vs Wall Street. Many of these ads, by the way, feature people wearing union t-shirts.

Same with Biden’s speeches. He was in Ohio for two appearances the other day, made a stop by a UAW hall, and talked about making investments in working people. He was in Florida talking to seniors about Social Security, health care, and prescription drug prices.

Last time I checked, all of the above are progressive causes, themes, and issues. I am a long-time progressive, and was a supporter of Elizabeth Warren in the primary. If I were running the Biden campaign, these are the same kinds of ads I would be running and speeches I would be writing.

Sullivan cites Biden’s language as wanting to be a president for all the people, not just Democrats, as being more evidence that Biden is focusing on the center. The irony there is that one of the things that progressives have found most offensive about Trump is that he only cares about the states and people that voted for him, not the broad American public.

This either/or choice thing is wrong at its core. Democrats are successful when they appeal to both progressive voters and swing voters at the same time. It works when they focus on progressive populist themes and issues. That is exactly what the Biden campaign has been doing at the end of this campaign.

After the primary, the Biden campaign did exactly what they needed to do with progressive voters: they reached out on the issues, negotiated in good faith, and consolidated those votes into their camp. The progressive community is now overwhelmingly and enthusiastically supporting Joe Biden and Kamala Harris -- partly because Trump is so awful, but partly because of the kind of campaign they are running. It is heartening to see how this is playing out, and I believe it will mean a big Democratic victory in November.

Trump Tax Story Reminds Us Again: Time for a Wealth Tax

Michael Lux

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Monday September 28, 2020 · 10:02 AM PDT

2020/09/28 · 10:02

ScreenShot2020-09-28at1.00.44PM.png — New York Times

The release of Donald Trump’s taxes to the NYT is a confirmation of many things long assumed about Donald Trump, or already documented in other ways: he is a failed businessman, deeply in debt, a scammer who usually avoids paying anything in taxes in spite of the wealth his father left him. But Donald Trump’s taxes are also a reminder of something that goes far beyond Trump: the mega-wealthy in this country will usually find ways to avoid paying taxes to support this country until you tax their wealth as well as their income. That fact is equally true with the successful big business people who, like Jeff Bezos with his wealth of $205 billion, as it is with the failing heirs to fortunes like Trump: none of them pay much in taxes because they don’t make much money in salaries.

The wealth tax is an idea whose time has come. Before the Trump paying no taxes story broke, a new poll out from the folks at Data For Progress on support for a wealth tax came out. Turns out the voters really like it. Not just progressives or Democrats; not just voters in blue states. Nationally, voters support some form of a wealth tax by enormous margins, by more than 2-1, but Data For Progress also did deep dives into a wide range of purple and red states states with competitive elections, and found that there wasn’t a state polled where voters weren’t strongly in favor of a wealth tax.

And here’s some news that may surprise you: even a plurality of Republicans support a wealth tax, with a majority of them supporting it in five of the 11 states polled (ME, AZ, NC, GA, IA), and with support among Republicans never dropping below 37% in any of the other states.

Here are the overall numbers in the 11 states polled:

Voters who described themselves as moderates supported a wealth tax by 2-1 as well, 57-29. Suburban voters, whom both parties are obsessed with winning and are devoting most of their messaging towards, are in favor of it by 58-31. Rural voters, supposedly the most conservative of all, favor it 52-35. Even among voters who describe themselves as somewhat conservative, the numbers are tied: 44-44. The only ideological category where the polling shows a negative reaction to a wealth tax is the people who list themselves as very conservative.

Swing voters, moderate voters, suburban voters, rural voters: all the classic swing groups in American politics are strongly for taxing wealth. So what explains why this policy isn’t at the center of the 2020 campaign, especially with all these new spending initiatives Democrats are united behind in terms of climate change, health care, child care, and rebuilding our nation’s crumbling infrastructure?

It’s the difference between what I have always called ‘DC centrism’ vs what is actually centrism in the real world of voters. DC Centrism, shaped by lobbyists for Big Business and think tanks funded by the wealthy, is full of ideas like cutting Social Security and Medicare and going easy on regulations for Wall Street, Big Tech, Pharma, Big Oil, and other big businesses. These ideas have never been popular among most voters, but a lot of the establishment players in DC think of them as responsible, centrist things to do to make the Democratic Party more friendly to Big Business interests.

Outside of DC, among actual voters in this country, those ideas aren’t centrist, they are violently opposed by most people. And among those same real voters, when they hear about an idea like the wealth tax, it sounds perfectly sensible and reasonable. In fact, in the DFP poll, when you make the classic arguments the establishment tends to make against the wealth tax -- that it’s impractical, that it might slow the economy, etc -- voters did not turn away, their support for the wealth tax stayed strong.

The wealth tax, in fact, turned out to be the most popular tax among all the taxes mentioned as a way to pay for a big new spending program (infrastructure was the one they tested), and was so popular that pairing infrastructure, a very popular idea already, with the wealth tax actually increased support for investing in infrastructure.

If, pray God, the Democrats win in 2020, this policy idea is important to have at the center of the debate next year. Our deficit is sky high, our economy is in shambles, and we desperately need to pay for policies that address crises in climate, child care, health care, and infrastructure. COVID has exacerbated all of these problems, and it is not going away any time soon.

We are going to need to start talking about revenue in a serious way. The wealth tax is both the most sensible and the most popular revenue idea out there. A 2-cent wealth tax on those with net wealth over $50 million would raise $2 trillion dollars over the next 10 years from a remarkably small number of people.

The story about Donald Trump’s taxes is the ultimate reminder: the wealth tax is the answer for all those uber-rich people -- whether the flailing heirs to their daddy’s big bucks, or the capitalists like Bezos minting new billions in their fortune every time they turn around.

Time for self-styled DC Centrists to make way for important economic policies like a wealth tax supported by the vast majority of voters throughout the country, including those who really are centrists and swing voters. It’s time to institute a wealth tax.

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