Derek Thompson/Atlantic nails it:
The Dangerous Myth That Hillary Clinton Ignored the Working Class
To many white Trump voters, the problem wasn’t her economic stance, but the larger vision—a multi-ethnic social democracy—that it was a part of.
After the election, some people called for an end to “identity politics” that promotes niche cultural issues over economic policy. But any reasonable working-class platform requires the advancement of policies that may disproportionately help non-whites. For example, hundreds of thousands of black men stay out of the labor force after being released from prison sentences for non-violent crimes. For them and their families, criminal justice reform is essential economic reform, even if poor whites see it as a distraction from that “real” issues that bedevil the working class, like trade policy.
The long-term future of the U.S. involves rising diversity, rising inequality, and rising redistribution. The combination of these forces makes for an unstable and unpredictable system. Income stagnation and inequality encourage policies to redistribute wealth from a rich few to the anxious multitudes. But when that multitude includes minorities who are seen as benefiting disproportionately from those redistribution policies, the white majority can turn resentful.
If you do it right, WWC might be pissed. That’s what we need to understand and deal with. Sometimes, you need to adjust. Other times, you need to outvote. That’s Politics 101.
James Hohmann/WaPo with an example of why you sometimes just have to outvote them:
-- Policy didn’t matter. “What we missed was that nobody cared about solutions,” said Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who managed Mike Huckabee’s campaign until he dropped out and then joined Trump’s operation as a consultant soon after. “They just wanted to burn it all down. They didn’t care about building it back up. They wanted to burn it to the ground and then figure out what to do with the ashes afterwards. There was no understanding of this electorate and the anger on the front end in terms of just how pissed off they were. You may have the best policy in the world to get every single American the best job they’ve ever had. Nobody cared.”
-- Experience didn’t matter. From Marco Rubio campaign manager Terry Sullivan: “We got hit with commercial after commercial about how little experience (Marco had) and how many missed votes in the Senate. It didn’t matter. People don’t care. The Senate sucks. Why would we want to be there? We’re not voting. Who cares? And voters bought into that.Experience was a liability. It was not an asset. We figured that out early, but Trump took it to the next level.”
And same author on NC lessons:
The Daily 202: How bathroom bill backlash cost North Carolina’s Republican governor his job
THE BIG IDEA: The American people punished politicians in both parties this year when they perceived them as being too focused on advancing a divisive social agenda at the expense of the bread-and-butter, kitchen-table issues that they care most about.
Key here is/was maintaining policy opposition while still looking reasonable (kudos to Rev. Barber).
Seth Masket/Pacific Standard:
The Case for ‘Normal’ Elections Under a President Donald Trump
Our default position for the upcoming elections in 2018 and 2020 should not be that Trump will self-immolate because he’s a disorganized mess.
One of the big mistakes that many political observers (including me) made this fall was assuming that, since this year’s presidential nomination cycle was so weird and defied the expectations of so many observers (including me), that the general election would be weird too. Quite simply, a Democrat running for a third consecutive term of Democratic control of the White House during a period of moderate economic growth should be at a slight disadvantage.
We knew that but set it aside. We assumed that Donald Trump’s bizarre and offensive behavior and his unconventional, unprofessional, and underfinanced campaign would change that equation. We were wrong. In the end, Trump has slightly underperformed the economy, but not by much. Partisan voters rallied to their respective camps and we got a pretty typical presidential election outcome.
That was part of the problem. No, it wasn’t because HRC was so universally awful. We and others expected more Rs to reject Trump and they did not. They voted. Our side voted, too, but not always in the places we expected.
We are going through this analytical exercise not to rile up Sanders supporters or third party proponents or loyal Democrats but to make sure we understand (really understand) what happened, and not just attribute it to your pet grievance or mine. If you don’t fully appreciate the problem (and how close this election was) you will not come up with the right solution.
Policy may not have mattered for this election. It may not matter by itself for the next one < gasp >, and just having a better policy won’t be enough. Or, we might be in a different place altogether. We might even miss what we used to have. We shall see.
For an example of things we might miss, Ed Yong/Atlantic:
How Trump Could Wage a War on Scientific Expertise
The mechanics of stripping empiricism out of America’s regulatory systems
It is clear where president-elect Donald Trump stands. “The monstrosity that is the Federal Government with its pages and pages of rules and regulations has been a disaster for the American economy and job growth,” he said during his campaign. Come January, he will have the power to take on that perceived monster.
As has been widely reported, a Trump administration can easily repeal regulations that were enacted by federal agencies in the final months of the Obama administration. But with the help of a few key new bills that are currently making their way through Congress, he could also thwart the very infrastructure of science-based policy making, transforming it from a process that’s merely frustrating into one that’s also futile.
David Lauter/LA Times:
Big Republican states could have a lot to lose from Obamacare repeal
Of the five states whose residents receive the most in subsidies to help them buy insurance, four — Florida, Texas, North Carolina and Georgia — have Republican-controlled congressional delegations.
Florida has the most to lose: Its residents will receive an estimated $5.2 billion in Obamacare tax credits this year, about one-sixth of the money that the federal government distributes to help people with their insurance premiums. That's even more than California, the nation's most populous state and the one Democratic bastion on the top-five list.
The data on the amount of the subsidies in each state were compiled by the Kaiser Family Foundation, which has tracked data on the Affordable Care Act since it took effect. The foundation based its estimates on the average amount of the tax credits and the number of people buying insurance under the law in each state.
The law provides subsidies to about 9.4 million Americans with moderate or low incomes to help them buy insurance. Almost half of those receiving subsidies live in the top five states.
Josh Marshall/TPM:
House Republicans have the D.C. press onboard with the idea that they're going to push through "Repeal and Delay" in the first weeks of the Trump administration and Medicare phaseout later in the year. But in an interview with the Portland Press Herald, Susan Collins seems like lukewarm or a no on both. (Lauren Fox has more on the story here.)
Without making a hard commitment, Collins told the paper she is not inclined to support plans to 'privatize' Medicare.
Susan Collins is “troubled” (her favorite word) by a lot of things that she eventually votes for on party lines. But any port in a storm.