Yes, there was an election in Georgia. Yes, the pundits will handle it tomorrow. But Jon Ossoff getting 48% of the vote in a Republican district is a big deal.
James Hohmann/WaPo;
To this day, most Washington elites don’t fully grasp just how painful the Great Recession was for tens of millions of Americans. Government spending increased, and the military-industrial complex prospered, so D.C. denizens were mostly insulated from the economic crisis.
-- Importantly, Janesville is not part of the Rust Belt. Places like Youngstown, Ohio, and Pittsburgh have been decaying for decades. But this area was faring relatively well until the 2000s. Generations of Janesville kids, going back to 1923, grew up excited to follow their dads onto the assembly line so they too could make Chevys. They saw a union card, not a college degree, as the ticket to a respectable middle-class livelihood.
So the plant closure was a profound shock to the system: Not only did it accelerate the decline of manufacturing and organized labor, it created a sense among many working-class whites that they were being left behind – harmed by trade and globalization. With full recovery still elusive nearly a decade later, some began to look for a new kind of savior.
John Stoehr/US News:
How can the Democrats appeal to the white working class without surrendering the hard-fought gains among women and minorities over two decades? This is how. Trump's base is increasingly wedged. The Democrats need to wedge it further. They don't have to return to their former days as the working man's party. But they do need exploit what is going to become a baneful wedge issue.
There is overlap, obviously, but there are serious differences between hardcore racists who support the president no matter what and the working-class white voters who are seeking tangible results from a candidate who promised far more than he could possible deliver. Using a combination of policy proposals, like "Medicare for all," and messaging, like "health care is a right," the Democrats can drive the wedge down more deeply, picking off white working-class voters here and there as they rebuild their winning coalition.
The Democrats are already on their way to this end. They have proposed an alternative infrastructure bill, one that would truly empower the working class of all races. They have the policy. Now comes the right message and, more importantly, finding the right messenger.
A familiar theme to regular readers.
Gallup:
Majority Say Wealthy Americans, Corporations Taxed Too Little
- More than six in 10 say corporations, upper-income Americans pay too little
- Views that middle-income earners pay too much have increased
- 14% say lower-income pay too little; down from high of 24% five years ago
Jamelle Bouie/Slate:
Andrew Sullivan’s Pathology
The writer’s perpetuation of model-minority and black-deficiency myths is pretty boring at this point.
iffing off of the recent incident on a United Airlines plane, where an elderly Asian American man was forcibly removed from his seat to make room for United employees, Sullivan presented a question about the strength of racism and white supremacy.
Asian-Americans, like Jews, are indeed a problem for the “social-justice” brigade. I mean, how on earth have both ethnic groups done so well in such a profoundly racist society? How have bigoted white people allowed these minorities to do so well — even to the point of earning more, on average, than whites? Asian-Americans, for example, have been subject to some of the most brutal oppression, racial hatred, and open discrimination over the years ... Yet, today, Asian-Americans are among the most prosperous, well-educated, and successful ethnic groups in America.
What gives? It couldn’t possibly be that they maintained solid two-parent family structures, had social networks that looked after one another, placed enormous emphasis on education and hard work, and thereby turned false, negative stereotypes into true, positive ones, could it? It couldn’t be that all whites are not racists or that the American dream still lives?
Sullivan, it would seem, is unaware of the diverse and often disparate experiences that comprise Asian American life, from that of some of the Chinese and Japanese Americans he automatically places in this “model minority” narrative, to the (less remarked on) poverty of Hmong, Cambodian, and other Asian American groups. But even if you took his premise of a singular and monolithic Asian community as a given, there is still a host of problems with Sullivan’s question-begging argument. That includes, but is not limited to, an ignorance of selection effects—a substantial cohort of Asian Americans chose to come here and entered the United States with advanced degrees—as well as an invocation of “culture” without any awareness that this image is a construction, a contingent narrative tied to the politics and political atmosphere of the mid-20th century United States.
What the hell is going on with North Korea, explained
It’s been a scary few days on the Korean Peninsula. Here’s what’s happening.
Bellicose rhetoric is pretty standard fare when it comes to North Korea, and doesn’t necessarily mean that armed conflict — let alone nuclear war — is anywhere close to breaking out. What’s new here is that the Trump administration is openly threatening the country in a way that neither the Bush nor Obama administration was willing to do, openly saying that it is prepared to use military force to rein in North Korea’s nuclear program.
Pyongyang has responded in kind, promising to raze US military bases in South Korea, calling them “the strongholds of evil.”
And the fact that all of these events have happened since Wednesday is a stark reminder that it’s North Korea, and not Russia or ISIS, that might actually pose the gravest and most immediate threat to American national security.
Here’s a quick guide to what happened and what it all means.
Monkey Cage/WaPo:
Racism motivated Trump voters more than authoritarianism
Let the analyses begin. Last week, the widely respected 2016 American National Election Study was released, sending political scientists into a flurry of data modeling and chart making.
The ANES has been conducted since 1948, at first through in-person surveys, and now also online, with about 1,200 nationally representative respondents answering some questions for about 80 minutes. This incredibly rich, publicly funded data source allows us to put elections into historical perspective, examining how much each factor affected the vote in 2016 compared with other recent elections.
Below, I’ll examine three narratives that became widely accepted about the 2016 election and see how they stack up against the ANES data.
Greg Sargent/WaPo:
This brutal new poll shows that fewer and fewer people believe Trump’s lies
A new Gallup poll out this morning, however, strongly suggests that an increasing number of Americans just don’t believe Trump’s spin about his presidency anymore. It finds that only 45 percent of Americans think Trump keeps his promises, down from 62 percent in February, an astonishing slide of 17 points:
WSJ:
Trump’s Renewed Focus on Health Bill Vexes GOP Tax Overhaul Strategy
Political shuffle underscores knotty relationship between budgetary priorities
President Donald Trump’s revived enthusiasm for tackling health-care legislation before tax policy has highlighted the complicated interplay between Republicans’ health-care overhaul and their planned tax bill.
Mr. Trump signaled last week that one of the reasons he has reprioritized health care is that he was relying on savings from the health bill to bolster the tax plan.
If the health plan is signed, “we get hundreds of millions of dollars in savings that goes into the taxes,” said Mr. Trump said in an interview Wednesday. “Could we do it without health care? Absolutely but it’s a cleaner package if we get health care done.”
The budget reality isn’t that straightforward. Budgetary savings from a health bill don’t get plowed into the tax bill, so the lack of a health bill wouldn’t necessarily change the tax-bill math. There is also no requirement that the health bill come first. But the two pieces of legislation are interrelated because the GOP health bill would eliminate discrete taxes created as part of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, smoothing the process of passing a broader tax overhaul.
Ruy Teixeira/Vox:
7 reasons why today’s left should be optimistic
The election of Donald Trump was a major shock to the left. It was not supposed to happen. It was not even supposed to be possible for it to happen. Many shuffle about their daily tasks suffused in gloom and pessimism. With Trump in the White House, and the Republicans in control of Congress and most states, surely little of the progressive agenda will remain in a few years. His brand of xenophobia and authoritarianism is on the ascent; the future looks bleak both for the country and a world torn by rising populism and threatened by climate change.
But despite recent setbacks, there are many excellent reasons for the left to be optimistic. The future is brighter — much brighter — than they think.