On the Nature of Things | Forum

Weiner’s high-profile scandals have cost him at least two other jobs: He resigned his seat in Congress in 2011 after accidentally tweeting a crotch-shot meant for someone else other than his wife. (He first blamed it on hackers.) After a 2013 sexting spree as “Carlos Danger” with Sydney Leathers destroyed his nascent political comeback, he took on a role at public relations firm MWW. But after two months, the firm let him go, citing distractions from news outlets writing on him.

Schumer: Republicans should throw their health bill 'in the trash'

This tension — between party leaders who will not compete for seats they think they cannot win and an energized base loath to concede any contests to Republicans — risks demoralizing activists who keep getting their hopes up. It also points to a painful reality for Democrats: Despite the boiling fury on the left, the resistance toward Mr. Trump has yet to translate into a major electoral victory.

Hillary at Wellesley: When I was your age, we also had a president who'd be impeached for obstruction of justice

Only 6% want Clinton back as president, most choose Reagan
by Paul Bedard | May 27, 2017, 11:02 AM

Zack Morris wrote:The Washington Examiner?

If you read the poll you'd see that -- BOOM! -- 21% of people want Obama back. I'm telling you, the guy's going to be on Mt. Rushmore before you die.

Zack Morris wrote:Yawn. Doesn't look like any crime was committed here.

Now for someone not even serving in any official administration position to try to set up a back-channel to keep information hidden from US intelligence agencies before the administration has even taken office, that is some weird sh*t right there. I wonder what Kushy wanted to talk about? Maybe the Russians do have financial kompromat on Trump and Kushner after providing funding for their real estate projects for years? Good thing it's being investigated!

Zack Morris wrote:Yawn. Doesn't look like any crime was committed here.

Now for someone not even serving in any official administration position to try to set up a back-channel to keep information hidden from US intelligence agencies before the administration has even taken office, that is some weird sh*t right there. I wonder what Kushy wanted to talk about? Maybe the Russians do have financial kompromat on Trump and Kushner after providing funding for their real estate projects for years? Good thing it's being investigated!

In June of last year, attorneys Jared Beck and Elizabeth Beck of law firm Beck and Lee filed a class action law suit against the DNC and former chairwomen Debbie Wasserman Schultz. The suit claims that the DNC acted against its charter when it showed demonstrable favoritism towards Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary, and failed to secure the data of DNC donors. The suit could have massive significance for the Democratic Party and could have an even wider impact if the origin of the DNC leaks are disclosed in the proceedings. . . .

The Democratic Party Is in Worse Shape Than You Thought

Sifting through the wreckage of the 2016 election, Democratic pollsters, strategists and sympathetic academics have reached some unnerving conclusions.

What the autopsy reveals is that Democratic losses among working class voters were not limited to whites; that crucial constituencies within the party see its leaders as alien; and that unity over economic populism may not be able to turn back the conservative tide.

Equally disturbing, winning back former party loyalists who switched to Trump will be tough: these white voters’ views on immigration and race are in direct conflict with fundamental Democratic tenets.

Some of these post-mortem conclusions are based on polling and focus groups conducted by the Democratic super PAC Priorities USA; others are drawn from a collection of 13 essays published by The American Prospect.

A consistent theme is that the focus on white defections from the Democratic Party masks an even more threatening trend: declining turnout among key elements of the so-called Rising American Electorate — minority, young and single voters. Turnout among African-Americans, for example, fell by 7 points, from 66.6 percent in 2012 to 59.6 percent in 2016.

Priorities USA, in surveys and focus groups, studied “drop off voters,” those who lean Democratic but failed to vote in either 2014 or 2016. By and large, these voters were members of the coalition that elected and re-elected Barack Obama:

people of color (41% African-American, Hispanic, or Asian), young (22% under the age of 29), female (60%), and unmarried (46% single, separated, widowed, or divorced).

Priorities found that drop off voters were distinctly lukewarm toward Hillary Clinton:

Just 30% describe themselves as very favorable to Clinton, far lower than the 72% who describe themselves as very favorable to Barack Obama.

Priorities also studied Obama-to-Trump voters. Estimates of the number of such voters range from 6.7 to 9.2 million, far more than enough to provide Trump his Electoral College victory. The counties that switched from Obama to Trump were heavily concentrated in the Midwest and other Rust Belt states.

To say that this constituency does not look favorably on the Democratic Party fails to capture the scope of their disenchantment.

The accompanying chart illustrates this discontent. A solid majority, 77 percent, of Obama-to-Trump voters think Trump’s economic policies will either favor “all groups equally” (44) or the middle class (33). 21 percent said Trump would favor the wealthy.

In contrast, a plurality of these voters, 42 percent, said that Congressional Democrats would favor the wealthy, slightly ahead of Congressional Republicans at 40 percent.

Geoff Garin is a partner in the Garin-Hart-Yang Research Group which, together with the Global Strategy Group, conducted the surveys and focus groups for Priorities USA. Garin wrote in an email:

The biggest common denominator among Obama-Trump voters is a view that the political system is corrupt and doesn’t work for people like them.

Garin added that

Obama-Trump voters were more likely to think more Democrats look out for the wealthy than look out for poor people.

“After economics,” Garin wrote,

the other main drivers for Trump were very specifically about immigration and race, and feelings about both things were powerful and raw.

Garin described Trump’s use of the race issue as “both masterful and dastardly” in exploiting “the polarization on race around Black Lives Matter and the shootings by and of police.” In doing so,

Trump accentuated people’s feelings that battle lines were being drawn in the country and that the forgotten American (a.k.a. working class whites) had to take sides.

I asked Nick Gourevitch, a partner in Global Strategies, to rank the importance of economics, race, immigration and cultural alienation in driving support for Trump. He emailed:

My take is that economics and culture/race are quite intertwined. The Obama-Trump shift happened in places that are no doubt economically distressed and when you do focus groups with Obama-Trump voters, the conversation always starts about the economy, jobs leaving, towns and places that are no longer as vibrant as they used to be.

As focus group discussions continued, Gourevitch noted, cultural and racial issues began to emerge in force:

So it may be that within economically distressed communities, the individuals who found Trump appealing (or who left Obama for Trump) were the ones where the cultural and racial piece was a strong part of the reason why they went in that direction. So I guess my take is that it’s probably not economics alone that did it. Nor is it racism/cultural alienation alone that did it. It’s probably that mixture.

If the Priorities analysis is bleak, the 13 American Prospect essays are even more so.

Stan Greenberg, the Democratic pollster, writes in his Prospect essay:

The Democrats don’t have a “white working-class problem.” They have a “working-class problem,” which progressives have been reluctant to address honestly or boldly. The fact is that Democrats have lost support with all working-class voters across the electorate, including the Rising American Electorate of minorities, unmarried women, and millennials. This decline contributed mightily to the Democrats’ losses in the states and Congress and to the election of Donald Trump.

Greenberg voiced an exceptionally sharp critique of his own party and its candidates. First, he takes on Barack Obama:

Working-class Americans pulled back from Democrats in this last period of Democratic governance because of President Obama’s insistence on heralding economic progress and the bailout of the irresponsible elites, while ordinary people’s incomes crashed and they continued to struggle financially.

Hillary Clinton does not escape Greenberg’s wrath:

In what may border on campaign malpractice, the Clinton campaign chose in the closing battle to ignore the economic stress not just of the working-class women who were still in play, but also of those within the Democrats’ own base, particularly among the minorities, millennials, and unmarried women.

Greenberg does not stop there, shifting his focus from individual Democratic politicians to the Democratic Party itself:

Past supporters

pulled back because of the Democrats’ seeming embrace of multinational trade agreements that have cost American jobs. The Democrats have moved from seeking to manage and champion the nation’s growing immigrant diversity to seeming to champion immigrant rights over American citizens’. Instinctively and not surprisingly, the Democrats embraced the liberal values of America’s dynamic and best-educated metropolitan areas, seeming not to respect the values or economic stress of older voters in small-town and rural America. Finally, the Democrats also missed the economic stress and social problems in the cities themselves and in working-class suburbs.

Along parallel lines, three analysts at the pro-Democratic Center for American Progress, Robert Griffin, John Halpin, and Ruy Teixeira, argue that:

Rather than debating whether Democrats should appeal to white working-class voters or voters of color — both necessary components of a successful electoral coalition, particularly at the state and local level — a more important question emerges: Why are Democrats losing support and seeing declining turnout from working-class voters of all races in many places?

Griffin, Halpin and Teixeira argue that

Democrats allowed themselves to become the party of the status quo — a status quo perceived to be elitist, exclusionary, and disconnected from the entire range of working-class concerns, but particularly from those voters in white working-class areas.

In the 2016 campaign, they continue,

rightly or wrongly, Hillary Clinton’s campaign exemplified a professional-class status quo that failed to rally enough working-class voters of color and failed to blunt the drift of white working-class voters to Republicans.

Comey got 'steely silence' after confronting Loretta Lynch about Clinton's email probe

On CNN Sunday, Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein said, "I would have a queasy feeling too, though, to be candid with you I think we need to know more about that and there’s only one way to know about it and that’s to have the Judiciary Committee take a look at that.”

In multiple private sessions over the last few months, Comey has told lawmakers about a second, later confrontation with Lynch shortly before the email probe was shut down.

Comey told lawmakers in the close door session that he raised his concern with the attorney general that she had created a conflict of interest by meeting with Clinton’s husband, the former President Bill Clinton, on an airport tarmac while the investigation was ongoing.

During the conversation, Comey told lawmakers he confronted Lynch with a highly sensitive piece of evidence, a communication between two political figures that suggested Lynch had agreed to put the kibosh on any prosecution of Clinton.

Democratic 2020 contenders? Voters haven't heard of them

There's limited time for no-name candidates to build name recognition and familiarity among voters.

Dozens of Democrats are reportedly considering challenging Trump in 2020. But voters haven’t heard of the vast majority of them.

According to a new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll that tested voters’ views of 19 potential Democratic presidential candidates — a list that includes eight senators, five governors, one congressman, a big-city mayor and a failed Senate candidate — most of the prospects are unknown among at least half the electorate.

Since the next presidential election won’t start in earnest for at least 18 months, that leaves a limited time for no-name candidates to build name recognition and familiarity among voters.