Bleeding Heartland has an excellent article on the state of Democratic Politics in Iowa. It includes a sophisticated analysis of the issues in light of the ANES survey.
Iowa had one of the largest ’12 to ’16 swings in the country. Obama always considered the state a bellwether and the personal connection he felt to the state was the reason his final 2012 campaign event was there.
I not sure I agree with everything, or even most of what is written. But it is interesting.
Regarding the 2018 “bloodbath”. Dissatisfaction with (R)’s doesn’t mean voters will switch to (D). They may be very dissatisfied but still think that (R) is the lesser evil.
I agree – nowhere close to a slam dunk. Right now the generic ballot isn’t in 2006 territory.
very, very interesting, thanks. several thoughts: new issues, due to T: 1 public education very very important. R senators supporting deVos, have already been warned by the electorate. 2 accepting refugees: mainstream denominations oppose T’s stance on this saying represents neither American nor Christian values. have run across some columns and radio programs stating this. horrifying interview w van Hollen by Michele Martin yesterday. she asked him to grade Democrats on what dems have done in T’s 100 days [great question]: all he could do is ramble on and on about how dems have no power and T is awful. she repeated the q a few times and in all the rambling he did say the measure of the dems should be preventing T from doing too much destruction, but then he veered off into more “T is awful we can’t do anything”.
my answer, Fladem, to the question you’ve posed often in recent months, about how to reach ppl, is that media and news stories are pretty distant from ppl in terms of inducing reflection. otoh the mainstream denominations are already doing it, and that’s a place ppl interact with other ppl as the values questions are raised
You are right on number 1: and that may effect state races where education is a more popular issue.
I also think you are dead right about refugees. Of all the people to keep out, they are the last. See also the NYT op-ed on the Haitian Refugees today.
I was at an event on climate change yesterday.I think they help but I worry they are made of the same people over and over.
The media just seems so hopeless in convincing anyone of anything. People create their bubbles and I am not sure what can break them down.
In certain contexts, which we are discussing, face to face interaction takes priority. in fact, it’s the only medium that means anything at all. everything else is white noise. I experience it myself. I go back to my place and read this blog, for example, and what I read is interesting but very distant, has absolutely no impact on the day to day discussions and very good relationships I have with ppl I see face to face. dem party may become relevant but for now, dems are saying absolutely nothing to reach ppl or create dialog on the issues. whatever the hair on fire ads and the infinite # of tedious fundraising emails say is just a lot of white noise when put side by side with human interaction. I think this is why though not in the Heartland context I like Beto O’Rourke so much; he speaks to his context, he creates dialog with humans in his context. In a sense it’s a MacCluhan issue and I’m afraid to say on this blog b/c most are so anti-religion- out of ignorance I would maintain), the religious institutions are the principal locus offering a context for constructive dialog because they are where ppl are dealing with values in a wholistic human sense, all under the radar of the parties. I think what’s happening is sort of like the Civil Rights movement era but very much under the radar. I guess you can see with Rev Barber how the religious institutions can offer a context to grapple with the issues so you can see what I mean. I suggest there’s a lot more going on that ppl are experiencing but the media has not picked up on because it’s not set up to see
Really? Religion — which I take it you mean subscribing to one of the various institutional forms based on a construct of a supernatural being — is so infrequently broached on this blog, and then only in passing, isn’t evidence of most being “so anti-religion.” And “out of ignorance” smacks of what religious missionaries say about heathens as they proselytize the superiority of their god over other gods.
Describing those that view keeping religion out of state affairs as “so anti-religion” is exactly what those that believe in any religion have been saying for centuries as they seek to worm their way into state institutions to promote their beliefs. Creating strife and destruction in the process. The majority of the founders of this country had a profound understanding that religion intermingled with affairs of state mucks up domestic tranquility. Leads to civil wars. What’s ignorant about that?
The US population is so religious that war making has become a permanent feature of this country’s interaction with other countries. That lobbing cruise missiles made Trump “presidential” (and that response included Democrats). Almost a hundred years on from the Scopes’ trial, have a majority of young Americans finally become ignorant?
FWIW, those over the age of twelve during the 1960s viewed the fundamentalist religious based anti-evolutionists as ignorant.
hmm. well, anyway, my original comment above is about mainstream denominations and my second comment follows up on it, i.e. refers to mainstream denominations also. perhaps you didn’t read it? perhaps you don’t know the stance of the mainstream denominations on separation of church and state?
Baptists aren’t mainstream? What’s your definition of mainstream?
Mainstream religions are also for anti-abortion laws. Or aren’t Roman Catholics mainstream?
Baptists are very different from mainline protestant denominations like the Episcopalians.
Even in Chicagoland their are more Baptists than Episcopalians, although Roman Catholics and Presbyterians seem to dominate. Not that their aren’t many denominations like Greek Orthodox and Ukrainian Catholic (they don’t recognize the pope).
Most the mainline protestant churches are in decline: about 30 years ago they lost their young to secularism.
I must confess that I was thinking only white population above. The Hispanic population is overwhelmingly Roman Catholic. The black population seems (the people I know) to be Baptist/Afro-baptist or Methodist. I know there is a sizable black Roman Catholic population in Chicago. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a black Episcopalian or Presbyterian. Episcopalians all seem to be rich Anglo-Saxons.
I never talked about religion to my Asian friends. The Chinese, having grown up in the People’s Republic are probably atheists. I know one Indian who is very definitely a follower of the ancient Indian gods. There is a temple to Krishna in my town. I know that because my aforementioned friend translated the name for me. I know a lot of Filipinos, both neighbors and co-workers. We never talked about it but I got the impression they were Catholic also. I’ve seen a couple of Korean Christian churches in neighboring towns. They seem to have their own denomination(s). And of course, my young Pakistani friend/co-worker was Muslim. There are two mosques in my town. Despite the heavily Hispanic population there is only one Roman Catholic Church. And one Protestant Church, a Bible Church.
see the Pew Research Center site I linked to your other comment,
Baptist US Presidents:
Harding
Truman
Carter
Clinton
Catholic US Presidents:
JFK
What’s your definition of mainline religion? Baptists have been here since before 1650.
I said mainline protestant churches, not mainline churches.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainline_Protestant
I am surprised the Baptist Church in included in the list, because of this:
“The mainline Protestant churches (also called mainstream American Protestant[1] and sometimes oldline Protestant)[2][3][4] are a group of Protestant denominations in the United States that contrast in history and practice with evangelical, fundamentalist, and charismatic Protestant denominations”
Baptist churches in my experience are evangelical, and I would not generally include them in the list given the distinction described. A number of the mainline protestant churches have endorsed gay marriage, and most have very different views on the role of women than to evangelicals.
To me, a non-mainstream denomination would be the moonies and whatever Jim Jones led. Evangelicals are too prominent and numerous to be considered non-mainline, particularly with their emphasis on the literal interpretation of the Bible. Mormons now, we had Mormon neighbors in Virginia. They seemed friendly but shunned us when we refused to join their Church. This really bothered my daughter as the “Yankee Girl” was rather desperate for friends. They had given us a Book of Mormon. Have you ever read it? WHACKO! Of course, I couldn’t tell them that.They would not be mainstream Christians. Some say they aren’t Christian at all since they don’t follow the Nicean Creed.
Mainstream is of course in the eye of the beholder.
I personally would consider as mainstream any denomination that a large number of mainstream Christians wouldn’t make snide remarks about (yeah, recursive definition, I know). IMHO this makes Pentacostals and charismatics (and of course LDS, SDA, Jehovah’s Witness, etc) non-mainstream, while Baptists, Lutherans, Episcopaleans, Methodists, and Catholics are mainstream. And cults are religions that haven’t caught on yet.
Then again, when I lived in the south, many didn’t consider Catholics as Christians even.
Mainstream is not the same thing as Mainline.
it’s as Fladem writes, “mainline denominations” is a technical term. here’s a website, and I’ll point out a few items I found interesting.
first, here are the categories – these are religious studies/ history/ sociology categories
http://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/
you can click on regions, states, or cities. compare, for example, IA
http://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/state/iowa/
with, say, San Francisco area
http://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/metro-area/san-francisco-metro-area/
or Boston
http://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/metro-area/boston-metro-area/
Looking at the heartland region, I’ll point out two things; first, ppl living in a small town in SW IA [I use this example b/c I spend time there] are more likely to have a discussion across denominations than in a “siloed existence” type high density urban area like Chicago (this fact goes to my original point). second, because of Catholic polity the position on immigrants that I mentioned is an official church position. in all the denominations with a centralized polity – Lutheran, Episcopalian, for example, the church that will be the case.
Okay, so, Catholics aren’t “mainline” because they aren’t Protestant. And Baptists aren’t “mainline” even though they’re Protestants because MA Bay, Plymouth, and Connecticut viewed Baptists and therefore, Rhode Island as heretics and for a hundred years actively sought to dismember RI.
Only very recently and then only by some churches within a denomination. Some have ended their affiliation. Let’s not overlook the fact that before Griswold and Roe, evangelicals were more likely to support birth control than all those upper crust type churches.
Marie, this is about your forth response on this subject and you haven’t come close yet.
You seem to want to heap derision on something you REALLY don’t understand. In fact I suspect you never heard of this term until this thread.
That is utter nonsense. Seriously you are just making it up. Few protestant churches ever had a problem with birth control, and certainly not the major mainline protestant ones.
You don’t know what you are talking about, and I mean that quite literally.
The reason this matters is that mainline churches were far better educated and far less likely to see a conflict between science and religion than evangelicals and fundamentalists are. Very few in mainline churches ever got up and said the world is 6,000 years old.
They are in decline because the young have left organized religion entirely.
Or maybe you don’t. Horace Julian Bond:
Erasing over three hundred years of your “mainline christian religions” history and dominance in the US, and then declaring that some communities of those mainline religions became more liberal and open minded over the past fifty or so years doesn’t even mean that today all of them are easy breezy. It would be like a Catholic declaring that Vatican II and the Beringer Brothers is what defines the church today. Pope Francis is an authentic man of science, but he continues to reject women for the priesthood and the right of women to control their own fertility.
It was the mainline religions that dominated US culture and governments. Promulgated US imperialism and early on facilitated slavery. Denied women suffrage and promulgated the anti-homosexuality legislation.
With the possible exception of Unitarians and Quakers (although Nixon was a Quaker so don’t want to give them too much credit), evangelical sects exist in all religions.
And
How many educated, “liberal,” and traditionally Republican Episcopalian, Methodist, Presbyterian, etc. voters bolted from the reformulated, anti-abortion, southern strategy GOP in 1972?
I do remember condom machines in Illinois marked “Sold for the prevention of disease ONLY”. Pharmacies didn’t have them out in the open like now. You had to ask for them and they wouldn’t sell to teenagers. My Catholic buddy across the alley got his by swiping them from his father’s drawer. His father had a whole dresser drawer full!
your reply does not make sense: contraception as a legal issue, – pertinence to stance of the churches? what ppl in mainline denominations in CT and MA actually did? [and include Catholics in that question]
history of Evangelicalism over the past 50 years and interplay with political, very complicated
as far as “became more liberal” ????? look at the period of slavery? reconstruction.
At the climate change event I was at one of the speakers was a Unitarian Universalist Minister. She talked about consumption and material wealth and the source of happiness. There is some of that ethic in the environmental movement I think.
It’s a dangerous place to go since the point isn’t to impose a world view on others.
Yet in some ways there isn’t really an idea of liberal politics without it.
agree it is a dangerous place to go, and yes that ethic permeates the environmental movement, – but the right wing has coopted the public face of Christianity at least, well, that’s changing now with Rev Barber. but I’m commenting here about the reverse, in reference to the question you pose about how to break through the polarization that shuts off discussion and pertinent to the wapo link marie posted, the issues are being discussed in mainstream denominations.
Unfortunately the mainstream denominations are shrinking.
The methodist are empty, the baptists are full.
The decline of the mainline Protestant churches has been a significant problem politically.
Looks as if most are fairly empty. Although a lot fuller in the most solid red states than in others.
18% of Americans never attend religious services, 22% attend less than once a year, and 21% attend a few times a year (that’s not a change from fifty years ago — Christmas and Easter masses were always packed, easily twice as many as regularly attended).
I remember a Chicago Tribune article about the E’s & C’s. That was in the 1980’s and yes, the ratio was around two to one.
BTW, does attending marriages and funerals count? I do attend those, mostly Catholic Mass but some are Protestant. Never been to a Jewish wedding or funeral, but was once at a Jewish wake which is nothing at all like an Irish wake.
I was baptized Catholic and raised Protestant (in a Bible Church). My friends as a kid were mostly Italian, Polish and Irish, so I was familiar with Catholic churches and beliefs. my mother was born catholic, became non-denominational and attended a Catholic Church at the end. I never thought of it, but when my sister said,”She always attended the closest Christian Church”, I realized she was right. The Bible Church, then in Virginia, the Methodist Church, then back to Illinois and a Baptist Church (closest), then she moved to the other side of town and back to the Catholic Church 9closer than the baptist church). She was a believer, but not doctrinaire. My father was your typical non-attending Catholic. On Sundays he stayed home and prepared a big breakfast for us. Loved his apple pancakes. Once, maybe 50 years ago, my sister and I talked to him about religion and he exclaimed, horrified, “Freethinkers! My children are Freethinkers!”. How else? Die Gedanken sind frei, nicht wahr?
If a wedding or a funeral is held in a church, etc. it counts because a) you’ve stepped into a church, etc. and b) you’re there for the entire service.
So, you missed out on all the good stuff of being raised Catholic at that time. OTOH, you didn’t have to suffer through and later cast off the bad stuff, but not sure the bad stuff varies that much from one christian denomination to another.
No, my best buddy who lived across the alley went to St. Vincent’s (Tony Accardo’s church) and catechism and all and told me all about it. Doubly Catholic, Polish father & Italian mother.
Vatican II was a breath of fresh air — but the mass and music in Latin had a more spiritual element.
Although this is very nice:
A few interesting developments as that was taking place: denominations that had split on the issue of slavery in the 19th Century reassociated [legally]; also Catholics began a discussion of how to address the loss of interest in religious orders – ordaining women, participation of the laity, shared parishes. And There was a major split in the Southern Baptists
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Baptist_Convention_conservative_resurgence
during which they lost from their more progressive membership to mainline denominations.
and just a fun fact for the scoffers, the UCC introduced the concept of environmental justice with a report Toxic Waste and Race in 1987.
sorry here’s the UCC link
http://www.ucc.org/environmental-ministries_toxic-waste-20
WaPo – Why did Trump win? New research by Democrats offers a worrisome answer.
(Surprisingly it wasn’t all the scapegoats, such as Russia-Putin, Bernie Bros, etc., that Democrats/liberals have been bashing.)
Is more polling needed? Didn’t FDR analyze and explain it in 1940?
Lots to digest in that report.
The PowerPoint slides are in some ways the best summary.
The drop off voters are the ones to understand. In the end I really wonder if all of these goddam predictions kept people home.
Still, the report is consistent with the Greenberg polling. Her economic message just didn’t get through. I actually think she had one that would have helped.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/r/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2017/05/01/Editorial-Opinion/Graphics/Post
-election_Research_Deck.pdf
Would that be the Clintonomics economic message or what was put into her campaign policy position papers that she boringly and long-windedly recited from?
To me the complaint seems to be that third time with the third-way neoliberal garbage wasn’t the charm. Living with the results of the first and second snowjobs, plenty of people in many states weren’t about to say, more and thank you and just enough people in several states went a step further and voted for a clown.
Focusing on three states (PA, MI, and WI) and the voter demographics that either shifted from Obama to Trump or opted to abstain, overlooks that fact that that sentiment and voting behavior wasn’t isolated and was widespread. The lead Democratic neoliberalcon messengers, Hillary and Kaine, were so bad that a freaking, comb-over, reality TV jerk beat them.
I heard her talk about her policy. In Iowa in her last event before the Caucuses I had her speak at at some length about it.
She had an infrastructure plan, she was for a minimum wage hike, and she had a decent education plan.
She had things to say that were not DLC stuff.
Was it what I would have liked: no. I do think she never realized the urgency, and her problems were not close to the scale of the problem.
This was not just a MI/WI/PA problem. It cost her FL and was why ME was close.
There is a very good tweet storm here. A summary of the book “listen Liberal”.
There is a lot of focus on NAFTA. A good summary of who Bill Clinton was and how he ran in ’92.
It is worth a read.
https://twitter.com/katereadsbks
I prefer to evaluate the past behavior of people (and particularly politicians) to gauge expected future behavior and not to dismiss past words and deeds in favor of whatever that person says today. (Bill Clinton conducted a poll on where to spend his vacation? And you seriously think that Hillary ’15-’16 words weren’t guided by polling and messaging constructed by the best wordsmiths that money can buy?) When the current words contradict past words and deeds, which is authentic: the past or today? Hillary couldn’t keep it simple in her campaign because that would have betrayed an even higher level of inauthenticity than her parsed to death and long winded statements did.
Democratic nominees since 1980 have always had an “infrastructure plan.” Win or lose, little materializes. Thus, it’s become campaign window dressing.
wrt minimum wage, in nominal and (2014) dollars:
February 1968 (Johnson): $1.60/hr ($10.75/hr)
January 1978 (Carter): $2.65 ($9.51/hr)
September 1997 (Clinton): $5.15/hr ($7.51/hr)
What would a President Hillary have settled for?
Did Hillary reject charter public schools? The high cost/low quality proprietary so-called colleges?
In particular this.
This is at the heart of the dispute within the Party, and partly why the Clinton’s are in some ways divisive figures. It really boils to down to how you read Bill’s Presidency. Clinton supporters are unable to see anything in the criticism beyond “right wing frames” and the left has forgotten that the “neo-liberal” tag applies partially, but not completely to Bill.
the clinton presidency
Those “big brain” neo-liberal manifesto writers/subscribers apparently neglected to study the history of industrial unions. “… all the waste involved in the Social Security program” could have been written by almost any Republican — not because it’s true but because it’s a GOP article of faith that Social Security is anti-capitalism –, the let’s beat up on teachers is just gross.
Well said:
Except it wasn’t a shift in 2016 — goes back at least to 1992. Genuflecting before the alter of pragmatism, meritocracy (aka right associates and right schools defines who merits more), and bipartisanship is an abstract version of a witch doctor’s feathers, rattles, and drums. Democratic politicians in general and the Clintons in particular have been and remain devoid of vision. Thus they rely on the highly successful to point out the roads they need to take. (As if US FP on Israel should be directed by children’s TV show creator that got rich off kids.) The GOP does have a vision (which GOP politicians embrace), regressive instead of progressive, but they don’t hide that they want to take the country back to 1900.
And this, page 26:
“Social Media feeds, especially Facebook, came up as a critical source of
news across all focus groups, persuasion and turnout.”
It was kind of odd: the Sanders people didn’t really rely on blogs. They relied on FB and reddit.
Same thing at the Climate Change event.
Get this on FB and twitter was the word.
As an attorney (only one at the pond that I’m aware of), was wondering if you’re following Carol Wilding, et al. v. DNC Services Corp, …? Transcript of Motion Hearing …
The Observer reported on it, but seems to have taken its information from the above linked transcript. However, they have been covering the filings in this lawsuit since at least September and therefore aren’t as far behind the curve as those that jumped on it in the past few days.