The Associated Press sent some reporters out to talk to suburban women in an effort to see how they’re reacting to President Trump’s winning personality. All of these types of stories are completely unscientific, but the general feel they got from talking to women outside Philadelphia, Detroit and Denver is that Trump is losing a lot of female suburban support with his racist attitude.
This is basically a no-brainer, especially if you actually live in the suburbs like I do. Suburban schools are so diverse now that pretty much every white kid has a bunch of “people of color” as friends. This is certainly true of my son, and I’d have to be some kind of complete miscreant to voice support for the president and still think my child would be welcome at birthday parties. The country has changed since the time of White Flight, and the price Trump will pay for looking to run up his numbers in all-white small towns and rural America is a worse shellacking in the nation’s suburbs.
Yet, that still doesn’t mean his plan can’t work. The Democrats are doing their damnedest to lose suburban support with some of their more extreme health care and immigration rhetoric, and some nominees would add to that the demonization of anyone who works in the insurance, pharmaceutical or financial services industries. Trump may very well do even better in rural areas than he did in 2016 when his shocking victory was almost entirely explained by his unanticipated strength there. To offset that, the Democrats need to more than match him in the suburbs, and they seem to be hellbent on playing with fire with that crucial slice of the electorate.
Remember, too, that the Democrat can run up much bigger numbers in places like Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles and San Francisco without it helping in the Electoral College at all. The battle will be won or lost outside of Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Columbus, Cleveland, Charlotte, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Tampa, and Orlando.
Trump knows what he needs to do to win again even while getting crushed in the popular vote. But he can’t do it alone. His strategy is losing him too much suburban support. The Democrats should not do things that hand that support right back to him.
Nah. What matters is the intensity of feeling among my progressive friends on Facebook. Passion will win the election, not votes.
Yes passion. Also purity. Purity with passion is absolutely the winning formula. That’s why Jill Stein in President. /s. (I’m assuming your post was also /s)
Martin, you seem to be the only pundit talking realistically about how to win the presidential election. Demonizing middle class people because they aren’t sufficiently passionate about punishing their employers and guilt-tripping middle managers in ‘capitalist’ enterprises is not the pathway to electoral success.
I doubt Martin subscribes to the centrist framing you are making.
There are ways to reach people with our progressive message. We don’t have to reach them all. Just need to peel off enough of the high %’s supporting Trump in rural counties so that their majorities there don’t swamp our urban votes.
You need to look into the future 4 years from now. Status quo? You really think that it’s being realistic to put off the revolutionary change needed now for a time when peoples’ pain will greatly increase the risk of an election that will give us something even worse than Trump?
Josh Marshall had a piece on the perils associated with the elimination of private insurance. I agree with him and Martin on that. Democrats also cannot give the impression they are for open borders.
It would be refreshing to see you reframe some of your posts. You are lining up nicely with Josh Marshall of TPM and he’s not really good company to be in.
I’d like to think that “it’s not what you say, but how you say it”. What you call radical policies are absolutely essential ones and it will take courageous and effective leadership with the kind of messaging that will also appeal to these people you are so concerned we are going to drive away. How about a post or two about how that might be done instead assuming that we need to support a damn centrist to prevent a Trump win in 2020?
What good is a victory that puts us right back where we were with Obama. We might stave off Trump with this but people dying from lack of healthcare, the increasing impact of climate change not being dealt with and the retardation of the economic lives of millions will only lead to a massive revolutionary change that could go either way in 2024.
I’d rather solve things now and not take the higher risk that comes with delaying solving the essential problems we face today.
I agree. These issues simply cannot be ignored. Health care, immigration and related issues need to be addressed. Heck we could lose critical turnout if we ignore it all. And climate change is simply something that won’t be ignored — period.
Thanks for your comment, but given what we know about the major Democratic candidates and their policy preferences, any one of them would—given the opportunity—advance a progressive agenda on climate change, health care, immigration and the economy. (Note: President Obama did too.)
The constraints on the next Democratic president are more likely to come from the Senate and the federal judiciary.
And, any Democratic president would be a vast improvement over the current occupant of the Oval Office.
“Any Democratic candidate”….would NOT advance a progressive agenda on climate change and healthcare and the economy. Some will do that and the others will take a more centrist, incremental (read: not progressive) approach.
This can be true and also – any Democratic Party nominee would be a vast improvement over the current occupant in the Oval Office.
Thanks for your response. I guess I tend to look at the political world this way: you’re either moving forward or you’re moving backward. Any Democratic president chosen from the current field is going to help move forward a progressive agenda to some degree. Some might do more than others (by reason of ideological preference, political skill, luck, or some other combination of factors).
And, any Democratic president in 2021 is going to be constrained from acting on health care, climate change, immigration, etc. less by his or her preferences and more by who controls the balance of power in the Senate.
So long as the senate is not an excuse, we will have the opportunity to change it over the ensuing eight years. So we should seek the progressive candidate we need.( with the caveat, anyone but Trump). Moscow Mitch has to go.
Just to be clear, I’m not using the Senate as “an excuse”. I’m just dealing with the world as it is. (There’s also the 1/4 (or so) of the federal judiciary that’s been appointed by Trump.)
I agree with your important point that “we will have the opportunity to change it over the ensuring eight years”. Yes, that’s politics. We aren’t electing a monarch who can rule by edict. We’re electing a president, who’s merely the leader of one of three co-equal branches of government. Whether it’s Biden or Sanders or Harris or Warren or anyone else, a Democratic president in 2021 will not sign their own health care/immigration/climate change bills into law; they’ll sign the bills that make it through Congress. (In turn, what makes it through Congress depends partly on the political environment created by the citizenry.)
I appreciate your response and perspective. I think other dynamics not yet observed in recent political history might come into play. Movements may form that are more successful at pressuring GOP and centrist lawmakers. An idea like the Green New Deal might catch fire. They may not too, in which case we are probably stuck with incrementalist steps forward – and a not very bright future as a result.
Thanks for your kind words. One hopeful example from history: after passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Democrats (and liberal Republicans) had no intention of dealing with voting rights in 1965. It was the strategic, disciplined mass nonviolent campaign by the various leaders and organizations of the civil rights movement that changed the political climate and made passage of the Voting Rights Act not only possible, but necessary.
Here is one incremental idea to put out there. Negotiated drug prices. Let Medicare negotiate payments for drugs. Maybe then we could get them to where they are in other countries, like Canada.
Sure! And there are a hundred (or more!) other good ideas like that out there, and that will end up as part of the Democratic platform next year.
All those good ideas face opposition. All those good ideas have to get through the House, the Senate, the White House and the Supreme Court…and then be implemented and enforced by various federal agencies, and by all 50 states.
By all means, vote for and support your favorite candidate in the primary election. And then do what you can to elect whomever wins the nomination.
Then it’s a matter of wash, rinse, repeat for Senate and House elections, and (especially because it’s a census year) also for your state elected officials.
Thanks for your comment, but things are probably worse than you think they are.
Even if your (or my, or someone else’s) preferred “courageous and effective” candidate wins the primary and defeats Trump, the newly elected president is going to have to deal with 1) Sen. Majority Leader McConnell, or 2) Sen. Majority Leader Schumer whose going to have to rely on someone like Sen. Manchin to provide the 50th vote to allow the vice-president to break a tie on any given piece of legislation (including health care, climate change, and every bill that affects the economy and income inequality).
You don’t have to like President Obama or any number of his accomplishments, actions, and statements while in office; but on all the issues you mentioned, the federal government took giant steps forward (at least, compared with any time in the previous 40 years) during his administration. See, for example:
https://masscommons.wordpress.com/2012/10/31/the-new-new-deal-the-hidden-story-of-change-in-the-obama-era/
https://masscommons.wordpress.com/2012/08/29/worth-the-fighting-for-the-new-new-deal/
No matter who gets elected president next year, we’re not going to “solve things now”. We’re simply going to face an altered political landscape, with greater or lesser opportunities to address the issues you care about.
“What good is a victory that puts us right back where were were with Obama?”
So a public option and fascism are indistinguishable?
(BTW, I agree with you on climate change…but it’s not clear to me that any D candidate, progressive or centrist, has a solution.)
You need to listen to the speech from Greta Thunberg a sixteen year old from Sweden. She has taken a year off school to spread her message, and as I believe, she is now in the US. She will make you a believer. Something must be done and soon.
I’m not going to pretend that decriminalizing the border is popular, but a lot of people would read that as “open borders” which explains its unpopularity. Eventually we will argue for open borders, but for now that’s politically toxic.
However, as new Quinnipac polling shows, Miller’s and Trump’s arguments/policies aren’t popular, and releasing immigrants while their asylum claims are processing has majority support:
Some of the way you’re writing lately is really turning me off. It’s like you accept that Trump has a winning hand on immigration when he most certainly does not.
More here from Greg Sargent
We cannot turn our backs on this and other very critical matters. To do so risks critical turnout.
This imbalance goes to the heart of the issue.
Some of the brightest, best-informed leftie commentators believe, as I think Martin does, that electorally-speaking , there is real equivalence between ‘extreme’ rhetoric by handful of Democrats, on the one hand, and the overt embrace of racism, of locking children in cages, of sexual assault, of aiding Russia’s capacity to continue to interfere with our elections, etc, etc, etc. by Trump and the entire Republican Party, on the other.
They may be right. But if they are, it says more about these suburban voters than about the Democratic Party.
If we have to lock a few babies in cages ourselves to win those voters, maybe it’s worth doing to get rid of Trump. I don’t know. But we’re not a thousand miles from that point yet. There are a dozen less-morally-bankrupt battles to fight before we get there (in fact, seabe keeps fighting them in the comments here). Most of those battles, I think, are to refuse to accept that proposed equivalence.
On the one hand we have a party talking about climate change, health care, immigration reform and economic equality and fair pay. And on the other is a fascist and racist lying sack of shit supported by such upright fellows and gals as Moscow Mitch and Susan Collins.That’s clear enough. So if the Orange Cheeto pulls another one out of the hat we have to seriously wonder what kind of country we are living in anyway.
We live in a country that elected Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson twice each (just to pick three of the most virulent racists to occupy the White House). We live in a country that elected Richard Nixon over Hubert Humphrey, Ronald Reagan over Walter Mondale, George W. Bush over Al Gore, and (of course) Trump over Clinton.
We also live in a country that elected Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama twice each, and Franklin Roosevelt four times. We live in a country where the only national holiday named for a citizen is named in honor of a young Black minister who when he died was an increasingly unpopular public figure.
Working to persuade our neighbors and fellow citizens to vote their hopes and not their fears is a constant struggle. (Probably is everywhere else in the world, too.)
Huffington Post has a listing of the eleven most racist presidents. We should add Trump and make that twelve. Still the world has changed since most of them made the list and it is changing still. Maybe there is simply no hope for many. Franklin Roosevelt was a racist on the list but found a way to work with the south to pass needed legislation. So perhaps we can do the same. Maybe we should say that 33 were not racist?
No, because we’d almost certainly be wrong.
Your point about FDR is probably more relevant. There’s an old story about a group of labor leaders meeting with FDR and arguing in favor of pro-union federal legislation. At the end of the conversation Roosevelt said, “Alright, you’ve convinced me. Now, go out there and make me do it. Because otherwise those businessmen will make sure I don’t.”
To oversimplify the story, that led to the Flint sit-down strike, which led to the Wagner Act.
Does it matter who the president is? On the margins, yes. Does it matter more what’s politically possible for a president to do? Definitely.
I am only trying to say, we know there are racists out there, lots of them. But we need to try and move ahead or we obviously get no where.. I had heard that story about FDR. What impresses me about FDR is he was not afraid to move into new areas like the WPA and CCC and social security in the face of conservative opposition. . It sure helps to have a depression but he nonetheless did it. Makes him number three behind Lincoln and Washington some say. Maybe that is why I like Warren. She has a message. And so far it is holding up.
And in the face of conservative opposition FDR compromised on pretty much every accomplishment liberals now celebrate him for. Social Security is one example. The Wagner Act (which excluded domestic and farm workers at a time when many/most domestic and farm workers were Black and in the South) is another.
There’s a terrific old (1938) essay by John Herman Randall, Jr. titled “On the Importance of Being Unprincipled” praising FDR for his lack of ideological consistency, and his willingness to negotiate and compromise and experiment, and arguing that it was precisely those traits that made FDR a good politician and president.
For many people, not materially different than the one that Sinclair Lewis wrote about ~100 years ago.
I think the proposals to eliminate private insurance are political suicide. It doesn’t matter what the actual content of a policy is, if that’s how you’re going to characterize it (“You *don’t* get to keep your health insurance”) you are going to get creamed.
I’ve heard that a number of times and I am still not sure I understand. It is not a loss of anything if it is replaced? And that is the whole idea: replace insurance with a less expensive alternative and better system and without co pays and deductibles (or at minimum).
To your point I think is the elimination of private insurance as an investment vehicle. That could require some form of equity payment. Also, I am pretty sure there will still be room here for the medicare advantage type of insurance to cover portions not included in the single payer amounts.
People are loss adverse. This is a well-established fact of our psychology (see Kahneman & Tversky). So, if you tell them, “you’ll lose A, but gain B” and if A and B have equal value, they will experience the loss of A as more significant than the gain of B. And…this is assuming that the gain is immediately apparent to them. In the present case, what you’re really saying is, “you’ll definitely lose private insurance, but we’ll give you something else, whose value you cannot possibly assess until a few years down the road.” Most people will (somewhat reasonably) focus their attention entirely on the loss, which is certain, rather than the gain, which is uncertain.
We saw this dynamic so clearly with ObamaCare. Have people forgotten that we got destroyed in 2010, in a large part because of discontent over ObamaCare? Now people (mostly) like it, but it took 6-8 years before people become familiar enough with it that it became a net electoral benefit. And ObamaCare was far less disruptive than m4a would be.
This is not an argument for not doing anything…but it should shape our opinion about how we go about this.
The democrats have not been particularly good at winning the house in the past fourteen elections having won it four times (including once under Clinton and once under Obama) and losing it ten times. So if you mean to say the American voters are dunces or the dems are dunces, you can have it either way.
As Adlai Stevenson said when campaigning against Eisenhower and a supporter yelled, “You have the support of every thinking American”: “Alas, I need a majority to win.”
Here are a few ways of thinking about it
1) A lot of professions (e.g. public service ones) trade lower wages for superior benefits. If you are promising to replace those existing benefits, generally superior to what other people have access to, with medicare, you are effectively reducing those workers’ compensation. That’s a hard ask for public service workers who also happen to constitute a reliable democratic constituency. But obviously it’s a hard ask for other people as well. Health care is not zero-sum, obviously, but there are trade offs when you extend equal benefits to all.
2) Rae made this point already, but there are no guarantees that the government will be good on its word. What happens during the next Republican administration? Private insurance obviously has its flaws but people are familiar with this system and relatively comfortable with it. No one wants to take their chances. I mean the whole point of insurance is so you *aren’t* taking chances.
These are intractable problems that do not admit of solutions, especially complicated “solutions” voted upon by the ill-informed American voter. The idea that the ordinary citizen can somehow divine the proper answer to America’s health care morass is absurd. The National Trumpalist/”conservative” MO is to specify nothing, yap about the “most beautiful” system ever seen and demonize the (overly specific) Dem proposals. Then, after winning the election, do precisely nothing. Perhaps the Dem candidate should just say, “who do you trust to try to do something sensible on this, us or them?” and leave it at that. It works for the Repubs!
As to the border, it certainly seems that government after government in poorer countries is effectively collapsing, almost certainly because of economic problems arising from (now inexorable) climate change. God knows we surely aren’t helping those flailing governments to do better, because that would involve diplomacy and actual foreign aid, both of which “conservatism” intensely despises. Hell, we are flailing ourselves! Americans (white especially) are apparently of two minds: they give widespread support to the idea of immigration in the abstract, while apparently strongly disliking the Latino immigrants that are presenting themselves. Since those are the immigrants on offer in the 21st Century, we again have an intractable problem. The default position then becomes “we gotta be cruel to be kind!”–i.e. National Trumpalism.
Given that much of the history of the suburbs is based in white flight, they seem a demographic particularly susceptible to fear-mongering, which is how the disgusting “conservative” movement has won them for decades. I am very suspicious of having them hold the flanks of the anti-Trumpalist position, but given the dearth of other possible allies, they are all we have. Good luck to Dems in the useless corporate media “debate” cattle-calls trying to thread the needle on suburban hopes and fears, while maintaining the enthusiasm of the young/urbanites—perhaps some extensive Rorschach testing can be administered! It’s a shame that suburban fears don’t seem to extend to (actually terrifying) climate change, but in the sprawling lands of the “essential” $80,000 (and 15mpg) Monster Pick-up and Escalade, this is perhaps understandable.