Democrats loss

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Useful pointers..

A rightwing US president wins an election by appealing to the left. In Britain, Ukip can plausibly claim to be supplanting Labour. A Tory prime minister attacks capitalism, while Labour supports Trident. Small wonder Castro gave up and died. 

Paul Krugman, field-marshal of an American left, stood last week on his battered tank, the New York Times, and wailed of Trump’s voters: “I don’t fully understand this resentment.” Why don’t the poor blame the conservatives? He had to assume the answer lay in the new Great Explanation, the politics of “identity liberalism”. He is right. It is 20 years since the philosopher Richard Rorty predicted that a Trump-like “strong man” would emerge to express how “badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates”.

Blame the identity apostles – they led us down this path to populism | Simon Jenkins | Opinion | The Guardian

The thrust of Clinton’s pitch to voters was about the unreliability and instability of her ego-bloated opponent, he says—not on dollars-and-cents issues. Ryan’s own message to his constituents was notably missing: Clinton wasn’t telling working-class folks that Trump was going to screw them, just that he was the wrong kind of guy to be president. 

“I think social issues are always part of a presidential campaign,” Ryan replies. “We don’t have to run from our progressive social agenda because I think most Americans agree with us on most of it, like on gay rights or even the choice issue. But if they see you talking only about social issues, and their main issue is their pocketbook, their job, their economic anxiety, you just look like you don’t understand them.” Asked for specifics on the economic message he’d like to see, Ryan points back to his own district and other former industrial strongholds.

Ohioans have had to get creative about new industries, he says, ticking off the successful business incubators in Youngstown, the new natural gas plants replacing coal-fire energy, and the additive and 3D manufacturing in cities like Cleveland and Dayton. “Everywhere there are these burgeoning little fresh new parts of the economy, and as Democrats, we should be the ones throwing gasoline on this stuff,” he said. “You need these public-private partnerships with strategic government intervention with layering capital for start-up businesses.”

Tim Ryan’s Rust Belt Reboot | New Republic

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The fake news stories were bad enough, but so was the real media coverage..

Clinton’s campaign did have a real news problem, but the problem was with the real news coverage — coverage that dwelled overwhelmingly on a bullshit email server scandal, devoted far fewer resources to investigating Trump’s shady foundation than Clinton’s lifesaving one, largely ignored Trump’s financial conflicts of interest, and almost entirely avoided discussion of the policy stakes in the campaign.. 

Trump ended the campaign as he began it — unpopular and viewed as unqualified by a majority of voters, with no amount of fake news stories to puff him up succeeding in moving the needle. But Clinton, who began the 2016 cycle with reasonably high favorable numbers, saw them crater under a torrent of email stories with 45 percent of voters telling exit pollsters they were bothered “a lot” by her decision to forgo a state.gov email address, of which 86 percent voted for Trump.

Fake news is a convenient scapegoat, but the big 2016 problem was the real news - Vox

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Indeed, it’s fair to say that the three great projects of the post-1955 right—repealing the New Deal, ultrahawkishness (first anti-Soviet, then pro-Iraq invasion) and repealing the sexual/culture revolution—have completely failed. Not only that, they are losing support among GOP voters.

Days of Desperation - POLITICO Magazine

So they had to find something else. Of course, reaching out to minorities (as the post-2012 postmortem had it was never going to happen). 

So Trump latched onto alt-right ideas like the liberal elite, globalism and the supposed mess left by Obama (47% unemployment, record crime rates, other made-up stuff) and the external threats of terrorism and immigration, and the internal threat of immigrants already here (rapist, criminals, etc.)

And in the meantime, it's simply back to Voodoo economics in one of the largest bait and switches ever seen:

The Heritage-Trump alliance is one of the more improbable developments in an election season that was full of them. A year ago, Heritage’s political arm dismissed Trump as a distraction, with no track record of allegiance to conservative causes. Today the group’s fingerprints are on virtually every policy Trump advocates, from his economic agenda to his Supreme Court nominees. According to Politico, Heritage employees acted as a “shadow transition team,” vetting potential Trump staffers to make sure the administration is well stocked with conservative appointees. At a Heritage event shortly after the election, John Yoo, author of the notorious Bush-era memos authorizing torture, trotted out a series of one-liners about the foundation’s influence.

The D.C. Think Tank Behind Donald Trump | New Republic

And Heritage is full in on Voodoo economics, of course. 

The evidence ... is totally at odds with claims that tax-cutting and deregulation are economic wonder drugs. So why does a whole political party continue to insist that they are the answer to all problems? It would be nice to pretend that we’re still having a serious, honest discussion here, but we aren’t. 

At this point we have to get real and talk about whose interests are being served. Never mind whether slashing taxes on billionaires while giving scammers and polluters the freedom to scam and pollute is good for the economy as a whole; it’s clearly good for billionaires, scammers, and polluters. 

Campaign finance being what it is, this creates a clear incentive for politicians to keep espousing a failed doctrine, for think tanks to keep inventing new excuses for that doctrine, and more. And on such matters Donald Trump is really no worse than the rest of his party. Unfortunately, he’s also no better.

Economist's View: Paul Krugman: On Economic Arrogance

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Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, speaking with Business Insider during a promotional tour for his new book, "Captured: The Corporate Infiltration of American Democracy," outlined three planks the party needs to run on in future elections. 

The first, he said, was directly related to his book, which outlined what he believes to be the negative effects of corporate influence on the political system. "I think one of the reasons I wrote this book is that I think this issue needs to be brought out front and center," he said. "If you have to compete with an entity that is actually a front group for a big special interest and you haven't successfully told the story of how it's just the end of the tentacle, then you're going to be at a huge disadvantage. And what it says will be given more face-value credit by the public than if they knew, 'Oh, OK, that's the glove with the Koch brothers hand in it, with Wall Street's hand in it.' So I think it's really important we focus on that." Whitehouse added disclosure of donations "ought to be a really, really big deal for us." 

The second plank, he said, needs to be a "really, really strong and simplified economic message," something he said Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton did not do in 2016.  "And we love, love, love to prove our bona fides by having a really good plan," he said. "And nobody wants to hear about a plan. They want a wall or something simple and captivating. And 10-point plans kind of go in the metal disposal bin." 

The party must take a handful of issues and be exceptionally visible on them, he said, naming student-debt relief and a carbon tax as two such things. "You can pick others, but I think having just a visible known few that become our, 'If you elect us, this is what you will get or we will die trying,'" he said.

The third plank, he said, was making sure the party is "solid" on its national security and defense platform. Far too often, he added, Democrats let themselves get painted as weak on both.

Sheldon Whitehouse on the future of the Democratic Party - Business Insider

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“Democrats still have literally no idea why they keep losing elections,” Carlson said on his Tuesday night show. “If they did, they would have run a real candidate with a real job who understands the constituents he is attempting to represent.” He continued: Instead, Democrats put up a 30-year-old semi-employed documentary filmmaker who can’t even vote for himself because he doesn’t live in the district. He’s got a ton of trendy, rich-people positions on just about every topic. The abortion people love him. He is gravely concerned about climate and childhood obesity and the availability of organic kale. He thinks illegal aliens are noble. He went to the London School of Economics. He’s super fit and way smarter than you are. Handel’s messaging largely hit the same notes. Anti-Ossoff ads tried to link him to figures on the left like Kathy Griffin and Nancy Pelosi. They made hay out of the fact that he lived outside of the district. One of the ads literally said, “He’s just not one of us.”

Tucker Carlson pretty much nailed the reason for Jon Ossoff’s defeat - Vox

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From Fareed Zakaria:

The Democratic economic agenda is broadly popular with the public. More people prefer the party’s views to those of Republicans on taxes, poverty reduction, health care, government benefits, and even climate change and energy policy. In one recent poll, 3 in 4 supported raising the minimum wage to $9. Seventy-two percent wanted to provide pre-K to all 4-year-olds in poor families. Eight in 10 favored expanding food stamps. It is noteworthy that each of these proposals found support from a majority of Republicans.

The Democracy Fund commissioned a comprehensive study of voters in the 2016 presidential election, and one scholar, Lee Drutman, set out his first key finding: “The primary conflict structuring the two parties involves questions of national identity, race, and morality.” Focusing on the people who voted for President Barack Obama in 2012 and then Donald Trump in 2016, Drutman found that they were remarkably close to the Democratic Party on economic issues. But they were far to the right on their attitudes toward immigrants, blacks and Muslims, and much more likely to feel “people like me” are on the decline.

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There is a fair bit of evidence that Comey's late intervention made quite an impact, and given the small margins in those three states (Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania)

From VOX:

Conversely, there’s fairly strong evidence that James Comey’s October letter to Congress about the discovery of what turned out to have been new copies of already-reviewed emails on Anthony Weiner’s laptop did swing national opinion enough to make a difference.

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How can they win the mid-term elections? 

A Trump-centric approach might make sense in 2020, assuming he runs for reelection, but would be folly in this year’s midterms, when Trump is not on the ballot. The Democrats would be wiser to target the Republicans who control Congress, many of whom are on the ballot, and force them to defend an array of unpopular policies, notably on health care and taxes. To the extent that Trump factors into Democrats’ messaging at all, it could be in the GOP Congress’ complicity in his corruption, since they’ve abnegated their constitutional duty to check his abuses of power.

Anti-Trumpism Is the Democrats’ Greatest Liability | The New Republic

In short, something we've argued for years, stress the reality that The Republicans are The Nasty Party