Dems, Progs, and Israel

Our latest book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  The 2024 race has begun.  The Gaza war is politically dangerous for Biden. A shocking percentage of young people think that the October 7 massacre was justified.  And Arab Americans in the key state of Michigan may be turning away from the president. 

Mara Gay at NYT:

For the first time in decades, possibly since the anti-Vietnam War and environmental movements, the left wing has led the center of the Democratic Party in a new political direction on a major issue — one sharply critical of the Israeli government, impatient with the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and increasingly willing to use American leverage to curb Israel’s military plans.

In recent weeks, Democratic leaders have begun inching closer to the progressive view that it is against U.S. interests to continue sending unconditional U.S. military aid to Mr. Netanyahu’s government in an asymmetrical war that has killed thousands of innocent civilians in Gaza. And they have recognized that anger among Democratic voters — especially young voters — over the U.S. role in Gaza is a serious threat to Mr. Biden’s re-election that cannot be ignored.

Jeffrey M. Jones at Gallup:

Prevailing political patterns in Middle East sympathies remain in place this year. Republicans overwhelmingly sympathize with Israel over the Palestinians, independents tend to favor Israel, and more Democrats side with the Palestinians than Israelis. This is the case even as Democrats give Israel much higher favorable ratings than they give the Palestinian Authority. The Democrats’ movement has been recent; until 2022, Democrats were more likely to sympathize with Israel.

Among age groups, young adults are slightly more sympathetic to the Palestinians than the Israelis (after being equally divided last year), with the other groups sympathizing with Israel.

But does this sympathy translate into votes in the voting booth or on the floor?

Politico Playbook:

The Biden world counterpoint comes courtesy of the recent Harvard Youth poll, which found economic issues — not the war in Gaza — dominating the list of issues that matter to young voters. (Only 2% of respondents cited the “Israel/Palestine conflict” as their top concern.) Aides also note the campaign has launched a major youth outreach effort and that “the youth vote and the student vote are not synonymous.”

Harvard polling guru JOHN DELLA VOLPE agreed that there is little “evidence that this is on its way to being a cultural phenomenon.” But, he added: “How this evolves, who knows? … Hopefully things improve. But I would not be willing to write [the protests] off right now.”

Most House Democrats supported Israel aid on Saturday, but the nay vote was higher among Dems than Reps.

GOVTRACK: H.R. 8034: Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2024

Apr 20, 2024 at 1:57 p.m. ET. On Passage of the Bill in the House.

This was a vote to pass H.R. 8034 in the House. The federal budget process occurs in two stages: appropriations and authorizations. This is an appropriations bill, which sets overall spending limits by agency or program, typically for a single fiscal year (October 1 through September 30 of the next year).

Vote Outcome

	All Votes		Republicans	Democrats
Yea	86%	366	193	173
Nay	14%	58	21	37
Not Voting		7	4	3

Passed. Simple Majority Required. Source: house.gov.

Divided, Indeed

 In Defying the Odds, we talk about the social and economic divides that enabled Trump to enter the White House. In Divided We Stand, we discuss how these divides played out in 2020.    It is the "coalition of the ascendant" v. "the coalition of the resentful.

From Pew:

The rural - urban divide

The racial and educational divide:

The religious divide:

Democrats and Palestinians

Our latest book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses foreign policy's role in US elections.

Lydia Saad at Gallup:

After a decade in which Democrats have shown increasing affinity toward the Palestinians, their sympathies in the Middle East now lie more with the Palestinians than the Israelis, 49% versus 38%.

Today’s attitudes reflect an 11-percentage-point increase over the past year in Democrats’ sympathy with the Palestinians. At the same time, the percentages sympathizing more with the Israelis (38%) and those not favoring a side (13%) have dipped to new lows.

Sympathy toward the Palestinians is also at a new high among political independents, up six points to 32%. However, more independents still lean toward the Israelis (49%).

Republicans’ views are unchanged, with nearly eight in 10 (78%) continuing to sympathize more with the Israelis while 11% side with the Palestinians.

Democrats and Factory Towns

In Defying the Odds, we talk about the social and economic divides that enabled Trump to enter the White House. In Divided We Stand, we discuss how these divides played out in 2020.

Mike Lux at American Family Voices:

Hard times, effective right-wing messaging, the demise of local news, and sometimes the Democratic Party itself have led to big changes in the voting and opinions of people living in small and midsized towns that have been most impacted by deindustrialization and increased Big Business power in the economy. But these Factory Towns voters are not lost causes to the Democratic Party, and we cannot afford to write them off. They comprise 48% of the voters in Pennsylvania and the Midwest, and if we continue to lose ground with them, the entire region will become more and more like Iowa and Missouri – tough states for the foreseeable future. However, if these counties start to move back toward the Democrats, that kind of progress could be the linchpin to building sustained Democratic majorities that can usher our country into a more progressive future.

This report is part of a continuing effort by American Family Voices to do on-the-ground research and data analysis to understand the thinking and motivation of working-class voters, and to recommend strategies that can begin to rebuild the Democratic Party’s and progressive movement’s historic connection to America’s working class.

The project focuses on voters in “Factory Town” counties in six key states: Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. These states were Ground Zero in 2016, breaking down the “Blue Wall” critical to Democratic victories. Joe Biden did just enough better in 2020 to help win back Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, but these communities in all six states remain very tough for Democrats and will be among the most highly competitive counties for 2024.

Despite the challenges, this is a moment where Democrats have an opportunity to make more gains. Biden and the Democratic Congress have passed substantial legislation that can bring progressive change, all the way down to the community level, over the next two years. The president’s policies, background, and genuine affinity for these working-class communities make him an ideal leader for this effort.

This report combines data from our most recent polling, Facebook and digital analytics, and comparisons of county-by-county elections results in 2022 to the past decade of state election results. The report closes with recommendations on how Democrats and progressive issue advocates should move forward with Factory Towns voters and counties.

Here is the bottom line in our findings:

1. The presidential horse race numbers are very competitive in these counties, but Republicans are stronger in terms of the economic frame.

2. Voters have negative opinions of both parties: this presents both challenges and opportunities for Democrats. Voters in these counties tend to think Democrats lack an economic plan, but they see the GOP as the party of wealthy corporations and CEOs.

3. Populist economics and the Democratic economic policy agenda play very well in these counties. These voters respond best to an agenda focused on kitchen-table economic issues.

4. Contrary to conventional wisdom, populist economic messaging works much better than cultural war messaging. Our strongest Democratic message on the economy beats the Republican culture war message easily. The Republican economic message is a bigger threat to us.

5. Community building needs to be at the heart of our organizing strategy.

6. I recommend that Democrats and progressives make major investments in local field organizing and door-to-door, special events that build community, online community building, existing local media and progressive media targeted to these counties, and progressive organizations that make sure voters know how to benefit directly from the Biden policy initiatives of the last two years

The Shrinkage of the Blue Dogs

Our latest book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections.  

Ally Mutnick and Sarah Ferris at Politico:

Congress’ influential Blue Dog Coalition is getting chopped nearly in half after an internal blow-up over whether to rebrand the centrist Democratic group.

Seven of the 15 members expected to join the Blue Dogs this year, including Reps. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) and Mikie Sherrill (D-N.J.), are departing after a heated disagreement over a potential name change for the moderate bloc. For now that’s left the Blue Dogs with seven, all male members — their smallest roster in nearly three decades of existence. One freshman member remains undecided.

At the core of some of the breakaway Blue Dogs’ demands was a rechristening as the Common Sense Coalition that, they argued, would have helped shed the group’s reputation as a socially moderate, Southern “boys’ club.” Blue Dogs have long stood for fiscal responsibility and national security, issues with broad Democratic appeal, but some members felt the name had a negative connotation that kept their colleagues from joining. A majority of other members disagreed, saying they saw no reason to toss out a longstanding legacy.

Those tensions came to a head earlier this month as Blue Dog members met for a lengthy debate over the reboot that culminated in a secret-ballot vote to reject the new name, according to interviews with nearly a dozen people familiar with the situation, on both sides of the dispute. Shortly after that vote, Reps. Ed Case (D-Hawaii); David Scott (D-Ga.); Rep. Brad Schneider (D-Ill.); Lou Correa (D-Calif.), Spanberger and Sherrill all left the group.

Defund the FBI?

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections.  In 2020, some Democrats called for defunding the police, and Republicans pounced.  Democrats are now returning the favor.

The Republican Party wants to defund the FBI to protect Donald Trump from being held accountable to the law. That's why I teamed up with @hirschorn & @thepeopledefend to bring America this message. pic.twitter.com/kTzWak9Ksm

— Rachel Bitecofer 📈🔭🇺🇲🇺🇦 (@RachelBitecofer) September 2, 2022

Registration Drives in the Midterm

Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses congressional and state elections.  The 2021 off-year races were a curtain-raiser for the midterms -- and the stage was full of bad mojo for Democrats.

Blake Hounshell and Leah Askarinam report on Democratic midterm strategy:

The latest entry into the debate comes from Forward Majority, a Democratic-aligned super PAC focused on winning the sorts of state legislative races that are increasingly central in American politics.

In a provocative new “Blueprint for Power,” the group calls for a “radical departure” from the Democratic Party’s existing strategy, which has left Republicans in command of key state legislatures across the country.

“We need to claw our way back to power to prevent election subversion,” Vicky Hausman, founder and co-chief executive of Forward Majority, said in an interview, expressing a common fear on the left that in 2024 Republicans will use those statehouse majorities to steal the next presidential election. Forward Majority has identified nearly 2 million unregistered voters it sees as likely Democratic, largely in suburban areas that the group says are critical to winning those legislatures back.

The new data comes as Republicans have begun to outpace Democrats in voter registration in major swing states, including Florida, Pennsylvania and North Carolina. Worse for Democrats, the coronavirus pandemic disrupted the usual pathways that the party had used to bring in new voters: sign-ups at the Department of Motor Vehicles and face-to-face field work. And it comes as President Biden faces growing skepticism among African Americans over whether he has a formula to overcome voting restrictions pushed by G.O.P.-led state legislatures — the topic of a high-profile address that he plans to give on Tuesday in Atlanta.

An analysis by Catalist, a Democratic data firm, shows that in 2020, the Democrats’ traditional edge in voter registration shrank to nine percentage points in key states, down from a 19-percentage-point advantage over Republicans in 2009.

Peak Polarization

Our 2020 book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties.

 Alan J. Abramowitz, "Peak Polarization? The Rise of Partisan-Ideological Consistency and its Consequences."  Prepared for delivery at the State of the Parties Conference, Ray Bliss Institute, University of Akron, November 4-5, 2021

 This paper presents evidence from American National Election Studies surveys showing that party identification, ideological identification and issue positions have become much more closely connected over the past half century. As a result, the ideological divide between Democratic and Republican identifiers has widened considerably. Using the extensive battery of issue questions included in the 2020 ANES survey, I find that a single underlying liberalconservative dimension largely explains the policy preferences of ordinary Americans across a wide range of issues including the size and scope of the welfare state, abortion, gay and transgender rights, race relations, immigration, gun control and climate change. I find that the distribution of preferences on this liberal-conservative issue scale is highly polarized with Democratic identifiers and leaners located overwhelmingly on the left, Republican identifiers and leaners located overwhelmingly on the right and little overlap between the two distributions. Finally, I show that the rise of partisan-ideological consistency has had profound consequences for public opinion and voting behavior, contributing to growing affective polarization as well as increasing party loyalty and straight ticket voting. These findings indicate that polarization in the American public has a rational foundation. Hostility toward the opposing party reflects strong disagreement with the policies of the opposing party. As long as the parties remain on the opposite sides of almost all major issues, feelings of mistrust and animosity are unlikely to diminish regardless of Donald Trump’s future role in the Republican Party. 

Democratic Decline Under Trump

Our forthcoming book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses Trump's attack on democracy.

Law enforcement is on high alert around the U.S. Capitol after intelligence uncovered a “possible plot” by a militia group to target the building. About 5,200 National Guard troops are in Washington, and a large fence remains around the Capitol perimeter. https://t.co/m5o5X6H9dm

— The Associated Press (@AP) March 4, 2021

Sarah Repucci and Amy Slipowitz at Freedom House:

The final weeks of the Trump presidency featured unprecedented attacks on one of the world’s most visible and influential democracies. After four years of condoning and indeed pardoning official malfeasance, ducking accountability for his own transgressions, and encouraging racist and right-wing extremists, the outgoing president openly strove to illegally overturn his loss at the polls, culminating in his incitement of an armed mob to disrupt Congress’s certification of the results. Trump’s actions went unchecked by most lawmakers from his own party, with a stunning silence that undermined basic democratic tenets. Only a serious and sustained reform effort can repair the damage done during the Trump era to the perception and reality of basic rights and freedoms in the United States.

The year leading up to the assault on the Capitol was fraught with other episodes that threw the country into the global spotlight in a new way. The politically distorted health recommendations, partisan infighting, shockingly high and racially disparate coronavirus death rates, and police violence against protesters advocating for racial justice over the summer all underscored the United States’ systemic dysfunctions and made American democracy appear fundamentally unstable. Even before 2020, Trump had presided over an accelerating decline in US freedom scores, driven in part by corruption and conflicts of interest in the administration, resistance to transparency efforts, and harsh and haphazard policies on immigration and asylum that made the country an outlier among its Group of Seven peers.

But President Trump’s attempt to overturn the will of the American voters was arguably the most destructive act of his time in office. His drumbeat of claims—without evidence—that the electoral system was ridden by fraud sowed doubt among a significant portion of the population, despite what election security officials eventually praised as the most secure vote in US history. Nationally elected officials from his party backed these claims, striking at the foundations of democracy and threatening the orderly transfer of power.

...

The exposure of US democracy’s vulnerabilities has grave implications for the cause of global freedom. Rulers and propagandists in authoritarian states have always pointed to America’s domestic flaws to deflect attention from their own abuses, but the events of the past year will give them ample new fodder for this tactic, and the evidence they cite will remain in the world’s collective memory for a long time to come. After the Capitol riot, a spokesperson from the Russian foreign ministry stated, “The events in Washington show that the US electoral process is archaic, does not meet modern standards, and is prone to violations.” Zimbabwe’s president said the incident “showed that the US has no moral right to punish another nation under the guise of upholding democracy.”

Instagram Socialism as a Problem for Democrats

In Defying the Odds, we discuss state and congressional elections as well as the presidential race.   Our next book, title TBA, discusses the 2020 results.

Some Democrats think that the controversy over "defunding" the police -- and other aspects of big-city progressivism -- cost their party seats in the 2020 congressional elections

Derek Thompson at The Atlantic:

One analysis of Census Bureau data projected that by 2040, roughly half of the population will be represented by 16 senators; the other, more rural half will have 84 senators at their disposal. If Democrats don’t find a way to broaden their coalition into less populous states with smaller metro areas, it may be impossible to pass liberal laws for the next generation.

Earlier this month, the Los Angeles Times published an analysis of California ballot measures that found that “the state’s two major population centers have grown more and more different” from the rest of the state. Residents of Los Angeles and the Bay Area were at least 30 percentage points more likely than other Californians to support various propositions, such as reinstating affirmative action and allowing parolees to vote. A 30-point gap is massive—akin to the difference between deep-blue Massachusetts and purple Pennsylvania. From a political perspective, Los Angeles and the Bay Area look like leftist havens in an otherwise moderate state.

Many of their causes are virtuous, such as universal health care and higher pay for low-income service workers. But given the dynamics of online communication, which prizes extremity, Instagram socialism usually functions as a crowd-sourcing exercise to brand widely appealing ideas in their most emotional and viral—and, therefore, most radical—fashion. Thus, major police reform (a popular idea) is branded “Abolish the Police” (an unpopular idea); a welcoming disposition toward immigrants (a popular idea) is blurred with calls for open borders (an unpopular idea); and universal health care (a popular idea) is folded into socialism (an unpopular idea).

“Defund police, open borders, socialism—it’s killing us,” said Representative Vicente Gonzalez, a Democrat from South Texas who nearly lost a district this year he’d previously won by 20 points. Beyond giving Republicans and Fox News easy ways to tarnish otherwise appealing reforms, Instagram socialism’s sloganeering is a turnoff for moderates who spend time online but are not, in the modern capital-O sense, Online. The average voter in a general election is something like a moderate 50-year-old woman without a four-year college degree who stays away from partisan media and follows politics only occasionally. She might hate Trump, but her dispositional conservatism makes her less likely to embrace policies tweaked in a social-media lab for viral emotionality.

Fearful Symmetry

In Defying the Odds, we discuss the Sanders candidacy and the leftward drift of the Democratic Party.

The Democratic left took heart when a socialist beat a standard liberal in a House primary in New York. Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns at NYT:

What worries some Democratic elders, though, is that activists will harbor unrealistic expectations of what sort of policies newly elected progressive lawmakers can push through in a still-divided capital.

“They say to new members, ‘You won because of us,’” said John A. Lawrence, former chief of staff to Ms. Pelosi and the author of a new book on the so-called Watergate Babies. “Actually no, typically you win because you were able to win moderate voters disgusted with incumbents.”

There is also a group of younger Democrats uneasy about the party drifting too far left.
Representative Cedric Richmond of Louisiana said he understood that Democratic voters were “furious and scared at the same time,” but he also said he wished his party had a moderating influence to counter Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the democratic socialist who has been at the front end of the party’s turn left.

“Bernie is fighting for his principles on what direction the party should go,” he said, “but we don’t really have anybody doing it on behalf of moderates and other Democrats. It has become a one-sided conversation.”

There is no question that Democratic leaders have been tugged toward a brand of more unadulterated progressivism. But there are fewer levers of power at their disposal to impose discipline or tilt their proposals toward the political center. They lack legislative earmarks to hand out, or withhold, and their ability to raise large sums of money matters less in an era in which liberal fund-raising is moving online.

And with the decline of unions, one of the last pillars of top-down authority in their coalition is on the wane. The public-sector unions stung by last week’s court decision had been one the movement’s remaining power centers.

Leftward Ho to the Hill!

In Defying the Odds, we discuss state and congressional elections as well as the presidential race.

At Politico, Charlie Mahtesian writes:

In state after state, the left is proving to be the animating force in Democratic primaries, producing a surge of candidates who are forcefully driving the party toward a more liberal orientation on nearly every issue.

These candidates are running on an agenda that moves the party beyond its recent comfort zone and toward single-payer health care, stricter gun control, a $15 minimum wage, more expansive LGBT rights and greater protections for immigrants.

In the surest sign of the reoriented issue landscape, they’re joined by some of the most prominent prospects in the 2020 Democratic presidential field—Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand and Kamala Harris among them—who are embracing the same agenda.

According to data compiled by the Brookings Institution’s Primaries Project, the number of self-identified, nonincumbent progressive candidates in Texas spiked compared with the previous two election years. This year, there were nearly four times as many progressive candidates as in 2016. Meanwhile, the number of moderate and establishment candidates remained flat for the past three elections in Texas.

Even in Illinois, where the Democratic Party holds most of the levers of power, the data tell a similar story: There were more progressive candidates this year, the Primaries Project reports, than moderate and establishment candidates, by a count of 25 to 21.

Dems Have Candidates to Ride a Wave

 In Defying the Odds, we discuss congressional elections as well as the presidential race.

Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns at NYT:

“There’s no illusion about the storm that’s coming,” said Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma, invoking last month’s governor’s races and last week’s Senate special election. “If you had any doubts, they were wiped away after New Jersey, Virginia and Alabama.”

From Texas to Illinois, Kansas to Kentucky, there are Republican districts filled with college-educated, affluent voters who appear to be abandoning their usually conservative leanings and newly invigorated Democrats, some of them nonwhite, who are eager to use the midterms to take out their anger on Mr. Trump.

Rachel Shorey and Lilia Chang at NYT:

Federal Election Commission filings show that if a wave crashes on the Republican House majority in November, as many have predicted, Democratic surfers will be on their boards to catch it. Nearly a year out from the election, Democratic candidates have filed in all but 20 House districts held by Republicans. By comparison, Democrats in 80 districts do not have a Republican opponent for their seat.

Democrats and Republicans Like to Live in Different Places

In Defying the Odds, we discuss congressional elections as well as the presidential race.

One reason for GOP control of the House is deliberate gerrymandering.  Another is partisan clustering, that is, the tendency of Democrats to huddle up in cities, where they create huge margins for their party, which means wasted votes.

A new Pew poll confirms that Democrats and Republicans like to live in different kinds of places.

Our studies of political polarization and partisan antipathy both found that the disagreements between Republicans and Democrats go far beyond political values and issues. They also have markedly different preferences about where they would like to live. Most Republicans (65%) say they would rather live in a community where houses are larger and farther apart and where schools and shopping are not nearby. A majority of Democrats (61%) prefer smaller houses within walking distance of schools and shopping.

Democrats to the Left

In Defying the Odds, we discuss the Democratic Party's leftward movement in 2016.  Ben Smith reports at Buzzfeed:

Donald Trump has already changed the Democratic Party more than his own Republican Party.

While the president has merely reduced his own party into a panicked mess, the Democrats’ trajectory seems to have moved subtly and decisively away from the center-left Clinton liberalism toward a politics whose planks make Barack Obama look like Al Gore.

I know, it’s been a distracting month. So you’re forgiven if you missed the big development on the Democratic Party policy front: the call for “a large-scale, permanent program of public employment and infrastructure investment.” That plan, titled “A Marshall Plan for America,” came not from Bernie Sanders but from the Center for American Progress, the Clintonite Washington think tank John Podesta led. The proposal breaks in tone and substance with the Clinton–Obama focus on an economy led and dominated by the private sector.

...
 The jobs plan is the bluntest sign of this shift, but the party appears to be inching its way toward another pillar of social democracy: government-funded health care.

“What happened in the presidential campaign is that Bernie ran explicitly in support of a Medicare-for-all approach” — a simple framework for single-payer — “and what the politicians saw is that voters were fine with that,” said Vermont Rep. Peter Welch, a longtime advocate of single payer.

Democrats to the Left

Some academics claim that polarization stems mostly from the GOP. Republicans, they claim, have more much farther to the right than Democrats have moved to the left. That argument was always dubious: in Congress, for instance, party unity scores have risen in tandem. And the 2016 election consigns it to the dustbin of intellectual history.

Dan Balz writes at The Washington Post:

Bill Clinton was the original New Democrat. On Tuesday, he was speaking to a party that had just adopted the most liberal platform in the party’s history. At times in this campaign, he has seemed caught between the then and the now, grappling with the forces that have been buffeting the party’s coalition and altering its priorities. But it is Hillary Clinton who has most had to adapt.
...
Nothing symbolizes the change in the party more than the issue of trade, although because of organized labor’s power within the Democratic coalition, the base of the party has long stood in opposition to most trade agreements.

In 1992, Bill Clinton challenged those conventions, advocating for a North American Free Trade Agreement in union halls in states such as Michigan and eventually steering the agreement through Congress.

Neither Hillary Clinton nor Sanders has done anything close to that, even though most presidents, including President Obama, have supported major trade treaties.

Opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement was at the heart of Sanders’s critique of an economic system that he said has favored the richest Americans over everyone else. Hillary Clinton, who had championed the possible benefits of a TPP as secretary of state, opposed it as a candidate, recognizing that to do otherwise would have carried a sizable political risk.
...
California Gov. Jerry Brown, who lost to Bill Clinton in the 1992 Democratic primaries and whose views then on trade and other issues clashed with those of the former Arkansas governor, described the DLC during a Tuesday interview as “a remnant of another period.”

Reflecting on the centrist views of government’s role vs. the views of Democrats today, Brown said: “They [today’s Democrats] want more interventionist government to make things more fair. They want the instrumentality of government. There’s more belief that more can be done. No one’s going to say government is the problem, not the solution. They’re not going to say that.”

The Iron Law of Emulation is at work.  Just as the right built its network....

At The New York Times, Gideon Lewis-Kraus reports on The Roosevelt Institute:

The progressive organizations in [Felicia] Wong’s rotation take as a matter of course the idea that the Obama administration was a significant missed opportunity for transformation on that order. They do not entirely blame Obama. He had his legislative victories — most importantly in the Affordable Care Act — but one lesson they drew from his time in office was that liberals had long been overly fixated on legislative success. (Johnson had a Congress he could work with; Obama mostly did not, and the next president probably won’t, either.) The right has set the agenda for the past 35 years because they built their economic movement deductively (from the first principle of the unregulated market) and took their victories where they could find them. The left, by comparison, tended to moralize, and spoke in the language of justice instead of growth. When they did talk about economics, it took the form of individual issues — minimum wage, student debt, paid family and sick leave — rather than overarching pronouncements. This muddle worsened during the Bush era, when urgent noneconomic concerns forced the left to privilege short-term electoral tactics over long-term strategy.

Roosevelt was designed to be a place, independent of the party establishment, to unite all of these factions under the banner of long-term, coherent economic thinking. Had such a movement existed in 2008, it might have seized on the financial crisis as an opportunity for structural economic reform. Obama’s recovery model, to the group’s lasting dismay, remained in thrall to old superstitions about growth. The goal of the bailout was to fix the existing financial system and get credit flowing back into the economy while keeping an eye on deficit spending. But today, though high-level macroeconomic numbers like monthly job growth or the headline unemployment rate have improved, almost half of the new jobs created in the first five years of the recovery were poverty-level. Repaired with a kludge, the system went right back to doing exactly what it did before: allowing the extraordinary concentration of power in the hands of the few to dominate the prospects of the many.

Declining Support for Democracy

Roberto Foa and Yascha Mounk write at Vox:

A lot of Americans are viscerally angry at the political system. They hate Washington, they don’t trust politicians, and they are increasingly willing to vote for populist outsiders—like Donald Trump. But we usually assume that for all of their disgust with political reality, they remain as loyal to the ideal of democracy as previous generations of Americans. According to recent polling data, that is simply not the case.

In our research we have found that citizens give less and less importance to living in a democracy. They have increasingly negative views about key democratic institutions. Most worryingly of all, they are more and more open to illiberal alternatives. Americans aren’t just souring on particular institutions or particular politicians. To a surprising degree, they have begun to sour on liberal democracy itself.
...
Political scientists have long known that "government legitimacy," or the popularity of particular administrations, is going down. But many of them have argued that "regime legitimacy," or citizens’ attachment to democracy as a political system, is as strong as ever. Our research shows that this is just not true: Attachment to democracy has fallen over time, and from one generation to the next. Take this worrying graph, which shows how much less important it is to young Americans to live in a democracy. For Americans born in the 1930s, living in a democracy holds virtually sacred importance. Asked on a scale of 1 to 10 how important it is to them to live in a democracy, more than 70 percent give the highest answer. But many of their children and grandchildren are lukewarm. Among millennials — those born since the 1980s — fewer than 30 percent say that living in a democracy is essential.

 Jan-Werner Mueller writes at Al Jazeera:

Populists are politicians who claim that only they represent the true people and that all those who criticize them — or just fail to vote for them — are not properly part of the people. Populists always polarize; it’s us, the real and righteous people, against them, the people’s enemies, who can be found inside and outside the country’s borders. Trump, with his xenophobic attacks on Muslims and Mexicans at home and abroad, fits this pattern perfectly.

When in opposition, populists criticize the elite and always tell a story of why they aren’t in power, which, given that they and only they represent the people, would seem impossible in a democracy. This accounts for the populist obsession with conspiracy theories. Think of Trump’s ominous comment about President Barack Obama that “there is something going on with him that we don’t know about” or Trump’s past false insinuations that Obama wasn’t born in the U.S.

...
 Populists, then, are not just anti-elitist; they are anti-pluralist. And there’s no such thing as democracy without pluralism. Hence, rather than throw around the F-word or conjure up fantasies of America going the way of the Weimar Republic, it is enough to say that Trump is simply not a democrat.

Sanders and Trump Spurn Their Own Parties

At Politico, Michael Kruse and Manu Raju write:

The most surprising thing about the independent Vermont senator’s surprisingly successful campaign so far is not that he’s doing it as a self-described democratic socialist. It’s that he’s seeking the nomination of a party he caucuses with in the Senate but is not a part of, isn’t a registered member of and has never been a registered member of—a party he’s spent his 40-year career beating at the polls and battering in the press.

He started as a politician in the 1970s as a perennial protest candidate with the anti-Vietnam War Liberty Union Party, offering voters an alternative to the two major parties, which he considered ineffective and equally beholden to corporate lords.

To become mayor of Burlington in 1981, he ousted a veteran centrist Democrat. To build power, his progressive allies in subsequent elections wrested away city council seats, relegating local Democrats to diminished, third-party status. In a series of statewide races in the late ’80s and into the early ’90s, he outdid even that—getting Democrats to all but wave a white flag when he ran.

He has never before chosen to run in a Democratic primary, but here he is, challenging Hillary Clinton—and doing it as an independent, technically permissible but highly unusual. How he’s trying to do this is how he always has—a calculated alchemy of outsider edge and insider smarts, provocation plus pragmatism, all learned and honed over what’s become a unique career in modern American politics.

As Timothy Noah pointed out in Politico a couple of weeks ago, Trump's connection to the GOP is almost as tenuous:

In 1999, Trump quit the Republican Party, saying “I just believe the Republicans are just too crazy right.” Trump was then conferring with political consultant Roger Stone about a possible presidential run as a candidate of the Reform Party, the political organization founded by his fellow billionaire Ross Perot.

In 2001, Trump quit the Reform Party to register as a Democrat. “It just seems that the economy does better under Democrats,” he told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in 2004. The Clintons attended Trump’s Palm Beach wedding to former model Melania Knaus in 2005. The following year Trump gave $26,000 to the House and Senate campaign committees.

By the late aughts, though, Trump’s political giving had started shifting back to the GOP, and in 2009 Trump registered again as a Republican. Two years later he registered as an independent while contemplating a third-party bid.

The Emerging Republican Advantage

Economist Paul Samuelson once said: "Well when events change, I change my mind. What do you do?"  John Judis, coauthor of The Emerging Democratic Majority, has changed his mind.

At the time [of Obama's 2008 election], some commentators, including me, hailed the onset of an enduring Democratic majority. And the arguments in defense of this view did seem to be backed by persuasive evidence. Obama and the Democrats appeared to have captured the youngest generation of voters, whereas Republicans were relying disproportionately on an aging coalition. The electorate's growing ethnic diversity also seemed likely to help the Democrats going forward.

These advantages remain partially in place for Democrats today, but they are being severely undermined by two trends that have emerged in the past few elections—one surprising, the other less so. The less surprising trend is that Democrats have continued to hemorrhage support among white working-class voters—a group that generally works in blue-collar and lower-income service jobs and that is roughly identifiable in exit polls as those whites who have not graduated from a four-year college. These voters, and particularly those well above the poverty line, began to shift toward the GOP decades ago, but in recent years that shift has become progressively more pronounced.

The more surprising trend is that Republicans are gaining dramatically among a group that had tilted toward Democrats in 2006 and 2008: Call them middle-class Americans. These are voters who generally work in what economist Stephen Rose has called "the office economy." In exit polling, they can roughly be identified as those who have college—but not postgraduate—degrees and those whose household incomes are between $50,000 and $100,000. (Obviously, the overlap here is imperfect, but there is a broad congruence between these polling categories.)

Dem Woes With Working Class Whites

Jonathan Topaz writes at Politico:

After two years of warnings about Republicans’ woeful performance among nonwhite voters in 2012, the midterms showed that Democrats have their own significant demographic vulnerability: working-class white voters. Republicans won white voters without a college degree by 30 points, 64 percent to 34 percent, according to exit polls, equal to their margin in the wave election of 2010. Polling data show that support for President Barack Obama among working-class whites has dropped 8 points since 2010.
...
“Democrats have chosen to focus on issues that the liberal base of the party really likes, but the working-class person in West Virginia or Arkansas or Louisiana or Alaska doesn’t necessarily identify with,” said political analyst Charlie Cook.

Cook pointed to those four states — where Republicans captured Democratic-held Senate seats this year — to argue that Democrats are a “marginalized party” across much of the country.

“This is more than just a bad year for Democrats,” he said. “The challenge that the Democratic Party has in parts of the country appears to be even more formidable than it was two years ago.”

Added former Rep. Dan Glickman (D-Kan.): “Democrats really gave up on small towns and exurban America.” [emphasis added]

And even though Republicans have yet to make significant inroads among minorities, the GOP could make up for those losses by further enhancing its performance among white voters.

“Given what’s happening with working-class voters and how disenchanted they are with the Democratic Party … Republicans still have a chance to win the presidency without [making] significant changes to policy,” said GOP consultant Ford O’Connell.

Democrats won’t necessarily be able to count on the same level of minority turnout in 2016 without Obama. At the same time, Mitt Romney in 2012 won a larger share of the white vote than any GOP nominee since George H.W. Bush and still lost the presidency.