President Trump and GOP control of Congress have sparked a 2018 Democratic candidate bonanza. Don't call it "recruitment:" for the most part, these aspirants decided to take the plunge on their own. Many are political newcomers; others have waited years for the right moment to run. And in light of national polling, it was only a matter of time before more GOP-held House seats joined the ranks of the vulnerable.In the latest Economist/YouGov poll, Democrats lead 40-33% in the generic ballot.
Over the past week, the Cook Political Report has met with dozens of Democratic candidates sporting impressive resumes, ranging from military veterans and former Obama administration officials to prosecutors and scientists. Much like the GOP's crop of candidates in 2010, only a handful were current or former elected officials. However, some campaigns have progressed more quickly than others and not all opportunities are created equal.
Friday, October 13, 2017
Democrats Are Looking at House Gains
Thursday, October 12, 2017
Kevin de León Could Win
He could win.
Although he is not yet a household name in California, he could mount a credible campaign. He has strong ties to organized labor and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, both of which have an outsized voice in party affairs. And as a top legislative leader, he is in a strong position to raise money.
Feinstein's situation recalls that of Senator Jacob Javits (R-NY) in 1980. Javits was a long-serving, well-respected member of the Senate minority. But as a liberal Republican, he was increasingly out of step with his party. He was also old and in ill health. Al D’Amato, then an obscure local official on Long Island, saw an opportunity. Few gave him much chance at the start, but Javits had never had a serious challenge from within the party, and was late to recognize how deep his troubles were. D’Amato attacked Javits’s liberalism, beat him in the primary and went on to win the general election. (Though he ran to the right in 1980, D’Amato ended up with a moderate voting record in the Senate. Full disclosure: I briefly worked in his office as a Congressional Fellow.)
Like Javits, Feinstein has not had a serious intraparty challenge since winning her seat. In fact, she has not had a competitive race since Michael Huffington’s surprisingly strong showing in 1994. Like Javits in 1980, she is out of practice. Unlike Javits, she does not seem to have any major health problems. But she is the oldest US senator, and she is not as vigorous as she once was. And though her voting record is consistently liberal, her willingness to work with Republicans puts her at odds with the strongly progressive wing of the Democratic Party.
Right now, the energy in the Democratic Party is all on the progressive side. At Democratic rallies, speakers do not get cheers when they brag about their bipartisan outreach. A scrappy, energetic progressive like de León could rouse the party base in a way that Feinstein could not. (Bernie Sanders showed the way on that score.)
One might argue that, even if Feinstein ran behind a progressive in the top-two primary, she would win in the general because Republicans would coalesce around her. But suppose there are Democrat-on-Democrat races for both governor and senator – as seems very possible. In that case, GOP turnout would plunge. And even if GOP voters did show up to the polls, many would skip the Senate race, as they did in 2016. In this scenario, a progressive Democrat could win the general as well as the primary.
One catch: progressive billionaire Tom Steyer is thinking about running. If he got in the race, de León would have a harder time. But in a head-to-head contest with Feinstein, we could see a replay of the 1980 Senate race in New York.
Trump Troubles
At first it sounded like hyperbole, the escalation of a Twitter war. But now it’s clear that Bob Corker’s remarkable New York Times interview—in which the Republican senator described the White House as “adult day care” and warned Trump could start World War III—was an inflection point in the Trump presidency. It brought into the open what several people close to the president have recently told me in private: that Trump is “unstable,” “losing a step,” and “unraveling.”
The conversation among some of the president’s longtime confidantes, along with the character of some of the leaks emerging from the White House has shifted. There’s a new level of concern. NBC News published a report that Trump shocked his national security team when he called for a nearly tenfold increase in the country’s nuclear arsenal during a briefing this summer. One Trump adviser confirmed to me it was after this meeting disbanded that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called Trump a “moron.”
In recent days, I spoke with a half dozen prominent Republicans and Trump advisers, and they all describe a White House in crisis as advisers struggle to contain a president who seems to be increasingly unfocused and consumed by dark moods. Trump’s ire is being fueled by his stalled legislative agenda and, to a surprising degree, by his decision last month to back the losing candidate Luther Strange in the Alabama Republican primary. “Alabama was a huge blow to his psyche,” a person close to Trump said. “He saw the cult of personality was broken.”Josh Dawsey at Politico:
Trump, several advisers and aides said, sometimes comes into the Oval Office worked into a lather from talking to friends or watching TV coverage in the morning.
Sometimes, a side conversation with an aide like Stephen Miller on immigration or a TV host like Sean Hannity would set him off.
Then, staffers would step in to avert a rash decision by calming him down. At times, new information would be shared, like charts on how farmers might feel about ending NAFTA — or how his base might react negatively to an idea, like the verbal deal he struck with Democrats on immigration last month.
In the first stretches of the administration, aides would ask outside figures to intervene with Trump.
...
Sometimes, advisers and people who know Trump well deliberately engage the media. Corker has told others on Capitol Hill that Trump doesn’t listen unless he hears the criticism on TV or reads it in the paper.
...
The Priebus strategy was largely to delay. Instead of ousting Sessions, as Trump wanted, Priebus, Bannon and others had outside advisers close to Trump call him and explain the ramifications. They tried to remind him what a dedicated campaign supporter Sessions had been — and that his firing could set off unpredictable dominoes.
Wednesday, October 11, 2017
The Bannon Base
In Defying the Odds, we discuss changes in the major parties.
Lloyd Green writes at The Hill:
Lloyd Green writes at The Hill:
In 2012, two-thirds of Mitt Romney’s individual contributions came in the form of large donations. As for his backers, their top five employers were large banks: Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, according to Open Secrets. Of Romney’s top five donor states, only Texas voted for him. At the same time, however, West Virginia was the state nearest to Wall Street that Romney won. As a practical matter, however, West Virginia may as well have been in a separate galaxy.
By contrast, small donors comprised an outsized portion of Trump’s campaign haul. In other words, Trump’s donors were his voters, and vice versa, and that nexus is not one that has escaped Bannon’s eyes. At Moore’s primary night party last month, Bannon hammered away at the fact that Moore was not graced by a deep bench of donors, and the reality is that Moore was outspent 10 to one.
Over the next 14 months, Corker stands to repeatedly stymie Trump. As a legislative body that relies upon consensus to function, a coalition of Democrats and renegade Republicans are poised to block Trump at every twist and turn. Yet that does not constitute party building, and for the moment it is Bannon who is keeping his eye on that prize.
Trump and the FCC
From the FCC itself (emphasis added):With all of the Fake News coming out of NBC and the Networks, at what point is it appropriate to challenge their License? Bad for country!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 11, 2017
We license only individual broadcast stations. We do not license TV or radio networks (such as CBS, NBC, ABC or Fox) or other organizations with which stations have relationships (such as PBS or NPR), except to the extent that those entities may also be station licensees. We also do not regulate information provided over the Internet, nor do we intervene in private disputes involving broadcast stations or their licensees. Instead, we usually defer to the parties, courts, or other agencies to resolve such disputes.But even if FCC does not license networks themselves, it can cause trouble for media companies. On September 15, 1972, Nixon talked about using it to punish The Washington Post.
PRESIDENT: The Post has asked -- it's going to have its problems.
HALDEMAN: (Unintelligible)
DEAN: The networks, the networks are good with Maury [Maurice Stans]coming back three days in a row and --
PRESIDENT: That's right. Right. The main thing is the Post is going to have damnable, damnable problems out of this one. They have a television station.
DEAN: That's right, they do.
PRESIDENT: And they're going to have to get it renewed.
HALDEMAN: They've got a radio station, too.
PRESIDENT: Does that come up too? The point is, when does it come up?
DEAN: I don't know. But the practice of nonlicensees filing on top of licensees has certainly gotten more,...
PRESIDENT: That's right.
DEAN: more active in the, in the area.
PRESIDENT: And it's going to be God damn active here.
DEAN: (Laughs)
PRESIDENT: Well, the game has to be played awfully rough.
Tuesday, October 10, 2017
Leftward Ho, Fall 2017
In Defying the Odds, we discuss the Sanders candidacy and the liberal drift of the Democratic Party.
Alan Greenblatt at Politico:
Alan Greenblatt at Politico:
Consumed by internecine battles and the idea of opposition, Democrats run the risk of again nominating someone like McGovern who pleases progressives but steers a course too far from the country’s center of political gravity to win, even as Trump continues his funhouse mirror impression of Nixon as the avatar of white cultural-grievance politics.
Politics today are much different than they were then, as is the shape of the American electorate. But there are parallels that Democrats should bear in mind as they nurse their hopes of driving Trump from the Oval Office. Trump is a culture warrior, and progressives today are perfectly willing to engage that sideshow—just as they did 45 years with Nixon.
Look no further than the recent controversy over NFL players’ protests over police violence and racism, which Trump has successfully portrayed for most voters as an insult to men and women in uniform, the American flag, mom and apple pie.Amy Walter at The Cook Political Report:
“If the Democrats become the party of those in favor of kneeling rather than standing for the national anthem,” says historian Jeffrey Bloodworth, author of Losing the Center: A History of American Liberalism, 1968-1992, “that would be a full McGovern.”
The latest data from the Pew Research Center, proves [that] Democrats have moved dramatically leftward since the 1990s on issues like the social safety net, immigration, and race relations. On those issues, the so-called Warren wing represents the mainstream of Democratic opinion
...
As for the issue of what [Mark] Penn calls “identity politics,” Democrats’ views on race have shifted dramatically over the last 23 years. In 1994, just 39 percent of Democrats said that “racial discrimination is the main reason why many black people can’t get ahead these days,” while 53 percent of Democrats agreed with the statement that “blacks who can’t get ahead in this country are mostly responsible for their own condition.” From 1994 until 2015, Democrats who viewed the lack of progress for blacks as a product of discrimination were outnumbered by those who said it was basically blacks’ own fault. By 2015, however, a majority (50 percent) pegged discrimination as the culprit. By the summer of 2017, the discrimination number shot up 14 points to 64 percent.
At the start of the Obama era, 57 percent of Democrats said that the country should continue to make changes to give blacks equal rights with whites. By 2017, that number had rocketed up 24 points to 81 percent. Why such big movement, so quickly? The percent of white and Hispanic Democrats who wanted to see more changes to racial equality, which was slowly climbing from 2009 to 2014, jumped dramatically in 2015 to 2017. In 2014, 57 percent of white Democrats wanted to see more changes to give blacks and whites equal rights. It was 80 percent in 2017. The support from Hispanic Democrats went from 59 percent in 2014 to 76 percent in 2017.Kenneth P. Vogel at NYT:
Entrenched Democratic groups are facing growing questions about the return on the hundreds of millions of dollars they have spent over the years. Groups affiliated with Mrs. Clinton “spent so much money based on a bad strategy in this last cycle that they should step aside and let others lead in this moment,” said Quentin James, a founder of a political committee called the Collective PAC that supports African-American candidates.
Mr. James’s committee is among more than three dozen outfits that have started or reconfigured themselves since the election to try to harness the surge in anti-Trump activism. In addition to political committees, grass-roots mobilization nonprofits and legal watchdog groups, there are for-profit companies providing technological help to the new groups — essentially forming a new liberal ecosystem outside the confines of the Democratic Party.
While the new groups gained early traction mostly on the strength of grass-roots volunteers and small donations — and with relatively meager overall budgets — they are beginning to attract attention from the left’s most generous benefactors.
“We’re in a disruptive period, and when we get through it, the progressive infrastructure landscape may look different,” said Gara LaMarche, president of the Democracy Alliance, a club of wealthy liberals who donate at least $200,000 a year to recommended groups. “There may be groups that have been around that don’t rise to the challenge, and there may be some new groups that do rise to the challenge, while others fade away.”
The Democracy Alliance has helped shape the institutional left, steering more than $600 million since its inception in 2005 to a portfolio of carefully selected groups, including pillars of the Clinton-aligned establishment like the think tank Center for American Progress and the media watchdog Media Matters.
But this year, the Democracy Alliance hired Archana Sahgal, a former Obama White House official, to help the new anti-Trump groups, and it suspended its intensive vetting and approval process to recommend donations to a host of groups created since last fall’s election.
Monday, October 9, 2017
Corker v. Trump
Jonathan Martin and Mark Landler at NYT:
Senator Bob Corker, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, charged in an interview on Sunday that President Trump was treating his office like “a reality show,” with reckless threats toward other countries that could set the nation “on the path to World War III.”
In an extraordinary rebuke of a president of his own party, Mr. Corker said he was alarmed about a president who acts “like he’s doing ‘The Apprentice’ or something.”
“He concerns me,” Mr. Corker added. “He would have to concern anyone who cares about our nation.”
...
The senator, who is close to Mr. Tillerson, invoked comments that the president made on Twitter last weekend in which he appeared to undercut Mr. Tillerson’s negotiations with North Korea.
“A lot of people think that there is some kind of ‘good cop, bad cop’ act underway, but that’s just not true,” Mr. Corker said.
Without offering specifics, he said Mr. Trump had repeatedly undermined diplomacy with his Twitter fingers. “I know he has hurt, in several instances, he’s hurt us as it relates to negotiations that were underway by tweeting things out,” Mr. Corker said/
...
“Look, except for a few people, the vast majority of our caucus understands what we’re dealing with here,” he said, adding that “of course they understand the volatility that we’re dealing with and the tremendous amount of work that it takes by people around him to keep him in the middle of the road.”
As for the tweets that set off the feud on Sunday morning, Mr. Corker expressed a measure of powerlessness.
“I don’t know why the president tweets out things that are not true,” he said. “You know he does it, everyone knows he does it, but he does.”
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