The Case for Staged Health Care Reform

A prior post made the case that in the 2018 mid-term elections, Democrats who ran on a Medicare for All platform did significantly worse than those who supported a more modest, staged approach to reforming the nation's health care coverage problem.  This has not deterred Bernie Sanders - who in my view should not even be allowed to run as a Democrat after he quickly jettisoned the Democrat Party after 2016 - and his followers who want an immediate single payer system regardless of the fact that a majority of Americans are not supportive of blowing up the current system overnight.  Lately, Elizabeth Warren seems to be moderating her proposals to more of a staged approach that would not end employer based coverage in one fell swoop.  Perhaps Warren is beginning to see political reality or perhaps its an attempt to address the criticisms and counter proposals of Buttigieg and others. A column in the New York Times looks at how health care reform continues to be a positive for Democrats and how a staged approach to reform may be the only one that is realistically feasible.  Here are column highlights:

Recent state elections — the Democratic landslide in Virginia, followed by Democratic gubernatorial victories in Kentucky and Louisiana — have been bad news for Donald Trump.

Among other things, the election results vindicate polls indicating that Trump is historically unpopular. All of these races were in part referendums on Trump, who put a lot of effort into backing his preferred candidates. And in each case voters gave him a clear thumbs down.

Beyond offering a verdict on Trump, however, I’d argue that the state elections offered some guidance on an issue that has divided Democrats, namely health care. What the results suggested to me was the virtue of medium-size reform: incremental enough to have a good chance of being enacted, big enough to provide tangible benefits that voters don’t want taken away.

Remember, there was a third governor’s race, in Mississippi, in which the G.O.P. held on. . . . So what made the difference?

Personalities surely mattered. Louisiana’s re-elected John Bel Edwards was widely liked, Kentucky’s defeated Matt Bevin widely disliked. Demography probably also mattered. Urban and especially suburban voters have turned hard against Trump, but rural voters haven’t, at least so far — and Mississippi is one of the few states left with a majority-rural population.

But there’s another difference among the three states. Kentucky and Louisiana took advantage of the Affordable Care Act to expand Medicaid, leading to steep drops in the number of uninsured residents; Mississippi hasn’t. This meant that voting Democratic in Kentucky and Louisiana meant voting to preserve past policy success, while the same vote in Mississippi was at best about hope for future reform — a much less powerful motivator.

It took years to get there, but in the end Pelosi [in 2010] was proved right, as health care became a winning issue for Democrats. In the 2018 midterms and in subsequent state elections, voters punished politicians whom they suspected of wanting to undermine key achievements like protection for pre-existing conditions and, yes, Medicaid expansion.

And this political reality has arguably set the stage for further action. At this point, as far as I can tell, all of the contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination are calling for a significant expansion of the government’s role in health care, although they differ about how far and how fast to go.

Which brings me to the latest development in intra-Democratic policy disputes: Elizabeth Warren’s proposal for a two-step approach to health reform. Her idea is to start with actions — some requiring no legislation at all, others requiring only a simple Senate majority — that would greatly expand health insurance coverage. These actions would, if successful, deliver tangible benefits to millions.

They would not, however, amount to the full Bernie, eliminating private insurance and going full single-payer. Warren still says that this is her eventual intention, and has laid out a plan to pay for such a system. But any legislative push would wait three years, giving time for voters to see the benefits of the initial changes.

Sanders supporters are, predictably, crying betrayal. For them it’s all or nothing: a commitment to single-payer has to be in the legislation from Day 1.

The trouble with such demands, aside from the strong probability that proposing elimination of private insurance would be a liability in the general election, is that such legislation would almost certainly fail to pass even a Democratic Senate. So all or nothing would, in practice, mean nothing.

The lesson I take from the politics of Obamacare, however, is that successful health reform, even if incomplete, creates the preconditions for further reform. What looks impossible now might look very different once tens of millions of additional people have actual experience with expanded Medicare, and can compare it with private insurance.

Although I’ve long argued against making Medicare for All a purity test, there is a good case for eventually going single-payer. But the only way that’s going to happen is via something like Warren’s approach: initial reforms that deliver concrete benefits, and maybe provide a steppingstone to something even bigger.

I continue to view both Sanders and Warren as un-electable especially given the demographics and mind sets in the hand full of swing states that will decide who wins the Electoral College even if that individual loses the popular vote by many millions of votes.

Are Never Trump Republicans Worth Democrats' Efforts?

As a former Republican - I left the GOP many years ago - I watch the antics and hand-wringing of never Trump Republicans with some skepticism.  For years as the GOP drifted towards becoming a party controlled by white supremacists and far right Christian religious extremists - the base that elected Donald Trump - these never Trumpers continually acted as apologists for GOP extremism and the war against Barack Obama waged by Mitch McConnell in the U.S. Senate and a who's who of the falsely named Christian Right.  Worse yet, in the 2016 election, many either held their noses and voted for Trump or voted for hapless third party candidates who had a snow ball's chance in Hell of winning so that such votes were a defacto vote for Trump.   Now that the handiwork of their actions has been fully realized and the GOP has become something truly hideous, some of them have the audacity to argue that Democrats ought to be kissing their asses and courting their votes. I'm sorry, but a vote for today's GOP and its candidates is, in my opinion, a vote for evil.  The ONLY alternative and way to fight that evil is to vote a straight Democrat ticket. A piece in Politico looks at the argument made by Mona Charen, a long apologist for the GOP and its worse policies who thinks she needs to be courted by Democrats.  I believe that the 2020 Democrat presidential candidates need to pursue moderation in their policies to win moderate voters, but I doubt the likes of Charen will ever be won over from the GOP that, like it or not, they helped create. Here are excerpts:

Dear 2020 Democrats—all 23 of you who are running for president:

You are itching to be rid of Donald Trump. Who can blame you? Of course, if this were a normal Republican presidency, I would not share your feelings. Not remotely. As a lifelong conservative, I think your policy ideas are ill-advised. But this cycle, other Trump-disgusted Republicans and I can contemplate voting Democrat. We could do so not because we’ve become progressives, but because we think it’s in the long-term interests of conservatism and the country to be rid of Trump. If he gains a second term, conservatism may well be irredeemably tarnished.

[L]et me make the case that you should court Republican refugees like me in 2020.

You may think you don’t need us—but you’d be wrong. I know things are looking good for you: Trump’s approval rating has never topped 46 percent, and among younger voters, millennials and Gen Zers, his support is 30 percent or below. But Trump was elected with the lowest approval ratings of any major candidate in history. Polls can disguise as well as reveal. The “shy Tory” phenomenon—in which voters seem disinclined to tell pollsters that they support conservatives—is real across the globe, as evidenced most recently by the upset victory of the conservatives (called “liberals”) in Australia. Right-wing populism continues to show strength worldwide as recent election results in Brazil, India, Hungary, Poland and the Philippines attest.

And if the results of the 2018 midterms have you feeling confident, you should look to the not-so-distant past. Democrats were pasted in the 2010 midterms and yet President Barack Obama glided painlessly to reelection in 2012.

While we’re on the subject of the midterms, remember that your 2018 victories were not a left-wing triumph. Your 40-seat pickup was due in no small measure to Republicans and independents who voted Democrat. In other words: Voters like me.

Democrats are well-positioned to win in 2020 by embracing political normalcy again. . . . Trump’s tenure has not, thankfully, featured pestilence or war. It’s more like the Three Stooges than the Four Horsemen. Still, today, many of us are prepared to put our long-term goals of balanced budgets and less government-controlled health care aside to feel some sense of political equilibrium again.

But that’s not the tone you are adopting. First, you seem taken with the idea of executive overreach. . . . This is precisely the kind of power grab that Trump engaged in when declaring his spurious state of emergency to redirect funds to his border wall. And though Democrats’ frustration with his lawlessness is justified, this would represent a total vindication of it. If Democrats respond to Trump’s arrogation of power by doing the same thing, our constitutional system is threatened.

The assertion of unlimited executive power is not just contrary to the Constitution; it’s also a recipe for rising political tensions. If I believe that a Democrat will propose legislation with which I disagree, I know I stand a good chance of having my representatives modify or even block it. That’s not true of executive action. The stakes of each presidential contest thus get ratcheted up, as both sides fear that the next president, unconstrained by Congress, can lurch the country in a dramatically new direction. That severely decreases the chances that all of you, hopeful Democrats, can bring more centrist voters over to your side.

Second, have some respect for the norms and institutions that undergird our system’s stability. You claim to be dismayed by Trump’s norm-shattering ways, and yet your proposals are political earthquakes.

Harris and Buttigieg also favor packing the Supreme Court. The court has had nine justices since 1869. Remember, when FDR attempted to pack the court in 1937, he was thwarted by his own party. If Democrats take this step, it will invite further erosions of tradition by the next Republican majority. And, like executive orders, it will heighten the sense that presidents are would-be emperors.

Sanders, Cory Booker, Harris, Warren, Julián Castro and Andrew Yang have endorsed the “Green New Deal,” and Amy Klobuchar and Gillibrand support the “aspirations” of the plan, if not the details. The plan would demand a vertiginous (in fact, impossible) reordering of our entire government and economy—for instance, by requiring the refurbishment of every single building in the country.

There’s a clear way forward, Democrats, and it is grounded in the Constitution. Do what you think is right—propose legislation to fix Obamacare or spend more on basic research of climate change or whatever—but in the constitutional way. No sweeping, federalism-smashing plans to overhaul everything in the name of your preferred policies. And please, don’t call for the abolition of traditions and constitutional structures, like the Electoral College, that make voters nervous about your stewardship.

Democrats would be wise to embrace that sensibility, in the person of Biden or another, not just because it could win, but because it’s important for all of us, right and left, to turn our faces away from Caesarism—of the right or the left.

Pennsylvania GOP Collapse Threatens Donald Trump’s Reelection Hopes

The Republican Party is nearing extinction in California.  The 2018 midterms saw a GOP bloodbath in Pennsylvania that could block Donald Trump 2020 reelection prospects, assuming he survives in office to rum for reelection. Within the state GOP, individuals are pointing fingers at each other yet the real problem for the GOP in Pennsylvania is likely Trump himself who had huge negative coattails in 2018. The intra-party infighting also ignores the reality that as the GOP message has become more racist and extreme, supporters have become alienated and are dwindling and it may be impossible to stop a further implosion.  Add Trump's never ending lies and 2020 could see further losses.  A piece in Politico looks at the GOP civil war and the - in my view, wonderful  - danger it poses for Trump. Here are highlights:

A GOP implosion in Pennsylvania has Republicans alarmed about President Donald Trump's reelection prospects in a state that proved essential to his 2016 victory.

The enfeebled state party — still reeling after a devastating midterm election where Republicans lost three congressional seats and whiffed gubernatorial and Senate races by double digits — is tangled in a power struggle messy enough to capture the attention of the White House.

The chaos threatens [Trump's] the president’s chances in a state where there’s no room for error. Trump, the first Republican presidential nominee to carry the state since 1988, won by less than a percentage point.

“He has to win Pennsylvania in order to win the presidency,” said Republican Rep. Ryan Costello, a one-time rising star from the Philadelphia suburbs who is retiring from Congress after just two terms. “And I don’t think he’s the favorite to win against a generic Democrat.”

Since Trump’s stunning 2016 win, Pennsylvania Republicans have gotten almost exclusively bad news. . . . Then came an election year from hell, beginning with Democrat Conor Lamb’s House special election victory smack dab in the middle of western Pennsylvania’s Trump Country. . . . The Pennsylvania Supreme Court blew up the state’s gerrymandered congressional map and redrew it to the Democrats’ benefit, leading Costello to announce he wouldn’t run for reelection. Then Nov. 6, 2018, happened.

GOP Rep. Lou Barletta, who tied himself closely to the president, lost by nearly 700,000 votes in his challenge to Democratic Sen. Bob Casey. The result in the governor’s race was even worse: Republican Scott Wagner lost by more than 800,000 votes.

The bleeding has led a faction of Republicans to point their fingers at the state party chairman: Val DiGiorgio, who hails from populous and increasingly Democratic southeastern Pennsylvania. . . . DiGiorgio’s supporters argue that he did everything he could in a year that was devastating for Republicans across the country, and that his critics are merely bitter after backing his opponent in the 2017 election for state party leader.

The Republican State Committee of Pennsylvania only has $94,000 on hand, according to campaign finance reports — almost $1 million less than the party had at the same point four years ago. The party’s headquarters staff has shrunk from between 16 employees in 2014, according to the previous chairman, to seven.

To some Republicans, especially those who lost reelection in November, Trump himself is largely responsible for the GOP’s shellacking in Pennsylvania.

Costello, who has been critical of the president, said the GOP’s double-digit losses in the state House in Harrisburg are “probably the best example of reverse coattails” this year.

“You’re talking about well-liked, experienced state representatives who worked their districts well and lost,” he said. “And they lost because people were just disgusted with Republicans.”

[T]he last thing Republicans need in 2020 in a must-win state for Trump is a civil war.  “The only Republican who’s won Pennsylvania twice in the last 60 years-plus was Ronald Reagan,” said Gerow. “A divided party won’t prevail.”

Let's hope the troubles of the Pennsylvania GOP continue and intensify.  :)

Signs the Foundation of Trump's Coalition is Cracking

New analysis of the 2018 midterm election results indicate that cracks may be developing in the coalition that thanks to a failure on the part of Electoral College electors put Trump in the White House.  The results of the new analysis also underscores the reality that evangelicals are the principal pestilence in both America's political and social discourse.  Evangelicals reflectively vote Republican and support policies harmful to the poor, the elderly, the sick, and which are decidedly racist and anti-black and anti-Hispanic (the term modern day Pharisees is too kind, in my view).  Meanwhile, the splintering of non-evangelical, non-college educated whites from the Trump coalition could provide an opening for Democrats in 2020 both at the presidential election level and at the Congressional level.  Here are lengthy highlights from a long piece at CNN that looks at this new analysis:

Cracks have emerged in Donald Trump's hold on his core constituency of white working class voters, new data from the 2018 election reveal.

Though Republican candidates almost everywhere registered large margins among white voters without a college degree, Democrats ran much more competitively among the roughly half of that group who are not evangelical Christians, according to previously unpublished results from the 2018 exit poll conducted by Edison Research for the National Election Pool, a consortium of media organizations including CNN. Democrats, the analysis found, ran particularly well this year among white working-class women who are not evangelicals, a group that also displayed substantial disenchantment in the exit poll with Trump's performance. Those women could be a key constituency for Democrats in 2020 in pivotal Rust Belt states such as Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where relatively fewer blue-collar whites are also evangelical Christians. Nationwide, nearly three-fifths of blue-collar white women who are not evangelicals voted Democratic in last month's House races, while an equal number said they disapproved of Trump's performance in office, the analysis of exit poll results found.
 "It's another overlay to the conclusion that there are some parts of the white non-college population that are open to Democrats and can be moved a few points in your direction," says Ruy Teixeira, a long-time Democratic analyst of voting trends who now serves as a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress. Though these distinctions sound like fodder for a cocktail hour argument at a political science faculty lounge, they actually inform a backstage debate simmering among Democratic strategists about 2020. This debate has clear implications for the message the party develops over the next two years and the kind of nominee it chooses against Trump in the next presidential election. At issue is how much emphasis the party should place on trying to recapture white working-class voters as opposed to maximizing turnout among its new base of minority, millennial and college-educated white voters, especially women and those in urban areas. Strategists in this camp argue it would be a mistake for the party to downplay outreach to white working-class voters who are not evangelicals, especially the women in that group.

This bubbling private debate has given rise to a new and improbable acronym that some Democrats see as a potentially pivotal group for 2020: WNCNEW, as in white non-college, non-evangelical women.
 "WNCNEW is the group Democrats should care about," one Democratic strategist insisted in an email. Those women represented about one in nine voters nationally this year and an even larger share in key Rust Belt battlegrounds. In practical terms, the party and its presidential nominee in 2020 inevitably will try to turn out its new base and to regain blue-collar voters of both genders from Trump: the decision facing the party is not either/or. But Democrats will face a genuine choice of emphasis. The detailed exit poll results provided to CNN show clear openings for Democrats with some groups of white working-class voters. But they also indicate that Democrats still face significant headwinds with most of those blue-collar whites and that white evangelical Christians look increasingly monolithic in their support for Republicans. That's a big challenge for Democrats in many southern states, where half or more of working-class whites are also evangelical Christians. To illuminate these subtle but critical distinctions, Edison Research analyzed results from the 2018 exit poll in its national sample and in seven states where voters were asked whether they are evangelical Christians.
 Nationwide, the exit poll found that evangelical Christians this year comprised fully 45% of all white voters without a college degree, a substantial portion of the total electorate. By contrast, evangelicals represented only one-fourth of college-educated white voters. At least 77% of white evangelicals without a college degree voted against the Democratic Senate candidates in Florida, Missouri and Tennessee, while 72% opposed defeated Democratic incumbent Joe Donnelly in Indiana, the exit polls found. In the Georgia governor's race, a breathtaking 89% of non-college white evangelicals voted for Republican Brian Kemp over African-American Democrat Stacey Abrams; 84% of those voters picked Ted Cruz over O'Rourke in Texas. Only Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin in West Virginia ran competitively, losing those voters by a narrow 52% to 46% margin. In House races, the exit polls found that exactly three-fourths of white evangelicals without a college degree voted Republican, while only about one-fifth supported Democrats. . . . . The picture wasn't appreciably better among white evangelicals with a college degree.
 The collapse of any meaningful distinctions among evangelicals reflects both their hardening loyalty to the GOP and the contraction of their overall numbers, says Robert P. Jones, chief executive officer of the Public Religion Research Institute, a non partisan group that studies religion, values and politics. In PRRI surveys, he notes, evangelical Christians have declined from about 21% of the total population in 2008 to 15% this year. That erosion, Jones says, has been "asymmetrical," with younger and better-educated members becoming the most likely to leave the faith. That's left behind a group that is older and more uniformly conservative. But if the 2018 election results highlight the solidifying uniformity of white evangelicals — male and female, college-educated or not — the findings simultaneously illuminate pressing reasons for Republican concern about white voters who are not evangelicals, both those with and without college degrees. Democrats carried fully two-thirds of college-educated whites that are not evangelical Christians. That included not only a head-turning 71% of college educated white women who are not evangelicals but also 59% of the equivalent men. The shares that said they disapproved of Trump's performance were even higher in both groups: 74% of the women and 63% of the men.

Democrats carried about three-fifths of these non-evangelical white-collar whites in the Florida Senate race and about two-thirds of them in Indiana, Tennessee and Missouri. Even in Texas, O'Rourke carried 61% of them, while Abrams won 55% of them in the Georgia governor's race. Those geographically dispersed results testify to the breadth of the recoil from the Trump-era GOP among these well-educated white voters that Republicans in an earlier generation considered part of their base. In the national House exit poll, Democrats actually carried a slim 52% to 46% majority among non-college whites who are not evangelicals, though with a significant gender gap. While Democrats won the blue-collar women who are not evangelicals by 16 percentage points, Republicans won the equivalent men by 9 points. And while 56% of those non-evangelical blue-collar men said they approved of Trump's performance in office, 58% of the equivalent women said they disapproved. Those are the so-called WNCNEW that some Democrats see as an essential target for 2020. [T]he 2018 exit polls showed that among both working-class white men and women who are not evangelicals, Democratic House candidates won a measurably higher share of the vote than Hillary Clinton did in the 2016 presidential race. In the heavily blue-collar Rust Belt states that tipped the 2016 election to Trump — particularly Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — even small improvements might be enough to tilt the result the other way. As Teixeira says, when trying to reverse Trump's narrow margin of victory in the decisive states, "it all counts."

Will the Trump/GOP Alienation of Young Voters Be Fatal in 2020

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, one of the things that has most baffled me is the GOP - and Trump's - almost deliberate alienation of younger voters as they prostitute themselves in favor of aging, conservative white voters who are literally dying off (albeit, not fast enough to have reversed the 2016 presidential and 2018 Senate election results).  The goal of a political party is to elect candidates not just in the election cycle at hand, but also in the future. As a piece at CNN that looks at younger voter turn out and the growing percentage of the electorate that they comprise, it is hard to see the GOP long term having anything less than a political death wish much as what has happened to the GOP in California (something I would love to see come to pass).  Pandering to Christian extremists while near 40% of younger voters have walked away from religion is simply insane.  The same goes for the GOP's increasingly open racism in the face of an increasingly racial diverse cadre of younger voters.  Here are article highlights:

The sharp turn against the Republican Party by young people in the 2018 election may be only the overture to an even greater political risk for the GOP in 2020.

Both historical voting patterns and underlying demographic trends suggest that the biggest difference in the electorate between this election and the next one is that relatively younger voters will cast a greater share of the votes in the presidential year -- perhaps a much larger share. Even with much higher than usual turnout among young voters this year, voters 45 and below are likely to increase their proportion of the total vote from just under three-in-ten this year to something closer to four-in-ten by 2020, historical trends suggest.

A rising participation level could threaten Republicans at a moment when younger voters, who have consistently expressed preponderant opposition to President Donald Trump in polls, provided Democrats their largest margins in decades during last month's election.

"Voters under 45 moved decisively and overwhelmingly toward Democrats, and I don't know how you take it as anything other than a total rebuke of Trump and what's he done," says Democratic pollster Andrew Baumann, who has extensively studied younger voters.

Despite Democrats' emphatic gains among younger voters, Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson, author of The Selfie Vote, a book on the Millennial Generation, says the GOP shows no signs of grappling with the shift.

Several states with Democratic campaigns that particularly targeted young people saw bigger increases, according to previously unpublished Catalist data. In Arizona, the share of the vote cast by those under 45 spiked from 21% in 2014 to 29% this year; in Georgia, the numbers jumped from 29% to 36% ; Texas increased from 26% to 33%.

That raises the clear red flag for Republicans that the young people who broke decisively against the party last month are likely to comprise a measurably larger share of voters in 2020.

The most basic reason younger voters loom even larger in 2020 is that the millennial Generation and Generation X, joined for the first time by the post-millennials born after 2000, will comprise a larger share of the eligible voter pool than in 2016. (Those three generations represented about 55% of all eligible voters in 2016, and are expected to rise to about 63% in 2020, according to forecasts by the non-partisan States of Change project.)

Heightened turnout in 2020 would raise the price for the losses Republicans suffered among younger voters this year. In the exit polls, Democrats carried fully 67% of voters aged 18-29 in House elections. That represented their best performance among adults under 30 in any House election since at least 1986; it even exceeded their modern high points of around three-fifths in the 2006 midterm election and the 2008 and 2012 presidential years, when former President Barack Obama was on the ballot.

Similarly, exit polls this year found House Democrats captured 58% among voters aged 30-44. That's also the highest share of the vote Democrats have won in that age group since 1986.

These results were remarkably consistent across regional lines. Democrats carried voters aged 18-29 in all 22 Senate races in which an exit poll was conducted, except for Indiana, where the two candidates tied. Many of their margins among these youngest voters were enormous. In the US Senate race in Texas, Democrat Beto O'Rourke, despite losing the race, carried 71% of voters younger than 30, the exit polls found. Gavin Newsom won 69% of voters younger than 30 in winning the California governor's race, and Stacey Abrams carried just under two-thirds of them in her losing Georgia gubernatorial bid.

"When you look at these crosstabs, and you see just how poorly Republicans did among thirty-somethings, not just kids just out of college, it's a problem," she says. "They have kids, they bought houses, they pay taxes, they are doing all of those things that were supposed to make them Republicans, and they didn't become Republicans."
 To Anderson, the GOP's weakness with voters now in their thirties is evidence that the party's problem extends beyond Trump: as she notes, the roughly three-fifths of voters 30-44 that Democrats won in 2018 almost exactly equaled their showing among voters in their twenties during their sweep in the 2006 mid-term election. "The problem now for Republicans is you are not just talking about we need to do better with younger voters, now it has spread so far up the age scale as these voters have gotten older and not become more conservative in the process," she said.

[W]hile the GOP's difficulties with the Millennial Generation predate Trump, there seems little doubt that he has compounded them. From the outset, many millennials viewed Trump's belligerent language on race and immigration, and his belittling comments about women, as an explicit counterrevolution against the ideal of a more inclusive and tolerant America that most of them say they support. In a summer 2016 ABC/Washington Post survey, two thirds of voters under 40 said they considered Trump biased against women and minorities. But doubts about Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton blocked the full expression of those doubts . . . 

In this [2018] election, Trump faced a withering verdict from younger voters. In the exit polls, 66% of voters aged 18-29 and 62% of those aged 30-44 said they disapproved of his performance in office. In each group, just over half said they strongly disapproved of Trump's performance, significantly more than the share of older voters (just over two-fifths) who said they were so strongly disenchanted with him.

But Trump is still committing the GOP to a strategy of squeezing more advantage from groups that are shrinking. All of the major data sources on the electorate's composition -- from the Census Bureau to the exit polls to Catalist -- agree that the share of the vote cast by Trump's core group of whites without a college education has been declining by about two percentage points over each four-year presidential cycle. With turnout among minorities and college-educated whites surging, Catalist's preliminary analysis found those working-class whites, while still the electorate's largest single group, dropped fully five points as a share of the vote this year, compared to the last mid-term in 2014.

One thing no political strategy can reverse is the tide of generational replacement. As not only the World War II and Silent Generations, but also more baby boomers pass out of the electorate, the share of the eligible voting pool comprised of Generation X, millennials and Post-millennials is inexorably rising. The States of Change project forecasts those three generations -- which are much more racially diverse and college-educated than the generations they are replacing -- will continue growing to about two-thirds of eligible voters by 2024 and nearly three-fourths by 2028. More voters mean more consequences if Republicans can't soften the recoil from the party that younger voters displayed last month.

As I said, the GOP is suffering from a long term death wish or suicide pact. 

Why the GOP Cannot Change Even After a Historic Loss

After the major politico debacle of losing 40 seats in the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterm elections it would seem rational for Republicans to consider retooling their message and seeking to once again attract the voters that they lost.  Yet, as a column in the Washington Post lays out, do not expect this to happen.  Rather, expect a doubling down of the GOP's embrace of racists and religious extremists.  Why?  First, look no further than the misogynist who occupies the White House.  Second, the GOP hard core base has become so insane that rational thought and analysis simply doesn't come into the mix.  The 2018 U.S. Senate race in Virginia is perfect example.  The GOP base insanely belied - and still believes - that the reason the party hasn't won a statewide election since 2009 is because the party's candidates are not "conservative enough."  And by "conservative, that means a white Christian extremist who embraces white nationalism, hence Corey Stewart's nomination and horrific defeat. Further proof: when Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring, proposed legislation in early 2018 to prohibit militia-style groups from marching and brandishing weapons in Virginia, the Republicans who control the legislature were having none of it. The same pattern applies at the federal level.  Here are column highlights:

Republicans suffered a historic defeat in the 2018 election, losing a net of 40 seats in the House, six governorships, hundreds of state legislative seats and six state legislative chambers. Yet as the New York Times reports, if you were viewing from the outside, you’d think they were convinced that everything is fine and dandy:

Yet nearly a month after the election, there has been little self-examination among Republicans about why a midterm that had seemed at least competitive became a rout.

President Trump has brushed aside questions about the loss of the chamber entirely, ridiculing losing incumbents by name, while continuing to demand Congress fund a border wall despite his party losing many of their most diverse districts.

I’m sure there are liberals who would look at this and say, “Ha ha, what a bunch of dopes.” But I have some sympathy for the quandary Republicans find themselves in, because even if they wanted to change course to appeal to a broader electorate in a country that grows more diverse by the day — and some of them do — it’s almost impossible for them to do so. They’re trapped.

The first reason is that parties are not dictatorships, where someone can just decide that a new approach is needed and then implement it. There are a variety of different people and forces within the party . . . As we’ve seen with the GOP’s struggles on immigration over the last decade or so, the party’s leaders can have a clear idea about where they want to go but be overruled by voters who don’t buy in.

When parties do change, furthermore, it usually happens as the result of a process that plays out over years. The best recent example is what happened in the Democratic Party in the 1980s and 1990s. After Walter Mondale’s defeat in the 1984 presidential election, a group of centrists decided that the party had become too liberal and too complacent, and mounted an effort, centered around the Democratic Leadership Council, to pull it rightward. . . . It may be hard to remember now, but at the time it seemed that Republicans had a lock on the White House; by the time President George H.W. Bush’s term was over, the GOP had controlled the executive branch for 20 of the previous 24 years.

Most of the time, parties don’t have to change after a defeat; all they have to do is wait for circumstances to change. For instance, in 2008 the Republicans suffered terrible losses: Not only was Barack Obama elected president, but also they lost a net of 21 seats in the House and eight in the Senate. They didn’t respond with some kind of ideological reorientation; instead, they just worked to get their base as angry as possible at Obama, which led them to a huge victory and a retaking of the House just two years later.

That’s one of the biggest reasons why a genuine change of course is so hard for Republicans: As a result not only of the recent intensification of polarization but also trends in party membership dating back to the post-civil rights realignment that began in the 1960s, there just aren’t many moderates left in the party to make the case. And the typical Republican in Congress represents a deeply conservative district or state, where the only thing they fear is a primary challenge from their right.

After the 2018 election that’s even more true than it was before, , , , , Their voters are also under the influence of an immensely powerful conservative media apparatus whose business model depends on stoking rage and resentment, which further prevents moderates from gaining a foothold.

Finally, there’s one gigantic reason Republicans can’t change course: Donald J. Trump. The party is inevitably defined by the president, and this president believes that the only path to political success is feeding the angriest instincts of his base. . . . You might have Republican candidates for other offices who try to run more moderate campaigns, but their message will be overwhelmed by what’s coming from the White House.

So for at least the next two years, the GOP is going to be exactly what it is now: a party devoted to the interests of the wealthy and large corporations, animated by xenophobia, gripped by climate denial and committed to the maintenance of political division. It might become something else someday, but it certainly won’t in the near future.

As some California Republicans have concluded, the GOP needs to die before the rebuilding process can commence.  In the 2019 Virginia elections, voters need to end the GOP grip on the Virginia General Assembly.

Democratic House Majority’s First Order of Business: Restore Democracy

In the 2018 midterm elections Democrats won 8.8 million more votes than their Republican opponents and won as of this writing 39 seats in and control of the U.S. House of Representatives.  Yet due to gerrymandering, the structural failure of the U.S. Senate, Republicans continue to hold an outsize measure of control in Washington - a  control that benefits the wealthy, large corporations and corrupt politicians to the detriment of average Americans.  In a column in the Washington Post, Democrats lay out their plan to re-balance democracy in favor of the majority, not the select few and racist minorities. Among the reforms the House Democrats seek to enact - getting them through the Senate may be an obstacle - are: (i) ending dark money form politics and forcing donors to be identified. As of now, we still do not know who paid Acting Attorney General Whitaker $1.2 million through a shell "charity," (ii) closing down the revolving door between Congress and large corporations, and (iii) ending gerrymandering and Republican voter suppression efforts.  Unless one is part of the greed driven 1%, a racist, or a vulture capitalist, these goals should be attractive to decent moral citizens.  Here are column excerpts:

Americans went to the polls and sent a powerful message: The election not only was a resounding verdict against Republicans’ assault on Americans’ health care and wages, but also it was a vote to rescue our broken democracy.

In the face of a torrent of special-interest dark money, partisan gerrymandering and devious vote-suppression schemes, voters elected a House Democratic majority determined to bring real change to restore our democracy.

The new Democratic House is ready to deliver with H.R. 1: a bold reform package:

First, let’s end the dominance of money in politics. For far too long, big-money and corporate special interests have undermined the will of the people and subverted policymaking in Washington — enabling soaring health-care costs and prescription drug prices, undermining clean air and clean water for our children, and blocking long-overdue wage increases for hard-working Americans.

So let’s rein in the unaccountable “dark money” unleashed by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision by requiring all political organizations to disclose their donors, and by shutting down the shell game of big-money donations to super PACs.

Next, let’s make sure that when public servants get to Washington, they serve the public. Restoring the public’s trust means closing the revolving door between government and private industries, and imposing strong new ethics laws to stop officials from using their public office for personal gain. To do so, we will expand conflict-of-interest laws, ban members of Congress from serving on for-profit boards, revamp the oversight authority of the Office of Government Ethics, and prohibit public servants from receiving bonus payments from their former employers to enter government.

Finally, let’s make it easier, not harder, to vote. Since the Supreme Court took the teeth out of the Voting Rights Act, Republican political operatives have increasingly turned to blatant schemes to make it more difficult for the Americans left behind to participate in elections — a narrow agenda all too often targeted at communities of color.
We must renew the Voting Rights Act to protect every citizen’s access to the ballot box and restore the vital safeguard of pre-clearance requirements for areas with a history of voter suppression. We will promote national automatic voter registration, bolster our critical election infrastructure against foreign attackers, and put an end to partisan gerrymandering once and for all by establishing federal guidelines to outlaw the practice.

These are the reforms that will ultimately change the balance of power in Washington. When we get dark money out of politics, clean up corruption and ensure fair elections, we will dismantle the ability of special interests to stack the deck of our democracy and our economy against hard-working Americans.

[W]ith a system that works for the people, we will deliver policy outcomes that make life better for all Americans: We will lower health-care costs and out-of-control prices for prescription drugs. We will rebuild the United States’ infrastructure, raise the minimum wage and put leverage back in the hands of workers and consumers. We will finally advance common-sense, bipartisan solutions to prevent gun violence. We will confront discrimination with the Equality Act , pass the Dream Act to protect the patriotic young undocumented immigrants who came here as children, and take the first step toward comprehensive immigration reform.

We have a responsibility to honor the vision of our founders, the sacrifices made to expand the right to vote and our duty to the American people.

Here in Virginia, we can aid in the effort by electing Democrat majorities to both the Virginia Senate and the House of Delegates in November, 2017, and end Republican obstruction.  

Women - A Vanishing Breed Among Congressional Republicans

As the base of the Republican Party has become increasingly concentrated among aging whites, Christian extremists, white supremacists and vulture capitalists, something has happened to Republican women in Congress: they are vanishing.  At this time, it appears that only 13 women will be among the Republican caucus in 2019 - down by 10 from the present Congress.   To anyone sentient, the reason should be obvious: women do not like the GOP's racist, male privilege based  agenda and will vote against Republicans even when the Republican candidate is a woman.    Yet the GOP seems shocked and ponders how to regain support from women.  Jettisoning much of the current GOP platform would be an obvious choice if one is in touch with objective reality, but don't hold your breath waiting for reality to set in.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the phenomenon.  Here are highlights:

About a half dozen House Republican women gathered this week for a somber, post-election dinner.

Exchanging thoughts about the brutal results for GOP candidates, they realized something depressing, according to one attendee. That small dinner group represented about half the total number of Republican women who would serve in the House next year.

Just 13 GOP women have won election so far to serve in the next Congress, down from 23 this year. With a half dozen races yet to be resolved, the House GOP — the minority party next year — is all but certain to have the lowest number of women in its ranks since 1994.

That drop-off came amid a national political climate that saw female voters sharply break from Republicans. Women favored Democrats over Republicans for Congress, 59 percent to 40 percent, according to exit polls.

It has set off a debate within the Republican Party about how to address this crisis, both in terms of appealing to female voters and recruiting and retaining women in Congress.
“I think the Republicans have to get off of defense on this issue,” Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said Friday in an interview.

Cheney was the uncontested winner this week in the race for House Republican conference chairwoman, which puts her in charge of the party’s communications and messaging strategy. She will become the party’s highest-profile woman in Congress, trying to rebuild and rebrand its battered image.

But she does not see any need for course corrections on policies relating to women, arguing that Democrats create silos for female issues that treat women in a condescending way. . . . She said that issues like security and a strong economy cut across gender lines and that if Republicans made that argument better and had more women making the pitch, they would win more support. “We need more women running for office, no doubt,” Cheney said.  Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) could not agree more. . . . . . “Take a look around,” she told the GOP lawmakers. “This is not reflective of the American public.”

Stefanik said she then asked Reps. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the minority leader candidates, what their plans were to recruit and elect more women.  “I was struck that I really didn’t get an answer,” she recalled in an interview Friday.

Just one new Republican woman, so far, will be sworn in for her first term in January.  Yet when Cheney and Stefanik look across the aisle next year, they will see a record number of female Democrats, at least 89.

Trump won two years ago despite more than a dozen women accusing him of improper conduct or sexual assault, charges he denies. After his win, the Democratic Party and liberal activists focused early on recruiting and advancing female candidates. The reaction to the #MeToo movement further encouraged Democratic women, culminating in the clash over sexual misconduct allegations against Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh and the GOP’s treatment of his accusers.

Kavanaugh denied the allegations. Trump mocked one of his accusers, .  . . Stefanik took a more nuanced view, believing that the terrible standing with women was pretty well baked before last month’s confirmation vote.  “We were having problems with women voters before that,” she said.

Cheney sees her main focus as sharpening the party’s message. She intends to do a lot more than just stand behind McCarthy, the incoming minority leader, to provide a better visual backdrop.

She wants to go after Democrats for supporting a “socialist economic policy” like single-payer insurance and how such a national health program would limit women’s medical choices. “That would be a disaster,” she said.

I'm sorry, but Cheney - a child of privilege who has ridden her parents' fame to success - is clueless on the issue of heath care access.  The more I see and with a background of doing legal work for  hospital system, single payer insurance is the only way all citizens will have equal access to adequate healthcare. 

The Message of the 2018 Midterms to Republicans

Political parties used to be about winning elections, both in the near term and in the longer view.  Now, the Republican Party has become largely a cult of a malignant narcissist deemed repulsive by the growing portions of the national electorate.  The message sent to Republicans was that outside of "red states,"  Donald Trump is toxic.  Sure, Republicans held the U.S. Senate, but only because of the anti-democracy design of the institution and its over-sized empowerment of small, low population states. Elsewhere, an urbanized coalition of Millennials, minorities, and college-educated whites set a strong message that Trump, his enablers in the GOP, and his racist and religiously extreme base were simply unacceptable.  Hence the loss of three seats in the House of Representatives in Virginia and severe Republican losses elsewhere such as Pennsylvania and California.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the message that should have been received by the GOP for the midterm elections.  I find it doubtful that they will listen.  Here are highlights:

In last week’s election, the bill came due on the defining bet placed by congressional Republicans during the Donald Trump era.

Led by House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, House and Senate Republicans made a strategic decision to lock arms around Trump over the past two years. They resolutely rejected any meaningful oversight of his administration; excused, or even actively defended, his most incendiary remarks; buried legislation to protect Special Counsel Robert Mueller; and worked in harness with the president to pass an agenda aimed almost entirely at the preferences and priorities of voters within the GOP coalition, including tax cuts and the unsuccessful attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Even as Trump’s presidency careened through daily storms, many of his own making, they lashed themselves to its mast.

In the election, the consequences of that decision became clear. The general trend in midterm elections is that voters’ decisions, for both the House and the Senate, increasingly correspond with their attitudes about the president. But the 2018 results raised that long-term trajectory to a new peak.

In the midterms of 2006, 2010, and 2014, . . . .between 82 and 84 percent of voters who disapproved of the president voted against his party’s candidates for the House. But on Tuesday, that number soared: Fully 90 percent of Trump disapprovers said they voted for Democrats for the lower chamber. That was the worst performance for the president’s party among disapproving voters since Ronald Reagan in 1982.

Meanwhile, Republicans carried at least 90 percent of Trump approvers in seven of the 21 Senate races, and between 80 and 89 percent in 13 others. Joe Manchin in West Virginia was the only Democrat to hold his Republican opponent to less than 80 percent of Trump supporters.

The power of these relationships shaped the outcome in both chambers. In total, the tightened connection between votes for Congress and attitudes about Trump was a negative for Republicans because significantly more voters disapproved of him (54 percent) than approved (45 percent) in the national House exit poll.

[T]hree-fifths of whites with a four-year-college degree or more disapproved of Trump, as did just over 70 percent of nonwhites. That gale-force rejection powered the sweeping Democratic gains in white-collar and diverse metropolitan House districts across the country. Democrats swept away Republicans clinging to House seats in otherwise blue metropolitan areas in and around New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Northern Virginia, Miami, Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis, Denver, Tucson, Seattle, and the northern exurbs of Los Angeles.

Republicans lost House seats in Richmond, Charleston, Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Oklahoma City, Kansas City, California’s Orange County, and possibly Salt Lake City. For Republican members in both varieties of suburbs, occasional votes against party positions or tepid and intermittent public quibbles with Trump’s behavior could not mollify voters dismayed by the GOP’s overall subservience to his leadership.

Trump in 2016 carried only 13 of the nation’s 100 largest counties, according to data compiled for me by the Pew Research Center. But last week, about half of that already modest group shifted toward Democrats in statewide races. Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and its surrounding suburbs in Arizona, was the largest county that Trump won. But as of Tuesday night, it provided the Democrat Kyrsten Sinema a decisive margin of about 40,000 votes in her Senate victory over the Republican Martha McSally.

Tarrant County in Texas, which includes Fort Worth, was the second-largest county that Trump carried. But last week, it narrowly backed the Democrat Beto O’Rourke over the Republican Ted Cruz. Among the other large counties that Trump took in 2016, Suffolk (New York), Pinellas and Duval (Florida), Macomb (Michigan), and Oklahoma (in Oklahoma) all broke for Democrats in governor and/or Senate races.

The surge toward Democrats in Harris County was so strong that the party elected a slate of candidates to posts across the government, including 17 African American women to county judgeships and a 27-year-old Latina who had never held public office to the job of the county’s chief executive. Democrats also won a majority on the county commission.

Even with the GOP’s net gain in the Senate, these patterns represent a heavy price to Republicans for the choice congressional leaders made to bind the party to Trump. Paul Ryan, who had been among the most openly skeptical of Trump during the 2016 election, sublimated any private doubts to a posture of public deference and a policy of legislative cooperation. Now Ryan leaves Washington as the architect of the GOP’s biggest loss of House seats in any election since Watergate.

Democrats demonstrated renewed strength by winning Senate and governor’s races in the three Rust Belt states that keyed Trump’s victory: Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. And they sent a clear message that Republicans in 2020 can’t entirely count on the emerging Sun Belt battlegrounds of Georgia, Arizona, and Texas. North Carolina, where Republicans lead by about 80,000 ballots in the total House popular vote, also remains highly competitive, if leaning slightly toward the GOP.

Whatever it augurs for Trump’s own chances, though, the 2018 results underscored how he has truncated the opportunities for congressional Republicans. So long as the party is defined by his racially infused nationalism, it will be a strong competitor in states and House districts dominated by older, blue-collar, and evangelical white voters.

But at the same time, the party seems guaranteed to struggle in suburban areas. It will also face growing challenges in Sun Belt states from Democrats who can mobilize an urbanized coalition of Millennials, minorities, and college-educated whites.

Over the past two years, Republicans up and down the ballot could have tried to establish an identity divorced from Trump. Instead, led by Ryan and Mitch McConnell, they sent voters an unmistakable signal that they would not act in any meaningful way to restrain, or even to oversee, him. In 2018, voters in turn sent Republicans an equally unmistakable signal: that their fate is now inextricably bound to the volatile president they have embraced as their leader.

With Robert Mueller perhaps closing in on him, it's likely that Trumps behavior will become even more reprehensible, thus driving more voters into the arms of Democrats. 

White Supremacists Celebrate Midterms as a Victory

Despite the fact that Republicans lost control of the House of Representatives in last week's midterm elections, white supremacists are puffing themselves up and claiming that they were the real victors.  Why?  Because what for years had been becoming an largely unspoken plank of the GOP agenda is now overt under Donald Trump: racists and white supremacists are openly welcome in the Republican Party.  (In Virginia, defeated GOP candidate Corey Stewart ran on a openly racist platform).  This reality, combined with the fact that Trump openly displays his racism and the re-election of some of the most racist GOP members of Congress - e.g.. Steve King - has white supremacists cheering.  The big question and fear is whether or not they will put their bigotry into action against non-whites.  A piece in CNN looks at this cancer on America.  Here are article highlights:

White supremacists are saying they were winners in last week's midterm elections.

They were already emboldened by the language used by President Donald Trump and senior members of his administration -- words like "nationalist" and "invasion" that have hateful dual meanings -- according to a review of sites frequented by white supremacists. And they saw Tuesday's results as a victory for white America with what they believe will be progress toward a border wall, an end to DACA, or the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, and birthright citizenship.
 Memes and commentary on the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer site bashed nonwhite candidates who did not win, as well as losses by Republicans not seen as Trump loyalists.

"This changed history. It cleared away any of the remaining fog of confusion about what exactly we are dealing with in this country," Daily Stormer founder and publisher Andrew Anglin wrote.
 Anglin was buoyed by the win of Rep. Steve King in Iowa, even after King was pilloried for meeting with a far-right Austrian group linked to Nazis and retweeting an avowed Nazi sympathizer. King, a Republican, says he was unaware of the Nazi links in both those instances, but he has used racially charged and anti-immigrant rhetoric for years.
 King still won with 50.6% of the vote in Iowa's deeply conservative 4th Congressional District. In Illinois, Arthur Jones, a self-declared Holocaust denier and former leader of the American Nazi Party tallied almost 56,000 votes, more than a quarter of the total, standing for the GOP in Illinois' 3rd Congressional District. "Steve King won," Anglin wrote. "If last night was a referendum on Steve King's white nationalism, as the Democrats were trying to frame it, then white nationalism won."

On the campaign trail for Sen. Ted Cruz fighting for re-election in Texas, Trump declared, "I'm a nationalist, OK? I'm a nationalist."   A commenter on the 4chan bulletin board joked Trump was winking at them.

Earlier, another poster declared Trump was venerated by white supremacists: "What Dems, all leftists and pundits do not understand is that TRUMP is patriots' and Western/American Heritage's CHAMPION." To Alcindor, Trump repeated two more times how racist the question was. But he also never flatly denounced white supremacists. They were overjoyed, calling the press conference "glorious," and "beautiful" on 4chan, with one commenter writing: "I am honestly in awe of this man as a leader." "It doesn't take an overt slur for these individuals to basically become emboldened and to recognize and be excited by policies that they see would further their goals," said Keegan Hankes, a senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project. "When they hear [Trump] the President say things like, 'I'm not a racist,' they turn around amongst themselves and say, 'He just has to say that for practical reasons,' 'he just has to say that basically to get himself cover, to do the things that we want him to do,'" Hankes says. What is not clear is if any extremists will follow words with violence, as allegedly happened with Robert Bowers, who has pleaded not guilty to killing 11 people at a synagogue late last month, allegedly because he believed Jews were helping "invaders."

On places like 4chan, false talk of the migrant caravan as "invaders" has taken over on some of the message boards and become a popular meme topic. Analysts say "the browning of America" where whites become a minority is what the white supremacists fear most. There are threads with memes containing photos doctored to look like people breaking down walls at the US border with Mexico. There are jokes about how the traditional rush of Black Friday shoppers is nothing compared to what would happen next. In another thread on 4chan, commentators speculate about how many people would be shot as they come over the border. The thread appeared to reference Trump's comment that US troops on the border could fire on someone in the migrant caravan if the person threw rocks or stones. "All of them," one poster wrote of a possible casualty count. "Not enough," said another.
 The administration's approach to immigration in particular has "electrified" many racists, Hankes said, "to the point where they're begging their followers to go out and find ways to put Republicans in office." "They believe it will be easier for these policies to sail through," he said. "And these are things that they think are essential for creating a white ethno-state." Perhaps this election did energize white nationalists to vote, if they thought they had a champion in government. But there is also the fear -- and the example -- of men taking matters into their own violent hands.
 Bowers, the accused synagogue killer, echoed Trump talking points when he wrote on the free-speech forum Gab that "I have noticed a change in people saying 'illegals' that now say 'invaders'." The post, made six days before the shooting, continued, "I like this."

The time has come for my Republican "friends" to decide whether they are racists or not.  They cannot support a racist party any longer and then pretend that they are not complicit in its ugly agenda.