THE GLOBALIST DEMOCRAT PARTY DOES NOT GIVE A FUCK ABOUT BLACK AMERICA. NAME ONE THING OBOMB AND BIDEN DID FOR BLACK AMERICA AS THEY WERE HISPANDERING AND SABOTAGING U.S. BORDERS FOR 8 YEARS!
There's little doubt that today's Democrat Party is the party of the rich. Actually, that's an understatement. Far more than billionaires are involved. A better expression of reality would be to say a fundamental core of Democrat coalition is the managerial class, also known as the elite. These are the people who run the media, Hollywood and the entertainment industry, the big corporations, the universities and schools, the investment banks, and Wall Street.
On BLM, Antifa, Democrats mean the opposite of what they say
July
25, 2020
On BLM, Antifa, Democrats mean the opposite of what they say
By Rick Hayes
The leftist
Democrat opposite/projection rule states that whatever name they have chosen to
work under must be 180 degrees opposite of what they are actually
doing. Two clear examples are "Antifa" and "Black
Lives Matter."
The name
"Antifa" is supposed to express the group's anti-fascist
sentiments. In reality, the group regularly assaults people with
different views, shuts down free speech, and uses violence to put towns and
cities in a state of fear, which is an accurate description of what a fascist
is and does.
The name
"Black Lives Matter" (BLM) is supposed to express the group's desire
to stop the senseless violence and bloodshed in the black
community. Yet
BLM has never protested in a Democrat-controlled city to address the sickening
and staggering number of black-on-black murders that occur.
An overwhelming
number of black community leaders have publicly stated the need for more police
presence in the inner cities because they are aware that increasing patrols
save black lives. However, BLM has marched in the opposite direction
and has successfully forced the defunding of various police
departments. BLM is now moving to completely disband all police,
which would exponentially increase the death tolls of the very people they say
matter.
As far as the
projection side of the rule, two clear examples pull the masks off of the
charade.
For three years,
leftist Democrats shouted out through their propaganda networks that President
Trump had worked with Russia to steal the election from Hillary Clinton.
Not ninety-nine
percent, but one hundred percent of all evidence collected thus far has
revealed that Hillary Clinton and the leftist Democrats worked with Russia
through Fusion GPS to steal the election from Donald Trump. In fact,
the scandal, now being investigated by the Department of Justice, is considered
the first genuine coup attempt against a sitting U.S. president.
And let's not
forget the constant rants by Hillary Clinton and the leftist Democrats that it
would be un-American and dangerous if Donald Trump did not accept and support
the 2016 election results.
However, in pure
projection form, the overwhelming and unmistakable evidence has been that it
was and is Hillary Clinton and the leftist Democrats who never accepted the
2016 election results and continue to openly work to destroy Donald Trump's
lawful and legitimate presidency.
So the
opposite/projection rule is a time-tested way to see the leftist Democrats for
who and what they are.
Illinois Democrats embrace Trump’s law enforcement “surge”
25 July 2020
On Wednesday, the Democratic mayor of Chicago, Lori Lightfoot, announced that she had reached an agreement with President Donald Trump to send a “surge” of some 200 federal agents to Chicago. Addressing concerns that this would result in paramilitaries patrolling the streets, the mayor issued a statement maintaining “that all resources will be investigatory in nature and be coordinated through the US Attorney’s office.”
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot [Credit: AP Photo/Jim Young, File]
Earlier on Wednesday, Trump announced an expansion of his plan, dubbed “Operation Legend,” to deploy federal police to cities across the country, ostensibly to fight gun violence. He said he would send federal agents to Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee and Albuquerque to support existing law enforcement efforts.
That night, in Portland, Oregon, camouflage-clad members of the Customs and Border Protection’s “Rapid Deployment Force” again used tear gas against demonstrators outside the Hatfield Federal Courthouse, including Portland’s Democratic mayor Ted Wheeler, who himself had previously ordered police to tear-gas protesters.
On Thursday, Homeland Security sent a similar “Special Response Team” to Seattle, Washington; it remains on standby and has not yet been deployed.
These deployments are part of the Trump administration’s moves towards dictatorial rule. Attorney General William Barr had already sent agents from the FBI, the US Marshals Service, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the Drug Enforcement Agency to beef up state and local law enforcement in Kansas City, Missouri.
The Justice Department’s John Lausch, currently US Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, is reported to have brokered the deal between Trump and Lightfoot, who initially postured as an opponent of the “surge.” Crain's reports that Lausch “assured her that, despite media reports, the surge would be not unilateral but cooperative, with agents working with the chain of command in their normal units—the FBI, the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives, US Border Patrol, etc.—and in coordination with local authorities. Just like it had in other instances in the past.”
On Wednesday night, some 1,000 protesters gathered near Lightfoot’s home in the north side neighborhood of Logan Square. Led by Black Lives Matter and Good Kids Mad City, an anti-gun violence activist organization, protesters opposed the plan to bring hundreds of federal law enforcement agents to Chicago and called for defunding the police.
Illinois Democratic lawmakers have made public statements aimed at assuaging public fears that the federal forces will crack down on anti-police violence protesters in Chicago, just as they have in Portland.
Tensions are escalating as both corporate-controlled parties collaborate in attempting to quell opposition provoked by the catastrophic mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic, the homicidal back-to-work campaign, the cutting off of extended unemployment benefits and the ending of moratoria on evictions.
In an effort to assuage popular anger over the deal to bring federal police into the city, Lightfoot said, “If there is any deviation from what has been announced, we will pursue all available legal options to protect Chicagoans.”
Democratic Representative Jan Schakowsky said legislators were assured on a conference call, “…we’re not going to see these agents in the street.”Illinois senators Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth issued a joint statement of approval. “After needless threats from the president, we’re relieved the Trump administration says they plan to work with local officials and authorities in Chicago rather than undermine local law enforcement and endanger our civil rights,” they wrote.
These statements are not expressions of gullibility. Those making them have no genuine concern for civil and democratic rights. Rather, they are worried that the fascistic provocations of the Trump administration will spark an eruption of social opposition that will spiral out of control.
Growing economic desperation has increased already high levels of gang activity in the city.
This, in turn, has resulted in a sharp rise in gun violence and mass shootings this year, centered mainly in the South and West Side neighborhoods, which have been battered by deindustrialization and the austerity policies of successive Democratic mayoral administrations and Republican and Democratic state leaderships.
Conflicts between numerous rival gangs are responsible for the bulk of the more than 330 shooting deaths in Chicago in 2020, nine of which have been of children. The funerals of those killed are being targeted by shooters. Fifteen were shot earlier this week outside of an Auburn Gresham funeral home, where services for a shooting victim had taken place.
Epidemic levels of gun violence in Chicago are a direct consequence of decades of pro-business political rule by the Democratic Party. The closure of hundreds of schools, factories and social service providers since the start of the 21st century has cut a large section of the young working class population out of the formal economy and increased social desperation and misery to such a degree that the majority of young black men under 25 in Chicago are neither in school or working.
While the gang violence is the ostensible target of the Trump-Lightfoot “surge,” the building up of a police state apparatus in the country’s third largest city is aimed at suppressing the social anger over historic levels of inequality and state violence. The ruling elite and both of its political parties fear the emergence of mass strikes and protests by workers in opposition to the bipartisan back-to-work drive.
The “surge” in federal law enforcement being jointly implemented by the Trump administration and leading Democrats in Illinois must be taken as a sharp warning to the working class.
The Democrats’ relentless promotion of race and gender politics is aimed at splitting the working class and concealing the basic class divisions in society and the bankruptcy of the capitalist system. In remarks to the media earlier this week, Lightfoot made the ridiculous suggestion that Trump was sending law enforcement into cities because the mayors are women.
Early Friday morning, Lightfoot issued an order to remove two statues of Christopher Columbus. Grant Park’s Columbus statue was the site of recent protests, where teen activist Miracle Boyd had several of her teeth broken when a Chicago police officer assaulted her. The Grant Park statue of Columbus was unpopular from the time of its installation. Erected during the 1933 World’s Fair, it was lauded in a letter from Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who wrote “Italy, rejuvenated by Fascism, is happy to join in the celebration.”
Initially having opposed removing the statue, Lightfoot issued a public statement indicating its removal was a public safety and police resource issue: “It comes in response to demonstrations that became unsafe for both protesters and police, as well as efforts by individuals to independently pull the Grant Park statue down in an extremely dangerous manner. This step is about an effort to protect public safety and to preserve a safe space for an inclusive and democratic public dialogue about our city’s symbols. In addition, our public safety resources must be concentrated where they are most needed throughout the city, and particularly in our South and West Side communities.”
City Council members representing the Democratic Socialists of America lauded Lightfoot’s decision to remove the two statues. DSA Alderwoman Rossana Rodriguez Sanchez attempted to portray the bringing down of the statue as a victory, even as Lightfoot embraced Trump’s deployment of federal law enforcement to the city. “It’s coming down because of the activism that has led to this moment,” she said. “Indigenous, Black and Brown people have been fighting for so long to see this happen. It’s also a balancing act; the mayor just accepted Federal Agents from Trump.”
No warnings have been issued to the working class of the immense dangers from the Democrats’ collaboration with Trump by these bourgeois politicians masquerading as socialists, while functioning as an arm of the Democratic Party.
Its goals include, without apology, the
upending of American society.
Who Is Black Lives Matter?
| July 23, 2020 11:00 PM
Honorees
Opal Tometi, Patrisse Cullors, and Alicia Garza accept an award onstage during
Glamour Women Of The Year 2016 at NeueHouse Hollywood in Los Angeles,
California.
(Kevork Djansezian vie Getty Images)
" Black Lives Matter" is
more popular than either President Trump or Joe Biden, the presumptive
Democratic nominee, according to recent polling. The online research firm
Civiqs found in June that voters approved of the movement by a 28-point margin.
Rasmussen found 62% of likely voters viewed it favorably and 32% very
favorably.
This demonstrates that there is a
national consensus that the lives of black fellow citizens matter, which has
not always been the case in our history. It also suggests strong support for
better, fairer policing in minority communities. But that seems far more likely
to be because large majorities believe in the principle of the Declaration of
Independence that all men are created equal rather than because they support
the agenda of the organization with the innocuous-sounding name, Black Lives
Matter.
Fact is, "black lives matter"
is a matter of common decency entirely separate from the activist, ideological,
left-wing agenda of the BLM group. That organization has stated aims that go far beyond addressing
police brutality. Its
goals include, without apology, the upending of American society. Yet it has gained massively more
attention, support, and money since the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black
man, in Minneapolis police custody. It is therefore important that the public,
much of which thinks that by supporting BLM, they are backing obviously decent
and humane reforms, knows enough to make the distinction between the idea and
the ideologues hijacking it.
The co-founders of Black Lives Matter
are avowed Marxists. At least one names a convicted cop killer among her
heroes. A key mentor in building and shaping the group is a two-time vice
presidential candidate for the Communist Party USA. The national organization
is financially supported through a leftist group whose board of directors
includes a convicted terrorist. A 2017 report from Black Lives Matter describes its founders,
Alicia Garza, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, and Opal Tometi, as “three radical Black
organizers.” The women espouse Marxism and openly push radical identity
politics.
Susan Rosenberg was listed as vice chair of the board of directors
for Thousand Currents, BLM's financial sponsor, until the
website was pulled down in late June. She had been a member of a radical
leftist revolutionary militant group known as the May 19th Communist
Organization, which was affiliated with the Weather Underground terrorist group
and the radical Black Liberation Army. She was convicted on weapons and
explosives charges and sentenced to 58 years in prison, serving 16 years behind
bars before being pardoned by President Bill Clinton at the
end of his second term in January 2001.
Rosenberg was a radical in the 1960s and
1970s who landed on the FBI’s Most Wanted list for a number of crimes. She was
caught in 1984 while unloading hundreds of pounds of dynamite and weapons,
including a submachine gun, from her car at a New Jersey storage facility. She
was believed to have been part of politically
motivated bombing plots. Rosenberg and her associates were also charged with
bombings during the 1980s that detonated at the Capitol and the Navy War
College, among other targets. They were tied to a 1981 Brink’s armored car
robbery in which a guard and two police officers were killed. She wrote
an autobiography in 2011 titled An American
Radical: Political Prisoner in My Own Country about her own radical
escapades.
Garza has repeatedly talked about how
convicted cop killer and wanted domestic terrorist Joanne Chesimard, also known
as Assata Shakur, is one of her main inspirations. Rosenberg was suspected of helping Shakur escape from
prison after murdering a police officer.
Garza wrote an article for Feminist Wire in
2014 claiming that “hetero-patriarchy and anti-Black racism within our movement
is real and felt” and explaining that “when I use Assata’s powerful demand in
my organizing work, I always begin by sharing where it comes from, sharing
about Assata’s significance to the Black Liberation Movement, what its
political purpose and message is, and why it’s important in our context.” Garza
has repeatedly tweeted approvingly about Shakur.
Shakur is on the FBI’s Most Wanted
Terrorists list with a $1,000,000 reward for information directly leading to
her apprehension. She is believed to be hiding in Cuba. Shakur, a
member of the revolutionary extremist group the Black Liberation Army, is
wanted for escaping from prison in New Jersey in 1979 while serving a life
sentence for murdering a police officer. In 1973, Shakur and two accomplices
were stopped for a motor vehicle violation on the New Jersey Turnpike by two
state troopers. She was wanted at the time for her role in a number of serious
crimes, including bank robbery. When pulled over, Shakur and her comrades
opened fire on the officers, wounding one trooper and killing Werner Foerster
execution-style at point-blank range.
The BLM website is operated under an
umbrella group known as the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation,
chaired by Cullors, who said she and Garza are “trained
organizers” and “trained Marxists” during a 2015 interview with the Real
News Network, noting: “We actually do have an ideological frame. … We are
super versed on, sort of, ideological theories, and I think what we really try
to do is build a movement that could be utilized by many, many black folk.”
Black Lives Matter states that it was
founded in 2013 in response to George Zimmerman being acquitted of the killing
of Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman argued he’d acted in self-defense. President
Barack Obama’s Justice Department under Attorney General Eric Holder found “insufficient evidence” to pursue
any federal civil rights charges.
Cullors’s memoir, When They Call You a
Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir, includes a foreword written by
Angela Davis and an opening epigraph from Shakur. In the book, Cullors writes
that “we do this work today because on another day work was done by Assata
Shakur, Angela Davis, [transgender activist] Miss Major, the Black Panther
Party,” and others. In describing her move toward activism, Cullors wrote, “I
read, I study, adding Mao, Marx, and Lenin to my knowledge of hooks.”
Mao Zedong, founder of the People’s
Republic of China, was responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of his
own people, including 45 million or more during the Great Leap Forward, and
millions more during the Cultural Revolution. Vladimir Lenin, the first leader
of the Soviet Union, presided over the Red Terror, which killed many tens of
thousands as he launched one of the most repressive regimes in history.
Cullors told Teen Vogue in
2019 that “Angela Davis is a mentor of mine.” The duo have coordinated on BLM’s
strategies, and they appeared together at a “TimesTalks” event put
on by the New York Times in 2018. During that discussion,
Cullors called the poverty she grew up in a “setup” imposed upon her by a
capitalist society and remarked: “If this is a setup, then I can set it up
differently.” Davis, seen as a hero and mentor to the BLM co-founders, is
another Marxist and was the Communist Party vice presidential nominee in 1980
and 1984. She was a leading apologist for the Soviet Union during the Cold War,
even praising the East German and Soviet tyrannies while in East Berlin. Davis
was the winner of the Soviet Union’s Lenin Peace Prize and repeatedly praised
the USSR’s October 1917 Revolution.
In the United States, Davis was
affiliated with the Black Panther Party and connected to violent, murderous
radicals. Firearms registered to her were used in the takeover of a California
courtroom in 1970 where four people were killed. Davis detests Israel and has
been dogged by accusations of anti-Semitism for decades. She has been a fervent supporter of the boycott, divestment, and
sanctions movement waging economic warfare against the state of Israel in
recent years. Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz wrote in his 1991
book Chutzpah that he’d asked Davis if she’d be
willing to speak up on behalf of Jewish prisoners of conscience in the Soviet
Union when she went to Moscow to receive a prize and claims she told him that
“they are all Zionist fascists and opponents of socialism” and would urge that
they be kept in prison. But she has pushed for “political prisoner” Marwan
Barghouti to be released from an Israeli prison. Barghouti, one of the leaders
of the First and Second Intifada and a founder of the al Aqsa Martyrs'
Brigades, was convicted on 21 counts of murder for attacks carried out by
Palestinian terrorists.
Garza and Davis appeared on Democracy
Now! in 2017, with Garza effusive in her praise of Davis and repeatedly thanking her for helping guide the
BLM leaders.
“I have to say, Angela, one of the
things I appreciate so much about you is that you’re not waxing poetic about
things that happened; you’re still very much in relationship to all of us and
still teaching us,” Garza said. “Thank you for being a constant presence for
us. You are always 100% available and paying attention, and it means a lot to
all of us. … You are one of my greatest teachers.”
Garza explained how thoroughly she’d
been shaped by Davis’s radical ideology: “I have a bookshelf full of your
writings. And there’s something very special and powerful about what you have
offered to all of us — this unapologetic way of making sure that we understand
how intricately connected race and class and gender is, and then pushing that
up against the state and the state apparatus and having us understand how we
need to fight that with the relationship between race and class and gender in
shaping our strategies and our movements is unmatched, so I want to thank you
for that. … Thank you for shaping not just our ideas, but the fights that we
have on the ground.”
Garza spoke at a leftist Net Impact
Conference in 2016, where she made it clear that BLM was a wider agenda than
police brutality, also pointing to the wage gap, climate change, the Dakota
Access Pipeline protests at the Standing Rock Reservation, and much more,
arguing that at the root of these alleged problems was the capitalist system.
The closely affiliated Movement for
Black Lives claimed in 2016 that Israel was an
“apartheid state” committing “genocide” against the Palestinian people. Cullors
has repeatedly talked about the importance of
“solidarity” with Palestine, leading a “delegation” to Palestine. Cullors was
one of the signatories of 2015’s Black Solidarity
Statement with Palestine, a thoroughly anti-Israel screed that stated in part: “Out of the terror
directed against us — from numerous attacks on Black life to Israel’s brutal
war on Gaza and chokehold on the West Bank — strengthened resilience and
joint-struggle have emerged between our movements.” The statement also said
that the signatories “reject Israel’s framing of itself as a victim” and,
hand-waving away the countless terrorist attacks and thousands of rocket
bombardments against Israel, falsely claimed that “anyone who takes an honest
look at the destruction to life and property in Gaza can see Israel committed a
one-sided slaughter.”
In the wake of Floyd’s death and the
subsequent protests, Black Lives Matter quickly set up a petition on its website to #DefundThePolice.
“We call for an end to the systemic
racism that allows this culture of corruption to go unchecked and our lives to
be taken,” Black Lives Matter said. “We call for a national defunding of
police. We demand investment in our communities and the resources to ensure
Black people not only survive, but thrive.”
The Black Lives Matter website explains this proposal with a July post
declaring: “We know that police don’t keep us safe — and as long as we continue
to pump money into our corrupt criminal justice system at the expense of
housing, health, and education investments — we will never be truly safe.
That’s why we are calling to #DefundPolice and #InvestInCommunities.”
The group argued that “George Floyd’s
violent death was a breaking point — an all too familiar reminder that, for
Black people, law enforcement doesn’t protect or save our lives. They often
threaten and take them.”
BLM is clear about its opposition to
President Trump and Republicans. A letter from BLM’s organizing director Nikita
Mitchell has lamented that “we face blatant anti-Blackness, capitalist values,
and imperial projects,” and she decried “a rise of conservatism that has
resulted in a fascist president.”
BLM says that it is looking to influence November’s election, arguing that
“Black voters tipped the balance in the 2018 midterm elections” and that
“moving towards 2020, we seek to increase the power of our voices and votes.”
The group recently launched a “#WhatMatters2020” campaign “aimed to maximize
the impact of the BLM movement by galvanizing BLM supporters and allies to the
polls in the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election.” The campaign says that it is
focused on “racial injustice, police brutality, criminal justice reform, Black
immigration, economic injustice, LGBTQIA+ and human rights, environmental
conditions, voting rights and suppression, healthcare, government corruption,
education, and commonsense gun laws.”
Beyond their Black Lives Matter work,
Cullors calls herself
the “self-described wife of Harriet Tubman” and works on radical Los Angeles jail
reform, while Tometi also spent years as executive director of the
leftist Black Alliance for Just Immigration. Garza, Cullors, and Tometi
were named three of Time Magazine’s 100
Women of the Year for 2013.
Black Lives Matter raises money through
the ActBlue donation
platform,
though claims that this makes it a "shell
company" for the Democratic Party are unfounded. Black Lives Matter
appears to make up the majority of the donation work that Thousand Currents does,
with the 2019 public audit statement for the latter group
showing just over $6.4 million in total financial assets, including holding
more than $3.3 million in assets for Black Lives Matter as of the end of last
June. The audit shows Thousand Currents released nearly $1.8 million in
donations to Black Lives Matter during the year ending on June 30, 2019.
The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation
has pulled in huge amounts of cash since Floyd’s death, telling the Associated Press that
it had received more than 1.1 million individual donations as of mid-June, with
each donor giving an average of $33 per donation — meaning the group brought in
more than $33 million in less than a month. Donations have continued to roll in
since then.
BLM announced funds totaling $12.5
million in recent weeks. It first unveiled a $6.5 million fund to support its
grassroots organizing work on June 11, stating in a press release that it was
“grateful for the generosity and support of donors” and that the fund would be
available to all chapters affiliated with the BLM Global Network Foundation.
Beginning July 1, “affiliated chapters may apply for unrestricted grant funding
of up to $500,000 in multi-year grants," the group said, later adding that
another $6 million will go to helping black-led grassroots organizers.
“In the upcoming year, we will provide
resources to those new to the movement and interested in Black Liberation
strategies by developing curriculum,” Cullors said when announcing the new
fund. “In this stunning moment in American history, we will honor those lost,
and those who have come before us in the fight for Black Liberation.”
Radicals attempting to co-opt otherwise
constructive social movements are nothing new. The far Left participated in,
and in some cases infiltrated, civil rights groups without discrediting the
just and necessary fight against Jim Crow. But the arguments that won the day
against segregation were rooted in the best American traditions, not in
overthrowing those traditions. Distinguishing Black Lives Matter the group from
the growing sentiment in favor of racial justice driving the phrase's
popularity is a necessary first step in repeating that history.
ALL BILLIONAIRES ARE DEMOCRATS. ALL BILLIONAIRES WANT OPEN
BORDERS FOR MORE CHEAP LABOR AND NO CAPS ON IMPORTING CHINESE AND INDIANS TO
WORK OUR TECH JOBS CHEAP.
Obama’s State of Delusion ... OR JUST ANOTHER "Hope &
Change" HOAX?
”The delusional character of Obama’s State of the Union
address on Tuesday—presenting an America of rising living
standards and a booming economy, capped by his declaration
that the “shadow of crisis has passed”—is perhaps matched
only in its presentation by the media and supporters of the
Democratic Party.”
“The general tone was set by the New York Times in its lead
editorial on Wednesday, which described the speech as a “simple, dramatic
message about economic fairness, about the fact that the well-off—the top
earners, the big banks, Silicon Valley—have done just great, while middle and
working classes remain dead in the water.”
OBAMANOMICS:
The report observes that while the wealth of the world’s 80
richest people doubled between 2009 and 2014, the wealth of the poorest half of
the world’s population (3.5 billion people) was lower in 2014 than it was in
2009.
In 2010, it took 388 billionaires to match the wealth of the
bottom half of the earth’s population; by 2013, the figure had fallen to just
92 billionaires. It fell to 80 in 2014.
THE OBAMA ASSAULT ON THE AMERICAN MIDDLE-CLASS
“The goal of the Obama administration, working with the
Republicans and local governments, is to roll back the living conditions of the
vast majority of the population to levels not seen since the 19th century,
prior to the advent of the eight-hour day, child labor laws, comprehensive
public education, pensions, health benefits, workplace health and safety regulations,
etc.”
“In response to the ruthless assault of the financial oligarchy,
spearheaded by Obama, the working class must advance, no less ruthlessly, its
own policy.”
New Federal Reserve report
US
median income has plunged, inequality has grown in Obama “recovery”
The yearly income of a typical US household dropped by a
massive 12 percent, or $6,400, in the six years between 2007 and 2013. This is
just one of the findings of the 2013 Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer
Finances released Thursday, which documents a sharp decline in working class
living standards and a further concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich
and the super-rich.
THE DEMOCRAT PARTY’S BILLIONAIRES’
GLOBALIST EMPIRE requires someone as ruthlessly dishonest as Hillary Clinton or
Barack Obama to be puppet dictators.
http://hillaryclinton-whitecollarcriminal.blogspot.com/2018/09/google-rigged-it-so-illegals-would-vote.html
1.
Globalism: Google
VP Kent Walker insists that despite its repeated rejection by electorates
around the world, “globalization” is an “incredible force for good.”
2.
Hillary Clinton’s Democratic
party: An executive nearly broke down crying because of the candidate’s loss. Not
a single executive expressed anything but dismay at her defeat.
3. Immigration: Maintaining
liberal immigration in the U.S is the policy that Google’s executives discussed the
most.
Why the rich favor the
Democrats
There's little doubt that
today's Democrat Party is the party of the rich. Actually, that's an
understatement. Far more than billionaires are involved. A better
expression of reality would be to say a fundamental core of Democrat coalition
is the managerial class, also known as the elite. These are the
people who run the media, Hollywood and the entertainment industry, the big
corporations, the universities and schools, the investment banks, and Wall
Street. They populate the upper levels of government
bureaucracies. These are the East and West Coasters.
The alliance of the
affluent with the Democrat Party can be seen in the widely disproportionate
share of hefty political donations from the well-to-do going to Democrats and a
bevy of left-wing causes. It's also why forty-one out of the fifty
wealthiest congressional districts are represented by Democrats.
BLOG: DEMS LOVE SOCIALISM
FOR ILLEGALS TO KEEP THEM COMING AND BREEDING ANCHOR BABIES FOR WELFARE AND
SOCIALISM FOR BANKS. TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS OF IT!
Bernie Sanders is
an exception. But he's an anomaly viewed as dangerous to the party,
which is why he's being crushed by the Democrat establishment.
Why do the wealthy align
with the Democrats? The answer may seem counter-intuitive, but it is
really quite simple. It's surely not ideals or high-minded
principles. Nor is it ignorance. Rather, it boils down to
raw self-interest.
In his book, The Age of
Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, Christopher Caldwell notes
that rich Americans think themselves to be as vulnerable as
blacks. They are a relatively small minority of the
population. They fear being resented for their wealth and power and of
having much of that taken from them. Accordingly, the wealthy seek
to protect what is theirs by preventing strong majorities from forming by using
the divide and conquer principle.
As R.R. Reno writes when reviewing
Caldwell's book: "Therefore, the richest and most
powerful people in America have strong incentives
to support an anti-majoritarian political system." He goes
on: "Wealthy individuals shovel donations into elite institutions that
incubate identity politics, which further fragments the nation and prevents the
formation of majorities."
Some of the rotten
fruit of the wealthy taking this approach include multiculturalism,
massive immigration of diverse people, resistance to encouraging
assimilation, racial strife, trying to turn white males into pariahs,
and the promotion of gender confusion. Through it all, society
is bombarded with the Orwellian mantra that "diversity is
strength," as if repeating it often enough can make it so. It
is also why patriotism and a common American culture are so disparaged
today. Those from the upper strata of society project the idea that
if you're a flag-waving American, you must be some kind of retrograde
mouth-breathing yokel.
The wealthy as a groups
are content to dissolve the glue that holds the U.S. together. And
it is all done to enhance and preserve their power, wealth, and
influence. This is why they so hate Donald
Trump. He strives to unite people and the country, although
you'd never know that that is what the president is doing if you
live in the media bubble. Trump's MAGA agenda is
an anathema to the managerial class.
To quote Reno one final
time:
The next decade will not
be easy. But it will not be about what preoccupied us in the
sixties, and which Caldwell describes so well. Rather than the
perils of discrimination we are increasingly concerned with the problem of
disintegration — or in Charles Murray's terms, the problem of "coming apart."
Trump and the GOP he is
molding are the vehicles to restore and strengthen national
solidarity. Trump said at the Daytona 500,
"No matter who wins, what matters most is God, family, and
country." That is not the Democrat agenda. As
seen in Democrat politicians, their policies, and the behavior of their major
contributors, the aim is to further weaken the social and national bonds in
America. There is a lot at stake here. If solidarity
wins, the Republic can survive and prosper. If the Democrats
and their wealthy cohorts do, then the middle class withers, the Republic
dies, and the rich and their managerial class get to rule the
roost. That is what it comes down to.
ALL BILLIONAIRES ARE DEMOCRATS. ALL BILLIONAIRES WANT WIDER OPEN
BORDERS, AMNESTY AND HELL NO TO E-VERIFY!
In addition, establishment Republicans are no better than
Democrats at stemming the flow of illegal immigration because big
businesses reap the benefits of this cheap labor without incurring any of the
social costs.
Democrats: The Party of Big Labor, Big
Government...and Big Business
There
is a widespread perception that the Democrat Party is the party the working
class and the Republican Party is the party of big business. Even
though Republicans on average received slightly more from corporate employees
prior to 2002, the overall difference between both parties from 1990 to 2020 is
statistically insignificant (Table 1). In fact, Democrat
reliance on big labor gradually shifted toward big business following the
involvement of solidly Democrat corporate giants in 2002, and from 2014 to
2020, Democrats consistently surpassed Republicans in corporate donations
(Tables 1 & 2).
Based
on data compiled by Open Secrets, Soros Fund Management, Fahr LLC (Tom Steyer),
and Bloomberg LP ranked among the top ten for political contributions that gave
over 90% to Democrats. In sharp contrast, the right-leaning Koch
Industries made the top ten only in 2014. In nearly all other years,
Koch ranked well below the top twenty.
Whether
or not this trend is long-term, there is no denying that large corporations on
average no longer lean right. But what does it mean to be "the
party of big business"? Donations are not definitive
evidence. What ultimately matters is what politicians do once they
get elected.
Many
liberals believe that big government is needed to "rein in" big
business and that in the absence of federal intervention, corporations will
"run roughshod" over the average American. Many liberals
also believe that corporations are the main beneficiaries of laissez-faire
economics and that free-market conservatives who want to scale back regulations
are somehow "in the pocket" of big business.
In
reality, the opposite is true: big business and big government
go
hand in hand because government meddling in the economy
for
the lobbyists. This crony capitalism grew exponentially as
during
the 1930s. Establishment politicians and well
connected corporations
are beneficiaries of the myth that big
government
and big business are adversaries because it hides
their
unholy alliance.
In
all fairness, neither party has had a monopoly on the dispensation of corporate
welfare: the TARP funds that propped up financial institutions deemed "too
big to fail" during the Great Recession were released by the Bush
administration. In addition, establishment Republicans are no better than
Democrats at stemming the flow of illegal immigration because big
businesses reap the benefits of this cheap labor
without incurring any of the social costs.
If
both parties are playing this game, what is the basis for labeling the Democrat
party "the party of big business"? What policies from
Republicans support small business?
Free-market
conservatism benefits small businesses because the government does not pick the
winners and losers by means of subsidies, tax breaks, and cumbersome
regulations. You will not see policies like these coming from
Washington in a major way because proposals for shrinking the federal
government rarely see the light of day in Congress.
Based
on data collected by Gallup and Thumbtack, red states far outscore blue states
in small business friendliness (Table 3). This may be why less
affluent Americans are fleeing states that score abysmally like California, Illinois, New York, and Hawaii. This might
also be why small business–owners are more likely to vote Republican.
The
Trump administration has been good for businesses of all sizes mainly due to
the unprecedented rate at which it scaled back stifling regulations. This may be
why some of the president's highest approval ratings now come from
small businesses.
Donald
Trump set himself apart from the ruling class when he latched onto the
third-rail issue of illegal immigration and called out the corporate darling Jeb Bush (AKA
"Low Energy Jeb") for his lack of grassroots support. This
may explain in part why Bain Capital, the firm co-founded by Mitt Romney,
switched teams and contributed solidly Democrat in 2018. In 2012,
Democrats accused Bain Capital of destroying jobs by systematically dismantling
the companies it bought off. Times have changed...
Small
businesses generate well over half of all new jobs. Most
importantly, many are family-owned, have strong ties to their communities, and
provide upward mobility for millions of Americans who never attended
college. The Democrats' undermining of this quintessentially
American institution is shameful and disqualifies it as the "party of the
working class." Contributions from big labor do not count
toward "labor-friendliness" because mega-unions care more about
recruitment than about the welfare of working Americans. This is why the SEIU
supports blanket amnesty for illegal aliens.
Democrats
fed up with the corporate status quo are now choosing their own
anti-establishment candidate, not realizing that socialism is just a more
impoverished version of the crony capitalism they are
rejecting. Many Sanders-supporters are also morally shallow because
they want to harness the power of the state to muscle in on the wealth of
Americans who borrowed responsibly and worked hard to pay their bills.
After
the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin said, "This Constitution ... is
likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in
despotism ... when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic
government." If Democrats implement the dystopian policies of California
on a national level, their corporate allies will do fine. It is
small business–owners and working-class Americans with nowhere to flee who have
the most to lose. Be careful what you wish for.
To view the tables below, click the links.
*The red lettering highlights a funding
advantage for Republicans. The blue lettering highlights a funding
disadvantage for Republicans.
**Based on a T-test, the difference is
insignificant at P = 0.46
Table 2: Top ten contributors to Democrats and Republicans by category
(union, corporate, and ideological) as compiled by Open Secrets:
*In 2008 Goldman Sachs donated 74% to
Democrats. All other groups in this column donated between 40 and
69% to both parties. This column does not differentiate between
giving equally to both parties and giving 70–79% to Democrats or Republicans.
**This number includes the "City of
New York." Although it is officially listed as
"other" by Open Secrets (not corporate, union, or ideological), I was
personally informed by someone from the organization that Michael Bloomberg was
the main source of this funding.
Table 3: Small business scores states scored by Thumbtack ranked
according to their Democratic advantage by Gallup:
*GPA scores are based on the following
numerical equivalents: A = 4, B = 3, C = 2, D = 1, F = 0, A+ = 4.3, A- = 3.7,
etc.
** Not scored.
***Mean GPA ± standard error. Based on a
T-test, the difference is significant at P = 0.00001.
Grim Reaper Mitch to Pelosi: I'm
Going to Kill Your Stimulus Plan
House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi just got some bad news from Mitch McConnell. Any talk
about another stimulus isn’t going to happen. She may draft a bill, but it’ll
meet a swift death in the Republican-controlled Senate. Mitch is the
legislative grim reaper for most of what the Democratic House sends his way
(via The Hill):
Senate Majority
Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) hit the brakes Tuesday on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s
(D-Calif.) plan to move ahead with a fourth stimulus package that would include
major infrastructure spending and other Democratic priorities.
“I think we need
to wait a few days here, a few weeks, and see how things are working out,”
McConnell said on “The Hugh Hewitt Show.”
“Let’s see how
things are going and respond accordingly,” he added. “I’m not going to allow
this to be an opportunity for the Democrats to achieve unrelated policy items
that they would not otherwise be able to pass.”
McConnell's remarks came the same day that President Trump
encouraged Congress to pass a $2 trillion infrastructure bill as the next piece
of coronavirus legislation.
Pelosi
is also mulling a rollback of the SALT taxes, which would be nothing short of a giveaway to
millionaires. And by the
giveaway, it would be something of a $620 billion tax cut for them. Remember,
this is the party of the working people, or so they say, and a part of me hopes
she goes aggressive on this, so we can see Bernie Sanders gum up the Democratic
works for a bit. There is no way a hardcore
lefty would back this nonsense. Yet, there’s another reason why Mitch isn’t
rushing on the House Democrats’ stimulus reloaded plans. They’re off. They
won’t be back to work until April 20. And The Hill added that Mitch hasn’t
forgotten about judges, adding that the Kentucky Republican’s motto is “leave
no vacancy behind.”
THE OBAMA –
BIDEN BANKSTERS CON JOB STARTED BEFORE HIS FIRST DAY IN OFFICE!
GET THIS
BOOK!
Obamanomics:
How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You and Enriching His Wall Street Friends,
Corporate Lobbyists, and Union Bosses
BY TIMOTHY P
CARNEY
Editorial
Reviews
Obama Is
Making You Poorer—But Who’s Getting Rich?
Goldman Sachs, GE, Pfizer, the United Auto Workers—the same
“special interests” Barack Obama was supposed to chase from the temple—are
profiting handsomely from Obama’s Big Government policies that crush taxpayers,
small businesses, and consumers. In Obamanomics, investigative reporter Timothy
P. Carney digs up the dirt the mainstream media ignores and the White House
wishes you wouldn’t see. Rather than Hope and Change, Obama is delivering
corporate socialism to America, all while claiming he’s battling corporate
America. It’s corporate welfare and regulatory robbery—it’s Obamanomics.
Congressman Ron Paul says, “Every libertarian and free-market
conservative needs to read Obamanomics.” And Johan Goldberg, columnist and
bestselling author says, “Obamanomics is conservative muckraking at its best
and an indispensable field guide to the Obama years.”
If you’ve wondered what’s happening to America, as the
federal government swallows up the financial sector, the auto industry, and
healthcare, and enacts deficit exploding “stimulus packages,” this book makes
it all clear—it’s a big scam. Ultimately, Obamanomics boils down to this: every
time government gets bigger, somebody’s getting rich, and those somebodies are
friends of Barack. This book names the names—and it will make your blood boil.
Investigative reporter Timothy P. Carney digs up the dirt the
mainstream media ignores and the White House wishes you wouldn’t see. Rather
than Hope and Change, Obama is delivering corporate socialism to America, all
while claiming he’s battling corporate America. It’s corporate welfare and
regulatory robbery—it’s Obamanomics. In this explosive book, Carney reveals:
* The Great
Health Care Scam—Obama’s backroom deals with drug companies spell corporate
profits and more government control
* The Global
Warming Hoax—Obama has bought off industries with a pork-filled bill that will
drain your wallet for Al Gore’s agenda
* Obama and
Wall Street—“Change” means more bailouts and a heavy Goldman Sachs presence in
the West Wing (including Rahm Emanuel)
*
Stimulating K Street—The largest spending bill in history gave pork to the
well-connected and created a feeding frenzy for lobbyists
* How the
GOP needs to change its tune—drastically—to battle Obamanomics
Praise
for Obamanomics
“The notion that ‘big business’ is on the side of the free
market is one of progressivism’s most valuable myths. It allows them to
demonize corporations by day and get in bed with them by night. Obamanomics is
conservative muckraking at its best. It reveals how President Obama is
exploiting the big business mythology to undermine the free market and stick it
to entrepreneurs, taxpayers, and consumers. It’s an indispensable field guide
to the Obama years.”
—Jonha Goldberg, LA Times columnist and best-selling author
“‘Every time government gets bigger, somebody’s getting
rich.’ With this astute observation, Tim Carney begins his task of laying bare
the Obama administration’s corporatist governing strategy, hidden behind the
president’s populist veneer. This meticulously researched book is a must-read
for anyone who wants to understand how Washington really works.”
—David Freddoso, best-selling author of The Case Against
Barack Obama
“Every libertarian and free-market conservative who still
believes that large corporations are trusted allies in the battle for economic
liberty needs to read this book, as does every well-meaning liberal who
believes that expansions of the welfare-regulatory state are done to benefit
the common people.”
—Congressman Ron Paul
“It’s understandable for critics to condemn President Obama
for his ‘socialism.’ But as Tim Carney shows, the real situation is at once
more subtle and more sinister. Obamanomics favors big business while
disproportionately punishing everyone else. So-called progressives are too
clueless to notice, as usual, which is why we have Tim Carney and this book.”
—Thomas E. Woods, Jr., best-selling author of Meltdown and
The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to American History
*
• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Regnery Press (November 30,
2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1596986123
• ISBN-13: 978-1596986121
Chuck
Schumer Pushes Tax Cut for Richest 1% in Coronavirus Relief Bill
16 Jul 202034
4:32
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is pushing for a
repeal of the state and local tax (SALT) deduction cap in the next round of coronavirus
relief — giving a tax cut to the wealthiest 1% of taxpayers, especially in
“blue” states.
In his landmark tax reform law, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of
2017, President Donald Trump and the Republicans offset some of the revenue
losses from low tax rates by restricting deductions. The law capped the SALT
deduction at $10,000.
Previously, those taxpayers wealthy
enough to file a list of itemized deductions could count all of the taxes they paid
to state and local governments toward a deduction in their federal tax
liability. That meant wealthy taxpayers in the most heavily taxed states —
primarily run by Democrats — benefited most. The SALT deduction also gave
Democrats political room to raise taxes higher, because it made rich taxpayers
less likely to resist: they could claim some of the money back.
Trump ended the deduction — at some political cost to himself.
Republicans went on to lose congressional seats in wealthy suburbs in high-tax
Democrat-run states. Orange County, California, for example, flipped entirely
to Democrats.
But Democrats still want to repeal the SALT cap, regardless,
because they want their state and local governments to avoid tax cut — and
because their wealthy campaign contributors want to be subsidized, once again,
by the rest of the country.
Even Seth Hanlon, a former Obama administration official who is
now a senior fellow at the left-wing Center for American Progress, has
protested against Schumer’s idea, noting that repealing the SALT cap would help
“the top 1%.”
Come on, not this again.
Repealing the SALT cap for 2020-21 would be a $137 billion tax
cut, with about 63% going to the top 1%.
It does nothing for states and
localities except potentially crowd out the actual fiscal relief they urgently
need. https://t.co/jlSjIhnzpq
A tiny percentage of middle-income people get any benefit.
The top 1% gets 63%: an avg. $35k tax cut for them.
The top 5% gets 87%.
Here is
the distribution just for New York. Largely the same story. A few more
middle-income people benefit a little compared to nationwide, but still, the
tax cut goes overwhelmingly to top one-percenters. Not the people most affected
by COVID!!! pic.twitter.com/Dp0evxq3P7
The basic
story is the same in every state. State by state estimates are here. https://t.co/1KREhnb6et
The Democrat-run House of Representatives has already passed a
repeal on the SALT cap that would be effective for two years.
According to The Hill,
“Schumer urged Senate
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) [on Tuesday] to ‘join the House, and
join the Democrats in the Senate, and get rid of that cap.'”
Schumer also vowed to make the SALT
deduction — the effective tax cut for the 1% — permanent: “If I become majority
leader, one of the first things I will do is we will eliminate it forever,” he
added, according to The Hill.
“It will be dead, gone and buried.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large
at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News
Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot
on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new
book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary
from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak
Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
David Shor’s Unified Theory of
American Politics
David Shor got famous
by getting fired. In late May, amid widespread protests over George Floyd’s
murder, the 28-year-old data scientist tweeted out a study that found
nonviolent demonstrations were more effective than “riots” at pushing public
opinion and voter behavior leftward in 1968. Many Twitter users — and (reportedly) some of Shor’s colleagues
and clients at the data firm Civis Analytics — found this post insensitive. A
day later, Shor publicly apologized for his tweet. Two weeks
after that, he’d lost his job as Civis’s head of political data science — and
become a byword for the excesses of so-called cancel culture. (Shor has not discussed his
firing publicly due to a nondisclosure agreement, and the details of his
termination remain undisclosed).
But before Shor’s
improbable transformation into a cause célèbre, he was among the most
influential data gurus in Democratic politics — a whiz kid who, at age 20,
served as the 2012 Obama campaign’s in-house Nate Silver, authoring the
forecasting model that the White House used to determine where the race really
stood.
And before that, he
was a college Marxist.
This idiosyncratic
combination of ideological background, employment experience, and expertise has
lent Shor a unique perspective on American politics. He is a self-avowed
socialist who insists that big-dollar donors pull the Democratic Party left. He is an adherent of Leninist vanguardism and the median voter theorem. And in the three
years I’ve known him, I don’t think I’ve found a single question about U.S.
politics that he could not answer with reference to at least three
peer-reviewed studies.
Shor is still
consulting in Democratic politics, but he is no longer working for a firm that
restricts his freedom to publicly opine. Intelligencer recently spoke with him
about how the Democratic Party really operates, why the coming decade could be
a great one for the American right, how protests shape public opinion, what the
left gets wrong about electoral politics, and whether Donald Trump will be
reelected, among other things.
What is it like to
have your name become shorthand for a culture war controversy?
I cannot comment on any of the stuff around all of that.
I cannot comment on any of the stuff around all of that.
All right. That line
of questioning is canceled.
Sorry!
Sorry!
I feel silenced, but
it’s okay. Let’s start here then: What are the biggest revisions you’ve made to
your conception of how electoral politics works since you first took a job on
the Obama campaign?
I think going into
politics, I overestimated the importance of the personal ideology of people who
worked in campaigns for making decisions — which was part of a broader
phenomenon of overestimating the extent to which people were making decisions.
In 2012, I would see progressive blogs* publish stories like, “The White House
is doing a Climate Week. This must be because they have polling showing that
climate is a vulnerability for Republicans.” And once you know the people who
are in that office, you realize that actually no; they were just at an awkward
office meeting and were like, “Oh man, what are we going to do this week? Well,
we could do climate.” There’s very little long-term, strategic planning
happening anywhere in the party because no one has an incentive to do it. So,
campaigns’ actions, while not random, are more random than I realized.
I’ve also fallen
toward a consultant theory of change — or like, a process theory of change. So
a lot of people on the left would say that the Hillary Clinton campaign largely
ignored economic issues, and doubled down on social issues, because of the
neoliberal ideology of the people who worked for her, and the fact that
campaigning on progressive economic policy would threaten the material
interests of her donors.
But that’s not what
happened. The actual mechanical reason was that the Clinton campaign hired
pollsters to test a bunch of different messages, and for boring mechanical
reasons, working-class people with low levels of social trust were much less
likely to answer those phone polls than college-educated professionals. And as
a result, all of this cosmopolitan, socially liberal messaging did really well
in their phone polls, even though it ultimately cost her a lot of votes. But
the problem was mechanical, and less about the vulgar Marxist interests of all
of the actors involved.
A tasteful Marxist
(or whatever the opposite of a “vulgar” one is) might counter that class biases
were implicated in that mechanical error — that cosmopolitan,
upper-middle-class pollsters and operatives’ eagerness to see their worldview
affirmed led them to ignore the possibility that their surveys suffered from a
systematic sampling error.
That’s exactly right.
Campaigns do want to win. But the people who work in campaigns tend to be
highly ideologically motivated and thus, super-prone to convincing themselves
to do things that are strategically dumb. Nothing that I tell people — or that
my team [at Civis] told people — is actually that smart. You know, we’d do all
this math, and some of it’s pretty cool, but at a high level, what we’re saying
is: “You should put your money in cheap media markets in close states close to
the election, and you should talk about popular issues, and not talk about
unpopular issues.” And we’d use machine learning to operationalize that at
scale.
The right strategies
for politics aren’t actually unclear. But a lot of people on the Clinton
campaign tricked themselves into the idea that they didn’t have to placate the
social views of racist white people.
What is the
definition of racist in this context?
Ah, right. People
yell at me on Twitter about this. So working-class white people have an
enormous amount of political power and they’re trending towards the Republican
Party. It would be really ideologically convenient if the reason they’re doing
that was because Democrats embraced neoliberalism. But it’s pretty clear that
that isn’t true.
I think that winning
back these voters is important. So if I was running for office, I would
definitely say that the reason these voters turned against us is because
Democrats failed to embrace economic populism. I think that’s sound political
messaging. But in terms of what actually drove it, the numbers are pretty
clear. It’s like theoretically possible to imagine a voter who voted for
Democrats their whole life and then voted for Trump out of frustration with
Obamacare or trade or whatever. And I’m sure that tons of those voters exist,
but they’re not representative.
When you take the
results of the 2012 and 2016 elections, and model changes in Democratic vote
share, you see the biggest individual-level predictor for vote switching was
education; college-educated people swung toward Democrats and
non-college-educated people swung toward Republicans. But, if you ask a battery
of “racial resentment” questions — stuff like, “Do you think that there are a
lot of white people who are having trouble finding a job because nonwhite
people are getting them instead?” or, “Do you think that white people don’t
have enough influence in how this country is run?” — and then control for the
propensity to answer those questions in a racially resentful way, education ceases
to be the relevant variable: Non-college-educated white people with low levels
of racial resentment trended towards us in 2016, and college-educated white
people with high levels of racial resentments turned against us.
You can say, “Oh, you
know, the way that political scientists measure racial resentment is a class
marker because college-educated people know that they’re not supposed to say
politically incorrect things.” But when you look at Trump’s support in the Republican
primary, it correlated pretty highly with, uh … racially charged … Google
search words. So you had this politician who campaigned on an anti-immigrant
and anti–political correctness platform. And then he won the votes of a large
group of swing voters, and vote switching was highly correlated with various
individual level measures of racial resentment — and, on a geographic level,
was correlated with racist search terms. At some point, you have to be like,
oh, actually, these people were motivated by racism. It’s just an important
fact of the world.
I think people take
the wrong conclusions from it. The fight I saw on Twitter after the 2016
election was one group of people saying the Obama-to-Trump voters are racist
and irredeemable, and that’s why we need to focus on the suburbs. And then you
had leftists saying, “Actually these working-class white people were betrayed
by decades of neoliberalism and we just need to embrace socialism and win them
back, we can’t trust people in the suburbs.” And I think the real synthesis of
these views is that Obama-to-Trump voters are motivated by racism. But they’re
really electorally important, and so we have to figure out some way to get them
to vote for us.
How should Democrats
do that?
So there’s a big
constellation of issues. The single biggest way that highly educated people who
follow politics closely are different from everyone else is that we have much
more ideological coherence in our views.
If you decided to
create a survey scorecard, where on every single issue — choice, guns, unions,
health care, etc. — you gave people one point for choosing the more liberal of
two policy options, and then had 1,000 Americans fill it out, you would find
that Democratic elected officials are to the left of 90 to 95 percent of
people.
And the reason is
that while voters may have more left-wing views than Joe Biden on a few issues,
they don’t have the same consistency across their views. There are like tons of
pro-life people who want higher taxes, etc. There’s a paper by the political scientist
David Broockman that made this point really famous — that “moderate” voters
don’t have moderate views, just ideologically inconsistent ones. Some people
responded to media coverage of that paper by saying, “Oh, people are just
answering these surveys randomly, issues don’t matter.” But that’s not actually
what the paper showed. In a separate section, they tested the relevance of
issues by presenting voters with hypothetical candidate matchups — here’s a
politician running on this position, and another politician running on the
opposite — and they found that issue congruence was actually very important for
predicting who people voted for.
So this suggests there’s
a big mass of voters who agree with us on some issues, and disagree with us on
others. And whenever we talk about a given issue, that increases the extent to
which voters will cast their ballots on the basis of that issue.
Mitt Romney and
Donald Trump agreed on basically every issue, as did Barack Obama and Hillary
Clinton. And yet, a bunch of people changed their votes. And the reason that
happened was because the salience of various issues changed. Both sides talked
a lot more about immigration, and because of that, correlation between
preferences on immigration and which candidate people voted for went up. In
2012, both sides talked about health care. In 2016, they didn’t. And so the
correlation between views on health care and which candidate people voted for
went down.
So this means that
every time you open your mouth, you have this complex optimization problem
where what you say gains you some voters and loses you other voters. But this
is actually cool because campaigns have a lot of control over what issues they
talk about.
Non-college-educated
whites, on average, have very conservative views on immigration, and generally
conservative racial attitudes. But they have center-left views on economics;
they support universal health care and minimum-wage increases. So I think
Democrats need to talk about the issues they are with us on, and try really
hard not to talk about the issues where we disagree. Which, in practice, means
not talking about immigration.
It sounds like you’re
saying that public opinion is a fixed entity, which campaigns have little power
to reshape. I think many progressives dispute that notion. In their view, the
“social views of racist white people” aren’t a given. Right-wing media has fed
the public a story that pits their interests against those of immigrants. But if Democrats offer a counter-narrative about how corporate
interests use ethnic divisions to divide and conquer working people, maybe they
can change what is and is not “popular.” Why is that view wrong?
It’s worth being
precise about mechanisms. It’s true that political parties have enormous
control over the views of their partisans. There’s like 20 percent of the
electorate that trusts Democratic elites tremendously. And they will turn their
views on a dime if the party tells them to. So this is how you can get Abolish
ICE to go from a 10 percent issue to a 30 percent issue. If you’re an
ideological activist, that’s a powerful force. If you convince strong partisans
to adopt your view, then when the party comes to power, strong partisans will
ultimately make up that administration and then you can make policy progress.
The problem is that
swing voters don’t trust either party. So if you get Democrats to embrace
Abolish ICE, that won’t get moderate-ish,
racist white people to support it; it will just turn them into Republicans. So
that’s the trade-off. When you embrace unpopular things, you become more
unpopular with marginal voters, but also get a fairly large segment of the
public to change its views. And the latter can sometimes produce long-term
change.
But it’s a hard
trade-off. And I don’t think anyone ever says something like, “I think it was a
good trade for us to lose the presidency because we raised the salience of this
issue.” That’s not generally what people want. They don’t want to make an
unpopular issue go from 7 percent to 30 percent support. They want something
like what happened with gay marriage or marijuana legalization, where you take
an issue that is 30 percent and then it goes to 70 percent. And if you look at
the history of those things, it’s kind of clear that campaigns didn’t do that.
If you look at
long-term trends in support for gay marriage, it began linearly increasing,
year over year, starting in the late 1980s. But then, right when the issue increased
in salience during the 2004 campaign, it suddenly became partisan, and support
declined. After it stopped being a campaign issue, support returned to trend.
Graphic: Gallup
Campaigns just can’t
effect those kinds of long-term changes. They can direct information to
partisans who trust them, and they can curry favor with marginal voters by
signaling agreement with them on issues. But there isn’t much space for
changing marginal voters’ minds.
How do you square
this analysis with the events of the past few weeks, in which the salience of
racially discriminatory policing increased in tandem with Joe Biden’s lead over
Donald Trump? Obviously there are a lot of other variables. But we have
seen a surge in support for the Black Lives Matter movement and police reform. We’ve
seen Biden boasting a bigger advantage over Trump on the question of which candidate can best
handle race relations — and all while progressive activists have been
associating the left with the exceptionally unpopular
concept of defunding the police.
Yeah. I’m not going
to pretend that I would have predicted that this is how it was going to shake
out. But I do think it’s actually consistent with what we’ve been discussing.
One way to think
about electoral salience and the effects of raising the salience of given
issues, is to look at which party voters trust on a given issue, not just what
their stated policy preference is. So if you do a poll on universal background
checks for guns, you’ll find that they’re super-popular. But then, politicians
who run on background checks often lose. In the same way, if you poll
comprehensive immigration reform, it’s super-popular, even among Republicans.
But then Republicans can run on anti-immigrant platforms and win. So how do you
square that circle?
One way is to
remember that these polls give us a very limited informational environment. You
just throw people a sentence-length idea, which they’ve often never heard of before,
and then people react to it. So it tells you how people will respond to a
policy at first brush without any partisan context. But ultimately, when people
hear from both sides, they’re gonna revert to some kind of partisan baseline.
But there’s not a nihilism there; it’s not just that Democratic-leaning voters
will adopt the Democratic position or Republican-leaning ones will
automatically adopt the Republican one. Persuadable voters trust the parties on
different issues.
And there’s a pretty
basic pattern — both here and in other countries — in which voters view
center-left parties as empathetic. Center-left parties care about the
environment, lowering poverty, improving race relations. And then, you know,
center-right parties are seen as more “serious,” or more like the stern dad
figure or something. They do better on getting the economy going or lowering
unemployment or taxes or crime or immigration.
If you look at how
this breaks down in the U.S. — Gallup did something on this in 2017, and I’m sure the numbers haven’t changed that much since
then — you see that same basic story. But there’s an interesting twist. One
thing that Democrats consistently get rated highly on is improving race
relations. And this points to the complexities of racial resentment. The way
that racially charged issues generally get brought up in the U.S. is in the
context of crime, which is a very Republican-loaded issue (in terms of which
party the median voter trusts on it). Or it comes up in terms of immigration,
which is itself a Republican-loaded issue. So even if voters acknowledge the
massive systemic inequities that exist in the U.S., discussion of them normally
happens in a context where conservatives can posit a trade-off with safety, or
all these other things people trust Republicans on.
What’s powerful about
nonviolent protest — and particularly nonviolent protest that incurs a
disproportionate response from the police — is that it can shift the
conversation, in a really visceral way, into the part of this issue space that
benefits Democrats and the center left. Which is the pursuit of equality,
social justice, fairness — these Democratic-loaded concepts — without the trade-off
of crime or public safety. So I think it is really consistent with a pretty
broad, cross-sectional body of evidence (a piece of which I obviously tweeted at some point) that nonviolent protest is politically advantageous, both in
terms of changing public opinion on discrete issues and electing parties
sympathetic to the left’s concerns.
As for “the abolish
the police” stuff, I think the important thing there is that basically no mainstream
elected officials embraced it. Most persuadable voters get their news from the
networks’ nightly news broadcasts and CNN. And if you look at how they
covered things, the “abolish the police” concept didn’t get nearly as
much play as it did on Twitter and elite discourse. And to the extent that it
was covered, that coverage featured prominent left politicians loudly
denouncing it. And I think that’s a success story for everyone involved.
Activists were able to dramatically shift the terms of debate around not just
racial justice issues, but police justice in a way that’s basically the
Second Great Awokening. But because
Democratic politicians kept chasing the median voter, we got to have our cake
and eat it too. We got to have public opinion shift in our direction on the
issues without paying an electoral price.
To play
insurrectionist’s advocate: The protests weren’t entirely nonviolent. And one
could argue that, had there not been rioting in Minneapolis, there would have
been less media attention and thus, fewer nonviolent protests. So how do we
know that the nonviolent protests were the source of the movement’s political
efficacy? And why didn’t the violence at the fringes of those protests activate
the public’s concerns about crime?
I want to caution
against turning this into physics. There’s only so much we can understand
about the dynamics of these events. But if you wanted to be purely utilitarian,
and set aside the morality concerns, I think you can tell a story about how the
initial wave of violence triggered media coverage, or got the police or
security forces really primed to use violence against nonviolent protesters,
and without that happening, it wouldn’t have exploded as much as it did. It’s
hard to know. I can’t really evaluate that counterfactual.
But there’s always a
mix of violent and nonviolent protest; or, there’s always some violence that
occurs at nonviolent protests. And it’s not a situation where a drop of
violence spoils everything and turns everybody into fascists. The research
isn’t consistent with that. It’s more about the proportions. Because the
mechanism here is that when violence is happening, people become afraid. They
fear for their safety, and then they crave order. And order is a winning issue
for conservatives here and everywhere around the world. The basic political
argument since the French Revolution has been the left saying, “Let’s make
things more fair,” and the right saying, “If we do that, it will lead to chaos
and threaten your family.”
But when you have
nonviolent protests that goad security forces into using excessive force
against unarmed people — preferably while people are watching — then order gets
discredited, and people experience this visceral sense of unfairness. And you
can change public opinion. And if you look at the [George Floyd] protests,
there was some violence in the first two or three days. But then that largely
subsided, and was followed by very high-profile incidents of the state using
violence against innocent people.
And, you know, the
real inflection point in our polling was the Lafayette Park incident, when Trump used tear gas on innocent people. That’s when support
for Biden shot up and it’s been pretty steady since then.
In describing the
Democrats’ troubles with non-college-educated white voters earlier, you put a
lot of emphasis on discrete decisions that the Hillary Clinton campaign made.
But, in my understanding, the 2016 election just accelerated a preexisting
trend: In both the United States and Western Europe, non-college-educated
voters have been drifting right for decades. Doesn’t
that suggest that something larger than any given campaign’s messaging choices
is at work here?
That’s a great point.
I used to spend a lot of time trying to figure out, you know, “Where did things
go wrong?” You see Matt Stoller and Ryan Grim do this, where you try to
pinpoint the moment in time when Democratic elites decided to turn their backs
on the working class and embrace neoliberalism. Maybe it was the Watergate
babies. Maybe it was the failure to repeal Taft-Hartley. Maybe it was Bill
Clinton in 1992.
But then you read
about other countries and you see that the same story is happening everywhere.
It happened in England with Tony Blair. It happened in Germany with Gerhard
Schröder. The thing that really got me was reading about the history of PASOK,
the Social Democratic Party in Greece. And you’re reading about an election in
the 1990s where it’s like, “the right-wing New Democracy party made gains with
working-class voters,” and you realize there are broader forces at work here.
So why is this
happening? The story that makes the most sense to me goes like this: In the
postwar era, college-educated professionals were maybe 4 percent of the
electorate. Which meant that basically no voters had remotely cosmopolitan
values. But the flip side of this is that this educated 4 percent still ran the
world. Both parties at this point were run by this highly educated,
cosmopolitan minority that held a bunch of values that undergirded the postwar
consensus, around democracy and rule of law, and all these things.
Obviously, these
people were more right wing on a bunch of social issues than their contemporary
counterparts, but during that era, both parties were run by just about the most
cosmopolitan segments of society. And there were also really strong
gatekeepers. This small group of highly educated people not only controlled the
commanding heights of both the left and the right, but also controlled the
media. There were only a small number of TV stations — in other countries,
those stations were even run by the government. And both sides knew it wasn’t
electorally advantageous to campaign on cosmopolitan values.
So, as a result,
campaigns centered around this cosmopolitan elite’s internal disagreements over
economic issues. But over the past 60 years, college graduates have gone from
being 4 percent of the electorate to being more like 35. Now, it’s actually
possible — for the first time ever in human history — for political parties to
openly embrace cosmopolitan values and win elections; certainly primary and
municipal elections, maybe even national elections if you don’t push things too
far or if you have a recession at your back. And so Democratic elites started
campaigning on the things they’d always wanted to, but which had previously
been too toxic. And so did center-left parties internationally.
What is your
understanding of why there’s such a profound divide between college-educated
and non-college-educated people on these so-called cosmopolitan issues?
Education is highly
correlated with openness to new experiences; basically, there’s this divide
where some people react positively to novel things and others react less
positively. And there’s evidence that this relationship is causal. In Europe,
when countries raised their mandatory schooling age from 16 to 18, the first
generation of students who remained in school longer had substantially more
liberal views on immigration than their immediate predecessors. And then,
college-educated people are also more willing to try strange foods or travel
broad. So it really seems like education makes people more open to new
experiences.
But politically, this
manifests on immigration. And it’s ironclad. You can look at polling from the
1940s on whether America should take in Jewish refugees, and college-educated
people wanted to and non-college-educated people didn’t. It’s true
cross-nationally — like, working-class South Africans oppose taking in refugees
from Zimbabwe, while college-educated South Africans support taking them in.
Other research has
shown that messaging centered around the potential for cooperation and
positive-sum change really appeals to educated people, while messaging that
emphasizes zero-sum conflict resonates much more with non-college-educated
people. Arguably, this is because college-educated professionals live really
blessed lives filled with mutually beneficial exchange, while negative-sum
conflicts play a very big part of working-class people’s lives, in ways that
richer people are sheltered from. But it manifests in a lot of ways and leads
to divergent political attitudes.
We’ve been talking a
lot about the education split among white voters. But the polling results you
just referenced from South Africa suggest that education-based splits on
cosmopolitanism manifest across racial and ethnic lines. Are Democrats losing
ground with nonwhite, non-college-educated voters?
Yeah. Black voters
trended Republican in 2016. Hispanic voters also trended right in battleground
states. In 2018, I think it’s absolutely clear that, relative to the rest of
the country, nonwhite voters trended Republican. In Florida, Democratic senator
Bill Nelson did 2 or 3 points better than Clinton among white voters but lost
because he did considerably worse than her among Black and Hispanic voters.
We’re seeing this in 2020 polling, too. I think there’s a lot of denial about
this fact.
I don’t think there
are obvious answers as to why this is happening. But non-college-educated white
voters and non-college-educated nonwhite voters have a lot in common with each
other culturally. So as the salience of cultural issues with strong
education-based splits increases — whether it’s gender politics or
authoritarianism or immigration — it would make sense that we’d see some
convergence between non-college-educated voters across racial lines.
American politics
used to be very idiosyncratic, because we have this historical legacy of
slavery and Jim Crow and all of these things that don’t have clear foreign
analogues. But the world is slowly changing — not changing in ways that make
racism go away or not matter — but in ways that erode some of the underpinnings
of race-based voting. So if you look at Black voters trending against us, it’s
not uniform. It’s specifically young, secular Black voters who are voting more
Republican than their demographic used to. And the ostensible reason for this
is the weakening of the Black church, which had, for historical reasons,
occupied a really central place in Black society and helped anchor
African-Americans in the Democratic Party. Among Black voters, one of the
biggest predictors for voting Republican is not attending church. So I think
you can tell this story about how the America-centric aspects of our politics
are starting to decay, and we’re converging on the dynamics that you see in
Europe, where nonwhite voters are more left wing than white voters, but where
they vote for the left by like 65 to 35 percent, rather than the 90-10 split
you see with African-Americans.
To be clear, if that
happens, it would take a long time. But if I had to guess, I’d say young
African-Americans might trend 4 or 5 percent against us in relative terms. But
they’re a small percent of the Black electorate. These are slow-moving trends.
Are all of the trends
you’ve studied unfavorable for Democrats? If the party is losing young
African-Americans and non-college-educated whites, is it making compensatory
gains? What is the outlook for the party over the coming decade?
I’ll start with the
good news. The fear I had after 2016 was that Romney-Clinton voters were going
to snap back to being Republicans, but Obama-Trump voters wouldn’t snap back to
being Democrats. And that hasn’t happened — we’ve retained Clinton’s gains. We
see this in 2020 polling. We saw it in 2018, with Democrats making big gains
with these voters in the Senate, House, and state-level elections.
And those don’t just
reflect discrepancies in which college-educated professionals decided to
turnout for a midterm?
Some of it was. But
roughly 75 percent was people changing their minds. So college-educated
professionals have basically become Democrats. These voters aren’t optimal for
winning the Electoral College. But they have other assets as a demographic.
There’s this sense in
left-wing politics that rich people have disproportionate political influence
and power. Well, we’ve never had an industrialized society where the richest
and most powerful people were as liberal as they are now in the U.S. You know, controlling
for education, very rich people still lean Republican. But we’re at a point now
where, if you look at Stanford Law School, the ratio of students in the college
Democrats to students in the college Republicans is something like 20-to-1.
Harvard students have always been Democratic-leaning, but only like three or
four percent of them voted for Donald Trump. So there is now this host of
incredibly powerful institutions — whether it’s corporate boardrooms or
professional organizations — which are now substantially more liberal than
they’ve ever been.
And this is
reflected not just in how they vote but in their ideological preferences. If
you look at small donors — which, to be clear, are still mostly rich people —
Democrats got around 54 percent of small donors in 2012. In 2018, we got 76
percent. People like to chalk that up to ActBlue or technology or whatever. But
2018 was also the first year where super-PACs, as a spending group, gave more
to Democrats than Republicans.
So these
constituencies that previously did a lot to uphold conservative power are now
liberal. I don’t know what all of the consequences of that are. But Democrats
are now better funded than they were. And the media is nicer to us. There’s a
lot of downstream consequences.
Many on the
left are wary of the Democratic Party’s growing dependence on wealthy voters
and donors. But you’ve argued that the party’s donor class actually pulls it to the
left, as big-dollar Democratic
donors are more progressive — even on economic issues — than the median
Democratic voter. I’m skeptical of that claim. After all, so much regulation
and legislation never crosses ordinary Americans’ radar. It seems implausible
to me that, during negotiations over the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Obama
administration fought to export
America’s generous patent protections on pharmaceuticals to the developing world, or to expand the
reach of the Investor State Dispute
Settlement process, because they felt
compelled to placate swing voters. Similarly, it’s hard for me to believe that the primary reason
why Democrats did not significantly expand collective-bargaining rights under
Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama was voter hostility to labor-law
reform rather than the unified opposition of business interests to such a
policy. So why couldn’t it be the case that,
when it comes to policy, a minority of big-dollar donors who are highly
motivated — and reactionary — on discrete issues pull the party to the right,
even as wealthier Democrats give more ideologically consistent responses to
survey questions?
It depends on what
level of government you’re talking about. When you’re talking about state
legislatures, that’s all really low-salience stuff. And the reality is that
state parties have to do some ethically questionable things to keep the lights
on because small-dollar donors generally don’t donate to their campaigns. So in
state and local politics, corporate money is absolutely a big driver.
But the rise of small-dollar
donors has really changed federal politics. And again — to be clear —
“small-dollar” donors are mostly affluent people. Most of these donors are
giving hundreds of dollars. But the thing people don’t realize is, at this
point, that’s most of the money. Most of the money in Democratic politics now
comes from ideologically motivated small donors and very liberal millionaires
and billionaires like George Soros. There’s corporate money, but it’s not the
biggest pool anymore. This produces some counterintuitive dynamics where, like
in West Virginia, there aren’t a lot of affluent liberals, and so there isn’t a
lot of small-dollar donations, and so Joe Manchin is a little bit more beholden
to corporations.
It’s true that, if
you are a representative in a swing district, you have a strong incentive to
raise lots of money. But I think those incentives mostly pull candidates left,
for the simple reason that the way that you get a lot of small-dollar donations
is to stand up and yell at Trump — or do whatever makes very liberal dentists
and doctors excited. Obviously, that doesn’t mean calling for socialism. But
these liberal professionals do tend to be pretty economically left wing.
David Broockman
showed in a recent paper — and I’ve seen
this in internal data — that people who give money to Democrats are more
economically left wing than Democrats overall. And the more money people give,
the more economically left wing they are. These are obviously the
non-transactional donors. But people underestimate the extent to which the
non-transactional money is now all of the money. This wasn’t true ten years
ago.
So then you get to
the question: Why do so many moderate Democrats vote for center-right policies
that don’t even poll well? Why did Heidi Heitkamp vote to deregulate banks in 2018, when the median
voter in North Dakota doesn’t want looser regulations on banks? But the thing
is, while that median voter doesn’t want to deregulate banks, that voter
doesn’t want a senator who is bad for business in North Dakota. And so if the
North Dakota business community signals that it doesn’t like Heidi Heitkamp,
that’s really bad for Heidi Heitkamp, because business has a lot of cultural
power.
I think that’s a very
straightforward, almost Marxist view of power: Rich people have
disproportionate cultural influence. So business does pull the party right. But
it does so more through the mechanism of using its cultural power to influence
public opinion, not through donations to campaigns.
So, in your view, the
reason that Democrats aren’t more left wing on economic issues isn’t because
they’re bought off, but because the median voter is “bought off,” in the sense
of responding to cues from corporate interests?
Yeah. One thing I’ve
learned from working in Democratic politics for eight years is that the idea
that the limiting factor on what moves policy to the left in this country is
the personal decisions of individual Democrats is kind of crazy. Democratic
politicians, relative to the country, are very left wing. But campaigns really
want to win.
In my career, I have
seen circumstances where polling has said to do one thing, and then we didn’t
do it for ideological reasons. But every single one of those times, we ignored
the polling from the left. Like, if Joe Biden wanted to just follow the polls,
he should support the Hyde Amendment (which prohibits federal funding for
abortion services). The Hyde Amendment polls extremely well. But the people who
work on his campaign oppose the Hyde Amendment. So Joe Biden opposes the Hyde
Amendment.
Like, if you look at
the Obama administration, the first time they resorted to procedural radicalism
was to make recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board. They didn’t do that to win votes; a lot of labor’s agenda —
repealing right-to-work laws, establishing sectoral bargaining — is unpopular.
But Democrats do pro-labor policies because the people who work on Democratic
campaigns, and who run for office as Democrats, are generally very liberal
people. Leftists just don’t understand how small of a minority we are.
One personal
anecdote: Shortly after Civis did a poll showing that a federal job guarantee
is actually a very popular idea, one of my colleagues took a call from a big
Democratic super-PAC. And they said, “You know, we saw the job guarantee
polling from Civis” — and my colleague was about to throw me under the bus (you
know, “Oh, it was just those crazy socialists in Chicago”) — but the super-PAC
just thought it was cool. And then there was a long discussion about how to
incorporate public job creation into messaging.
So I think people
underestimate Democrats’ openness to left-wing policies that won’t cost them
elections. And there are a lot of radical, left-wing policies that are
genuinely very popular. Codetermination is popular. A job guarantee is popular. Large
minimum-wage increases are popular and could literally end market poverty.
All these things will
engender opposition from capital. But if you focus on the popular things, and
manage to build positive earned media around those things, then you can
convince Democrats to do them. So we should be asking ourselves, “What is the
maximally radical thing that can get past Joe Manchin.” And that’s like a
really depressing optimization problem. And it’s one that most leftists don’t
even want to approach, but they should. There’s a wide spectrum of
possibilities for what could happen the next time Democrats take power, and if
we don’t come in with clear thinking and realistic demands, we could end up
getting rolled.
Do you think the
coronavirus crisis has expanded the realm of realistic demands?
I think a really
underrated political consequence of coronavirus has been a large increase in
Democrats’ odds of taking the Senate. A year ago, I thought it was possible but
a long shot. Now, it’s something that has a very reasonable chance of
happening.
And I think that’s
partly because a lot of Senate Republicans have put themselves in the position
of opposing very popular things. The coronavirus has really increased the
salience of health care, which is a Democratic-loaded issue. But it’s also made
opposing things like paid leave incredibly toxic. And we’ve seen Republican
incumbents do that again and again. I think Republican Senate incumbents are
being blamed for a lot of what’s happening in ways that aren’t fully
appreciated by the media. So that’s the most direct way that coronavirus is
expanding the realm of the possible.
Sorry, so you were
saying about positive trends for Democrats?
Yeah. So the other
positive thing is that age polarization has also gone up. It’s not just that
every new generation is more Democratic. Something much weirder has happened.
People who were 18 years old in 2012 have swung about 12 points toward
Democrats, while people who were 65 years old in that year have since swung
like eight points toward Republicans. Right now, that’s a bad trade. Old people
vote more than young people. But the age gap has gotten so large that
cycle-to-cycle demographic changes are actually worth something now. On the
Obama campaign in 2012, I calculated that demographic change between 2008 and
2012 — holding everything else constant — would gain Democrats like 0.3 points.
Now, I think that number is probably two-to-three times higher. Young white
people are now very liberal. And that’s going to be important.
The bad news is, over
the next ten years, our institutions’ structural biases against Democrats are
going to become very large. People say this a lot, but I don’t think they truly
appreciate how bad things are. The Electoral College bias is now such that
realistically we have to win by 3.5 to 4 percent in order to win presidential
elections. Trump is historically unpopular, so this year we can maybe pull that
off. But for the past 30 years or so, most presidential elections have been
pretty close. So the fact that we need to win by four points is going to
decrease the amount of time we hold the presidency. People like to say things
like, “Oh, but the Sun Belt will trend towards us” — I think if you actually go
and simulate things, barring some large realignment, the Electoral College bias
is probably going to hold steady over the next decade.
So you don’t think
Texas could become a 51 percent Democratic state by 2030?
If education-based
polarization reaches a point where Texas becomes the tipping-point state, then
that means that Michigan and Minnesota and Maine and Wisconsin are all gone.
Right now, we’re in a place where there are a bunch of working-class states
that are two points more Republican than the country. And that sucks, but we
can live with it. If those states become five points more Republican than the
country, then it becomes harder. I’m not saying it will be like this forever.
But for the next two cycles, the baseline case is fairly bad.
The Senate is even
worse. And much worse than people realize. The Senate has always been, on
paper, biased against Democrats. It overrepresents states that are rural and
white, and mechanically, that gives a structural advantage to Republicans. For
50 years or so, the tipping-point state in the Senate has been about one
percentage point more Republican than the country as a whole. And that
advantage did go up in 2016, because white rural voters trended against us (it
went up to 3 percent). But the problem isn’t just about that increase in the
long-term structural bias. If it were, I wouldn’t be so despondent about the
future. The real problem is that the Senate’s bias used to not matter much,
because the correlation between how people voted for president and how they
voted for Senate used to be much lower. As recently as 2006, if you looked
among Democratic incumbents, there was literally zero correlation between how
states voted on the Senate level and how they voted on the presidential level.
That year, Ben Nelson in Nebraska actually did better than Bob Menendez in New
Jersey. So 14 years ago, the correlation was roughly zero. And now, it’s
roughly 90 percent.
That’s the core of
the problem. There used to be a lot of randomness down ballot, and there also
used to be very strong incumbency advantages. In 2004, being an incumbent was
worth about 11 points of vote share. Now it’s about three points. And with an
incumbency advantage that low — and correlation with presidential vote that
high — it’s just not possible for Democrats to win in all these states that
used to be the backbone of our Senate majorities. We won an open race in North
Dakota in 2012. It’s true that the bias is getting higher, and that that’s made
things worse. But 90 percent of the story is that ticket-splitting used to be
common and now it’s rare. And that’s not a Trump thing. Ticket-splitting was
declining in the Bush era, and accelerated under Obama. And that trend line
probably isn’t going to change.
Why not?
The reason people
aren’t splitting their tickets anymore is probably because the internet exists
now and people are better informed than they used to be. There was this
broadband rollout study where they looked at the fact that different places got
broadband at different times. And what they saw was that when broadband reached
a given congressional district, ticket-splitting
declined and ideological polarization went up.
Right now — because
we already have a lot of these incumbents in red states, and because we were
lucky enough to have a big wave when many of them were on the ballot in 2018 —
we have a decent chance of winning the Senate in 2020. But if you just project
out the trends — if you fit a regression on 2018 polling and apply it forward —
if we have a neutral national environment in 2024 (i.e., a 2016-style
environment), we’re going to be down to 43 Senate seats. It’s really quite
bleak. The Senate was always a really fucked-up anti-majoritarian institution.
But it was okay because people in Nebraska used to vote randomly. But now they
have the internet, and they know that Democrats are liberal.
So what should
Democrats do? Abolish the internet? Or add states?
Everything we can.
Obviously, D.C. and Puerto Rican statehood are great. But we should really
strongly consider adding more than two states. I’ve been trying to push the
U.S. Virgin Islands, for example — home to largely nonwhite, marginalized
people who don’t have representation. We’ve actually done polling on this. And
even with pro and con arguments provided, it polls really well. People
have really weird, incoherent views on representation. When you tell people,
“There are 50,000 people in American Samoa and they don’t have a senator to
stand up for their interests. Do you think they should get a senator?” — even
when you tell them that Republicans say this proposal is an absurd Democratic
power grab — still a very large minority of Trump supporters say yes. In our polls,
majorities are onboard with adding three or four or five states. People think
it’s fair. One fun thing is, Virgin Islands statehood actually polls much
better than D.C. statehood. D.C. statehood is actually the least popular of any
of the statehood proposals we’ve polled.
What probability
would you assign to Donald Trump winning reelection?
I think one big
lesson of 2018 was that Trump’s coalition held up. Obviously, we did better as
the party out of power. But if you look at how we did in places like Maine or
Wisconsin or Michigan, it looked more like 2016 than 2012. Donald Trump still
has a giant structural advantage in the Electoral College.
So, in 2016, we got
51.1 percent of the two-party vote share (of the share of votes that went to Democrats
and Republicans). And if we had gotten 51.6 percent of that, we would have had
about a 50 percent chance of winning an Electoral College majority. We probably
needed to get to 52 percent in order to have a high chance of winning the
presidency. For most of the last six months, in public polls, Biden was at 52
or so. Now, we’re at like 54.
So, the question is
just: Are things going to go down?
I’m not gonna
speculate about whether the coronavirus will get better or whether it will get
worse. I think you can tell plausible stories in either direction. But if you
go back and look at polling this far out, and then do a regression where you
predict Election Day as a function of polling, generally, when candidates are
this far ahead, things tend to revert toward a mean. And unfortunately, in this
case, the historical mean we’re regressing to isn’t 50 percent; incumbents have
historically averaged 51 percent of the vote. So things are likely to tighten.
And, of course, polling was wrong in 2016. And actually, on a state level, the
polling was wrong by a similar margin in places like West Virginia or Ohio or
Michigan or Montana in 2018. So after we get through the conventions, and
partisans activate on both sides, there’s a substantial chance that we’ll find ourselves
in a close election. And everybody should treat it that way.
Personally, I
remember that in 2016, around September, we gave Hillary an 85 percent chance
of winning. And this led to situations where you had Democratic organizations,
our clients at Civis, wanting to take money out of Pennsylvania and put it in
other places. I think one person literally asked me, “What if we try to
maximize 370 electoral votes instead of 270.” I think there’s going to be a
real instinct for us to take the election for granted, and start to do dumb,
hubristic things like spending millions of dollars on our victory stage, which
is something that Hillary Clinton did.
So we should all have
the discipline to continue investing in tipping-point states and appealing to
the median voter. Because this is an incredibly important year. This is our
last chance to win a trifecta for a very long time. And if we don’t win the
presidency, things could get very dark. So everything we do matters a lot.
*In an earlier
version of this interview, Shor attributed a blog post about “climate week” to
Daily Kos Elections (DKE). He was referencing something he remembered reading
eight years ago extemporaneously, and misidentified the outlet that published
the (alleged) blog. DKE published no such post.
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