Nearly six in 10 Americans say that the U.S. representative in their congressional district deserves to be reelected, the highest level of such sentiment recorded by Gallup since 2012. While only 35% similarly say that most members of Congress deserve reelection (as opposed to their own member), that's also a higher percentage than at any time since 2012.
What bodes so well for Democrats, obviously, is that they currently hold a commanding majority in the House. So when 59% of Americans are happy with the status quo, it redounds to Democrats’ advantage. As Gallup writes, “Democrats have a solid majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the elevated 59% of Americans saying their member of Congress deserves reelection augurs well for their bid to maintain their majority next year.”
In her first public comments since the impeachment hearings, retired Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch told students at Georgetown University Wednesday that her former employer is currently in a shambles. “Right now, the State Department is in trouble,” she said in an acceptance speech for the Trainor Award, celebrating her decades-long work as a U.S. diplomat. “Senior leaders lack policy vision, moral clarity and leadership.”
Yovanovitch suggested the department's current emphasis on sizing up monetary contributions country by country is both shortsighted and counterproductive to the nation's long-term foreign policy goals. “It’s not about a handout for foreign friends; it’s about enlightened self-interest,” she explained. “For example, it’s hard to see how cutting funds to the World Health Organization in the middle of the coronavirus crisis keeps Americans safer.” Unfortunately, this is the type of concept that requires an explanation under the Trump-era leadership of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Yovanovitch also said some of the current shortcomings were an outgrowth of the "hollowing out" of the department internally, in terms of expertise, institutional knowledge, and personnel. "The policy process has been replaced by the decisions emanating from the top with little discussion," Yovanovitch observed. "Vacancies at all levels go unfilled and officers are increasingly wondering whether it is safe to express concerns about policy, even behind closed doors."
The veteran diplomat also warned that America's current trajectory could leave us isolated as our allies find "more reliable partners.”
“To be blunt: An amoral, keep-'em-guessing foreign policy that substitutes threats, fear and confusion for trust cannot work over the long haul, especially in our social media-savvy, interconnected world," Yovanovitch said. "At some point, the once-unthinkable will become the soon-inevitable: that our allies, who have as much right to act in their own self-interest as we do, will seek out more reliable partners, partners whose interests might not align well with ours."
As dire as her prognosis was, she still chooses to be positive about the future of U.S. diplomacy. "Some people say I'm too optimistic, and that may be, but throwing up our hands is a self-fulfilling prophecy," she said. "In these trying times, optimism is no longer a default setting for many of us—it's a choice."
What a testament to Yovanovitch’s strength of character after what Donald Trump and his henchmen put her through. Brava!
Political journalists simply don't make donations to politicians. It's a cardinal rule that insulates reporters from being tagged as provably biased toward one candidate or another. I've abided by that rule for the better part of two decades with one exception, when a close buddy of mine was running for Congress in Western Michigan where I grew up. But this week I broke that rule when I made a modest donation to Elizabeth Warren. I had wrestled with the impulse to donate to her campaign for over a month. As a reporter-turned-blogger, I no longer make any claim to so-called objectivity, though I still prize fairness, transparency, and intellectual honesty as hallmarks of my own work. I don't write things I don't believe in, and I refuse to be a blind follower of any particular person or group. So to some extent, this post is a public confession of sorts. And despite donating to Warren, I reserve the right to disagree with her and/or take her to task if the moment calls for it.
But what this political moment calls for right now is that every American who wants to save this country from its slide toward authoritarianism step up and do everything humanly possible to combat that descent. For different people that means different things. For me, it means going public about why I think Warren is not only the best candidate to take on Donald Trump but also has a path toward the nomination in a muddled field where no single candidate has proven they can consolidate the base, unite the party, and steamroll Trump in the general election. And just to be clear, I think that both uniting the party, first and foremost, while also appealing to disaffected voters from the white working class and more affluent suburbs is a must to defeating Trump in November.
To me, that's where the current front-runner for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Bernie Sanders, continues to fall short. Despite winning the popular vote in both Iowa and New Hampshire and demonstrating some appeal among voters of color in the polls, Sanders still hasn't lived up to his promise of turning out an army of young people and other nontraditional voters to propel Democrats to victory in the fall. Sanders' promise has been that by inspiring nontraditional voters to turn out in droves, he can beat Trump without getting overly concerned about appealing to disaffected conservatives and other voters looking for an alternative to Trump. But he has yet to deliver on that promise and has underperformed in both Iowa and New Hampshire according to the expectations his own campaign set. In Iowa, he predicted huge '08-level turnout that never materialized and found himself struggling to make the case that he had won. In New Hampshire, where turnout exceeded 2016 levels, Sanders just barely edged out Pete Buttigieg for first by little more than one point after absolutely clobbering Hillary Clinton there in '16, 60%-38%. Sure, there's more people in the race, but that night was custom-made for Bernie and he underperformed again. As the Washington Post writes:
The share of Democratic voters ages 18 to 29 dropped from 2016. And [Cook Political Report's Dave] Wasserman observed that turnout increased by higher percentages in areas where Buttigieg and third-place finisher Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.) won than they did in Sanders's towns. This suggested the overall increase in turnout was likely attributable to GOP-leaning independents who opted to vote in the Democratic primary, rather than Sanders bringing out new voters.
So even though Sanders has more delegates and arguably more momentum than any other Democrat in the field, his electability argument for beating Trump has not held up. In fact, so far, Sanders has not demonstrably broadened his coalition beyond where it was in 2016. The loyalty of his core of supporters runs deep, which makes him a good-enough candidate in a crowded field but doesn't necessarily make him a formidable candidate in a two-way race. In short, Bernie may ultimately win the war of attrition, but this isn't the stuff of a revolution.
I also personally believe that Bernie is Trump's dream opponent, which is why Republicans have consistently tried to rile his base supporters into believing establishment Democrats are treating him unfairly. As GOP strategist and anti-Trumper Rick Wilson observed on MSNBC Friday, looking out across the field, Republicans absolutely want to run against the actual socialist who’s had recent health problems and plans, above all else, to take away people's private health insurance. That's a whole bunch of scary stuff teed up for Trump and the GOP. And I’m not saying any of that is fair, but it does appear to be the match up Republicans want most in the general election.
The problem for the other Democrats right now is that, while Sanders hasn't exactly closed the deal yet, they are dividing the rest of the pie up amongst themselves. In fact, some three-quarters of the Democratic electorate still prefers some other candidate. Analysts have generally thought of these divisions in terms lanes, with Sanders and Warren in the liberal lane; Buttigieg, Vice President Joe Biden, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar in the moderate lane; and Mike Bloomberg and Tom Steyer in the "billionaires buy elections" lane. I say that last part only half facetiously because, while Bloomberg in particular is now running third nationally, it's not yet clear that he has any ideological pull among Democratic voters other than his ability to flood the zone with billions if he's the nominee. That idea alone may appeal to some voters who are absolutely desperate to unseat Trump, but the more I think about it, the more it turns my stomach. If Bloomberg were to win the nomination and take on Trump, our presidential elections would be forever changed into a billionaire showdown every four years.
Where Warren comes in is that she is the only candidate who can bridge the divides of the party. If she were to be nominated, she could excite the widest swath of Democratic voters, leaving no single bloc with the burden of holding their nose at the voting booth. This isn't just my opinion, it has bore out in polling metric after polling metric, (some of which I've written about before). But in brief, Warren has twice won a polling question that asked, if you could wave a magic wand and nominate anyone in the Democratic field, who would it be? Warren was the top pick in both June 2019 and January 2020, the only two times the question was asked.
Earlier this week Warren also topped a Quinnipiac poll showing that she would draw more Democratic votes than anyone else in the field in a head-to-head with Trump. Most other candidates were mere points away from her but the takeaway isn't that she absolutely dusts everyone else. The takeaway is that voters have talked themselves into the idea that a woman can't the win against Trump, or is somehow unelectable. That fear-based bill of goods has harmed Warren's candidacy more than anyone else in the field, and frankly, it's an absolute shame so many voters let it dissuade them from voting their heart.
The latest poll demonstrating the breadth of Warren's appeal is one that pitted each Democratic candidate against Sanders, the current front-runner. Warren is really the only other Democratic candidate who rivals Bernie for the affections of Democratic primary voters. She's not only within 2 points of him (42% Warren to 44% Sanders), she puts the most undecided votes in play at 14%.
That's a particularly interesting finding because it shows Warren's ability to draw a coalition of support that includes both moderates and liberals, since Sanders has shored up more of the liberal vote by now. Warren is also better suited for the general election particularly because she doesn't identify as a socialist. Whoever the nominee is, Republicans will smear them as a socialist, but in Bernie's case it will actually be true. There's a marked difference between that smear and that reality, and Warren's self-identification as a capitalist will give her the ability to provide a safe space to voters who don't exactly want to vote Democrat but can't stand Trump.
But all electability arguments aside, Warren has my vote because she would make the best president hands down. Although she is not a life-long politician or creature of Washington, she has proven her ability to things done (like creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau). She has been a U.S. Senator just long enough to have the relationships and institutional knowledge needed to effectively enact policies. She also has a slew of well-reasoned ready-made policies, which (fairly or unfairly) have received far more vetting from the press than those of any other candidate. As writer Kaitlin Byrd put it, Elizabeth Warren is who you vote for if you like Bernie Sanders’ policy but actually want it enacted.
In fact, in a marked turn-around this week, some staunch Sanders supporters began to admit that he likely couldn't actually achieve passage of his signature issue: Medicare For All. Most notably, one of Sanders' most high-profile surrogates, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, told Huff Post that compromising on Bernie's signature proposal might be necessary.
“The worst-case scenario? We compromise deeply and we end up getting a public option. Is that a nightmare? I don’t think so,” she said.
The entire article suggested that, whatever the differences between candidates' goals on health care, the realities of what can be achieved in Congress might result in very similar outcomes. In fact, I generally agree with that contention, but it is a very notable departure from the litmus-test proposition the Sanders campaign has promoted on the campaign trail. Warren, in particular, was demonized for creating and presenting a transition plan to Medicare For All. On top of that, exit polls in New Hampshire suggested that just 6% of Democratic primary voters support single payer only, while 61% support offering both a public option and a single-payer plan. Bernie dominated among the small slice of hardcore single-payer only fans, winning 65% of them, which clearly helped him eke out a victory in the state. But it's not where the bulk of Democratic primary voters appear to be.
What has consistently polled well among both Democrats and the general electorate alike are Warren's signature issues: an anti-corruption bill and a wealth tax. In poll after poll, Warren's 2% wealth tax on households with a net worth exceeding $50 million has polled at 60%-plus among American voters. And while both the wealth tax and M4A have lost a bit of traction after being debated for a year on the campaign trail, the wealth tax continued to gain the support of more than six in 10 Americans, according to the New York Times as of last November.
Furthermore, Warren's emphasis on ending corruption in Washington is the perfect antidote to the reelection bid of Trump, easily the most corrupt president in American history. Equally as important, her anti-corruption package—the bill she would champion first and foremost as president—would be the linchpin to getting future major legislative wins because it would end the stranglehold that entrenched lobbying interests have on otherwise very popular policies. They include measures like combatting gun violence, climate change, and ever-increasing healthcare costs.
All that analysis is a long and perhaps tedious way of saying that I've thought about this a lot, and I have concluded that this political moment yearns for both a Warren candidacy and a Warren presidency. And although her chances of winning the nomination now are very slim, I am dedicated to the proposition that you must never stop fighting the good fight for the things you believe in. This is easily the most volatile and unpredictable field of primary candidates most of us have witnessed in our lifetimes, and only a tiny homogeneous percentage of the Democratic electorate has spoken. I'm putting my money on Elizabeth Warren not because she has the best chance of winning but because I believe she is the best candidate in the field. And one thing I have never regretted in my life is holding true to my ideals and fighting for them no matter what the odds. The greatest wins are never the most obvious ones—they are the dreams that triumph because a group of committed individuals refused to let them die.
The rule of law is the very virtue that separates a democracy from a dictatorship. Though one’s ability to vote is a feature of democracy, elections are meaningless without a functional legal apparatus to safeguard them. People are allowed to cast votes in virtual dictatorships all the time, but their collective will is ultimately crushed by leaders who rig the outcomes. Without the rule of law America is doomed as a democracy, and the sanctity of the legal system is exactly what Donald Trump and his attorney general, William Barr, are working to dismantle in real time by turning the Department of Justice into a tool of the State.
Trump is reportedly seething after enduring three years of investigations for which he is constitutionally incapable of taking any responsibility. Sure, he called for Russia to find Hillary Clinton’s emails in 2016, and Russia followed suit almost immediately by hacking the Democratic National Committee. Sure, he asked the Ukrainian president to investigate his political rival Joe Biden and withheld desperately needed funding and political backing to pressure him into doing so. But Trump is never wrong, can never be questioned, and surely has never been held accountable in his life. And now that he will carry the stain of impeachment to his grave, there’s going to be hell to pay and the nation’s top law enforcement officer has proven eager to help wherever possible.
But this goes way beyond the interference Barr ran last year on public release of the Mueller report, which otherwise would have been devastating to Trump. Barr is now intervening in the administration of justice on multiple cases, weaponizing the Justice Department against Trump’s political enemies, and shielding Trump’s allies from the full force of the law.
The list of interventions is simply staggering. In brief, they include a relentless effort to find wrongdoing by the officials at the FBI and CIA involved with launching the Russia investigation in 2016, taking specific aim at former FBI Director James Comey and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe (who was already denied his pension benefits by Barr’s predecessor after decades of service at that bureau).
And on the leniency side, Barr has moved in recent weeks to lighten the punishment for two Trump loyalists and former campaign advisers, Mike Flynn and Roger Stone. In service of that goal, Barr removed the Senate-approved U.S. attorney in D.C. and replaced her in the interim with a close ally from his office, Timothy Shea, who has gladly done Barr’s bidding. Shea is the guy who earlier this week signed off on overruling the sentencing recommendations made by the four federal prosecutors on Stone’s case who have all since resigned in protest. While all these actions are indefensible, Barr’s interference with the sentencing recommendations of a Trump ally was so unprecedented that it has elicited an outcry from a groundswell of former federal prosecutors and Justice Department officials.
“I’ve never seen so many prosecutors, including those who aren’t political or those who haven’t been following this situation closely, go to red alert so quickly,” Joyce White Vance, a former U.S. Attorney in the Obama administration, told the Washington Post. “The reason is this: If a president can meddle in a criminal case to help a friend, then there’s nothing that keeps him from meddling to harm someone he thinks is his enemy. That means that a president is fully above the law in the most dangerous kind of way. This is how democracies die.”
Vance’s prognosis isn’t hyperbole. America is teetering on the edge and Republican lawmakers have proven to be nothing but a herd of sycophantic lemmings. Unfortunately, House Democrats, who do have some agency, haven’t exactly been robust in their response. Barr has agreed to appear before the House Judiciary Committee for a hearing but not until March 31.
At her weekly press conference Thursday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi called Barr “a sad disappointment,” saying he had “deeply damaged the rule of law by withdrawing the Department of Justice sentencing recommendations” in the Stone case, among other things.
But frankly, Democrats should be jumping up and down about this in order to shine a public spotlight on the Justice Department’s turn toward becoming nothing short of an instrument of authoritarianism. How about a bicameral press conference? How about burying the Justice Department in subpoenas just to make a point? How about a speedier timeline for Barr’s hearing? Some actual outrage spiraling into public spectacle would be useful here. We need leadership to meet the moment so American voters will understand the stakes here and be fully operational when they hit the polls in November.
Barely past the sham GOP-led impeachment trial of Donald Trump, U.S. senators on both sides of the aisle are already bracing for what they expect to be a shorter time period between this removal proceeding and the next one. But naturally, the goals of Republican and Democratic lawmakers are quite different, according toThe New York Times.
Republicans hope to enact rules that would limit both the House’s ability to impeach a president and the scope of information that would be considered in a Senate trial. One GOP official is advocating for a way to block consideration of what they called "nuisance" impeachments sent over from the House, as if Donald Trump's attempt to rig U.S. elections with foreign help was just a pesky dust-up. To that end, Florida Sen. Rick Scott is pushing to raise the House threshold for impeachment to require three-fifths support in the lower chamber rather than a simple majority.
Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley also wants to thwart the House's control over when articles are officially transmitted by simply giving the Senate authority to initiate a trial within a certain period after the House impeaches.
Democrats, on the other hand, want to expand Senate trials by mandating that new documentary evidence and testimony be considered. “I’d like to see witnesses and documents be required,” Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said of the proposal from Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley.
But at least some Republicans are pulling for a cooling-off period before any new rules are implemented. Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt noted that about a dozen years passed between the anticipated Nixon-era trial that ultimately never materialized and impeachment rule changes made in 1986. “They waited a dozen years before they said, ‘OK, now that things have totally settled down, nobody has an ax to grind, half the Congress that was here in 1972 isn’t here anymore, let’s look at the rules,’” Blunt said.
The idea that House Republicans were in any way compatible with a committee bearing the word "intelligence" in its name was always a stretch. Apparently, that reality has finally sunk in with the House GOP and its members sitting on the Intelligence Committee, who declared that they would boycott a public committee hearing Wednesday related to developing new methods of intelligence gathering.
In a letter to House Intelligence chair Adam Schiff, Republican panel members accused Democrats of holding "publicity events" rather than conducting oversight. "Given this Committee's access to highly sensitive information, it is concerning that you prioritize publicity events rather than the more productive work that occurs in the Committee's classified spaces," wrote the panel's ranking member, Rep. Devin Nunes; the ranking member of the Strategic Technologies and Advanced Research Subcommittee, Rep. Chris Stewart; and the six other Republican members of the committee.
Those would be members of the very same GOP caucus that stormed a closed-door Intelligence Committee briefing last fall to review classified information related to the impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump. In fact, Rep. Stewart, who had opened the door that allowed a bunch of his unauthorized colleagues and cameras to enter the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF), threatened that House Republicans would continue such stunts unless Schiff allowed more transparency.
“We have written (Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif.) a letter where we’re asking for him to quit restricting our ability to look at the transcripts and a number of other things,” Stewart said after about two dozen of his colleagues had marched through a door that said, “Restricted Area. No public or media access. Cameras or recording devices prohibited without proper authorization.”
But suddenly, the same Republicans who lobbied Schiff for more access and transparency now want to conduct all committee business in “classified spaces” where the “more productive work” happens.
Really? Republicans fricking held a pizza party complete with cameras and recording devices in that secured area last fall in order to protest the "work that occurs in the committee’s classified spaces." Apparently, now that the impeachment inquiry is over, Republicans want to bury everything in the dark of night so the public will never know what's going on.
The subcommittee's chair, Democratic Rep. Jim Himes, bemoaned the tactics of his GOP counterparts during Wednesday’s hearing and apologized to the panel's witnesses for the lack of GOP participation, according to CNN.
"Even as this committee was the epicenter of the polarizing impeachment debate, this committee has always succeeding compartmentalizing the emotions and arguments of impeachment from the critical work we do," Himes said. "Not so today, that Rubicon has been crossed."
By a 15-point margin Americans say that, despite being acquitted in the Senate, Donald Trump has not been cleared of wrongdoing in the Ukraine matter. Fully 55% say Trump has not been exonerated by his acquittal while 40% believe he has, according a new Quinnipiac poll released Monday. The views of independents track almost perfectly with those findings, with 54% saying Trump has not been cleared and 40% saying he has.
What this means more broadly is that Americans weren't fooled by Republicans' sham trial one bit. In the poll, 51% still believe that Trump's actions were serious enough to warrant impeachment, while 46% believe they didn't reach the threshold. Independents are split on that question 49% to 49%. Perhaps even more telling are respondents' views on whether the Senate trial was conducted fairly:
Unfairly: 59%
Fairly: 35%
That finding is almost identical to Monmouth polling also released today, showing 58% say the trial was unfair, while 35% say it was fair. In effect, Senate Republicans’ sham trial only inspired confidence in GOP voters, 54% of whom called it fair, while Democrats (78%-18%) and independents (56%-39%) overwhelmingly found it unfair.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is asking 74 inspectors general, in every agency across the federal government, to investigate retaliation against whistleblowers following Donald Trump's weekend firing of people associated with his impeachment probe, according to Politico.
On Friday, Trump fired National Security Council member and impeachment witness Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, along with his twin brother, Lt. Col. Yevgeny Vindman, who did not testify, and Ambassador Gordon Sondland, who repeatedly said during testimony that all of Trump's top lieutenants were "in the loop" on his Ukraine scheme. The Vindman brothers are both active-duty military and have been reassigned.
In a letter, Schumer call the dismissals "part of a dangerous, growing pattern of retaliation against those who report wrongdoing only to find themselves targeted by the President and subject to his wrath and vindictiveness.”
Schumer specifically asked to be updated by the Pentagon's acting inspector general, Glenn Fine, on how recently Defense Department staff had been reminded of their whistleblower rights. Schumer additionally requested written assurances that the Defense Department's general counsel would protect whistleblowers both past and present against retaliation.
After firing Vindman from his White House assignment on the NSC, Trump continued smearing him over the weekend, calling him "insubordinate" and retweeting a GOP congressman who called him a "leaker."
The day after the GOP-led Senate acquitted him, Donald Trump held a White House rally packed with all his besties and sycophants to assure Americans he was even crazier than they had remembered. Still seething from the visible shredding of his speech by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the body blow of being the only president in history to draw a bipartisan conviction vote, Trump vomited venom for more than an hour, spewing words and phrases like, liars and leakers, scum, bullshit, sleazebag, phony, rotten, evil and sick.
By Friday, a newly emboldened Trump initiated his post-acquittal massacre, firing not only Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who provided impeachment testimony regarding his work on the White House National Security Council, but also Vindman's twin brother who similarly worked on the council and then Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, who perhaps provided the most damning testimony that all of Trump's top advisors were "in the loop" on the Trump-Giuliani Ukraine scheme.
It's a scary moment for the country, especially as we watched Democrats devolve into mayhem following Monday's caucus. And far from learning some sort of "lesson" from the whole impeachment episode that would rein him in, Trump learned that Senate Republicans were too cowardly to ever provide a check on him. He was now unbridled and free to act on his every impulse without any fear of consequence.
Worse yet, the media got hung up on one Gallup poll showing Trump at 49% job approval and I'll be damned if that number wasn't bandied about as the absolute truth all week. Between acquittal, that singular poll, and higher job creation than anticipated in January (225,000 jobs v. 158,000 expected), many political analysts declared this one of the best weeks of Trump's presidency.
Not to worry. Trump is already stepping on his coattails with his unhinged rally and campaign of retribution. Instead of basking in the glow of turning the page, letting bygones be bygones, and making a renewed call for unity, Trump is responding like the grievance-ridden, petulant child he always proves to be. Once more, the polling pundits latched onto that's surely pushing Trump to feel especially emboldened is most likely an inflated outlier. His unusually high approval (still low by most standards) is likely being driven by a phenomenon that happens when one party or certain voters suddenly feel enthused, making them more open to talking to pollsters and telling them how they feel.
As researchers at Columbia University write, "Some of that shift can be explained by differential nonresponse: more Republicans and fewer Democrats answering the poll. This explanation for the change is not mentioned in the Gallup report, but we can read between the lines and see it." In fact, you can actually see that differential based on the variation in trend lines between phone polling right now (in gold below) and online polling (in blue), which tends to be a more stable representation of shifting attitudes over time.
Flagging this again: We're seeing very large differences in Trump's approval ratings by poll mode right now � perhaps the biggest of his presidency so far. We have some suggestive evidence that partisan non-response bias is artificially inflating his numbers in some phone polls. pic.twitter.com/H89RFXn47s
It also possible that as we head into an election year, some Republicans are simply starting to come home in the run up to November. Whatever the case, the Trump bump doesn't seem tied to any real appreciation in his standing with most voters. His cultists just appear to be ecstatic at the moment. They really do love those vendetta rallies. ;)
But as Democrats eye November, it's important to be clear-eyed about the over-hyped economy and the very real way in which it's failing the vast majority of Americans. First, it's true that Obama's last three years of job growth all beat Trump's best year so far. And while perception matters, actual pocket books matter a lot more. As Annie Linskey reported this week in a must-read piece for The Atlantic, "Beyond the headline economic numbers, a multifarious and strangely invisible economic crisis metastasized: Let’s call it the Great Affordability Crisis."
Linskey notes that what Americans are earning only tells half the story. What they had to spend of those earnings is both the other half of the story and arguably the most important part.
In one of the best decades the American economy has ever recorded, families were bled dry by landlords, hospital administrators, university bursars, and child-care centers. For millions, a roaring economy felt precarious or downright terrible. ... Fully one in three households is classified as “financially fragile.”
This is the crux of the matter. No matter what the statistics on the stock market, job creation, or even wage growth suggest, many Americans are still struggling mightily. The average American isn't necessarily experiencing a moment of glorious expansion, instead they're slogging through a wilderness of anxiety producing unknowns.
That truth, as unfortunate as it is, leaves plenty of room for Democrats to reach voters where they actually are and make a more reality-based case for boosting the fortunes of both working- and middle-class Americans to a brighter and more inclusive future.
One would never know it by the post-Iowa media narrative of the Democratic race, but there is a fourth candidate in the top four coming out of Iowa. That candidate finished third, over-performing expectations and beating out the national front-runner. Wow! Who’s that?, you say.She’s a woman, tall and a touch lanky. She’s got a famous dog. Oh … right!
Seriously, the mainstream media counted Elizabeth Warren out before Iowa happened. Then when she claimed one of the three tickets heading out of Iowa, they counted her out again. The only stories I have seen for a solid four days now are about the jostling for first between Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders and then an onslaught of stories perseverating over whether Joe Biden can rise from the dead. Since the mainstream media won’t write a single thing about Warren, I’m going to because, while Warren isn’t getting the post-Iowa boost that Buttigieg and Sanders are, I still think she’s got the best chance of building a coalition that can appeal to the broadest range of voters.
Here’s why: Buttigieg is gaining in New Hampshire and might pull out a first or second place win there. But he’s still nowhere with people of color. He’s got a wall once he hits more diverse states, South Carolina, in particular. Could that change? Perhaps, but we haven’t seen any evidence of that yet and his efforts to broaden his appeal have fallen flat so far.
Bernie’s theory of the case has always been that he can beat Trump because he will motivate more people to the polls, including an army of youth and other nontraditional voters, to vote for his revolution, as he calls it. He has continually polled strongest among voters under 30 and, to his credit, across a range of demographics. He was well organized in Iowa and his campaign predicted turnout there would rival that of 2008, when Barack Obama drew a whole new generation of voters to the polls. "I will tell you this without a shadow of a doubt,” Sanders said, heading into Iowa, “If there is a large voter turnout—if working people and young people come out in large numbers—we will win and win big." Sanders campaign spokesperson Mike Casca told Politico, “If there's a huge voter turnout, you can turn off your TV—Bernie won.”
Unfortunately for Democrats as a party, turnout was nowhere near ‘08 levels (roughly 240,000 caucusers), rather it was closer to 2016 levels (roughly 170,000 caucusers). The record-level turnout that the Sanders camp hyped doesn’t seem to have materialized. Perhaps to Sanders’ credit, turnout among voters under 30 appears to have increased slightly from 2008 levels. The Sanders camp also put serious energy into increasing participation with nontraditional voters by organizing satellite caucuses, which the campaign argues could still help Sanders edge out Buttigieg in the state delegate equivalent count. But any way you slice it, turnout was underwhelming and perhaps even concerning given the necessity of beating Donald Trump.
What that suggests is that bringing more voters into the fold as Sanders aimed to do isn’t enough. On the other hand, nominating someone who alienates Democrats’ most loyal voting bloc, as Buttigieg seems to, could produce exactly the type of turnout problems in the Rust Belt states that hobbled Hillary Clinton in ’16, not to mention the fact that it would make expanding the map very difficult for Democrats.
And while Joe Biden on paper seems to be the perfect candidate to hit both of those notes, on the stump he has proven to be uninspiring, which is exactly why he finished fourth in Iowa. Once voters really start paying attention to Biden, he fails to make the conversion. That was true even though both he and Buttigieg had a wide open state for two weeks while Sanders, Warren, and Amy Klobuchar were all stuck in Washington at Trump’s impeachment trial. Buttigieg was able to capitalize on that advantage, Biden wasn’t and it’s telling.
So who, you ask, could put together a coalition that motivates progressives, working class voters, and people of color, while still drawing cross-over votes among never-Trumpers? Warren. While Warren did not dominate hardly any counties across Iowa, her numbers were strong enough among a wide variety of voters and regions of the state that she pulled off a third-place finish. The fact that Warren actually outperformed expectations in Iowa is a story that has been completely ignored. She also remains third in national polling and third in FiveThirtyEight’s 2020 forecast behind Sanders (who got the biggest bump) and Biden for securing a majority of delegates to win the nomination.
Warren still edges out Buttigieg in the forecast, albeit by a single percentage point. As Nate Silver put it, “The case for Warren is that she's in 3rd place, more or less, and the Top 2 candidates aren't that far ahead of the pack and have big vulnerabilities.” All of which is to say, her complete erasure from the political discussion is curious to say the least. But as Democrats continue their quest for a candidate who can beat Trump, they need one that doesn’t turn off voters in any direction while having the fire in their belly for a fight over the long haul. Unless and until voting patterns and polling suggests otherwise, Warren is that person.
Warren’s overall appeal was apparent in two pre-Iowa polls: one showing that given the choice of nominating a candidate through the wave of a magic wand, voters chose Warren over every other Democratic candidate, which was also true in June 2019; and the other showing that Warren would be the least likely candidate to alienate Democrats if she were to win the nomination.
It's not that I think Warren is the perfect candidate, no candidate is ever perfect, as the recent exit of several staffers of color in her Nevada campaign demonstrates. It's just that I believe she has the best path to pull from all the demographics Democrats need to beat Trump, which includes both motivating nontraditional voters and attracting votes from high-propensity voters who don’t necessarily identify as Democrats. We will need every single vote we can get and, at this point, Warren bridges those gaps better than any other candidate in the field.
But whether Warren gets through the next few contests where other candidates have advantages is still an open question. Buttigieg is already getting a sizable bump in New Hampshire polling and Sanders just proved that he’s a fundraising juggernaut with a $25 million haul in January alone. Warren’s chances will likely depend on perhaps outperforming in one of the next several contests with a first- or second-place finish and remaining viable through Super Tuesday. But if Warren really does have a chance, don’t expect the mainstream media to let you know.
