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I first encountered Tom Perriello, who lost the Virginia Democratic gubernatorial primary, on June 13th, almost twenty years ago. I had written an article about Bill Clintons disastrous foreign policy in West Africa, which bolstered one of the regions worst war criminals, President Charles Taylor, of Liberia, and strengthened his grip on neighboring Sierra Leone. Perriello read the piece and shared some of my outrage at American policy there. He called me and we chatted about the yin and yang between realism and moralism in American foreign policy. While I had written the piece entirely from a desk in Washington, Perriello was inspired to move to West Africa and work as an adviser to the prosecutor for the Special Court for Sierra Leone. The tribunal, established jointly by the U.N. and the government of Sierra Leone, was charged with prosecuting war criminals in the regions long-running conflicts. In an audacious and controversial move, the prosecutor for whom Perriello worked unsealed an indictment against Taylor while he was visiting Ghana, making him the first sitting head of state since Yugoslavias Slobodan Milosevic to be indicted by an international court. Taylor fled back to the safety of Liberia, but, thanks to pressure from the Bush Administration, he stood trial and was convicted at the Special Court, in 2012. He will spend the rest of his life in jail in the U.K.

Perriello played a crucial role in bringing one of the worst murderers of the twenty-first century to justice. The next time I heard from Perriello was in late 2008, just after he won an upset victoryby less than a thousand votesover a longtime Republican congressman from Virginia, where Perriello grew up. Perhaps being overly generous because he was an incoming member of Congress who needed media contacts, he called and reminded me that his career in public service all started with that article I had written. As a journalist, you tend not to forget those kinds of calls, and Ive always followed his career with interest.

Perriello was swept out of office two years later, when midterm voters turned ferociously against Obama and the House of Representatives flipped into Republican hands. Obama and many of his aides retained a special affection for Perriello as someone who championed much of their ambitious early agenda despite the difficult politics of his district. He worked briefly at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, before Secretary of State John Kerry brought him into the State Department, where Perriello had a notableand under-coveredachievement late last year. He helped the Democratic Republic of Congo manage its first peaceful transition of power.

As he was wrapping up that work, Donald Trump was preparing to become President. Perriello decided to run for governor of Virginiaone of only two states that elects its governors in the odd year after each presidential election and so, along with New Jersey, is often seen as the first real referendum on an incumbent president.

The election of Donald Trump was not just some transfer of power from Democrats to Republicans, Perriello, who is forty-two, told me earlier this week, as we discussed the lessons of his losing campaign to secure the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. It was really the rise of at least a wannabe racial demagogue on U.S. soil. The response to that was going to be extremely important, and it was going to start in Virginia. So we closed up the peace deal in Congo at 11:00 P.M. on New Years Eve and launched the campaign for governor January 5th.

Perriello lost the primary by almost twelve points. His main lesson of running for office in the era of Trump is a little surprising. The single biggest thing that I took away from this campaign, he said, is that whichever party ends up figuring out how to speak about two economic issuesautomation and monopolywill not only be doing right by the country but will have a massive electoral advantage.

In many ways, Perriellos race in the Virginia primary was as much of a long shot as the Congo peace deal. His opponent, Ralph Northam, the lieutenant governor, was older and more established in the state. (He attended the Virginia Military Institute, while Perriello went to Yale as both an undergraduate and for a law degree.) Northam already had the backing of most top Virginia Democrats, including Governor Terry McAuliffe, one of Bill and Hillary Clintons closest friends, and the two Democratic senatorsTim Kaine, Hillarys 2016 running mate, and Mark Warner.

Perriello had some other big problems. He had trouble distinguishing himself ideologically from Northam, who moved to the left on a host of issues, including adopting a minimum wage of fifteen dollars per hour, two years of free community college, and comprehensive criminal justice reform. But Northam also pilloried Perriello from the left on abortion, because Perriello once voted on an amendment during the Obamacare debate that would have prevented the use of federal funds for insurance coverage of abortions.

Perriello was also outspent and outraised. He won the backing of Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and thirty former Obama staffers, and the primary was cast in the media as a fight between the Democratic Partys populist and establishment wings. But the national fundraising networks of the left never adopted Perriello as a priority. (Northam had a four million dollar spending advantage.) Instead, most of the Netroots energy and dollars focused on the special congressional election in Georgia, where Democrat Jon Ossoff raised an astounding twenty-three million dollars but still lost. There are no limits on donations in Virginia, and Perriello relied on a few wealthy donorsor angel investors, as Perriello prefers to call themwho wrote six-figure checks, which was slightly awkward for the populist candidate.

Perriello also ended up losing his anti-Trump edge over Northam, an Army veteran who was originally reluctant to run as a fierce voice of #TheResistance. But in a TV ad on which he ended up spending the most money, Northam, who is a neurologist, looked straight to camera and, in a weirdly matter-of-fact way, called Trump a narcissistic maniac. (The ad was in heavy rotation on D.C. television, especially the cable news channels, and Trump himself, who watches hours of cable news, almost certainly would have seen it.)

Finally, the Washington Post , which endorsed Northam late in the campaign, had an enormous impact on the race. Perriellos internal polls showed a fifteen-point swing against him in the last ten days of the race after the endorsement.

Despite the loss, Perriello thinks there are some lessons for progressive Democrats who believe that anti-Trumpism is enough to win. I think its important for Democrats to keep a couple of things in mind right now, Perriello said about what he learned. One is not to assume that all anti-Trump energy is pro-Democratic energy. We have to go out and earn those votes. And I think, related to that, its important for us not just to be addressing Trump, but the forces that gave rise to Trump.

Trump, he believes, has been the result of a coming collision course between the rise of economic anxiety due to the disappearance of work and the persistence of structural and overt racism. One of the silliest conversations were having in Democratic politics is whether the presidential election was about economic anxiety or racism. My answer to that is, Yes. Those two have always gone hand in hand. So for us to not speak out forcefully about the structural and overt racism would be to not be doing our job as progressives, but we cant miss the implications of a genuine shift in the economics of the United States.

Despite being cast as the candidate of the populist left, Perriello did better with less-traditional Democratic constituencies. We did really well with all the groups that Democrats are struggling with, he said, young voters, rural voters, diaspora, communities of color, voters below the age of sixty-five. And we did terribly with all the people that are going to vote with Democrats no matter what.

He found a major disconnect between how the economically struggling parts of the state understood the big economic trends in the country, compared with voters in the more upscale areas.

When I talked to Trump voters, I talked about the fact that hes half right about 5.7 million manufacturing jobs being lost in the last decade, and that thats devastating communities, Perriello said. But then Id ask that room, Can anyone tell me where eighty-five per cent of them went? And when I was in red parts of the country, every hand went up and said, technology and automation. And when I was in the blue parts, say, at a donor meeting, and it might be one or two hands that got that.

Perriello announced this week that he will run a new PAC to focus on helping Democrats win seats in the Virginia House of Delegates. Ideally, he said, the group will serve as an innovation hub for testing better strategies for campaigning, which could then be useful to candidates across the country in 2018, both in terms of messaging and how Democrats run in the Trump era.

His main insight on that front so far is that his party needs to harness the revulsion to Trump that exists in many quarters with an economic message that has been lacking. If Democrats lazily think that anti-Trump energy is pro-Democratic Party energy, he said, were going to miss a generational opportunity to realign peoples political identities.

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What Tom Perriello's Loss in Virginia Can Teach Democrats - The New Yorker

Liberal writers and political operatives, now that its finally dawning on them that no one is going to find evidence that Donald Trump conspired with Russia to steal the presidential election, are turning to giving advice to the Democratic Party.

Thats a natural, if somewhat delayed, response to an election that left the worlds oldest political party out of power in the three branches of the federal government. A consensus is arising that Democrats should rely less on identity politics and more on economic appeals.

In retrospect, they over-relied on the theory that demographic change increasing percentages of nonwhite voters and single women would produce automatic victories. Actually, this ascendant America netted Barack Obama only 51 percent of the vote in 2012, leaving little margin for error. And no other Democrat was likely to match the black turnout and Democratic percentages he inspired.

Another problem is that reliance on a coalition of minorities encourages a self-righteous mindset that dismisses everyone else as deplorable. Hillary Clintons resort to this label at a Manhattan fund-raiser was not an accident.

The better course, say many Democrats from The Atlantics Franklin Foer to the narrowly defeated candidate Jon Ossoff in Georgias 6th Congressional District is to stress economics. They yearn to return to the days when the Democratic Party was the party of the union guy, when blue-collar workers voted by a 2-1 margin for Democrats.

Those days are actually long past. Republicans have been carrying white non-college graduates for 25 to 30 years, since long before Trump came onto the political scene. Trumps achievement, with his trade and immigration proposals, was to increase the margin with those voters significantly in states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin by appealing to those raised in union households who had been sticking with the Democrats.

But what do Democrats have to offer on economics? Higher tax rates on high earners? Most voters like the idea but dont seem convinced it would help people like them. Maybe increased revenues would reduce deficits or enable government to hire more bureaucrats or pay them more. But would that mean a better life for voters?

What about jacking up wages by increasing the minimum wage? Again, that polls really well, but its a policy that wouldnt do much for most ordinary people. It could even hurt the intended beneficiaries; a University of Washington study showed that Seattles sharply increased minimum wage has significantly reduced low-skilled workers incomes because of a reduction in their hours.

The problem for Democrats is that the United States already has a progressive tax structure, more so than much of Europe, and already supplements low-wage work with the earned income tax credit.

Meanwhile, promises of free college or free health care lack credibility. Negative ratings of ObamaCare in the Obama years and current Republican repeal-and-replace proposals show an ingrained skepticism that government can provide improved services.

Voters may have noticed that government-aid policies have coincided with above-inflation cost increases in higher education and health care. Political promises to spend more may not work with an electorate that fears that spending cuts might hurt but doubts that spending increases would help.

Its true that economic growth has been lagging at a historic rate and that workforce participation, especially among non-college-educated men, has been deteriorating. But those were phenomena of the Obama years, which weakens Democrats credibility in addressing them. However, the trends are deeper and longer-lasting, which means that Republicans dont have much credibility, either.

The fact is that both parties traditional economic-policy levers seem poorly adapted to repair todays economic weaknesses. Voters may just be zoning out when either Democrats or Republicans argue they can strengthen the economy.

If thats right, then elections most likely will continue to be fought out mainly on identity-politics lines. Democratic economic appeals wont win over many blue-collar Christians in flyover country any more than Republican economic policies will win over many high-income coastal secularists.

The good news for both parties is that recent elections show that both sides can win. The bad news: Both can lose.

Continued here:
Democrats still have nothing to say about boosting the economy - New York Post

People working for Democratic senators are overwhelmingly white and mostly women, according to a first-of-its-kind report on diversity in some congressional offices.

The current Congress is the most diverse in history, with more minority lawmakers than ever before and a record 21 women in the U.S. Senate. But a cadre of current and former congressional staffers, lobbyists and party donors have been pressuring congressional leaders especially Democrats to intensify the search for minorities to fill jobs on Capitol Hill and in district offices nationwide.

Responding to the pressure, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) released a report Friday that confirms what staffers and outside observers long believed: Despite having 16 women in the caucus and more minority senators than ever, Democratic Senate staffing is overwhelmingly white.

Thirty-two percent of staffers are non-Caucasian, defined as African American, Asian/Pacific Islander, Latino, Native American or Middle Eastern/North African, according to the report. Fifty-four percent of staffers are women; 46 percent are men.

The report confirms what weve all known for some time that there is a significant diversity problem that cannot be allowed to continue in the most representative branch of our government, said Don Bell, director of the Black Talent Initiative at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a group that has been studying congressional staffing issues for years. He called on other House and Senate leaders to follow suit and begin collecting this vital information.

Across the Senate Democratic staff, 13 percent are African American roughly on par with the national percentage; 10 percent are Latino, behind the roughly 17 percent nationally; 8 percent are Asian-Pacific ahead of the national percentage; 4 percent are Native American; and 3 percent are Middle Eastern/North African. (Some staffers chose more than one category.)

As we continue the full-court press to make the Senate a more diverse place, this survey will be important to help us track our progress, Schumer said in a statement announcing the reports release. The more diverse the Senate is, the better it can serve our diverse country.

House and Senate Republicans do not publicly report data on staffing gender and ethnicity and declined requests in the past when asked by The Washington Post. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) also has intensified her caucuss push to hire more minorities, and a committee of Democratic lawmakers is considering options similar to what Schumer has adopted.

Schumers report mirrors similar surveys conducted by the Office of Personnel Management for executive branch employees that ask workers to self-report gender, ethnicity and other characteristics. About 94 percent of the roughly 2,800 people who work for Democratic senators responded to the survey, according to Schumers office.

The report is a major step in the right direction, but we have a lot of work to do, said Darrel Thompson, a former deputy chief of staff to former Senate majority leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), who is now with The Group, a government relations firm. Thompson helped Reid establish the Senate Democratic diversity office that helps recruit and place minority job applicants.

Among individual Democratic senators, the staff of Brian Schatz (Hawaii) ranks the most diverse, with 66 percent of his employees identifying as minority, most of them as Asian or Pacific Islander, the report said. Sens. Kamala D. Harris (Calif.) and Mazie Hirono (Hawaii) rank second at 61 percent, followed by Sen. Cory Booker (N.J.) at 57 percent; Chris Van Hollen (Md.) at 54 percent; and Tom Udall (N.M.) at 52 percent.

Cristina Antelo, a principal at the Podesta Group and former Democratic Senate staffer and current vice chairman of the nonpartisan Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, noted that 43 percent of Udalls staff is Latino, the most of any senator, likely because his chief of staff, Bianca Ortiz-Wertheim, is one of only two Hispanic women holding that role in the Senate.

When you have someone like that in a position like chief of staff, it makes a difference, she said.

On the flip side, Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) has the least diverse staff (7 percent), followed by Sens. Joe Manchin III (D-W. Va.) (9 percent) and Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) (10 percent). All three represent overwhelmingly rural and white states.

Overall, There are a bunch of offices who have numbers that are reflective of their states that Im actually happy to see, Antelo said.

Francisco Bencosme, president of the Congressional Hispanic Staff Association and a Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer, called Schumers decision to release the report significant because it helps establish a marker for future years. He said his group would be working with offices that have low percentages of minority workers to help identify future job candidates.

On gender, Sens. Michael F. Bennet (D-Colo.) and Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) employ the most women, with 66 percent each. The female senator with the highest percentage of female employees is Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) (65 percent). Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) employs the highest percentage of men (60 percent).

The report also accounts for the diversity of professional committee staffs. One hundred percent of Democratic staffers on the Indian Affairs Committee are minority 60 percent are Native Americans, the report said. Staffs for the committees on Appropriations (5 percent), Agriculture (7 percent) and Banking (8 percent) are least diverse.

I think the committees have some work to do, Antelo said, adding that its concerning that several committees lack any Asian, African American or Latino staffers.

Schumer agreed to compile the data earlier this year after meeting with leaders of Asian, African American and Latino congressional staffing associations. He also agreed to expand the diversity office and asked Democratic senators to adopt the Rooney Rule, an NFL hiring practice that requires pro football teams to interview at least one minority applicant for head coaching and other senior team positions. In the case of senators, Schumer asked that at least one minority applicant be interviewed for every staff opening. Pelosi recently asked House Democrats to adopt the same policy.

Some Democratic staffers expressed surprise Friday that Schumer opted to publish the report, but its publication and the mere fact that it was conducted at all follows several years of pressure from Asian, and Latino congressional staff associations. In more recent years, lobbyists and Democratic donors who are Asian, African American and Latino have pressured Schumer, Pelosi and other party leaders to increase minority hiring and publicly release the numbers to hold lawmakers to account.

The issue earned wider attention when minority staffers began circulating New York Daily News columns by civil rights activist and writer Shaun King, who used a series of essays to call out Democrats for failing to promote minorities into senior positions.

Democrats in the Senate have their own problems with bigotry, King wrote in January, noting that the only two black Senate chiefs of staff worked for Republican senators, Tim Scott (S.C.), who is black, and Jerry Moran (Kan.). Jonathan Burks, chief of staff to House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), is also black.

Read more at PowerPost

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Democratic Senate staffers are mostly white and women, new report says - Washington Post

News from Virginia demonstrates again how elections can be self-fulfilling prophecies. This is from its state legislature. Republicans have dominated the House of Delegates, the lower chamber, and hold 66 of the 100 seats going into their election this year (Virginia and New Jersey both hold state legislative elections this year, although the Virginia state Senate is not on the ballot).

Donald Trump's unpopularity in Virginia, and the burst of Democratic energy in reaction to his presidency, have convinced potential candidates there to run for office and for the party to raise tons of money for them. Democrats will contest 48 of those 66 Republican-held seats rather than not even bothering to try, as has been the case in the past. It's likely that some of the challengers will be newcomers who will fizzle once the election gets closer. It's also possible, however, that some of those inexperienced challengers will turn out to be very good at politics (after all, everyone has to start somewhere), and it's likely that those 48 challengers also include some relatively seasoned strategic politicians who see this as a good year to run and will make excellent candidates.

What all that means is that if Trump's popularity craters even more by November, Virginia Democrats are ready to exploit it, including a best-case scenario in which they pick up the bulk of the 17 Republican-held seats in districts carried by Hillary Clinton and actually win a chamber majority. On the other hand, if Trump rallies, Democrats will still probably win a few they wouldn't have otherwise. The early enthusiasm means that candidates have filed and resources will be available tothem.

If Trump remains unpopular for another few months, the same thing will be true at every level for the 2018 midterms. Already, far more Democrats than usual have filed to run for U.S. House seats. It's very early for 2018 state legislative elections, but you can be sure that potential candidates are already scouting out opportunities, and they'll be closely watching those Virginia and New Jersey results as well as Trump's approval numbers.

None of that guarantees a great year for Democrats in 2018. But the more things go their way -- the more Democrats think 2018 will be a great year for them (and Republicans think it will be a bad one, and behave accordingly) -- the more Democrats will be able to exploit the opportunities they wind up having, and the more they'll be able to overcome obstacles if the tides shift against them.

1. Charles Stewart III on the Pence commission's letter to state election officials.

2. Rick Hasen also has problems with what the commission is asking from the states.

3. Back to the Monkey Cage with Victoria Tin-bor Hui on Hong Kong and China.

4. My Bloomberg View colleague Francis Wilkinson on Trump and phony voter fraud stories.

5. Amy Walter and David Wasserman on the 2018 House election playing field.

6. Ezra Klein on the health-care bill and what it says about the Republican Party.

A daily round-up of superb political insights.

Jonathan Bernstein's Early Returns

7. And Byron York remembers that Republicans knew in 2013 that once the Affordable Care Act was fully implemented that it wouldn't be repealed. A large part of this is just the status quo bias in U.S. politics, which made it so difficult to pass health-care reform in the first place.The rest? My guess is that it's not at all about those who now benefit from Obamacare changing their minds; it's about most other people who, having seen that it's possible to expand health care to more people, don't want to take it away.

Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. Clickhereto subscribe.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story: Jonathan Bernstein at jbernstein62@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Brooke Sample at bsample1@bloomberg.net

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Democrats Seize on Opportunity in Virginia - Bloomberg - Bloomberg

The Buzz is the Registers weekly political news column.

Ardent opposition to President Donald Trump is motivating veteran and first-time activists in Orange Countys four Republican congressional districts, but unseating the incumbents remains an uphill road.

Three of those GOP members won reelection by more than 10 percentage points last year. And while polls show dissatisfaction with Congress as a whole, historic polling shows constituents view their own representatives far more favorably.

Hillary Clinton won all four districts, but a new report by the Public Policy Institute of California details how Democrats strongest demographic groups are also the least likely to vote in midterm general elections.

The population of eligible voters among Latinos and Asian Americans is growing faster in California and the county than elsewhere in the country while the overall voter registration rate is falling faster. In 2014 the last midterm election the states voter registration rate was about 5 percent less than the nations rate, according to the PPIC. Thats because Latinos and Asian Americans arent registering to vote at the rate of other eligible adults. The lack of registered Latino voters in the county could particularly hurt Democrats next year.

Meanwhile, the strongest age group for county Democrats is those 25 and younger. But those voters low turnout in midterm elections is the biggest reason the state slid from 70 percent turnout in the 1982 midterm general election to 42 percent in 2014, according to PPIC.

Orange County Democrats were watching the June 20 special election in Georgia because it was similar in some ways to the GOP districts in Orange County: Educated voters who usually favored Republicans but were wary of Trump (Trump won the district by just 1 percentage point). But the outcome was bad news for those Democrats, with Republican Karen Handel beating Democrat Jon Ossoff 52 percent to 48 percent.

Thats more than Trumps margin of victory and an indication that distaste of the president wasnt enough to carry the Democrat to victory.

If you know where to look, you can find bits of good polling news that reflect well on Trump.

Approval among Republicans remains strong at 85 percent, according to the most recent Gallup poll. Thats leagues beyond their approval of the GOP-controlled Congress, which is at a lowly 28 percent, according to Gallup.

And Republicans are far more optimistic about the future of the country since Trump took office, with 69 percent saying the country is going in the right direction, according to a just-released Morning Consult poll. Thats rocketed from 11 percent last July. Meanwhile, Democrats optimism for the country has dropped from 37 percent to 19 percent over the same period.

The problem is that less than half the country is Republican, especially when accounting for independents.

Trump took office with a historic low approval rating among all voters, 45 percent. And its been a slow drift downward since, with his latest rating at 39 percent, according to Gallup.

Within the party, theres a significant divide. When asked if the GOP generally cares about people like you, 72 percent of self-described conservatives said yes but just 49 percent of moderates thought so, according to the Morning Consult data.

The weakest demographic among Democrats is those ages 18 to 29, with 73 percent of that group saying the party cares about people like them. All other age groups are at 80 percent or higher. Overall, 80 percent of Democrats and 63 percent of Republicans said their party cares about people like them.

Measuring patriotism can be treacherous, but that didnt stop the approaching Independence Day from spurring WalletHub to rank the 50 states. That ranking is based on 13 factors divided into two categories: military engagement (a states number of military enlistees counted for 25 percent of their score) and civic engagement (the share of adults who voted last November accounted for 10 percent).

Virginia ranked first overall, Alaska ranked first in military engagement (and 36th in civic engagement) and Vermont ranked first in civic engagement (and 39th in military engagement).

CaliforniIa ranked 44th overall, 38th in military engagement and 42nd in civic engagement. It had the third lowest veterans per capita, but otherwise didnt crack the top five or bottom five in key categories.

Excerpt from:
Study highlights Democrats' campaign hurdles in 2018 - OCRegister