Archive for the ‘Democrats’ Category

Democrats had the worst May fundraising since 2003 – Washington Examiner

The Democratic National Committee raised nearly $4.3 million in May, making it the organization's worst May on record for fundraising since 2003, according to newly released Federal Election Commission data.

In May 2003, the Democratic group pulled in $2.7 million. Although 2017 is an off-year for fundraising, the DNC has raised between $4.5 million and $20 million every May in the nearly decade and a half since then.

The low number follows another rough fundraising month in April, in which the group hauled in $4.7 million, making it the worst April of fundraising since 2009.

DNC Chairman Tom Perez has said he intends to double the organization's budget from $50 million to $100 million this year, a change that will prove difficult if donations continue to remain below average. Perez defended his performance by saying he has only been leading the DNC for a few months now.

"Well again, I got there on March 1. And so, I was the first to say, we have a lot of rebuilding to do," Perez said on NBC.

The Republican National Committee reported $10.8 million in donations for the month of May, an off-year record-high number for the group.

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Democrats had the worst May fundraising since 2003 - Washington Examiner

Democrats’ wonky plan to delay GOP health care bill – CNN

It's a long shot, but Democrats believe they've identified an error in the health care bill that would force Republicans to get 60 votes to pass their plan, rather than 51. With only 52 Republicans in the Senate, it could essentially kill the bill.

A warning: we're getting into some seriously wonky territory. But it's important, so stay with us.

Under reconciliation, the way Republicans can try to pass the bill with 51 votes, Republicans have to save $2 billion total. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said last month that Republicans did that in their House bill. But, there is more to the rules. The $2 billion can't come from just anywhere. They have to save $1 billion in each of the relevant committees. That means Republicans have to save $1 billion from programs under the jurisdiction of the Senate Health, Education and Labor Committee and another $1 billion from the Finance Committee.

Democrats charge Republicans haven't hit the target the HELP committee and accuse them of using budgetary tricks. They want to force the health care bill back to HELP to find more in savings. That would mean a delay and ultimately a committee vote on the plan.

It's a disagreement that's been ongoing for weeks now. Republicans balk at the charge and say it's already been decided, the House health care bill is fine and they are full steam ahead.

Given that Republicans and Democrats are so dug in, it may be the kind of issue that goes to the Senate's parliamentarian.

But here's why Republicans say Democrats may not get very far with their accusation and why even the parliamentarian may not matter.

Under section 312 of the 1974 Congressional Budget Act, Republicans argue that the rules say that it's ultimately up to the Senate Budget Committee Chairman to decide if legislation complies with Senate reconciliation requirements, not a parliamentarian.

Bottom line? At the end of the day, Budget Committee Chairman Mike Enzi, R-Wyoming, gets to say whether the House health care bill is in compliance with reconciliation.

"The parliamentarian does not decide whether the bill saves enough in HELP jurisdiction to be considered under reconciliation -- again the Chairman of the Budget Committee does," a GOP aide said in an email.

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Democrats' wonky plan to delay GOP health care bill - CNN

How the Democrats Lost Their Way on Immigration – The Atlantic

The myth, which liberals like myself find tempting, is that only the right has changed. In June 2015, we tell ourselves, Donald Trump rode down his golden escalator and pretty soon nativism, long a feature of conservative politics, had engulfed it. But thats not the full story. If the right has grown more nationalistic, the left has grown less so. A decade ago, liberals publicly questioned immigration in ways that would shock many progressives today.

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In 2005, a left-leaning blogger wrote, Illegal immigration wreaks havoc economically, socially, and culturally; makes a mockery of the rule of law; and is disgraceful just on basic fairness grounds alone. In 2006, a liberal columnist wrote that immigration reduces the wages of domestic workers who compete with immigrants and that the fiscal burden of low-wage immigrants is also pretty clear. His conclusion: Well need to reduce the inflow of low-skill immigrants. That same year, a Democratic senator wrote, When I see Mexican flags waved at proimmigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When Im forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration.

The blogger was Glenn Greenwald. The columnist was Paul Krugman. The senator was Barack Obama.

Prominent liberals didnt oppose immigration a decade ago. Most acknowledged its benefits to Americas economy and culture. They supported a path to citizenship for the undocumented. Still, they routinely asserted that low-skilled immigrants depressed the wages of low-skilled American workers and strained Americas welfare state. And they were far more likely than liberals today are to acknowledge that, as Krugman put it, immigration is an intensely painful topic because it places basic principles in conflict.

Today, little of that ambivalence remains. In 2008, the Democratic platform called undocumented immigrants our neighbors. But it also warned, We cannot continue to allow people to enter the United States undetected, undocumented, and unchecked, adding that those who enter our countrys borders illegally, and those who employ them, disrespect the rule of the law. By 2016, such language was gone. The partys platform described Americas immigration system as a problem, but not illegal immigration itself. And it focused almost entirely on the forms of immigration enforcement that Democrats opposed. In its immigration section, the 2008 platform referred three times to people entering the country illegally. The immigration section of the 2016 platform didnt use the word illegal, or any variation of it, at all.

A decade or two ago, says Jason Furman, a former chairman of President Obamas Council of Economic Advisers, Democrats were divided on immigration. Now everyone agrees and is passionate and thinks very little about any potential downsides. How did this come to be?

There are several explanations for liberals shift. The first is that they have changed because the reality on the ground has changed, particularly as regards illegal immigration. In the two decades preceding 2008, the United States experienced sharp growth in its undocumented population. Since then, the numbers have leveled off.

But this alone doesnt explain the transformation. The number of undocumented people in the United States hasnt gone down significantly, after all; its stayed roughly the same. So the economic concerns that Krugman raised a decade ago remain relevant today.

Whats Wrong With the Democrats?

A larger explanation is political. Between 2008 and 2016, Democrats became more and more confident that the countrys growing Latino population gave the party an electoral edge. To win the presidency, Democrats convinced themselves, they didnt need to reassure white people skeptical of immigration so long as they turned out their Latino base. The fastest-growing sector of the American electorate stampeded toward the Democrats this November, Salon declared after Obamas 2008 win. If that pattern continues, the GOP is doomed to 40 years of wandering in a desert.

As the Democrats grew more reliant on Latino votes, they were more influenced by pro-immigrant activism. While Obama was running for reelection, immigrants-rights advocates launched protests against the administrations deportation practices; these protests culminated, in June 2012, in a sit-in at an Obama campaign office in Denver. Ten days later, the administration announced that it would defer the deportation of undocumented immigrants who had arrived in the U.S. before the age of 16 and met various other criteria. Obama, The New York Times noted, was facing growing pressure from Latino leaders and Democrats who warned that because of his harsh immigration enforcement, his support was lagging among Latinos who could be crucial voters in his race for re-election.

Alongside pressure from pro-immigrant activists came pressure from corporate America, especially the Democrat-aligned tech industry, which uses the H-1B visa program to import workers. In 2010, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, along with the CEOs of companies including Hewlett-Packard, Boeing, Disney, and News Corporation, formed New American Economy to advocate for business-friendly immigration policies. Three years later, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates helped found FWD.us to promote a similar agenda.

This combination of Latino and corporate activism made it perilous for Democrats to discuss immigrations costs, as Bernie Sanders learned the hard way. In July 2015, two months after officially announcing his candidacy for president, Sanders was interviewed by Ezra Klein, the editor in chief of Vox. Klein asked whether, in order to fight global poverty, the U.S. should consider sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders. Sanders reacted with horror. Thats a Koch brothers proposal, he scoffed. He went on to insist that right-wing people in this country would love an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I dont believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country.

Sanders came under immediate attack. Voxs Dylan Matthews declared that his fear of immigrant labor is uglyand wrongheaded. The president of FWD.us accused Sanders of the sort of backward-looking thinking that progressives have rightly moved away from in the past years. ThinkProgress published a blog post titled Why Immigration Is the Hole in Bernie Sanders Progressive Agenda. The senator, it argued, was supporting the idea that immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs and hurting the economy, a theory that has been proven incorrect.

Sanders stopped emphasizing immigrations costs. By January 2016, FWD.uss policy director noted with satisfaction that he had evolved on this issue.

But has the claim that immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs actually been proved incorrect? A decade ago, liberals werent so sure. In 2006, Krugman wrote that America was experiencing large increases in the number of low-skill workers relative to other inputs into production, so its inevitable that this means a fall in wages.

Its hard to imagine a prominent liberal columnist writing that sentence today. To the contrary, progressive commentators now routinely claim that theres a near-consensus among economists on immigrations benefits.

There isnt. According to a comprehensive new report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Groups comparable to immigrants in terms of their skill may experience a wage reduction as a result of immigration-induced increases in labor supply. But academics sometimes de-emphasize this wage reduction because, like liberal journalists and politicians, they face pressures to support immigration.

Many of the immigration scholars regularly cited in the press have worked for, or received funding from, pro-immigration businesses and associations. Consider, for instance, Giovanni Peri, an economist at UC Davis whose name pops up a lot in liberal commentary on the virtues of immigration. A 2015 New York Times Magazine essay titled Debunking the Myth of the Job-Stealing Immigrant declared that Peri, whom it called the leading scholar on how nations respond to immigration, had shown that immigrants tend to complementrather than compete againstthe existing work force. Peri is indeed a respected scholar. But Microsoft has funded some of his research into high-skilled immigration. And New American Economy paid to help him turn his research into a 2014 policy paper decrying limitations on the H-1B visa program. Such grants are more likely the result of his scholarship than their cause. Still, the prevalence of corporate funding can subtly influence which questions economists ask, and which ones they dont. (Peri says grants like those from Microsoft and New American Economy are neither large nor crucial to his work, and that they dont determine the direction of my academic research.)

Academics face cultural pressures too. In his book Exodus, Paul Collier, an economist at the University of Oxford, claims that in their desperate [desire] not to give succor to nativist bigots, social scientists have strained every muscle to show that migration is good for everyone. George Borjas of Harvard argues that since he began studying immigration in the 1980s, his fellow economists have grown far less tolerant of research that emphasizes its costs. There is, he told me, a lot of self-censorship among young social scientists. Because Borjas is an immigration skeptic, some might discount his perspective. But when I asked Donald Davis, a Columbia University economist who takes a more favorable view of immigrations economic impact, about Borjass claim, he made a similar point. George and I come out on different sides of policy on immigration, Davis said, but I agree that there are aspects of discussion in academia that dont get sort of full view if you come to the wrong conclusion.

None of this means that liberals should oppose immigration. Entry to the United States is, for starters, a boon to immigrants and to the family members back home to whom they send money. It should be valued on these moral grounds alone. But immigration benefits the economy, too. Because immigrants are more likely than native-born Americans to be of working age, they improve the ratio of workers to retirees, which helps keep programs like Social Security and Medicare solvent. Immigration has also been found to boost productivity, and the National Academies report finds that natives incomes rise in aggregate as a result of immigration.

The problem is that, although economists differ about the extent of the damage, immigration hurts the Americans with whom immigrants compete. And since more than a quarter of Americas recent immigrants lack even a high-school diploma or its equivalent, immigration particularly hurts the least-educated native workers, the very people who are already struggling the most. Americas immigration system, in other words, pits two of the groups liberals care about mostthe native-born poor and the immigrant pooragainst each other.

One way of mitigating this problem would be to scrap the current system, which allows immigrants living in the U.S. to bring certain close relatives to the country, in favor of what Donald Trump in February called a merit based approach that prioritizes highly skilled and educated workers. The problem with this idea, from a liberal perspective, is its cruelty. It denies many immigrants who are already here the ability to reunite with their loved ones. And it flouts the countrys best traditions. Would we remove from the Statue of Liberty the poem welcoming the poor, the wretched, and the homeless?

A better answer is to take some of the windfall that immigration brings to wealthier Americans and give it to those poorer Americans whom immigration harms. Borjas has suggested taxing the high-tech, agricultural, and service-sector companies that profit from cheap immigrant labor and using the money to compensate those Americans who are displaced by it.

Unfortunately, while admitting poor immigrants makes redistributing wealth more necessary, it also makes it harder, at least in the short term. By some estimates, immigrants, who are poorer on average than native-born Americans and have larger families, receive more in government services than they pay in taxes. According to the National Academies report, immigrant-headed families with children are 15 percentage points more likely to rely on food assistance, and 12 points more likely to rely on Medicaid, than other families with children. In the long term, the United States will likely recoup much if not all of the money it spends on educating and caring for the children of immigrants. But in the meantime, these costs strain the very welfare state that liberals want to expand in order to help those native-born Americans with whom immigrants compete.

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Whats more, studies by the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam and others suggest that greater diversity makes Americans less charitable and less willing to redistribute wealth. People tend to be less generous when large segments of society dont look or talk like them. Surprisingly, Putnams research suggests that greater diversity doesnt reduce trust and cooperation just among people of different races or ethnicitiesit also reduces trust and cooperation among people of the same race and ethnicity.

Trump appears to sense this. His implicit message during the campaign was that if the government kept out Mexicans and Muslims, white, Christian Americans would not only grow richer and safer, they would also regain the sense of community that they identified with a bygone age. At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America, he declared in his inaugural address, and through our loyalty to our country, we will rediscover our loyalty to each other.

Liberals must take seriously Americans yearning for social cohesion. To promote both mass immigration and greater economic redistribution, they must convince more native-born white Americans that immigrants will not weaken the bonds of national identity. This means dusting off a concept many on the left currently hate: assimilation.

Promoting assimilation need not mean expecting immigrants to abandon their culture. But it does mean breaking down the barriers that segregate them from the native-born. And it means celebrating Americas diversity less, and its unity more.

Writing last year in American Sociological Review, Ariela Schachter, a sociology professor at Washington University in St. Louis, examined the factors that influence how native-born whites view immigrants. Foremost among them is an immigrants legal status. Given that natives often assume Latinos are undocumented even when they arent, it follows that illegal immigration indirectly undermines the status of those Latinos who live in the U.S. legally. Thats why conservatives rail against government benefits for undocumented immigrants (even though the undocumented are already barred from receiving many of those benefits): They know Americans will be more reluctant to support government programs if they believe those programs to be benefiting people who have entered the country illegally.

Liberal immigration policy must work to ensure that immigrants do not occupy a separate legal caste. This means opposing the guest-worker programsbeloved by many Democrat-friendly tech companies, among other employersthat require immigrants to work in a particular job to remain in the U.S. Some scholars believe such programs drive down wages; they certainly inhibit assimilation. And, as Schachters research suggests, strengthening the bonds of identity between natives and immigrants is harder when natives and immigrants are not equal under the law.

The next Democratic presidential candidate should say again and again that because Americans are one people, who must abide by one law, his or her goal is to reduce Americas undocumented population to zero. For liberals, the easy part of fulfilling that pledge is supporting a path to citizenship for the undocumented who have put down roots in the United States. The hard part, which Hillary Clinton largely ignored in her 2016 presidential run, is backing tough immigration enforcement so that path to citizenship doesnt become a magnet that entices more immigrants to enter the U.S. illegally.

Enforcement need not mean tearing apart families, as Trump is doing with gusto. Liberals can propose that the government deal harshly not with the undocumented themselves but with their employers. Trumps brutal policies already appear to be slowing illegal immigration. But making sure companies follow the law and verify the legal status of their employees would curtail it too: Migrants would presumably be less likely to come to the U.S. if they know they wont be able to find work.

Schachters research also shows that native-born whites feel a greater affinity toward immigrants who speak fluent English. Thats particularly significant because, according to the National Academies report, newer immigrants are learning English more slowly than their predecessors did. During the campaign, Clinton proposed increasing funding for adult English-language education. But she rarely talked about it. In fact, she ran an ad attacking Trump for saying, among other things, This is a country where we speak English, not Spanish. The immigration section of her website showed her surrounded by Spanish-language signs.

Democrats should put immigrants learning English at the center of their immigration agenda. If more immigrants speak English fluently, native-born whites may well feel a stronger connection to them, and be more likely to support government policies that help them. Promoting English will also give Democrats a greater chance of attracting those native-born whites who consider growing diversity a threat. According to a preelection study by Adam Bonica, a Stanford political scientist, the single best predictor of whether a voter supported Trump was whether he or she agreed with the statement People living in the U.S. should follow American customs and traditions.

In her 2005 book, The Authoritarian Dynamic, which has been heralded for identifying the forces that powered Trumps campaign, Karen Stenner, then a professor of politics at Princeton, wrote:

The next Democratic presidential nominee should commit those words to memory. Theres a reason Barack Obamas declaration at the 2004 Democratic National Convention that there is not a liberal America and a conservative America There is not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; theres the United States of America is among his most famous lines. Americans know that liberals celebrate diversity. Theyre less sure that liberals celebrate unity. And Obamas ability to effectively do the latter probably contributed to the fact that hea black man with a Muslim-sounding nametwice won a higher percentage of the white vote than did Hillary Clinton.

In 2014, the University of California listed melting pot as a term it considered a microaggression. What if Hillary Clinton had traveled to one of its campuses and called that absurd? What if she had challenged elite universities to celebrate not merely multiculturalism and globalization but Americanness? What if she had said more boldly that the slowing rate of English-language acquisition was a problem she was determined to solve? What if she had acknowledged the challenges that mass immigration brings, and then insisted that Americans could overcome those challenges by focusing not on what makes them different but on what makes them the same?

Some on the left would have howled. But I suspect that Clinton would be president today.

*Opening photo credits: AFP; Alain Jocard; Alfons Teruel / Eyeem; Bloomberg; Brooks Kraft; Chesnot; David McNew; David Ramos; Drew Angerer; Erik McGregor / Pacific Press / LightRocket; Frederic J. Brown; Gerard Julien; Getty; Hector Vivas / LatinContent; Jonathan Nackstrand; Lars Baron; Mike Roach / Zuffa; Omar Torres; Orlando Sierra; Paul Bradbury; Paul Morigi / WireImage; Pradeep Gaur / Mint; Rodin Eckenroth; Saul Loeb; Spencer Platt; Tasos Katopodis; Thomas Koehler / Photothek; Victor J. Blue; Vitaly Nevar / TASS; Zach Gibson

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How the Democrats Lost Their Way on Immigration - The Atlantic

Florida Democrats’ chairman ready to resign over racial remarks – Politico

One Democrat to whom Bittel spoke said he is ready to quit if hes asked. He is sorry. And he wants to make amends. | Charles Morse via YouTube

The embattled chairman of the Florida Democratic Party, Stephen Bittel, is prepared to quit if members of the legislative black caucus want him gone for dismissing them as childish amid a dispute at a million-dollar weekend fundraising gala, top Democrats tell POLITICO Florida.

Bittel compounded the controversy Saturday night by initially accusing the African-American lawmakers of playing the race card once they took offense, lawmakers say. But Bittel soon apologized and spent two days expressing contrition to party leaders.

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To clear the air, Bittel set up an 11:30 a.m. meeting Tuesday in his Miami Beach office with Senate Democratic leader Oscar Braynon and the future Democratic leader in the House, Kionne McGhee. Both are both African-Americans from Miami.

Stephen is a true believer in the party and if the party needs his head, hell give it, said one Democrat familiar with Bittels thinking. If Oscar or Kionne want him gone, hes gone.

Braynon, who spoke extensively with POLITICO about the controversy after it happened, said he didnt want to comment further but added that hes ready to sit down with Bittel to figure out a way forward. The two have had a fraught relationship ever since Braynon pulled the Senate Democrats elections machine out of the party once Bittel was elected in January.

McGhee said House Democrats also might withdraw from the party structure as well now. He wants to talk to Bittel first.

When someone asks to meet, out of respect, Ill meet, said McGhee. The question we have now is what is he going to do to make sure that 2018 is not jeopardized.

One reason neither lawmaker may ask for Bittels resignation: many Democrats think hes the best chairman for the party. Bittel, an independently wealthy developer and longtime Democratic donor, can still raise money.

Elected just six months ago on a pledge to unite the party and help it raise an astonishing $30 million, Bittel has done neither. Knowledgeable insiders have been sidelined. And some state lawmakers say they sensed the chairman doesnt understand the limits of their power and fundraising capacity in Tallahassee, where Republicans control the Legislature, the governors office and the three statewide Cabinet posts.

Ironically, Bittels divisive comments came right before the keynote speaker for the $1 million gala, former Vice President Joe Biden, talked about the need for unity and decency.

We have to make it clear what we stand for. We have to refocus our attention on how to unite America and the values for which we stand, said Biden. He also called out Bittel, an old friend and donor, and said he was crazy. Being chairman of a party, particularly in such a large state, is maybe the most thankless important job in the world.

By that point, Democratic lawmakers were anything but thankful.

Shortly before, Bittel gave the order to speed up the fundraising program at the event so Biden could give his speech and then get home to celebrate his 40th wedding anniversary. But Democratic House and Senate members were expecting to be recognized onstage. When informed by Braynon that lawmakers wouldnt like the slight, Bittel dismissed the concerns.

Braynons counterpart in the House, Rep. Janet Cruz of Tampa, was angry at the disrespect but Bittel responded with a quip about how much money was being raised. Another state senator, Lauren Book, said she approached Bittel about the same time, leading him to again boast about the success of the fundraiser.

But Bittel then went the extra step and said the black caucus members were acting like three-year-olds and childish, Braynon told POLITICO, adding that Bittel singled him out for being like a child.

Braynon was so angry that Democratic staffers almost forced him out of the room, which he left upon their advice.

The leader would have killed the chair, said a Democrat who witnessed the incident said. Why did he have to blame the black caucus? It was Cruz who was the first one really upset about it. It had nothing to do with race Bittel isnt a racist. But hes a rich white man who doesnt know that the things that come out of his mouth can be really offensive.

As word of the incident spread in the Diplomat hotel in Hollywood, members of the caucus demanded to speak with Bittel. Sen. Bobby Powell of West Palm Beach confronted Bittel about 1 a.m. Sunday. As they began to argue the raised voices could be heard in an adjoining room Bittel slipped again.

Why are you playing the race card? he asked, according to Democrats to whom Powell relayed the conversation.

Asked by POLITICO about Bittels comments, Powell wouldnt confirm or deny it, nor would a spokesman for Bittel.

McGhee, who showed up with Braynon and other caucus members after Powell found Bittel, almost chuckled in disbelief when he was asked about the encounter and the race card comments. McGhee said he doesnt think Bittel is a racist but needed to understand how out of line he was.

At the end of the day, the statement was made. We laid down the law to him about how we felt. We litigated this, McGhee said. Now the question at this point is what does Bittel do to unify this party?

For Bittel, it starts with him saying Im sorry repeatedly.

I have much to learn and I am committed to being better and learning from this mistake. I sincerely apologize, Bittel said in a written statement provided to POLITICO late Monday. I am working with Democratic leaders to mend fences, move forward and make our party stronger.

A big test for the party comes this summer during the special election for Floridas 40th Senate District in Miami. It was vacated earlier this year after Republican state Sen. Frank Artiles resigned for using a slang variant of the n-word in a heated exchange with black lawmakers.

One Democrat to whom Bittel spoke said he is ready to quit if hes asked. He is sorry. And he wants to make amends. A fundraiser who has worked with Bittel in the past said the chairman is now learning how tough the job is.

Hes not used to this. Hes used to being a big donor who gets ass-kissed by politicians and party leaders, or hes the developer who gets his way, said one longtime party insider. The whole time he thought the party was just run by idiots and all it would take is his leadership. Now look at where we are.

Sen. Book, a white lawmaker to whom Bittel first made the childish comments about the black caucus, said that she hopes this is an opportunity for everybody to continue to be sensitive to a topic we need to pay attention to. This initially had nothing to do with black lawmakers or Jewish lawmakers or Latino lawmakers. This had to do with lawmakers disrespected in our view.

Bittels style also rankled staffers at the Democratic National Committee, according to hacked emails released by the group Wikileaks last year. In one exchange, two DNC staffers joked about sidelining Bittel at a 2016 Miami fundraiser.

"Bittel said this morning he was coming so just plan on it, but he doesn't sit next to POTUS!" DNC national finance director Jordan Kaplan wrote in an email to a deputy, Alexandra Shapiro, at the time.

Yes Bittel will be sitting in the s-------t corner I can find, Shapiro responded.

After President Trumps surprise win in Florida, Democrats were despondent. They hadnt lost an open presidential seat in 16 years in Florida. Democrats who backed Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in his primary bid against Hillary Clinton partly blamed party elites for the loss. The division carried over into the Florida Democratic Party chair race where Bittel, a Clinton donor and friend of former DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, fended off challengers backed by Sanders supporters.

Soon after Bittel assumed office, Democratic operatives buzzed with speculation that he wanted to sideline Democrats loyal to the partys executive director, Scott Arceneaux, whos well-respected in Tallahassee and Washington and was leaving his post. Arceneaux wouldnt comment. Many were further surprised when Bittel decided to pass over the consultant who helped him win his chair race, Reggie Cardozo, who wouldnt comment.

Bittel, instead, picked an outsider from Idaho with little knowledge of Florida, Sally Boynton Brown, to be the partys executive director. Brown last month apologized for embarrassing remarks at a progressive caucus meeting in which she said poor voters are emotional beings who dont care enough about issues. Earlier in the year, Brown ran for DNC chair and caused a stir during a forum when she spoke about race relations and those in her party who dont get it.

My job is to shut other white people down when they want to say, oh, no, Im not prejudiced. Im a Democrat. Im accepting,' Brown said. We have to teach them how to communicate, how to be sensitive and how to shut their mouths if they are white.

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Florida Democrats' chairman ready to resign over racial remarks - Politico

What’s Wrong With the Democrats? – The Atlantic

The strategy was simple. A demographic wavelong-building, still-buildingwould carry the party to victory, and liberalism to generational advantage. The wave was inevitable, unstoppable. It would not crest for many years, and in the meantime, there would be losseslosses in the midterms and in special elections; in statehouses and in districts and counties and municipalities outside major cities. Losses in places and elections where the white vote was especially strong.

But the presidency could offset these losses. Every four years the wave would swell, receding again thereafter but coming back in the next presidential cycle, higher, higher. The strategy was simple. The presidency was everything.

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Anyone who examined the strategy that the Democratic Party has embraced ever more tightly in recent years could see its essential precariousness. And anyone could see that investing such grave hopes in the person of Hillary Clintonwho had lost the partys nomination to a little-known senator in 2008; who had struggled to win it against a little-known socialist eight years laterwas particularly risky.

But liberals fears were softened in 2016 by a widely shared belief: that the candidacy of Donald Trump would shatter the Republican Party, at least in the form in which we had long known it. His trail of wreckage would force a painful reckoning with the partys shortcomingsthe narrowness of its coalition, the cloistered cluelessness of its elites, its intramural disagreements about the future of the nation. After a season of Trumps destruction, the party would lie in rubble.

On November 8, that prophecy was realized, true in every regard, except that it described the Democrats. On Inauguration Day, the partys power ebbed to its lowest level since the 1920s.

If theres any consolation to the realization of terrible fears, of worst-case scenarios springing to life, its that they are invigorating. Donald Trumps presidency has rocked a long-complacent Democratic Party like nothing in recent history. Liberals, with their confidence that the trajectory of the country points in their direction, never had quite as much practice as conservatives in expressing their anger. Thats what makes the Resistancethe many marches, the seething hostility at town-hall meetings, the anti-Trump placards shouting at passersby from bungalow windowsa transformational break in the pattern.

How the Democrats Lost Their Way on Immigration

Leaderless and loud, the Resistance has become the motive power of the Democratic Party. Presidential hopefuls already strive to anticipate its wishes. Elected officials have restructured their political calculus to avoid getting on its wrong side. The feistiness and agitation of the moment are propelling the party to a new place.

But where? The question unnerves Democrats, because the party has no scaffolding. All the dominant leaders of the last two generationsthe Clintons, Barack Obamahave receded. Defeat discredited the partys foundational strategyor, at the very least, exposed it as a wishful description of a more distant future, rather than a clear plan for victory in the present. Resistance has given the Democrats the illusion of unity, but the reality is deeply conflicted. Two of the partys largest concernsrace and classreside in an increasing state of tension, a tension that will grow as the party turns toward the next presidential election.

To produce a governing majority, the party will need to survive an unsettling reckoning with itself. Donald Trump didnt just prevail over the Democrats; he called into doubt their old truths.

A year before his wife lost, Bill Clinton had a premonition of how things could go very wrong. He revealed his forebodingperhaps fittinglyat fund-raising events. He would hint at what he considered his wifes glaring vulnerability: the roiling discontent of the white working class. The travails of the group44 percent of eligible voterspreoccupied him. He could recite one grim statistic after another. Even at this early date in the campaign, he knew that their cultural alienation might place them beyond the reach of a Democrat. And while most pundits at that point still considered Trump the second coming of Herman Cain, a circus act rather than a serious candidate, Clinton feared Trumps ability to channel white-working-class rage. Hes a master brander and he[s] sensing sort of the emotional landscape of people hes selling to, Clinton told donors gathered in Atlanta in October 2015.

Hillary Clinton always had trouble getting right with the zeitgeist, and her aides worried about that flaw. She began her first presidential bid as her party exploded in anger over the Iraq War, an adventure she had sanctified in the Senate. The specter of that vote and the campaign that followed, the fear that the political moment might again turn against her, continued to haunt her closest aides, especially Neera Tanden, the head of the Center for American Progress and one of her longest-standing advisers. Five months before the 2016 Iowa caucus, Tanden warned that Clinton would be punished for supporting banking deregulationthe closest thing to an Iraq vote we have to face, she wrote her fellow members of the campaigns inner sanctum. Her analysis proved wrong in the particulars, but broadly captured a central tension of the campaign. Some in Clintons camp could clearly see that a large chunk of the country seethed against elites, yet the candidate could never quite understand the need to insulate herself from the ire, much less harness it.

At first, the challenge of Bernie Sanders looked like a gift. All of the Democrats with big benefactors and well-tended reputations sensed the futility of running against Clinton, because she had started with imposing poll numbers, a well-funded apparatus, and the goodwill of a party that felt her loyal service to Obama merited reward. That left her facing a cantankerous, aging democratic socialist with a small following. Even Sandersa luftmensch who ran his operation with about the same attentiveness he brings to getting dressedseemed to doubt the potential of his own candidacy. A year before the first primary, he told Elizabeth Warren that he would cease his campaign preparations if she wanted to run. He would have given her a clear lane, one former Sanders adviser told me. But Warren demurred. She had only recently arrived in the Senate, and it wasnt hard to imagine a fusillade of Clinton-campaign attacks, an opposition-research file disgorged, leaving her too damaged for future fights.

Sanders, however, would prove a flummoxing rival. To win the Democratic presidential nomination, it helps to secure the African American vote. But another path to victory involves rallying white voters with a populist bent. This can create an uncomfortable dynamic in presidential primaries, where race vies with class to become the defining concern of the party. Politicians rarely vocalize the tension. But the socialism of Bernie Sanderswhich hindered his efforts to explain the centrality of race to American lifemade this split less subterranean than usual.

Of course, Hillary Clinton would have preferred to avoid an argument about the primacy of race versus class. But African American voters provided her the surest path to primary victory. They gravitated to her, in no small measure out of loyalty to Obama. Where Clinton posed as the presidents anointed successor, Sanders questioned Obamas legacy and called for revolutionary change. He never dedicated himself to making meaningful inroads with African American or Latino voters, and so Clinton doubled down. After she lost New Hampshire in February, she began traveling with the grieving mothers of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and other African American casualties of violence. Criminal-justice issues became an elevated feature of her standard pitch.

This was an inversion of the 2008 primary campaign. Desperately attempting to forestall Barack Obama by collecting wins in Appalachia, Clinton posed then as the tribune of hardworking Americans, white Americans. But her reinvention last year followed the partys prevailing wisdom. The Democrats had slowly transformed themselves since the 1960s, when working-class voters of every ethnicity had been reliable constituents. As the party had shed white southerners, it had trodden less tentatively on issues of race. And the swell of immigration that had begun with the Johnson administrations liberalization of quotas had finally yielded enough citizens to lay a foundation for a cosmopolitan party. That direction suited white urban professionals, who considered themselves tolerant members of a globalized world. Working-class whites hadnt been lost completely, of course; they remained important to the party in places like the upper Midwest, and unions, however shrunken, continued to provide support. But it was the mlange of minorities, Millennials, and white professionals that provided the basis for the so-called Obama coalition. And if Clinton had carried over any lesson from the 2008 race, it was the necessity of mimicking Obamas tactics and methods, even if she sometimes produced only ersatz copies of them.

Sanders hardly represented a mortal threat to her nomination, but his campaign did real damage to her chances in November. Alert to her flaws, he portrayed her as a greedy insider, tightly tethered to Goldman Sachsan image that would reappear in the closing ads Trump ran against her. Clinton, meanwhile, could hardly take the African American vote for granteda worrying number of black Millennials distrusted her, and some blamed her husband for ushering in the age of mass incarceration. She needed to prove the authenticity of her critique of that system, which meant she returned to that issue far more than any strategist focused on a general election would have deemed prudent. As one Clinton aide told Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, the authors of Shattered: Inside Hillary Clintons Doomed Campaign, Our failure to reach out to white voters, like literally from the New Hampshire primary on, it never changed.

By the spring of 2016, one top Clinton adviser explained to me, the campaigns own polling showed that white voters without a college degree despised Clinton. The extent of their loathing was surprisingshe polled far worse with them than Obama ever had, especially in states like Ohio and Iowa. Trump compounded her challenge. From the moment he announced his candidacy, he aimed his message at the white working class. He pursued that group with steadfastness. The threat that he might capture an unusually large chunk of it persuaded Clinton to pursue professionals with even greater intensity in an attempt to offset Trumps potential gains.

With hindsight, its possible to see the risks of her strategy. Her campaign theorized that dentists, accountants, and middle managers needed to fully understand how Donald Trump surrounded himself with bigots and anti-Semites. From the start, she argued in a sharply worded speech in August, Donald Trump has built his campaign on prejudice and paranoia. Her campaign ads against Trump emphasized his misogyny. The attacks highlighted Trumps greatest weakness, but also played to his greatest strength. Trump had spent the entirety of his campaign trying to foment a culture war, and Clinton zealously joined it. He talked endlessly about political correctnesstrying to convince his voters that they werent just losing the debates over gay marriage or immigration, but that the elite wanted to banish them as bigots if they even dared to question the prevailing liberal view. Clinton boosted that cause when she told donors in September, To just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trumps supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. It was meant to be a sotto voce comment, but thats never how it works, as Mitt Romney could confirm.

Clinton apologized, but she didnt have any credibility to fall back on. She never fully met her most important political challenge: the need to both celebrate multiculturalism and also cushion the backlash against the celebration. A look back on some of the campaigns slogansto be fair, she reportedly didnt love any of themcaptures her difficulties on this score. First there was Im With Her, not exactly brimming with substance, aside from its plea for gender solidarity. Then she turned to Breaking Down Barriers, which also highlighted the historic nature of her candidacy, yet made no effort to appeal to either the self-interest or the patriotism of white men. Finally she settled on Stronger Together, which got closer to an appeal to all Americans. But it still read more like an indictment of Trumps intolerance than a vision for the nation. All the while, as Clinton groped for a summation, Trump never veered from the words stitched onto his red hat.

Whats worse, in focusing so intently on Trumps temperament, Clinton neglected to make a robust economic argument. Democratic presidential candidates have traditionally closed on a populist note, arguing that while Republicans are for the rich, Democrats fight for the working stiff. The pitch might sound hackneyed, but it has a solid record of bolstering support. Nonetheless, neither Clinton nor her campaign manager, Robby Mook, had any apparent interest in that appeal. They considered Trumps disreputable character the issue that would carry the election. One Clinton adviser describes watching drafts of speeches begin with a strong populist message. But with each revision, as the drafts advanced to the highest reaches of the campaign, those lines would steadily weaken and then disappear. So instead of having to rebut the traditional Democratic attack, Donald Trump came to own it. He ran ads that portrayed Clinton as a puppet of Wall Street. Trump never missed an opportunity to ding Crooked Hillary, caricaturing her as a self-righteous elite who bent the rules for her own gain.

It didnt need to be this way. While Clinton sought to copy Barack Obama, his example in fact suggested a more nuanced approach. Even though many on the left have come to consider him an avatar of the neoliberal establishment, Obama ran two of the most populist campaigns in recent American history. In 2008, he presented himself as a figure untainted by the prevailing political culture; he would arrive in Washington carried by a transformational gust, a prefiguring of Trumps promise to drain the swamp. In 2012, his campaign mercilessly pummeled Mitt Romney as the coldhearted representative of plutocracy.

And where Clinton found herself bogged down in the quagmire of a culture war, Obama had stepped around such debates. Confident that his campaign would generate overwhelming African American turnout, he celebrated a vision of one America that seemed carefully designed to assuage racist anxieties that he would favor one group at anothers expenseand more generally to reassure whites, particularly those past middle age and with an acute sense of cultural and economic anomie, that America wasnt kicking them to the side. (Indeed, his most effective ads against Romney sympathetically portrayed precisely those voters and blamed the Republican nominee for their suffering.) He spoke of his desire to broker a compromise on immigrationan issue he framed as a matter of good governance. His campaign explicitly targeted rural counties. Obama didnt believe he could win them, and by and large he didnt, but by redirecting populist anger and allaying cultural anxieties, he reduced his deficit among white noncollege voters to a tolerable margin. (When Bill Clinton asked his wifes campaign to dispatch him to such small towns in 2016, campaign officials refused, because it would take him away from cities with larger vote hauls.) This tactic enabled Obama to win the upper Midwest so decisively that many analysts began to describe the region as part of a blue wall.

That blue wall, of course, turned out to be less sound than Democrats allowed themselves to understand. In an election so close, any number of explanations for defeat are plausible. Hillary Clinton didnt battle just a demagogue, but also the adroit meddling of Vladimir Putin, the pious intervention of James Comey, and widespread misogyny. Still, the nagging question remains: If the Democrats couldnt muster a coalition of the cosmopolitan to take out Donald Trump, can they ever count on that coalition? Clintons defeat reflects badly on her candidacy, but also exposes the limits of the Democratic Party, which has sustained failures at nearly every tier of government over the past eight years.

Demographys long arc may yet favor the Democrats, but in the meantime the U.S. electoral system penalizes a party with support concentrated within and around metropolises. White voters without college educations remain a vast voting blocespecially important to Democrats in Senate races and in contests to control state governments. As the Democrats seek to recover, they need a deeper understanding of the forces that have driven these voters beyond the partys reach.

Over the decades, the Democratic Partys quest to understand the white working class kept doubling back to the suburbs of Detroit, to a county called Macomb. For a time, Macomb was a clich in political journalism, examined relentlessly as a symbol of the disaffected Reagan Democrats. But if the county was a trope, it became so thanks to the work of Stanley Greenberg.

After Ronald Reagans defeat of Walter Mondale in 1984, a drubbing for the ages, Democratic Party elders summoned Greenberg, a Yale political scientist turned freelance pollster. Once upon a time, Macomb was a testament to the force of the New Deal, a vision of middle-class life made possible by the fruits of American industry. The county rewarded Democrats for this prosperity in overwhelming numbers. John F. Kennedy carried it with 63 percent of the vote. But over the years, Macomb grew distant from the party, and then furious with it. The states party organization asked Greenberg to figure out the roots of voters estrangement.

Greenberg is diminutive and prone to mumbling. He wasnt an obvious choice to send out to connect with factory workers. But in the small focus groups he convened in the backs of restaurants and in hotel conference rooms, his style yielded brutal candor.

Many political analysts who puzzled over Democratic losses described how the backlash against the civil-rights era had propelled white voters away from liberalism, but none gave racism quite the same centrality as Greenberg did. He found a profound distaste for black Americans, a sentiment that pervaded almost everything that Macomb residents thought about government and politics. Denizens of Macombthe county was 97 percent whitedid little to disguise their animosity. African Americans, they complained, had benefited at their expense. Their tax dollars were funding a welfare state that plowed money into black communities, while politicians showed no concern for their own plight. (That plight was real: The auto industry, which provided the undergirding for middle-class life in Michigan, had collapsed in the face of foreign competition.)

Greenbergs study of Macomb became a canonical text for Democrats attempting to recover from a decade of pummeling. Bill Clinton hired him in 1992, and in his presidential campaign he spoke directly to the racial anxieties revealed in the focus groups. Clinton distanced himself from the welfare state, which he damned as bloated and inefficient. He promised to pour money into the middle class itself, through tax cuts and spending on education and health care. Lets forget about race and be one nation again, he told an audience in Macomb. Ill help you build the middle class back.

The strategy that Bill Clinton pursued worked, eroding the Republican advantage in the county. Then Barack Obama won Macomb in 2008, the first of his two victories there. Greenberg declared that Macomb had become normal and uninteresting. In a New York Times op-ed, he vowed to walk away from his great subject: Good riddance, my Macomb barometer.

That was a wishful farewell. Not only did Trump reclaim Macomb for the Republicanstrouncing Clinton by 12 percentage points therebut he turned the Democratic establishment back to Greenbergs central question about working-class whites: Did racism put many of them beyond reach? When Greenberg traveled to Michigan in February, to conduct his first focus groups in Macomb in nearly a decade, he was genuinely unsure of what he might find. Trumps naked appeals to racism were far more intense than anything he had ever witnessed. The scenes from Trumps rallies created a plausible impression that the president had activated long-suppressed feelings of hatred. To probe their disaffection, Greenberg pulled together voters who, for the most part, had defected from Obama to Trump, who had gone from voting for the first African American president to siding with his racist successor. I joined him as an observer.

Greenberg doesnt give his subjects a clear sense of why they have been gathered or what they have in common. When they figure out that they all belong to the same politically incorrect tribe, the shock of familiarity and solidarity, like a shot of whiskey, frees the conversation of inhibition, especially since many feel the stigma of supporting Trump.

Over the years, Greenberg had heard the worst from Macomb. Back in the 80s, he knew precisely the buzzwords that could ignite a torrent of racism. The mere mention of Detroit would send people into paroxysms of rage. Decades later, Detroit didnt provoke any extreme expressions of animus, only comments marveling that the city finally picked up the garbage and cleaned the streets of snow. When the moderator mentioned Flint, the largely African American city whose drinking water had been steeped in lead, the focus groups professed sympathy for the community. The lack of angry responses seemed to shock Greenberg. Theres so much less about race, he leaned over to tell me.

Prejudice, however, remained very real. The old complaints about African Americans had affixed themselves to immigrants. Dearborn, which has a thriving Muslim immigrant community, is a short drive away. Just as Macombs whites had once accused African Americans of prospering at their expense, members of Greenbergs focus groups spoke openly about being displaced by immigrants. We need to take care of home first, one participant said, as if the immigrant neighbors werent also living at home. When asked to explain their greatest hopes for Trump, many cited his promise to build a border wall.

There was a strong element of self-loathing in the hostile view of immigrants. A 60-year-old woman described her work as a cashier at Kroger. What she hated, she said, was waiting on immigrants who didnt bother to smile. They act like they cant do that, even. Another woman described going to sign up for Medicaid: Im looking around at all these people that cant even say hello to me in English. Greenbergs subjects had expected to occupy a higher rung in society. That they exist on par with newcomers to the country feels like a betrayal of what they thought to be the natural order.

Its one thing to know that nativism exists; its another to hear it espoused so casually in the presence of strangers. Many of the voters Greenberg had gathered seemed beyond the grasp of any plausible Democratic appeal, their hatred of immigrants racialized, paranoid, and unshakable. But not everyone harbored those convictions. To test their view of multiculturalism, Greenberg played a Coca-Cola ad that had aired a few weeks earlier, during the Super Bowl. The ad, a rendition of America the Beautiful sung in a babel of languages, represented the corporate bet on the Obama coalition. Plenty of people objected to it. I just dont know why they cant all sing it in English, since its America, one woman blurted out. But the ad also seemed to have performed its intended trick, spurring a patriotic appreciation for the ethnic patchwork of the country. The anger directed at the ad was counteracted by defenses of it. Thats the way America should be, one man explained. Multiculturals a good thingit really is.

The focus groups were designed to probe for weakness in Trumpism, to test lines of attack that might neutralize his appeal. Once Greenberg has earned a rooms trust, he introduces new ideas to it. His moderator asked the subjects whether it worried them that Trump had stocked his administration with Wall Street chieftains. That piece of news, it seemed, hadnt traveled widely in Macomb, and it consistently rattled the groups. Its going to be a lot of the same old garbage, one man groused. Concerns about Trumps temperament did nothing to dislodge the participants supportthe connection these voters felt with Trump was personal and deepbut the fact that he might align with traditional Republicans annoyed them to no end. (The groups reacted angrily when shown photos of Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell. People described them as shifty and for the upper class.) What many Macomb voters value about Trump is that he represents an unaligned force in American politics. Thats the very quality that in earlier election cycles led them to Obama.

The spectacle of Democratic elites flagellating themselves for their growing distance from these voters has the whiff of the comicthe office-tower anthropologists seeking to understand Appalachia from their Kindles. But theres another way of putting the problem. If the stagnation of the middle class and the self-reinforcing advantages of the rich are among the largest issues of our time, the Democrats have done a bad job of attuning themselves to them. The party that has prided itself on representing regular people has struggled to make a dent in the problemand at times has given the impression of indifference to it. A healthy republic cant afford for a seething populace to fall deeper into its hostilities. A healthy party, arguably, ought never to write off a whole category of voters. Greenbergs focus groups begin to hint at a way that Democrats can stay true to their principles and still reverse some of their losses with the white working classbut will their leaders pursue that path?

Its hard to forecast a front-runner for the 2020 presidential nomination so many years in advance. Anita Dunn, the communications czar in the early days of the Obama White House, told me in March that a group of party insiders had recently met socially and compiled a list of potential contenders, both those actively exploring a run and those who were likely mulling the idea. It had 28 plausible names on itand that didnt include oddballs with a delusional sense of their own potential. Donald Trump profited from such a densely populated Republican field in 2016, which raises the possibility of an outsider similarly prevailing in a many-sided melee among Democrats.

The current politics of the Democratic Party make it less likely than usual that the nominee will be a centrist in the traditional mold. During the Democrats long losing streaks in the late 20th century, the party ritualistically engaged in postmortems that propelled it toward the center. That was the natural cycle of politics: Getting repeatedly clubbed by conservatives suggested trekking in a more conservative direction. But as a candidate, Trump placed little priority on traditional conservative positions, and often flouted them. His victory suggests a very different set of lessons, lessons in tune with the mood of the Democratic Partys base.

Since 2008, energies have been building on the leftfueled by growing inequality, mass incarceration, and the inevitable frustration with a party that held the White House for eight years but couldnt deliver everything activists wanted. Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter arose. A self-proclaimed democratic socialist captured 43 percent of the primary vote. Then Trump was elected, an event that was received by the party as a catastrophe and that has extended the activist spirit to a far broader audience.

Anger and activism are an opportunity for Democrats to grow their nucleus of supporters motivated to vote in midterm elections. The main question is whether those energies will be channeled in a way that reinforces the long-building demographic divide in American politics or in a way thatat least to some extentblurs it. Or to put it another way: whether the Democrats accept the continued outflow of the white working class into the arms of the GOP as a fait accompli, or whether they try to stanch it.

There are in fact two different lefts in bloom today, with differing understandings of American politics. One strain practices what its detractors call identity politicsit exists to combat the bias and discrimination that it believes is built into the system. What it seeks isnt just the protection of minorities and womens rights, but the validation of minorities and women in the eyes of the national culture, which it believes has marginalized them.

The cultural left was on the rise for much of the Obama era (and arguably, with the notable exception of Bill Clintons presidency, for much longer). It squares, for the most part, with the worldview of socially liberal whites, and is given wind by the idea that demography is destiny. It has a theory of the electorate that suits its interests: It wants the party to focus its attentions on Texas and Arizonastates that have growing percentages of Latinos and large pockets of suburban professionals. (These states are also said to represent an opportunity because the party has failed to maximize nonwhite turnout there.) It celebrates the openness and interdependence embodied in both globalization and multiculturalism.

While this cultural left has sprung into vogue, the economic left has also been reenergized. It has finally recovered from a long abeyance, a wilderness period brought on by the decay of organized labor and the libertarian turn of the postCold War years. As the financial crash of 2008 worked its way through the Democratic Partys intellectual system, the economic left migrated from the fringe protests of Occupy Wall Street to just outside the mainstream. While the cultural left champions a coalition of the ascendant, the economic left imagines a coalition of the despondent. It seeks to roll back the dominance of finance, to bust monopolies, to curb the predations of the market. It wants to ply back the white working-class votersclustered in the upper Midwestwhom Greenberg deemed persuadable.

Neither strain of activism has much disagreement with the broad goals of the other. On paper, they can peaceably coexist within the same platform. But political parties can have only one main theory of the electorate at any given timeand the prevailing theory tends to prioritize one ideology. The Republican Partys pursuit of the South shaped its view of race; the Democratic Partys wooing of professionals led it to embrace globalization.

The tensions between the cultural left and the economic left were evident in the last Democratic primary, and they have persisted. In a November talk after the election, Bernie Sanders railed against identity politics with an abandon that would have been foolish on the campaign trail. It is not good enough for somebody to say, Im a woman, vote for me, he complained. In a way, this squabbling is a prelude to the next presidential primary, a contest that will be packed with candidates, each attempting to show him- or herself as the truest champion of minorities or women or the working and middle classes. Seeking victory, candidates will accuse their competitors of not authentically believing in the cause they themselves elevate most highly.

In March, I visited Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, one of the many denizens of Capitol Hill widely thought to be considering a presidential run in 2020. When I stopped by his office, late in the evening, he was sporting an Apple Watch and preparing to speak at the SXSW tech conference in Austin, Texas. The semiotics of Cory Booker are highly intentional. He is the embodiment of the Obama coalitionhis moderate economic views comfort professionals while his pursuit of racial justice pleases the cultural left. On the wall of his office hangs a map of Newarks Central Ward, a high-mileage conversation piece that allows him to note that he still lives in the same poor, mostly black neighborhood where he launched his career: I go back and live in the community with median income for individuals of $14,000 a year. At the same time, he has defended Wall Street and Big Pharmapositions that endear him to elites.

Just before making my way to Booker, I had met with Bernie Sanders. Interviewing Sanders requires some fortificationand my exchange ended when he peremptorily dismissed me from his office for asking a question about his political relationship with Elizabeth Warren. (Sanders had expected Warren to endorse him in the 2016 primary, and her failure to do so sent him into a funk.) I recounted the episode to Booker, along with Sanderss thoughts about the future of the Democratic Party, which were characteristically splenetic: Whatever the Democratic Party has been doing for the last several decades has been a dismal failure, he had grumbled. But Booker waved this argument away. Ive heard the dire assessments before, he told me.

Booker said that he has no interest in high-minded discussions about the future of the party and pointed to the map on the wall. I want my voters to know that I am authentically fighting for them. He wanted me to know that his political program consisted of an unbending commitment to his communityand that he had little patience with attempts to change the partys image in order to appease critics of the cultural left. I dont see any evidence of a problem with so-called identity politics, he told me. The term itself bothered him, he said: Too many people were throwing it around without bothering to define what they meant by it.

The underlying moral logic of Bookers case is unassailable. Identity politics might make for a fair description of the environment on some college campuses. But the issues that Booker described as his driving passionthe depredations of private prisons, hefty sentences for nonviolent drug offendersare hardly akin to protesting that a cafeterias attempt at bnh m is cultural appropriation. Recent (and compelling) scholarship blames liberals for their complicity in the scourge of mass incarceration, what Booker calls the new Jim Crow, a term he borrows from the title of Michelle Alexanders 2010 book. This critique of the party, which lands on Bill Clinton and the tough-on-crime era over which he presided, is harsh and fair. Over the past few years, Clinton himself has conceded the excesses of his administrations agenda. Hillary Clinton was pushed to apologize for a speech she gave in 1996 fomenting fear of superpredators. And in fact, her campaign went further than Barack Obamas had in blaming structural racism and implicit bias for the struggles of many African Americans.

This belated recognition makes the present moment fraught. After years of neglect, African Americans have finally received a spoonful of the attention that should go to the partys most loyal voting bloc. The prospect of the partys attention turning back to the same white working class that rejects multicultural America will not be met eagerly by many on the leftparticularly given the shadow cast by the politics and policies of Bill Clintons presidency.

As Booker pressed his case, it was not hard to imagine the campaign he might run. Racial and criminal-justice issues would provide him a platform, and his point of differentiation would be his willingness to trumpet it to the whitest audiencesthe starkest evidence of the authenticity he claims. He joked about being asked to stump for senators in red states (Are you bringing me out because of the large black vote?). More earnestly, he said that the skin color of his audience wouldnt cause him to make any adjustment: The message to Montana voters is going to be no different from that in Newark or elsewhere. Reduced to its essence, his strategy would seem a straight continuation of Hillary Clintons.

Bookers opposite number, in some ways, is Elizabeth Warren, the great hope of the populist left. Before there was a resistance to Trump, Warren had prefigured its combative style. In moments designed to spread virally across Facebook, she would ask sharp, angry questions of bankers and regulators. (Did you have your eyes stitched closed? she said last year to a former Federal Reserve official who was testifying that nothing in the data had suggested a mortgage meltdown in the run-up to the 2008 crash.) Her latest book is called This Fight Is Our Fight. The book before that: A Fighting Chance.

I first spoke with Warren just after she lucked into another such viral moment. The night before, Mitch McConnell had stopped her from speaking out against Jeff Sessionss nomination for attorney general. In words destined for college-feminist T-shirts, he accused Warren of transgressing a rule intended to preserve the Senates bonhomie: She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted. As I walked with Warren across the Capitol, she seemed almost punch-drunk after a night of fawning press coverage and little sleep. She stepped with the bounce of a lottery winner. A few weeks earlier, she had found herself reamed by anti-Trump forces for voting in committee to confirm Ben Carson to the Cabinet, a vote that was unexpectedly condemned as a concession to tyranny. McConnell had restored her bona fides.

Warrens social-media moments create the impression that she is radical. But in fact, she didnt spend her youth protesting, and she never joined a movement. Voter-registration records from the early 90s list her as a Republican. I sound like I come from the left to people on the left, she told me. I dont sound that way to a lot of folks on the right, or a lot of people who are just fundamentally apolitical.

Nor is Warrens driving obsession wealth redistribution. Thats important politically, because many Americans simply dont begrudge wealth, and inequality as a clarion call hasnt stuck. (Indeed, Democrats have begun to shift away from inequality as a label for what ails Americas economy and culture. Some fear that white voters who are predisposed to racial resentments hear the word as code for a desire to transfer wealth from whites to blacks.)

Rather, Warren is most focused on the concept of fairness. A course she taught early in her career as a law professor, on contracts, got her thinking about the subject. (Fairness, after all, is a contracts fundamental purpose.) A raw, moralistic conception of fairnessthat people shouldnt get screwedwould become the basis for her crusading. Although she shares Bernie Sanderss contempt for Wall Street, she doesnt share his democratic socialism. I love marketsI believe in markets! she told me. What drives her to rage is when bankers conspire with government regulators to subvert markets and rig the game. Over the years, she has claimed that it was a romantic view of capitalism that drew her to the Republican Partyand then the partys infidelity to market principles drove her from it.

Trump managed to exploit populist anger in part because he could go places ideologically that no Democrat would ever travel. As a matter of politics and policy, Democrats will never be the party of economic nationalism. Its voters are, on balance, more globalist than the Republican base. They tend to live in places that have prospered from trade and technology. They typically support immigration. But Warren has begun to outline the possibilities of a new center-left populismone that gets beyond wealth redistribution alone.

At the core of Warrens populism is a phobia of concentrated economic power, an anger over how big banks and big businesses exploit Washington to further their own interests at the expense of ordinary people. This fear of gigantism is a storied American tradition, descended from Thomas Jefferson, even if it hasnt recently gotten much airtime within the Democratic Party. It justifies itself in the language of individualismrights, liberty, freedomnot communal obligation.

Theres a growing consensus among center-left economists that the dominance of entire industries by a few enormous companies is one of the defining economic problems of the era. The issue has gravitated toward the mainstream of Democratic Party thinking partly due to the work of Barack Obamas in-house economist, Jason Furman, a protg of former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. Furman revolted against the behavior of business leaders who came to call at the White House. Many of them didnt seem especially committed to capitalism. With their privileged access, they groveled for favors that would further their dominance. They were like the Chinese, he told me recently. They craved certainty. They wanted everything planned.

Everyone can plainly see the lack of competition in many sectorsthe way that there are five big banks, four big airlines, one dominant social-media company, one maker of EpiPens. Whats more, a small set of institutional investorsBlackRock, Fidelity, Vanguardholds stock in a vast percentage of public companies, so even sectors that look somewhat competitive are less so than they appear. CVS and Walgreens, for instance, have a strikingly similar set of major shareholders. The same is true for Apple and Microsoft.

Furman argues that such business concentration is a leading cause of inequality and wage stagnation. Warren has come to believe in this same idea. As a senator, she can see how the ills of financethe industrys concentration, its abuse of political powerhave been replicated across the American economy. Last June in Washington, she gave an important speech, naming a long new list of enemiesoligopolistic companies like Comcast and Google and Walmart, which she blamed for sapping the life from the American economy. When Big Business can shut out competition, entrepreneurs and small businesses are denied their shot at building something new and exciting. In making a Jeffersonian argument, she has begun to deploy Jeffersonian rhetorical trappings. As a people, we understood that concentrated power anywhere was a threat to liberty everywhere, she argued. Competition in America is essential to liberty in America.

Warren has not committed to running for president, either publicly or, according to close associates of hers, privately. But if she does run, she will likely seek to channel working-class anger toward behemoth firms, their executives, and the government officials who coddle them. Its not a terribly complicated case to build, since the headlines are so packed with the rent-seeking exploits of those firms: the continued predations of banks on their own customers; airline overbooking; life-saving allergy injections that cost hundreds of dollars; cable companies exacting ever-higher fees; the exposure of low-level workers to such erratic hours that it becomes impossible to establish a daily routine; a broad indifference to consumers.

The approach exudes a Trumplike hostility to Washington elites, but not necessarily to government. And nearly the entire Democratic agenda can be justified through its prism: Obamacare preserves freedom and loosens corporations grip on their employees, by allowing workers to switch jobs without fear of losing health insurance. Criminal-justice reform is an effort to secure liberty and equality from an abusive apparatus of the state.

A turn toward populism will never be enough to win back a state like West Virginia, which is now deep-red. And there are legitimate questions about whether a strident former Harvard professor, no matter her Oklahoma roots, can effectively purvey that message to a sufficiently broad audience. But Warrens brand of populism could help cool white-working-class hostility toward the Democrats and persuade the likes of Greenbergs focus-group members to switch allegiance again. Empathy with economic disappointment, and even anger over the status quo, might reduce the sense that Democrats are perpetrators of the status quo. And liberal populism would take the party beyond ineffectual arguments about Trumps temperament. A populist critique of Trump would point to his fraudulence as an enemy of the system, a fraudulence that perfectly illustrates everything wrong with plutocracy.

Whether or not Warren runs for president, evidence for the resurgence of liberal populism can now be seen in numerous parts of the Democratic establishmentnot least in the barometrically sensitive form of Chuck Schumer, whose new job as the Senates minority leader demands that he understand and distill the mood of his caucus. This March, I met him in his ornate lair just off the floor of the Senate. When I entered his office, Schumer was compressed into the corner of an antique sofa, his tie loosened and his feet resting on a coffee table.

The populists have never considered Schumer one of their own. But as he riffed about the trajectory of the party, he mouthed their talking points. Insufficient fidelity to populist ideas, he argued, had cost Democrats the election: We didnt have a strong, boldpopulist, if you willeconomic message. He blasted financial elites, monopolies, and Chinese mercantilism. These werent stray observations. He has included Warren and Sanders on his Senate leadership team, and traveled with Sanders to rally support for Obamacare in Macomb County.

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The partys movement toward populism, ironically, could also be seen well before Election Dayin the guts of the Clinton campaign. Clinton leaned heavily on Elizabeth Warrens allies to craft her regulatory apparatus. Heather Boushey, who led economic-policy planning for Clintons transition team, told me, This was teed up to be the most progressive administration in recent American history. Theres a certain tragedy to that description. Clinton had developed what was in many ways a populist agenda, but she apparently could never get past her own self-consciousness about Wall Street speeches and fund-raising in the Hamptons to make these issues her own.

To win again, the Democrats dont need to adopt an alien agenda or back away from policies aimed at racial justice. But their leaders would be well advised to change their rhetorical priorities and more directly address the countrys bastions of gloom. The party has been crushednot just in the recent presidential election, but in countless down-ballot electionsby its failure to develop a message that can resonate with people beyond the core members of the Obama coalition, and by its unwillingness to blare its hostility to crony capitalism. Polling by the group Priorities USA Action shows that a stunning percentage of the voters who switched their allegiance from Obama to Trump believe that Democratic economic policies favor the rich42 percent, nearly twice the number who consider that to be true of Trumps agenda.

The makings of a Democratic majority are real. Demographic advantages will continue to accrue to the left. The party needs only to add to its coalition on the margins and in the right patches on the map. Doing that does not require the abandonment of any moral principles; persuasion is a different category of political activity from pandering. (On page 60 in this issue, Peter Beinart describes how Democrats might alter their language and policies regarding immigration to broaden appeal without sacrificing their principles.) A decent liberalism, not to mention a savvy party, shouldnt struggle to accord dignity and respect to citizens, even if it believes some of them hold abhorrent views.

Victories in the culture wars of the past decade seemed to come so easily to liberals that they created a measure of complacency, as if those wars had been won with little cost. In actuality, the losers seethed. If the Democrats intend to win elections in 2018, 2020, and beyond, they require a hardheaded realism about the country that they have recently lackedabout the perils of income stagnation, the difficulties of moving the country to a multicultural future, the prevalence of unreason and ire. For a Democratic majority to ultimately emerge, the party needs to come to terms with the fact that it hasnt yet arrived.

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