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Since lastyears presidential election, progressives have consistently stated that President Donald Trumps election was not a victory for right-wing politics over progressive politics, but a victory for populism over the status quo. This, many have argued, is the key takeaway from 2016, which saw the Democratic Party lose control of all three branches of government, along with the majority of state legislatures and governorships.

Not surprisingly, the party establishment has yet to fully accept this verdict, and there remains an obstinateresistanceto populism within the Democratic Partys ranks. Indeed, many continue to insist that the 2016 election was a disaster because Democrats were too progressive, rather than beingtoo much in line with the Establishment.

This perspective was dealt yet another blow this week, however, when two relatively minor elections in the Northeast provided further confirmation that populism is the pragmatic way forward for Democrats.

The first was in New Yorks Long Island, where Christine Pellegrino, a progressive and Bernie Sanders delegate at last years Democratic National Convention, was elected to the New York State Assemblyon Tuesday. The significance here is that just six months ago, Donald Trump won by a whopping 23 points in this Republican-leaning suburban district, where Pellegrino becomes the first Democrat to hold the Assembly seat, according to Newsday. In the Nation, John Nicholssummed up this Berniecrat candidate and her successful populist campaign:

Pellegrino, a founding member of the group Long Island Activists, which was born out of the Bernie Sanders movement, ran an edgy anti-corruption campaign that recognized the mood of voters who are frustrated with politicians of both major parties. [And] it worked. The progressive won 58 percent of the vote her conservative foes 42 percent.

The second noteworthy election for Democrats took place in New Hampshire, where Edie DesMarais became the first Democrat to win astate House seat in Wolfeboro,a longtime Republican stronghold in the rural swing state.This successful effort is the first crack in the Republican majority, and the initial sign of Democratic energy translating into electoral victory in the aftermath of the 2016 election, declared the New Hampshire branch of the Democratic Party on its official website.

At first glance these two local elections may appear inconsequential, but their implications should be clear enough. These Democratic victories in Trump country obviously signal that a big electoral backlash reminiscent of 2010 may be upon us and that Trumps toxic brand is beginning to contaminate other Republican candidates. The presidents approval rating continues to drop to historic lows, and even his base about 30 percent of the electorate, give or take appears to be shrinking.The chaotic and scandal-ridden first months of Trumps presidency have generated widespread discontent, and there is no telling how big Democrats could win in the 2018 midterm elections.

Of course, it would be quite a gamble for Democrats to rely solely on Trumps repellent nature to propel them to victory next year. If we learned anything about political strategy from 2016, it is that going after a deplorable figure like Trump for being deplorablewill only get you so far, and that victory is doubtful without a compelling message that appeals to the populist spirit of today. (Though many Hillary Clinton loyalists have maintained that hercampaign had a strong and progressive message, consider this: The vast majority of Clinton campaign ads focused exclusively on personality rather than policy more so than for any other candidate going back to at least 2000.)

No matter how unpopular Trump gets and at this rate it wouldnt be surprising if his approval rating in the future dips below Congress notoriously low rating Democrats would be foolish to think they can revert to business as usual and still lead a successful resistance. If there is anything more anathema to the American electorate than the boorish president, it is the corrupt and arrogant Washington establishment.

The election of a Berniecrat like Pellegrino in a district that went overwhelmingly forTrump reveals the potential and popular appeal of left-wing populism. If the Democratic Party is smart, it will embrace Pellegrinos style of politics. Bold populism that puts working families issues front and center. This is how we win in Trump country, declared Bill Lipton, the state director of the Working Families Party, on Tuesday while commenting on Pellegrinos big win. This is the lesson for Democrats around the country.

Liptons views are supported by the facts. Progressive populism is the path to victory for Democrats in 2018 and 2020.And though populism on the right triumphed in 2016, more and more Americans are coming to see it as the political sham it is, without any real ideas about how to confront the problems we face today. With any luck, the disastrous Trump administration will serve to discredit reactionary populism for a generation. But anti-Establishment anger is unlikely to die down, as many Beltway insiders doubtless hope. As long as the government is dominated by big money and special interests, it seems likely that the Establishment will have to keep fending off popular revolt.

The week concludedwith a special election for the sole congressional seat in Montana between Republican Greg Gianforte and progressive Democrat Rob Quist. The race entered the national spotlight after Gianforte assaulted a reporter for the Guardian the day before the election. (This unlikely had much of an impact, however, as 70 percent of votes were cast early.) Gianforte came out on top, winning a seat Republicans have held for 24 years and counting, but it took millions of dollars in outside spending,and his victory was hardly decisive compared with Trumps 20-point win in the state last November. As the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committees chairman, Rep. Ben Lujn,put it after the election, Republicans should be worried that theyve had to dump so many dollars in to try to defend a district that they shouldnt have had to spend a penny in.

Trump was elected six months ago because he had the perfect opponent in Hillary Clinton, who personified the Washington establishment. Had the billionaire faced a genuine populist on the left, he would probably be at Trump Tower today, still tweeting impulsively about how the election had been rigged. This past week has signaled an approachingelectoral backlash that could dwarf the Tea Party backlash of2010.

But if Democrats hope to retake control of Congress and send Trump packing, they will have to do much more than point out the well-known characterflaws of the president, and galvanize millions of Americans into taking action with a bold,populist and progressive platform.

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Berniecrats are winning in Trump country: Why populism is the pragmatic way forward for Democrats - Salon

New York Times

Georgia Democrats Know Close Won't Count This Time - The New ... New York Times Wanda Jackson-James and Felix Saylor, volunteers with the New Georgia Project, which encourages minority political participation, canvassed an apartment ... and more »

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Georgia Democrats Know Close Won't Count This Time - The New ... - New York Times

The story of Greg Gianforte, a fiend who just wiped out a Democrat in a congressional race about ten minutes after being charged with assaulting a reporter, is dj vu all over again.

How low do you have to sink to lose an election in this country? Republicans have been trying to answer that question for years. But they've been unable to find out, because Democrats somehow keep failing to beat them.

There is now a sizable list of election results involving Republican candidates who survived seemingly unsurvivable scandals to win higher office.

The lesson in almost all of these instances seems to be that enormous numbers of voters would rather elect an openly corrupt or mentally deranged Republican than vote for a Democrat. But nobody in the Democratic Party seems terribly worried about this.

Gianforte is a loon with a questionable mustache who body-slammed Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs for asking a question about the Republican health care bill. He's the villain du jour, but far from the worst exemplar of the genre.

New Yorkers might remember a similar congressional race from a few years ago involving a Staten Island nutjob named Michael Grimm. The aptly named Grimm won an election against a heavily funded Democrat despite being under a 20-count federal corruption indictment. Grimm had threatened on camera to throw a TV reporter "off a fucking balcony" and "break [him] in half like a boy." He still beat the Democrat by 13 points.

The standard-bearer for unelectable candidates who were elected anyway will likely always be Donald Trump. Trump was caught admitting to sexual assault on tape and openly insulted almost every conceivable demographic, from Mexicans to menstruating women to POWs to the disabled; he even pulled out a half-baked open-mic-night version of a Chinese accent. And still won.

Gianforte, Trump and Grimm are not exceptions. They're the rule in modern America, which in recent years has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to vote for just about anybody not currently under indictment for serial murder, so long as that person is not a Democrat.

The list of winners includes Tennessee congressman Scott Desjarlais, a would-be "family values" advocate. Desjarlais, a self-styled pious abortion opponent, was busted sleeping with his patients and even urging a mistress to get an abortion. He still won his last race in Bible country by 30 points.

The electoral results last November have been repeated enough that most people in politics know them by heart. Republicans now control 68 state legislative chambers, while Democrats only control 31. Republicans flipped three more governors' seats last year and now control an incredible 33 of those offices. Since 2008, when Barack Obama first took office, Republicans have gained somewhere around 900 to 1,000 seats overall.

There are a lot of reasons for this. But there's no way to spin some of these numbers in a way that doesn't speak to the awesome unpopularity of the blue party. A recent series of Gallup polls is the most frightening example.

Unsurprisingly, the disintegrating Trump bears a historically low approval rating. But polls also show that the Democratic Party has lost five percentage points in its own approval rating dating back to November, when it was at 45 percent.

The Democrats are now hovering around 40 percent, just a hair over the Trump-tarnished Republicans, at 39 percent. Similar surveys have shown that despite the near daily barrage of news stories pegging the president as a bumbling incompetent in the employ of a hostile foreign power, Trump, incredibly, would still beat Hillary Clinton in a rematch today, and perhaps even by a larger margin than before.

If you look in the press for explanations for news items like this, you will find a lot of them. Democrats may have some difficulty winning elections, but they've become quite adept at explaining their losses.

According to legend, Democrats lose because of media bias, because of racism, because of gerrymandering, because of James Comey and because of Russia (an amazing 59 percent of Democrats still believe Russians hacked vote totals).

Third-party candidates are said to be another implacable obstacle to Democratic success, as is unhelpful dissension within the Democrats' own ranks. There have even been whispers that last year's presidential loss was Obama's fault, because he didn't campaign hard enough for Clinton.

The early spin on the Gianforte election is that the Democrats never had a chance in Montana because of corporate cash, as outside groups are said to have "drowned" opponent Rob Quist in PAC money. There are corresponding complaints that national Democrats didn't do enough to back Quist.

A lot of these things are true. America is obviously a deeply racist and paranoid country. Gerrymandering is a serious problem. Unscrupulous, truth-averse right-wing media has indeed spent decades bending the brains of huge pluralities of voters, particularly the elderly. And Republicans have often, but not always, had fundraising advantages in key races.

But the explanations themselves speak to a larger problem. The unspoken subtext of a lot of the Democrats' excuse-making is their growing belief that the situation is hopeless and not just because of fixable institutional factors like gerrymandering, but because we simply have a bad/irredeemable electorate that can never be reached.

This is why the "basket of deplorables" comment last summer was so devastating. That the line would become a sarcastic rallying cry for Trumpites was inevitable. (Of course it birthed a political merchandising supernova.) To many Democrats, the reaction proved the truth of Clinton's statement. As in: we're not going to get the overwhelming majority of these yeehaw-ing "deplorable" votes anyway, so why not call them by their names?

But the "deplorables" comment didn't just further alienate already lost Republican votes. It spoke to an internal sickness within the Democratic Party, which had surrendered to a negativistic vision of a hopelessly divided country.

Things are so polarized now that, as Georgia State professor Jennifer McCoy put it on NPR this spring, each side views the other not as fellow citizens with whom they happen to disagree, but as a "threatening enemy to be vanquished."

The "deplorables" comment formalized this idea that Democrats had given up on a huge chunk of the population, and now sought only to defeat and subdue their enemies.

Many will want to point out here that the Republicans are far worse on this score. No politician has been more divisive than Trump, who explicitly campaigned on blaming basically everyone but middle American white people for the world's problems.

This is true. But just because the Republicans win using deeply cynical and divisive strategies doesn't mean it's the right or smart thing to do.

Barack Obama, for all his faults, never gave in to that mindset. He continually insisted that the Democrats needed to find a way to reach lost voters. Even in the infamous "guns and religion" episode, this was so. Obama then was talking about the challenge the Democrats faced in finding ways to reconnect with people who felt ignored and had fled to "antipathy toward people who aren't like them" as a consequence.

Even as he himself was the subject of vicious and racist rhetoric, Obama stumped in the reddest of red districts. In his post-mortem on the Trump-Clinton race, he made a point of mentioning this that in Iowa he had gone to every small town and fish fry and VFW hall, and "there were some counties where I might have lost, but maybe I lost by 20 points instead of 50 points."

Most people took his comments to be a dig at Clinton's strategic shortcomings she didn't campaign much in many of the key states she lost but it was actually more profound than that. Obama was trying to point out that people respond when you demonstrate that you don't believe they're unredeemable.

You can't just dismiss people as lost, even bad or misguided people. Unless every great thinker from Christ to Tolstoy to Gandhi to Dr. King is wrong, it's especially those people you have to keep believing in, and trying to reach.

The Democrats have forgotten this. While it may not be the case with Quist, who seems to have run a decent campaign, the Democrats in general have lost the ability (and the inclination) to reach out to the entire population.

They're continuing, if not worsening, last year's mistake of running almost exclusively on Trump/Republican negatives. The Correct the Record types who police the Internet on the party's behalf are relentless on that score, seeming to spend most of their time denouncing people for their wrong opinions or party disloyalty. They don't seem to have anything to say to voters in flyover country, except to point out that they're (at best) dupes for falling for Republican rhetoric.

But "Republicans are bad" isn't a message or a plan, which is why the Democrats have managed the near impossible: losing ground overall during the singular catastrophe of the Trump presidency.

The party doesn't see that the largest group of potential swing voters out there doesn't need to be talked out of voting Republican. It needs to be talked out of not voting at all. The recent polls bear this out, showing that the people who have been turned off to the Democrats in recent months now say that in a do-over, they would vote for third parties or not at all.

People need a reason to be excited by politics, and not just disgusted with the other side. Until the Democrats figure that out, these improbable losses will keep piling up.

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Taibbi: The Democrats Need a New Message - RollingStone.com

New York Times

Democrats in Congress Urge Democrats in Albany to Return to the Party New York Times The letter, signed by 18 members of Congress, is the latest effort to persuade the eighth-member Independent Democratic Conference, and a ninth rogue senator, Simcha Felder of Brooklyn, to abandon their coalition with the Republicans and help take ... and more »

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Democrats in Congress Urge Democrats in Albany to Return to the Party - New York Times

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi hasannounced that if the Democrats take the House in next years elections, within the first 100 hours they will pass a bill to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour. While this might seem like just some unimportant posturing Republicans will probably still have the Senate, and they have the White House, so such a bill would have almost no chance of becoming law it shows something important thats going on within the Democratic Party.

To say the party is moving left is basically true, but too simplistic. The Trump presidency is pushing Democrats toward a new kind of clarity but theyre still arguing over what form it will take.

On the minimum wage, Democrats have been steadily upping their demands in the past few years, as Republican resistance to any increase has hardened. It started at $9, then became $10.10, then $12. At the start of the 2016 campaign, Bernie Sanders supported $15, and Hillary Clinton supported $12, but by the end of the race, she was on board with $15 as well (albeit with some caveats). The bill Democrats are now rallying behind would raise it gradually to $15 by 2024, then index it to inflation.

There are a number of ways to interpret this evolution. One is that Democratic politicians are realizing that this is what their voters want. Another is that theyre being pulled to the left by Sanders and his supporters. Another is that theyre realizing that a more robust emphasis on inequality is critical to them winning back the White House. All of which might contain some truth. But they also may be realizing that they need to stop worrying so much about the details at least when it comes to what they present to the public and paint in some broad strokes. Instead of agonizing about whether $14 or $15 might maximize income gains while minimizing job losses, theyre just saying: $15 is what people like? Fine, well go with $15.

Democrats are never going to stop being concerned about what works theyre the party of government, after all but the election of 2016 was the ultimate test of whether they could win by showing that they cared about getting policy right. As Clinton said in her speech at the Democratic convention, I sweat the details of policy, whether were talking about the exact level of lead in the drinking water in Flint, Mich., the number of mental-health facilities in Iowa or the cost of your prescription drugs. Because its not just a detail if its your kid, if its your family. Its a big deal. And it should be a big deal to your president, too.

Most Democrats agree with that as a substantive matter. But as a political matter, it has some problems, as Clinton could tell you. This is a complicated issue, so heres my complicated proposal doesnt help anyone if it means that Donald Trump becomes president.

So Democrats now seem to be thinking more about a division between the front end and back end of what theyre presenting to the public. You can think about it as the difference between the interface and the underlying code, or the maitre d and the chef. The party has been dominated by the people who sweat the details, which is how you sometimes get losing candidates such as Clinton, John Kerry or Al Gore, who know a lot about politics and governing but arent very good politicians. Every once in a while, you find someone who cares a lot about policy and is also charismatic Bill Clinton, Barack Obama but those people are rare. And right along with that problem you have the problem of uncharismatic policies.

For instance, the Affordable Care Act is an uncharismatic policy that is meant to solve an intricate, interlocking series of problems in the American health-care system. But you know what is a charismatic policy? Single-payer health care. Its easy to understand, and it promises terrific benefits. And right now, theres an argument brewing between leftists who want the party to stand firmly for single-payer, and liberals who support it in principle but worry about the political and practical difficulties of getting there. To those liberals, the leftists respond: We need to aim high, speak in broad strokes and not get bogged down by self-imposed constraints about the possible.

The truth is, we dont know how the public would respond to a presidential candidate advocating single-payer. Sanders advocated it, but he never got attacked with the full force of the Republican propaganda machine, which is capable of some pretty impressive stuff (you might recall that along with the enthusiastic help of the news media, it turned Clinton into historys greatest monster because she used the wrong email account). Maybe the policy is charismatic enough to survive that, or maybe not. But we might find out in 2020, or perhaps in 2024.

What we can say is that there will almost certainly be other issues on which Democrats will discard their previous Its complicated position for ones that take a firm, clear stance and leave the compromises and complications until after the election. For instance, youll probably see candidates coming out in favor of marijuana legalization, instead of saying Lets see how it works at the state level for a while (which was Clintons position). That new clarity could come out in a lot of different ways, but it wont necessarily be because they want to move left so much as they want to offer voters an unambiguous choice.

Of course, Democrats will always disagree over the details, but its clear what has to happen now: They all have to agreethat they need to offer a crisp, clear vision to the voters about what it will be like if they give Democrats power. Clinton, who got too bogged down herself in the details in 2016, today gave a speech in which she hinted at this growing recognition.

For too long, our leaders have viewed politics as the art of the possible, she said in her commencement address at Wellesley today. The challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible possible.

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How the Trump era is pushing Democrats toward a new clarity - Washington Post (blog)