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The carefully calibrated unity of the Democratic Party lasted about six months. After a summer when moderates and progressives joined together to elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. president, his victory has now given permission for the party to expend time and energy on the difficult task of sorting out its ideological core.

House Democrats, reeling from unexpected losses in competitive races, wasted no time. Moderates have blamed progressives for pushing policies such as Medicare for all and defunding the police, which are unpopular in swing districts.

But progressives, rallying to influence Mr. Biden on cabinet appointments and initial policy, have pushed back. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York has pinned those House losses on poor digital campaigning, saying members made themselves sitting ducks for Republicans.

Conor Lamb, the 36-year-old Pennsylvania Democrat who beat back a Republican challenge in a district that President Trump won in 2016, is one of those moderates who believes the left is costing Democrats in key areas. In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Lamb said he expected the incoming administration to govern as it had campaigned: with progressives at arms length.

This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Q. Whats your expectation of Joe Bidens Democratic Party? How do you expect him to fall on the moderate vs. progressive divisions we see in the House?

A. I think that he means what he says when he says, I ran a Democrat, but Im going to serve as an American president. And what that means, I believe, is that every single day, and on every issue, hes going to be working to get as many people around the table and singing from the same sheet music as you can. And sometimes that will be everyone in the Democratic caucus. Sometimes it will be some people in the Democratic caucus and some Republicans. I think thats going to change by the issue, but hes a person that really believes our actual job in Washington, D.C., is to work with each other, compromise to get the best deal we can and then get the thing done. And I believe that too.

What went wrong for House Democrats when they were supposed to pick up seats?

Im giving you an honest account of what Im hearing from my own constituents, which is that they are extremely frustrated by the message of defunding the police and banning fracking. And I, as a Democrat, am just as frustrated. Because those things arent just unpopular, theyre completely unrealistic, and they arent going to happen. And they amount to false promises by the people that call for them.

If someone in your family makes their living in some way connected to natural gas, whether on the pipeline itself, or you know, even in a restaurant that serves natural gas workers, this isnt something to joke around about or be casual about in your language.

Thats what were trying to say: that the rhetoric and the policies and all that stuff it has gone way too far. It needs to be dialed back. It needs to be rooted in common sense, in reality, and yes, politics. Because we need districts like mine to stay in the majority and get something done for the people that we care about the most.

Lets take that issue. Joe Biden did not support defunding the police. Almost all the members of the Democratic Congress, even folks like Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, came out against it. What is the party supposed to do that it didnt?

I think we can do it much more clearly and repetitively and show it with our actions. We need to have a unified Democratic message about good law enforcement and how to keep people safe, while addressing the systemic racism that I do believe exists and the racial inequities that absolutely do exist. And when we passed the George Floyd Justice and Policing Act, thats exactly what we did.

But the people that I was on the phone with, when we were passing that at the time, were not the freshmen members who are criticizing us today. It was Karen Bass and Cedric Richmond and Colin Allred and I was listening to them. And, you know, pretty much most of our moderate conservative Democrats all voted for that bill. We listened, we compromised and we got something done. And thats what this job is really about.

Is it the view of moderate Democrats that the progressives or the so-called Squad has taken up too much space in the national conversation?

I wouldnt put it that way. Because that really focuses on them as individuals and their personalities. And that is not what were trying to do. Were trying to have a discussion about policy, not personality. And I want to be really clear on that, because I respect every one of those members and how hard they worked to get elected and how hard they have worked to stay elected and represent their constituencies. But the fact is that they and others are advocating policies that are unworkable and extremely unpopular.

So I would just say that our view is more that we want to have a clearer, sharper, more unified message on policy itself, regardless of who gets the credit or who is in the limelight for that.

In the Democratic primary, even as progressive candidates lost, polling showed that their issues remained popular among Democrats. Even things like single-payer health insurance or things like the Green New Deal. Whats your response to that?

At the end of the day, its individual candidates that have to win races, and then work with their fellow officeholders to pass bills into law and change peoples lives. So you can tell me all the polling you want, but you have to win elections.

And Ive now been through three very difficult elections in a Republican-leaning district, with the president personally campaigning against me. And I can tell you that people are not clamoring for the two policies that you just asked about. So, thats just what probably separates a winner from a loser in a district like mine.

On Saturday, I interviewed Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez and she mentioned you and how some House moderates ran their campaigns. I wanted to get a fact check quickly: Did you all spend just $2,000 on Facebook the week before the election?

She doesnt have any idea how we ran our campaign, or what we spent, to be honest with you. So yeah, her statement was wrong. But theres a deeper truth there, which is this that our districts and our campaigns are extremely different. You know, I just leave it at that.

She said the way moderates ran their campaigns left them as sitting ducks. What was your reaction?

I have to be honest and say that I was surprised about the whole interview on the day when Vice President and now President-Elect Biden was having the election called for him. I just dont think it was a day for people to be sniping at other members, especially in districts that are so different from their own.

I respect her and how hard she works. And what she did in an extremely low-turnout Democratic primary. But the fact is that in general elections in these districts particularly in the ones where President Trump himself campaigns over and over and over again, and attacks members within their own Republican-leaning districts, like me and Representative Slotkin and Representative Spanberger its the message that matters. Its not a question of door knocking, or Facebook. It matters what policies you stand for, and which ones you dont. And that is all that we are trying to say.

The American people just showed us in massive numbers, generally, which side of these issues that they are on. They sent us a Republican Senate and a Democratic president; were going have to do things that we can compromise over.

You mentioned sniping. Are progressives leading that or are moderates also doing so? Im thinking of all the anonymous quotes attacking members of the left, something that she mentioned.

Thats just honestly a hard question to answer, because I dont know who the anonymous people are. I believe we should put your name behind those types of comments and thats generally what I do.

But I got to say, as youve talked a lot about Representative Ocasio-Cortez, she can put her name behind stuff and thats I guess courageous, but when its a damaging idea or bad policy, like her tweeting out that fracking is bad in the middle of a presidential debate when were trying to win western Pennsylvania thats not being anything like a team player. And its honestly giving a false and ineffective promise to people that makes it very difficult to win the areas where President Trump is most popular in campaigns.

You and Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez are on different sides of the ideological spectrum, but the same side of a generational divide among Democrats. House party leadership has said they plan to run again. Does there need to be more youth among Democratic leadership?

The most important thing is that the leadership we have has to listen to the newer, younger members and actually give us some input and help us get accomplishments at the policy level.

But what seems to happen sometimes is when push comes to shove, the younger members who have come from these really tough districts and tough races dont always feel that the leadership takes our input as seriously as we would like. And I think thats something they need to improve, and I would bet that Representative Ocasio-Cortez would feel similarly even if it was on different issues.

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Conor Lamb, House Moderate, on Bidens Win, the Squad and the Future of the Democratic Party - The New York Times

Why so glum? I asked a sullen group of Democrats who were expressing despair as they reviewed the results of the Nov. 3 elections.

They explained their gloominess. Democrats had lost seats in the state House and Senate, losing any chance to expand Medicaid or have a hand in the redistricting of seats in the state legislature and the states congressional delegation.

They continued. Republican candidates beat Democrats, appearing to win the chief justices seat and other positions on the states Supreme Court and all the open seats on the Council of State, including the lieutenant governors race in which an unknown and far-out Republican candidate beat an attractive, well-liked and experienced woman state legislator.

What about Bidens victory over Donald Trump? Surely this should have made my Democratic friends happy. No, they responded. It was supposed to be a blue wave. But it was not a blowout, not even close, they said, noting that they did not even win control of the U.S. Senate and lost seats in the U.S. House.

I confess that I lost my cool. I asked whether they would choose to be Republicans today rather than gloomy Democrats?

Would you really like to go to bed tonight and wake up as a Republican? Maybe you could help bring that party back to its historic principles, which its current leadership has abandoned. More likely you would have to carry the burdens of being a member of todays Republican Party, tied as it is tightly to Donald Trump and his loyal backers, dependent on all those peoples support to win primaries and elections as a Republican.

Like other present-day Republicans, you would be so dependent that you would have to subordinate your principles and good sense to a cult figure and his other followers, to their alarmist conspiracy stories, and the inaccurate alternate facts that they propound.

If you woke up as a Republican, I said, you would be tied to a party of aging white people in a state and nation that are rapidly diversifying. You would be stuck with a vision of our country that rejects the multi-ethnic American traditions of equality and fairness for everyone, regardless of gender, racial and ethnic background, or sexual orientation.

You would have to reject the American commitment of true religious liberty and respect for differing religious views. You would have to reject the true patriotism that includes respect for our history of painful battles to expand equality and opportunity without covering up our countrys imperfections. You would have to put aside any continuing commitment to expanding opportunities for every citizen.

Our great country, I said, was not served up on a platter to or by our forebears. Every battle, including its war for independence, the end of slavery, the expansion of the right to vote, the opening of public schools to people of all races, the opening of public facilities to those of all different races and other battles for equality and fairness are battles that continue today.

You can be happy now, I told the group, that you are free to work for a better country, supported by high ideals and carefully discovered scientific facts rather than being bound to the inconsistent and deadly poisons prescribed by a haughty autocrat and his inconsistent dogma.

More than that, I said, you should be happy that your partys candidates for president and vice president are on the verge of a momentous victory, and North Carolina will soon be joining its neighbors Virginia and Georgia in becoming a place where both Democrats and Republicans have a fair chance to win political contests.

After my passionate ramblings, my friends nodded, smiled, and continued their gloomy conversations.

D.G. Martin hosts North Carolina Bookwatch, Sundays at 3:30 p.m. and Tuesdays at 5 p.m. on UNC-TV.

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Column: Democrats See Only the Losses From Election, Not the Progress - Southern Pines Pilot

Chris Arnade, Opinion contributor Published 6:01 a.m. ET Nov. 14, 2020 | Updated 9:11 a.m. ET Nov. 14, 2020

Over the past few decades, Democrats have become the professorial party of the educated elite. Republicans are learning what the working class wants.

Democrats are right to be celebrating a JoeBiden presidency, but the details of his win should worry them. In particular, President Donald Trump increased his vote share in once solidly Democratic counties, like Starr County, Texas,and Robeson County, North Carolina,and from traditional Democratic groups like Mexican Americans.

What connects all these different communities? All have fewercollege graduates, indicating that while the racial gap is decreasing, the education gap is solidifying, and becoming multi-racial.

This means the Democrats, in numbers and attitude, continuedits evolution into the party of highly educated college graduates, while Republicans, despite having a very long way to go, shifted towards a more racially diverse coalition of non-graduates.

That doesnt surprise me, because I spent eight years driving 300,000 miles all over America listening to people, and what I found was the biggest divide in our country was education. We have become two very different countries, with communities like Austin, Texas, and Madison, Wisconsin,filled with college graduates, and communities like Portsmouth, Ohio, and Bakersfield, California,filled with non-college graduates.

My book "Dignity" focused on those communities without college graduates, both rural and urban, both majority white like Portsmouth, Ohio,and highly Black or Latino like rural Mississippi or Texas.Places ignored by the media, except for when something bad happens.

What I found was decent, hardworking people dealing with the loss of good jobs and filling with drugs. I also found an overwhelming sense of frustration, especially towards Washington, D.C.

Suzette Hackney: Black voters steer America toward moral clarity in presidential race

In these communities, there is a belief that the politicians have left them behind, and only bother to listen to them, or talk to them,when they need their votes every few years.

The result is, most people I met didnt vote, or vote only now and then. That is backed up by the numbers.Almost 100 million peoplewho could vote didnt, a far larger number than either Donald Trump or Joe Biden got.

Why do so many people not vote? Because they dont feel much good ever comes out of voting. As a Black man in Lumberton, North Carolina,who voted for President Obama told me in 2016, people like him arefed up with the whole thing. When Obama left office,it seemed likenothing changed for him or hisneighborhood. It doesn't matter who is on the ballot.

I heard the attitude all over the country, in big towns and small towns. In red state and blue states. From Blacks, Mexican Americans, whites, Asian Americans. Everyone.

This election, some of those people who usually dont vote, did vote, and many surprisingly chose Trump. How can it be that hard working people, who are scrambling to pay their bills, many of them new immigrants, chose to vote for an ivy league billionaire who wants to limit immigration? Because how we think about politics and voting is all wrong.

Victory for equality: Deep blue and overwhelmingly against racial preferences: What's going on in California

The details of politics and policy that political pundits on TV fight over are lost on most Americans. Not because they are too stupid to understand them, but because they are too busy to focus on something that rarely affects them.

That doesnt mean they dont have views on politics, but it means politics to them is a sport. While they will never be players, they can be fans.

So who they support is more about which social group to join. It is more about whose supporters would they rather hang out with at a bar, not what policies they want. In the last few decades, Democrats have shiftedtowards being the party of the highly educated. They resemblecollege professorsin how they talk to votersand how they present themselvesand, consequently,how they are viewed by many Americans. While Trump has shifted the GOP towards being a party that maybe, just maybe, might get who they are.

While Democrats can sound too much like wonks, Trump talks their language, in simple, often blunt terms, that avoids details about policy, but gets a few big things right like understanding that frustration with D.C.

President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden debate in September at Case Western University in Cleveland.(Photo: Patrick Semansky, AP Images)

Trump also gets smaller things right that college professors and journalists in D.C. find unimportant and embarrassing, but really matters in how people view politics, like celebrating a big win with a big spread from McDonalds, or hugging the United Statesflag. Based on my experience and reporting, thisis especially true of newer immigrants, including those from Mexico, who are proud to be here and love America in an unflinching and emotional way.

They believe in faith, family, the flag, and the American dream, and are not embarrassed aboutthat.

I titled my book "Dignity" because that is what I found every American wants, now matter how much education they have, or how poor they are. Yet giving people dignity means not only listening to them, but also not talking down to them. It means understanding and respecting who they really are, rather than assuming you know what is best for them because you read about them in astudy somewhere.

If Democrats want to be the working class party, that is the team they need to remember to be.

Chris Arnade is a writer and photographer covering addiction and poverty in America. He is also the author of "Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America." Follow him on Twitter: @Chris_arnade

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2020 exit polls: As the racial gap closes, the Democrat-Republican education gap widens - USA TODAY

Unofficial results show Democratic President Elect Joe Biden won seven Ohio counties one less than Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2016. But while President Trump won the state, it appears Biden won more votes than Clinton. Suburban women boosted Democrats in this election but those gains were offset by losses in other areas where Democrats have been successful in the past.

While Ohio voters chose to re-elect President Trump by approximately the same margin he won by a few years ago, there was a difference.Some suburban areas were less red than theyve been in past elections.

And these ladies who are part of a national group known as Red Wine and Blue think women were the key difference.Katie Paris is the groups director.

Almost every suburban county moved in the Democrats direction. Delaware County narrowed the gap with Republicans by nine points. Warren County narrowed the gap with Republicans by seven points. In fact, all of the counties where we focused our attention with red, white and blue, we saw movement in that direction," Paris says.

And Paris, whos based in Shaker Heights in suburban Cleveland,says the exit polling was even more remarkable when you look at white college educated women.

They moved 37 points from 2016. According to the exit polls, white college women voted for Trump by 17 points in 2020. They supported Joe Biden by 20 points. So that's real movement. We're excited about the progress that we've made," Paris says.

But an ad by the Trump campaign that depicted a 9-1-1 call being diverted to an answering machine may have swayed some Republican women to stay with the President. That ad said the call couldn't be answered immediately due to "defunding of the police." Lee Ann Johnson who headed Ohio Women for Trump says this message resonated with some women.

I think denouncing law and order just did not go over well with suburban women. I have a 16-year-old son. I want to know that, God forbid if he got into a car accident and had to call the police, that they were going to show up and make sure that everything was OK. And I think that is just multiplied across the state, especially for suburban moms," Johnson says.

LeeAnn Johnsonis the wife of Congressman Bill Johnson of Marietta, who was re-electedoverwhelminglyin Ohios 6thDistrict, which covers 18 counties in Appalachian Ohio. Johnson says the women theGOPput on the ballot were successful too.

The women, the Republican women in the House doubled their numbers. All 11 women seeking re-election in the US House were re-elected and we doubled those numbers by 13. That's remarkable. And every Republican candidate that flipped a Democrat seat was either a minority, a woman or a veteran. And that speak volumes," Johnson says.

But even though Democratsperformed better in suburban areas, Ohio Democratic Party Chair David Pepper says those gains were offset by losses in small towns and rural areas.

If places that used to vote for Democrats like Mansfield or Marietta or all these other smaller towns that aren't the suburbs, they're a little more rural down now. Maybe it's West Union, Ohio.It's all over the state until Democrats have a real plan of action to help lift those communities. I think we will struggle.

OSU Political science professor Paul Beck agrees Democrats need to do better with small towns in Ohio. But in the effort to gain suburban women, he says Democrats lost support from one of their key constituencies.

One big difference in Ohio compared with perhaps the national picture is that union members, union households in Ohio were considerably more for Trump. That was true nationally. Nationally, they were Biden supporters, majority of them in Ohio. A majority of them were Trump supporters. And you see this, by the way, in the results that appear from Mahoning Valley County and maybe Trumbull as well, that white industrial workers, largely males, but not entirely males, are very much enamored of President Trump and much less so than the Democratic nominee," Beck says.

Democrats held onto gains they made in the suburbs in 2018, when they gained a net total of five seats in the Ohio House. And they added a seat in Westlake in suburban Cleveland, with Monique Smith beating Republican Rep. Dave Greenspan. But Republicans picked up three seats that had been held by Democrats in rural southeast Ohio, in extreme northeast Ohio and in the union-strong Mahoning Valley, where incumbent Gil Blair was knocked off by Mike Loychik.

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Suburban Women Boosted Democrats But Not Enough To Offset Losses By Unions And Small Towns - The Statehouse News Bureau

mark pazniokas :: ctmirror.org

Rep. Sean Scanlon, D-Guiford, right, and Sen. Matthew Lesser, D-Middletown, have been authored several drafts of the public option bill.

Democratic leaders in the House and Senate, fresh off election wins, are laying out a key goal of the 2021 legislative session two months in advance: passing a public option health insurance plan.

The measure failed in 2019 and was shelved this year when the state suspended its regular session amid the coronavirus pandemic. But Democratic lawmakers say that with COVID-19 cases on the rise and hundreds of thousands out of work, the need to expand government-run health coverage is more pressing now.

At the exact moment when people in Connecticut need health insurance more than ever, we are seeing an increase a huge and disturbing increase in the number of our residents who lack access to affordable, quality health care, said Sen. Matthew Lesser, D-Middletown, a co-chair of the Insurance and Real Estate Committee. A new legislature has been elected that ran on this issue, that has talked about this issue, and that has made promises to the American people in Connecticut that we are going to deliver real reform.

As they have in the past, officials with the states insurance companies expressed opposition to the concept of a public option.

Assuming this is the same version of government-run health care pushed by the comptroller in years past, the health insurers in the state will adamantly oppose it, said Susan Halpin,executive director for the Connecticut Association of Health Plans, which lobbies on behalf of insurers.Its a proposal thats failed before with good reason. It establishes a false promise thats already proven unsustainable in the limited form it exists today.

In an early draft of the 2019 bill, legislators had hoped to open the states health plan to nonprofits and small companies those with 50 or fewer employees and form an advisory council to guide the development of a public option. Comptroller Kevin Lembo said at the time that his office would partner with insurers under an umbrella contract to provide plans outside of the states risk pool. The legislation also would have allowed the state to form ConnectHealth, a program offering low-cost coverage to people without employer-sponsored insurance.

Later that year, legislators unveiled a sweeping overhaul of that bill. The second version would have established the Connecticut Option a state-sponsored plan available to individuals and small businesses funded by reviving the individual mandate, a requirement that people obtain health coverage or face a financial penalty. Legislators also suggested raising money for the program by levying a 1-cent-per-milligram tax on opioid manufacturers. The revised bill, which also included the restoration of cuts to the states Medicaid program and approval to import drugs from Canada, was watered down before passing the House. It did not win approval in the Senate.

The latest proposal, rolled out in March, would have allowed small businesses, nonprofits and labor unions to join the state-operated Connecticut Partnership plan, which already is available to municipalities, and it would have created a third option for individuals on Access Health CT, Connecticuts insurance exchange. Two carriers currently offer individual plans on the exchange. A week after the March 5 release of that concept, the Capitol closed for deep cleaning. Lawmakers did not return for the regular session.

On Thursday, Lembo joined lawmakers in pledging a resurrection of the public option bill. He revealed few details about what the newest version would look like but said officials would again try to use the states purchasing power to negotiate an insurance plan for individuals.

We are very likely to see a leveraging of the state employee pool using that pricing and those 220,000 lives that are in there to get better deals and offer more opportunities, Lembo said. So, leveraging it through partnership, leveraging it through the state employee plan, but setting up different benefit designs for these populations that are affordable and accessible for them, not necessarily the one product that were offering now just to state employees.

The backstop is the state of Connecticut. Im not going to run away from that, he added. But you set your premiums according to the risk profile of the people who are coming in.

Despite President-elect Joseph Bidens support for a public option, Democrats said Thursday that they dont want to wait for the gridlock in Washington, D.C. to subside before making progress. Uncertainty surrounding the balance of power in the U.S. Senate means Bidens health reform agenda may not be successful, they said.

There is not a majority in the United States Senate to support President Biden in his effort to make health care more affordable, which means its going to fall to the states states to act, said Rep. Sean Scanlon, D-Guilford, a co-chair of the Finance, Revenue and Bonding Committee. Even though we have a new president theres still going to be paralysis there. Thats why its up to us here in Connecticut, because our constituents simply cant wait any longer for the politics of Washington to work in their favor. They need the politics of Hartford to work in their favor.

Republican legislative leaders, who did not participate in the Democrats announcement Thursday, signaled that they would not support a public option bill.

The Democrat proposal of a public option, I fear, will not accomplish our shared goal of reducing costs and increasing accessibility and will simultaneously threaten thousands of good paying jobs, Senate Minority Leader Kevin Kelly, R-Stratford, said. The Democrat plan aims to move insurance jobs under the scope of government, put government in charge of health care with little regulation or requirements to even abide by the Affordable Care Act, and compete with a private industry using taxpayer dollars as a backstop. If claims exceed premiums, taxpayers will be the ones on the hook.

Rep. Vincent Candelora, R-North Branford, said the proposal would threaten jobs in the insurance sector and harm the pandemic recovery we all hope for.

I appreciate Democrats passion in pursuing affordable health care unfortunately, theyve been campaigning for 20 years on the promise of doing something about it but have instead continued to implement more taxes, more consumer-paid assessments, and more regulations that have driven premiums upward, he said. I look forward to learning more about their unwritten proposal.

The Partnership Plan has run multi-million dollar deficits over the past few years, Halpin said. At the same time, it sets the state up to compete with its own signature industry on an un-level playing field. When you peel back the layers of the onion, the proposal just doesnt work and it does more harm than good.

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Public option health insurance in CT is a key priority for Democrats in 2021 - The CT Mirror