Category Archives: Democrats

2020 Democratic Primary, Democrats

Bernie Sanders sets up the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, as a foil with the Stop BEZOS Act — and gets clobbered by policy wonks

Poor Bernie Sanders has fallen victim to the hack gap. – Kevin Drum

A decade ago, Mark Kleiman noted a basic advantage of the right, which Matthew Yglesias dubbed, ‘the hack gap.’ Yglesias:

Just like Mark, “I don’t really wish that we behaved like our wingnut opponents, but their capacity to work up and sustain outrage has to be counted among their structural advantages.”

In brief (generalizing beyond the examples Kleiman and Yglesias discuss): rightwing proposals and theories, even those only tenuously – if at all – linked to facts, are reliably repeated by Fox News Channel, talk radio, and other outlets in the conservative media bubble and readily embraced by conservative foundation reps, policy analysts, and legislators. The goal is less to advance understanding or actual policy, than to repudiate opponents on the left – regarded as enemies of conservatism – who serve as foils to rev up the Republican base at election time.

In contrast, among mainstream liberals, there is a commitment to reality-based analysis and advocacy. Truth and accuracy are highly valued. Why? Because liberals are committed to crafting legislative and administrative solutions to real-world problems. The ideas advanced must be empirically well-grounded or there is no point to implementing them.

The failure of Congress to repeal and replace the Affordable Healthcare Act in 2017 is illustrative of the dynamic on the right: there was no Republican member of the House or the Senate with a deep understanding of the ACA and the healthcare market, of pragmatic conservative alternatives, and of the trade-offs and costs involved in making changes. No one, in other words, who had anything resembling a replacement on hand – even after many years of election promises to repeal and replace. That practical focus was nowhere on the Republican agenda.

On the liberal side, the dynamics are different. When Democrats passed the ACA in 2010 they did so to solve a genuine problem in plain sight – millions of Americans without access to affordable healthcare; the Democratic majority passed the ACA to reduce the number of people without health insurance. Among the practical goals were improving people’s health – especially among people living in poverty, with preexisting conditions, and lacking employer-based insurance – in measurable ways, and ensuring that catastrophic illness would not result in bankruptcy and financial ruin for families.

Demagoguery may help win elections; it is not a reliable route to sound public policy. Hacks are useful for rousing up the Republican base, but not for fixing problems among folks who work for a living.

Stop BEZOS

This past week, Senator Bernie Sanders (and Representative Ro Khanna) proposed the Stop BEZOS Act (Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies Act), a title suggestive of a simple, enticing meme, replete with moral outrage and demonization – ingredients unhesitatingly embraced daily by Fox News. The idea itself is equally beguiling: the legislation would require large companies to pay back, dollar for dollar, the cost of public benefits (such as, food stamps, Medicaid, rental subsidies, and school lunch aid) that support their low-wage employees.

“At a time of massive income and wealth inequality, when the 3 wealthiest people in America own more wealth than the bottom 50 percent and when 52 percent of all new income goes to the top one percent, the American people are tired of subsidizing multi-billionaires who own some of the largest and most profitable corporations in America,” Sanders said in a statement.

Sanders cited a report by the nonprofit New Food Economy suggesting that a third of Amazon employees in Arizona — and thousands in other states — rely on food stamps.

Since analysts on the left are more highly committed to getting the details right, than scoring points against conservatives, Sanders’ proposal was met with  a chorus of objections.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities – the preeminent liberal research shop focused on how public policy affects poverty and inequality – while praising the act as well intentioned, offered a devastating critique: “It seeks to induce large firms to raise the wages they pay, which is an important goal after decades of stagnant or falling wages for millions of hard-working Americans. But the legislation likely won’t meet that goal, and it would have a series of adverse unintended consequences. Moreover, we have better ways to induce or require firms like Amazon and Walmart to raise their wages and bear more of the costs of core government functions, including basic nutrition assistance and health coverage for struggling families.”

The problems included creating perverse incentives to hire fewer low-income and disabled workers; promoting corporate lobbying to reduce assistance programs; requiring complicated and expensive administrative procedures; and failing to do what it sets out to do – to raise wages and living standards.

Other analysts on the left, while praising Sanders’ intentions, added another criticism: that by stigmatizing people receiving benefits, it was antithetical to sustaining a healthy social safety net.

Ryan Cooper: “Now, I understand what Sanders is driving at. Amazon workers are underpaid. And it is important to note that Amazon has been directly subsidized …

But the way to wage class war on Jeff Bezos is with broad taxes, unions, and regulations, not schemes to punish him for his employees being on public programs.”

Jared Bernstein: ‘”My concern is that there is already a political movement afoot to vilify public benefits and even though I know for a fact that the main sponsors of this bill — Sanders and Ro Khanna — don’t feel that way, I worry that this idea unintentionally provides the hard right with another argument,” Bernstein told Business Insider.’

Dean Baker at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and  Mike Konczal at the Roosevelt Institute also offered critical perspectives on the proposal.

Michael Hiltzik takes exception to the criticism as misguided.

One would think that Democrats and progressives would praise Sanders for this legislative initiative. After all, Amazon’s employment of low-wage workers, its baleful influence on communities and the punishing working conditions in the warehouses from which its merchandise is shipped to customers have been amply documented. Instead, they’ve turned their fire hoses full-blast on Sanders himself. The drawbacks of his proposal have been picked apart to a fare-thee-well by some of the nation’s leading progressive think tanks, including the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The critics aren’t wrong about the proposal, exactly. They’re just allowing themselves to be distracted by the details of a legislative proposal that on the gonna-happen scale is a “not.”

So, should we take Sanders seriously, but not literally? Well, something like that. Hiltzik again:

The truth is that proposals like Sanders and Khanna’s serve a very clear purpose in our political system. They’re not designed to end up as the law of the land, but as prompts for debate.

Matt Yglesias argues that Sanders, whose 2016 policy proposals on Medicare-for-all, free college, and a $15 minimum wage have been widely embraced by Democrats in this cycle, intends to separate himself from the pack. So, while other Democrats would be unhappy to see their proposals dismissed as unworkable, “Sanders almost certainly won’t care, and part of the core of his appeal is a sense that this is the correct and appropriate way to think about politics.”

September 7, 2018 update – Jared Bernstein tips his hat to Senator Sanders: “When Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), scourge of the top tenth of the top 1%, and Bezos, denizen of that privileged niche, are exchanging loving tweets, attention must be paid. Sanders, along with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), has long called out Amazon for its labor practices, and they recently introduced a bill, subtly entitled the Stop BEZOS Act. While I share their goal of pushing for higher pay for low-wage workers, I thought their bill, which charged companies for the public benefits its workers received, was misguided in that it would vilify legitimate benefit receipt and lead firms to discriminate against hires they thought might draw such benefits. But I have no question that their pressure was instrumental in driving this change.”

Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

 

Democracy, Democrats, Donald Trump, Republicans, Tribalism

“You need to vote because our democracy depends on it.” Barack Obama sounds alarm, implores students to step up to restore American values

In the twenty-two months since leaving the White House, Barack Obama has kept quiet. He broke his silence on Friday in a speech at the University of Illinois, making it clear he believes the country is in crisis, having strayed from our values, and urgently needs to get back on track:
“I’m here today because this is one of those pivotal moments when every one of us, as citizens of the United States, need to determine just who it is that we are. Just what it is that we stand for. And as a fellow citizen, not as an ex-president, but as a fellow citizen, I’m here to deliver a simple message, and that is that you need to vote because our democracy depends on it.”

Obama painted a picture of “fitful progress, uneven progress” throughout American history, as our country moved nearer our ideals, while describing “a darker aspect to the American story.”

Each time we’ve gotten closer to those ideals, somebody somewhere has pushed back. The status quo pushes back. Sometimes the backlash comes from people who are genuinely, if wrongly, fearful of change. More often it’s manufactured by the powerful and the privileged who want to keep us divided and keep us angry and keep us cynical because it helps them maintain the status quo and keep their power and keep their privilege. And you happen to be coming of age during one of those moments.

It did not start with Donald Trump. He is a symptom, not the cause. He’s just capitalizing on resentments that politicians have been fanning for years, a fear and anger that’s rooted in our past but it’s also born out of the enormous upheavals that have taken place in your brief lifetimes.

The former president reminded students of the financial crisis at the time he took office and the progress he made in setting things right – but the fear remained.

So we pulled the economy out of crisis, but to this day, too many people, who once felt solidly middle class, still feel very real and very personal economic insecurity. Even though we took out bin Laden and wound down the wars in Iraq and our combat role in Afghanistan, and gotten Iran to halt its nuclear program, the world’s still full of threats and disorder that come streaming through people’s televisions every single day.

And these challenges get people worried. And it frays our civic trust. And it makes a lot of people feel like the fix is in and the game is rigged and nobody’s looking out for them, especially those communities outside our big urban centers.

And even though your generation is the most diverse in history, with a greater acceptance and celebration of our differences than ever before, those are the kinds of conditions that are ripe for exploitation by politicians who have no compunction and no shame about tapping into America’s dark history of racial and ethnic and religious division. Appealing to tribe, appealing to fear, pitting one group against another, telling people that order and security will be restored if it weren’t for those who don’t look like us or don’t sound like us or don’t pray like we do, that’s an old playbook. It’s as old as time.

He continued, “And in a healthy democracy, it doesn’t work.” The old playbook falls flat. When, however, “the better angels of our nature” are eclipsed, things go awry.

But when there’s a vacuum in our democracy, when we don’t vote, when we take our basic rights and freedoms for granted, when we turn away and stop paying attention and stop engaging and stop believing and look for the newest diversion, the electronic versions of bread and circuses, then other voices fill the void. A politics of fear and resentment and retrenchment takes hold and demagogues promise simple fixes to complex problems. No promise to fight for the little guy, even as they cater to the wealthiest and most powerful. No promise to clean up corruption and then plunder away. They start undermining norms that ensure accountability and try to change the rules to entrench their power further. And they appeal to racial nationalism that’s barely veiled, if veiled at all.

He indicted the Congress of the United States for its failures:

This Congress has championed the unwinding of campaign finance laws to give billionaires outside influence over our politics. Systematically attacked voting rights to make it harder for young people, the minorities and the poor to vote. Handed out tax cuts without regard to deficits. Slashed the safety net wherever it could, cast dozens of votes to take away health insurance from ordinary Americans, embraced wild conspiracy theories, like those surrounding Benghazi or my birth certificate, rejected science, rejected facts on things like climate change, embraced a rising absolutism from a willingness to default on America’s debt by not paying our bills, to a refusal to even meet, much less consider, a qualified nominee for the Supreme Court because he happened to be nominated by a Democratic president. None of this is conservative.

I don’t mean to pretend I’m channeling Abraham Lincoln now, but that’s not what he had in mind, I think, when he helped form the Republican Party. It’s not conservative. It sure isn’t normal. It’s radical. It’s a vision that says the protection of our power and those who back us is all that matters even when it hurts the country. It’s a vision that says the few who can afford high-price lobbyists and unlimited campaign contributions set the agenda. And over the past two years, this vision is now nearing its logical conclusion.

He denounced the lack of checks and balances, passage of $1.5 trillion tax cuts for the richest Americans with resulting skyrocketing deficits, carte blanche to polluters and dishonest lenders, repudiation of the global climate change agreement, eroding our relationships with allies, cozying up with Russia, and sabotaging the Affordable Healthcare Act. He also criticizes, in passing, the infamous Anonymous op-ed:

In a healthy democracy, there’s some checks and balances on this kind of behavior, this kind of inconsistency, but right now there’s nothing.

Republicans who know better in Congress, and they’re there, they’re quoted saying, yes, we know this is kind of crazy, are still bending over backwards to shield this behavior from scrutiny or accountability or consequence, seem utterly unwilling to find the backbone to safeguard the institutions that make our democracy work. And, by the way, the claim that everything will turn out okay because there are people inside the White House who secretly aren’t following the president’s orders, that is not a check. I’m being serious here. That’s not how our democracy’s supposed to work.

These people aren’t elected. They’re not accountable. They’re not doing us a service by actively promoting 90 percent of the crazy stuff that’s coming out of this White House. And then saying, don’t worry, we’re preventing the other 10 percent. That’s not how things are supposed to work.

This is not normal. These are extraordinary times. And they’re dangerous times.

Finally, Obama urged his listeners to participate in the political process  – and, especially, to vote – to change the country’s direction:

Thirty minutes, 30 minutes of your time, is democracy worth that? We have been through much darker times than these and some how each generation of American’s carried us through to the other side. Not by sitting around and waiting for something to happen, not by leaving it to others to do something but by leading that movement for change themselves.

And if you do that, if you get involved and you get engaged and you knock on some doors and you talk with your friends and you argue with your family members and you change some minds and you vote, something powerful happens.

The complete speech, annotated by Amber Phillips, is available at the Washington Post.

Democrats, Donald Trump

The status of the labor movement on a Labor Day when the President of the United States attacks the leader of the AFL-CIO

The headlines on Labor Day highlight the President’s twitter attack (and retweets with spelling corrected) on AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka. The Washington Post story of the skirmish reports on the decline of labor unions in recent decades: “Union membership nationwide has fallen markedly from the 1970s, with the percentage of American workers in a union dropping from about 25 percent in the 1970s to less than 11 percent in 2017, according to survey data. But among the general public, popular support for unions has risen steadily, to a 61 percent approval rating, a high point in more than a decade, according to Gallup polling.”

The good news, for working men and women, union members, and the Democratic Party (which relies on organized labor for vital support) is that steadily rising approval rating (from the Gallup organization’s graph presented in the image over this post). When asked, “Do you approve or disapprove of labor unions?” a rising 62% of respondents surveyed approved, while only 30% disapproved.

The bad news is found in more detailed questions deeper in Gallup’s survey. For instance, this question and the most recent (August 2016) results:

Overall, do you think labor unions mostly help or mostly hurt workers who are not members of unions?

Mostly help Mostly hurt No opinion
38% 54% 8%

Organized labor has been under attack by conservatives for decades. The most recent body blow was the Janus ruling in June 2018. John Cassidy comments on the decision: “It marks the culmination of a decades-long anti-union campaign by conservative groups and billionaires tied to the Republican Party, such as the Koch brothers, the Uihlein family, and their allies. By funnelling money through tax-exempt organizations like the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, the Liberty Justice Center, and the Center for Individual Rights, these ultra-wealthy people have helped to finance a series of legal attacks on labor unions that represent ordinary working people who earn modest wages. Faced with the formidable challenge of overturning what most experts regarded as settled law, the well-funded union haters persisted, and eventually they found a court that was willing to overturn precedent: the John Roberts–Neil Gorsuch high court.”

The switch from Anthony Kennedy to Brett Kavanaugh will only intensify the SOCTUS majority’s assault on labor unions.

Although Donald Trump was elected with critical backing from the white working class (few of whom are unionized or even especially sympathetic to unions), he has done little to advance the interests of American workers. As Eric Levitz puts it (“15 Ways President Trump Has Hurt the American Worker”):

Donald Trump loves the working class as a mascot, but despises it as a class. The president will gladly take the side of the archetypal working man in his (largely imaginary) conflicts with environmentalists, welfare cheats, immigrants, and liberal elites — but never that of actual working people in their material conflicts with their bosses.

 

2020 Democratic Primary, Democrats

Companies shouldn’t be accountable only to shareholders – Elizabeth Warren aims to fix what’s wrong with American corporations

“Corporate profits are booming, but average wages haven’t budged over the past year. The U.S. economy has run this way for decades, partly because of a fundamental change in business practices dating back to the 1980s. On Wednesday I’m introducing legislation to fix it.” – Senator Elizabeth Warren, August 14, 2018

The Financial Times Lexicon offers this definition of corporate responsibility: “Corporations have a responsibility to those groups and individuals that they can affect, i.e., its stakeholders, and to society at large. Stakeholders are usually defined as customers, suppliers, employees, communities and shareholders or other financiers.”

During the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s in the United States, this precept represented the mainstream view embraced by big business. Although, “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country,” is a misquotation of GM’s CEO, this phrase aptly summed up a paradigmatic theme: when GM – and other big companies – did well, everyone benefited. And the broad benefits were direct and tangible, unlike the phantom ‘trickle down’ prosperity we’ve been promised repeatedly since Ronald Reagan became a Republican icon. In the post-World War II era (which stretched over three decades), the American economy was guided by an economic consensus: from the offices of CEOs and other executives to the factory floor – everyone should share the wealth. They all helped build it; they would all benefit from it. Communities with corporate headquarters and factories would also benefit. We were all in it together. Even government had a critical role in encouraging investment, research, education, health and safety, among other elements of a healthy thriving economy.

In Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman’s 1962 offensive against the economic view of the era, he argued that corporations have only one responsibility: to maximize profits for stockholders. He argued against a broader, more inclusive view of corporate responsibility (Chapter VIII – Monopoly and the Social Responsibility of Business and Labor, Social Responsibility of Business and Labor):

“This view shows a fundamental misconception of the character and nature of a free economy. In such an economy, there is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition, without deception or fraud.”

Long story short: during the following decades this view took root. Friedman’s vision, which blossomed during the Reagan years, is the economic regime of 21st century America. And actions have consequences. Few Americans – apart from the richest 1% – have reason to celebrate this outcome, as Warren notes:

That shift has had a tremendous effect on the economy. In the early 1980s, large American companies sent less than half their earnings to shareholders, spending the rest on their employees and other priorities. But between 2007 and 2016, large American companies dedicated 93% of their earnings to shareholders. Because the wealthiest 10% of U.S. households own 84% of American-held shares, the obsession with maximizing shareholder returns effectively means America’s biggest companies have dedicated themselves to making the rich even richer.

In the four decades after World War II, shareholders on net contributed more than $250 billion to U.S. companies. But since 1985 they have extracted almost $7 trillion. That’s trillions of dollars in profits that might otherwise have been reinvested in the workers who helped produce them.

Before “shareholder value maximization” ideology took hold, wages and productivity grew at roughly the same rate. But since the early 1980s, real wages have stagnated even as productivity has continued to rise. Workers aren’t getting what they’ve earned.

Accountable Capitalism Act

Her solution – to ensure that “giant American corporations should look out for American interests” – is strikingly simple in concept: The Accountable Capitalism Act would require all corporations with more than one billion dollars in annual revenue to get a federal charter. Currently, companies are incorporated by the states, which creates a ‘race to the bottom’ landscape featuring a surfeit of corporate privileges and a dearth of social responsibilities. With this requirement, we could level the playing field.

Second, the legislation would require that corporate boards consider the interests of all principal stakeholders in making decisions.

Senator Warren notes that ‘benefit corporations,’ authorized in 33 states and the District of Columbia, provide a rough working model for her plan. (Some readers may be familiar with B-Corps, closely related – though not identical – to benefit corporations.) The prevailing approach (as articulated by Friedman) excludes consideration by corporate boards of any goals apart from maximizing shareholder value. As a Silicon Valley attorney explains on the American Bar Association website:

This real or perceived duty to maximize stockholder welfare often becomes the core guiding principle.

The benefit corporation changes the game because it turns the corporation into a dual-purpose entity with the twin purposes of optimizing stockholder welfare and creating general public benefit. It expressly authorizes corporations to provide a material positive effect on society and the environment while pursuing profits as usual. The legal architecture of the benefit corporation allows ethical corporations to put the full power of corporate law behind their social and environmental values and higher purposes.

Essentially, benefit corporations broaden the fiduciary responsibilities of corporations beyond stockholder value; our experience with benefit corporations demonstrates that the model Warren proposes has a measure of practical grounding.

Worker participation

Warren’s proposal provides for two significant changes in corporate governance – relating to worker participation and political spending – that would amplify the voices of rank and file corporate employees:

“My bill also would give workers a stronger voice in corporate decision-making at large companies. Employees would elect at least 40% of directors. At least 75% of directors and shareholders would need to approve before a corporation could make any political expenditures.”

The first change would put one of the principal stakeholder groups at the table when corporate decisions are made. Employees – who have a strong stake in the success of the company they work for – would have a voice in the company’s decisions.

Matthew Yglesias cites evidence that worker participation (‘codetermination’) in corporate decision-making has positive effects in Germany, where it is well established:

“Studies from Germany’s experience with codetermination indicate that it leads to less short-termis in corporate decision-making, and much higher levels of pay equality, while other studies demonstrate positive results on productivity and innovation.”

Those are broad, significant benefits, though the presence of employee directors undoubtedly would lead to lower share prices and much less generous compensation for CEOs – hardly welcomed by everyone.

Political reform

The second change, requiring 75% approval for the use of corporate dollars to fund political messages, would have far reaching effects on our political environment. Corruption in Washington is rampant. The Trump administration has brought a wrecking crew to environmental and financial regulation. And ideologues forming a growing majority on the Supreme Court have ushered in a political epoch where corporate dollars – given in secret, often without accountability to candidates or parties, much less to voters – can flood into political campaigns and, after candidates beholden to big business are elected, ensure ‘access’ to elected officials who craft legislation and who can impede enforcement of rules and regulations.

Recall Friedman’s comment about a corporation maximizing profits “so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition, without deception or fraud.” This prerequisite is phony if corporate money – shielded from public view – sways elections and buys access. Corporations – and rich stockholders – are rigging the rules of the game.

This simple 75% rule could be a game changer.

Persons under the Constitution

Though Mitt Romney said, “Corporations are people, my friend,” they are not. They were created by government to advance a public purpose. As Teddy Roosevelt put it: “The great corporations which we have grown to speak of rather loosely as trusts are the  creatures of the State, and the State not only has the right to control them, but it is duty bound to control them wherever the need of such control is shown.”

Louis Brandeis suggested, “We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” Dissenting in a 1933 case before the Supreme Court, he endorsed the race to the bottom theory and argued that corporations were created by the state and the state could regulate them to ensure public benefit. Large corporations threaten to monopolize free markets, to infringe on individuals’ liberties and opportunities, and to quash workers’ rights. Most dangerous of all: “Through size, corporations, once merely an efficient tool employed by individuals in the conduct of private business have become an institution—an institution which has brought such concentration of economic power that so-called private corporations are sometimes able to dominate the state.”

Senator Warren asserts the right to make corporations accountable. This is long overdue.

Trampling individual rights

Citizens United unleashed corporate money into our political system with a shrug from Justice Anthony Kennedy that “independent expenditures do not lead to, or create the appearance of, quid pro quo corruption.” Hobby Lobby ruled that corporations can trample on the rights of women – that is to say, of human beings. As Adam Winkler notes, “the rights of employees have to give way to the rights of the corporation.” And, “the data show that the Roberts Court is the most business-friendly Supreme Court in nearly a century.”

Professor Winkler concludes:

So while a business corporation can’t go to church, fast on Yom Kippur, or travel to Mecca for Ramadan, it can still go to court and, on the basis of religious freedom, demand to be exempted from the law that applies to everyone else. Today, women are the victim. Tomorrow, it could be LGBT people. Indeed, after Hobby Lobby, every person is at risk. Everyone, that is, except the corporate person, my friend.

Democrats, Donald Trump

Women are leading the Resistance to Trump and focused on generating a Blue Wave in November

In a previous post I suggested that the greatest threat to a Blue Wave this fall was sky high Republican turnout on behalf of a president with historically low approval ratings. Trump’s campaign strategy is to gin up his base by stoking division, including (as Paul Ryan has observed) straight-up trolling his perceived enemies. Thus far, his base is sticking with him as measured by his “own party” approval ratings. He is also able to sway a huge swath of Republican primary voters.

But of course the Trump onslaught can’t help but rile up his opponents as well. What reasons do we have for believing that a Blue Wave will crest on Election Day?

First, a brief aside to consider several views of what a ‘wave election’ is. Nate Cohn tweets:

Amy Walter at the Cook Political Report, looking at the elections Cohn references – 1994, 2006, and 2010, provides a bar graph illustrating the number of seats needed by the out-party in each case plus the number of additional seats they actually won:

(Click for link at Cook Political Report and scroll down to view larger image.)

“By this metric,” she writes, “a gain of 35 seats by the Democrats should be considered a wave.”

Alexi McCammond at Axios points to a report by Ballotpedia, which begins with this definition: “We define wave elections as the 20 percent of elections where the president’s party lost the most seats during the last 100 years (50 election cycles).” Based on this criterion, Democrats would need to win 48 House seats for it to constitute a wave.

The bottom line, of course, isn’t whether the Democratic margin of victory hits a designated historical benchmark – though the political impact will be amplified as the margin of victory increases – it’s whether or not the Democrats win working majority in the House. At this stage, we don’t know, but if it happens, what will drive that victory?

“Reports from journalists and academics describe grassroots organizational activity by left-of-center citizens and groups that is unequalled since Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign, and disproportionate political engagement among women that may have been last matched during the push for the Equal Rights Amendment four decades ago,” writes David Hopkins at Honest Graft, who believes this is the underreported story of 2018, receiving only “a small fraction of the media coverage that was directed to the Tea Party movement in advance of the Republican victories of 2010.”

Hopkins argues that because the media loves conflict and – unlike the Tea Party, which aggressively challenged the Republican establishment – the grassroots movement opposing Trump hasn’t fractured the Democratic Party, created anti-Washington fervor, or given rise to ideological purity.

“We are left, instead, with a picture of millions of Americans arrayed from the political left to the center, disproportionately well-educated, suburban, and professional, who are simultaneously captivated and repulsed by the day-to-day behavior of Donald Trump.”

Theda Skocpal, a scholar who studied the Tea Party and has looked more recently at the opposition to Trump, notes that while activists from both groups sound surprisingly similar (“I used to vote. Now I realize my country could be lost, and I have to do more.”), the resistance to Trump is a center-left phenomenon led overwhelmingly by women. Skopal estimates that 70% of Indivisible participants, for instance, and most of its leaders, are women.

“These are middle-class women’s networks, with some men in them. They turned around public opinion on the Affordable Care Act. They were behind Conor Lamb’s victory, along with the unions. They’re everywhere, and they have made a real difference. They’re likely to be the key to congressional victories, if they happen.”

Tea Party activists were clustered on the ideological far right and infused with anti-establishment fervor. The Resistance looks different. She notes that it is not being driven by Bernie Sanders’ followers, nor the left-most stalwarts in the Democratic Party. Instead, they are as likely to occupy the middle of the road as the far left.

“They’re not likely to be highly ideological. They care about good government, health care, education, decency toward immigrants and refugees. A lot of them got involved through church networks…..

A lot of them are progressive, but they’re also pragmatic. They don’t insist on the leftmost candidate. They’ll get behind any reasonable Democrat.”

Will the anti-Trump movement push Democrats to the House majority in 2018? There are powerful obstacles to overcome. The most prominent, as George Packer puts it: “Democrats have a habit of forgetting to vote between Presidential elections.” And the demographic groups that boast the highest level of support for Democrats – such as young people, black and Latino communities, and working class folks – are the most likely to forget.

At this stage, though, the wind is at the Democrats’ backs. A study released at the beginning of this week, revealed a surge of Democratic enthusiasm, as measured by turnout in 2018 primary elections: up 84% compared with 2014. In comparison, Republican turnout is up only 14% relative to 2014.

But the bottom line is that votes cast, not increased turnout, will carry the day on November 6. And in many of the House districts that Democrats need to flip, Republicans outnumber Democrats. Plus, Republicans are simply more reliable voters.

Consider: among the most talked about House seats that Democrats are targeting nationally are a number of California districts, seven of which have been on the Democrats’ Red to Blue wish list for more than a year. They are: CD 10 (Jeff Denham); CD 21 (David Valadao); CD 25 (Steve Knight); CD 39 (Ed Royce – retiring); CD 45 (Mimi Walters); CD 48 (Dana Rohrabacher); and CD 49 (Darrell Issa – Retiring).

In six out of these seven districts, Republicans on the June 2018 primary ballot received more votes than Democratic candidates did. The only exception was CD 49, where 92,837 votes were cast for Democrats and 89,839 votes for Republicans. Representative Issa, alone among the Republican Congressmen from these seven districts, narrowly avoided defeat in 2016. The Cook Political Report rated (as of August 9) CD 49 as ‘Lean Democratic,’ though there is a slight Republican registration edge, with a Cook Partisan Voter Index (PVI) rating of ‘R+1.’

But, while Republicans turnout more reliably, more Democrats get out to vote for general elections than for primaries. With a ballot for California’s Governor and the U.S. Senate in November, Democratic turnout will dwarf what we saw in June. So Democrats can expect to be highly competitive, if not quite favored. Cook rated four of these races ‘Republican Toss Up’: CDs 10, 25, and 39, which all have a PVI rating of ‘Even,’ along with CD 48, which has a PVI of ‘R+4.’ Cook rated CD 45 as ‘Lean Republican’ (PVI: ‘R+3’) and CA 21 as ‘Likely Republican’ (PVI: ‘D+5’).

If Democrats flip the House in November, credit a diverse group of activists throughout the country, but count on middle-class women to drive the change. As Theda Skocpol describes the movement to resist Trump, “This will not look like a far-left reinvention of Tea Partiers or a continuation of Bernie 2016. It will look like retired librarians rolling their eyes at the present state of affairs, and then taking charge.”

Photograph: editor’s photo of January 20, 2018 Women’s March in Los Angeles.

 

2020 Democratic Primary, Democrats

Senator Kamala Harris introduces Rent Relief Act to help 13.3 million working families

California Senator Kamala Harris, who has been talked about as a Democratic candidate for president, has introduced legislation to provide refundable tax credits to benefit 13.3 million rent-burdened families. ‘Refundable’ means they would receive cash, even if they owed no taxes.

In many urban areas – including in Senator Harris’s home state of California and especially in places with booming economies, such as the Silicon Valley – the lack of affordable housing constitutes a crisis. The Department of Housing and Urban Development defines affordability as “the extent to which enough rental housing units of different costs can provide each renter household with a unit it can afford (based on the 30-percent-of-income standard).” The National Low Income Housing Coalition, which accepts this standard, has documented a significant national gap between wages and rents.

“A full-time worker earning the federal minimum wage of $7.25 needs to work approximately 122 hours per week for all 52 weeks of the year, or approximately three full-time jobs, to afford a two-bedroom rental home at the national average fair market rent. The same worker needs to work 99 hours per week for all 52 weeks of the year, or approximately two and a half full-time jobs, to afford a one-bedroom home at the national average fair market rent.”

The Rent Relief Act would provide tax credits for renters across the country with limited incomes who pay more than 30% of their incomes for rent and utilities. Below $25,000, the subsidy would be 100% of the cost of rent that exceeds 30% of income. In very expensive areas, the income ceiling would be $124,999, which would yield a 25% subsidy of the excess. (That’s not a lot of spending power for a family of four in some cities.)

This proposal certainly represents a bracing expansion of federal policy related to renters (though the tax code is strewn with ample benefits for homeowners). Irony watch: while this is more grist for the mill in talk of the Democratic Party’s move to the left, and chatter about democratic socialism, especially since the election of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – the Rent Relief Act is actually a revision of a proposal introduced by Representative Joe Crowley, the old guard Democrat whom Occasio-Cortez defeated.

It’s easy to find fault with this approach to high rents based on the principle of supply and demand: if there is a shortage of affordable houses and apartments, then the obvious solution is to build more. As the supply goes up, prices will come down. Instead, in cities with the most expensive rental rates, restrictive zoning laws, minimal parking requirements, and opposition by residents to denser housing in their neighborhoods (and in the neighborhoods through which they commute each day), ensure that the supply of affordable housing is severely restricted where it is most needed (including in prosperous cities in blue states, such as California). So local regulations and neighborhood opposition quashes the development of new housing.

The virtue of Harris’s proposal is that it is straightforward in concept: rents are too high for wage earners, so give them money to pay the rent. Whether refunding taxes or providing subsidies, the federal government is capable of dispensing money.

The most successful anti-poverty program in history is Social Security. As complicated as the rules are, it’s simple in concept, and that’s one reason for its success. Folks need not be well-versed in Social Security rules to understand that they (and their employers) support the program with taxes, and when they retire, they draw monthly benefits.

In my view, Living Wage Ordinances (locally) or expanded Earned Income Tax Credits (nationally) would make more sense. Why line the pockets of landlords with rental subsidies? With increased EITC funding, the government could provide additional income – unrestricted – so folks could decide how to spend the money: food, clothes, education, transportation – whatever – not just housing.

Of course conservatives will object to creation of another ‘entitlement.’ Where will the money come from? Kevin Drum has an idea – or rather eleven (each with a footnote) – on places to adjust the budget to come up with the cash.

It’s all a matter of priorities. Do we help low-wage workers struggling to pay the rent, or do we dish out more tax reductions to the rich?

Photo: Senator Harris on Twitter.