By Kent R. Kroeger (Source: NuQum.com, June 2, 2017)

Three certainties remain after the Trump administration’s decision to leave the Paris Agreement. First, climate change science will become even more politicized. Second, coal is not coming back.

The third certainty is that the Paris Agreement on climate change, with or without the U.S. in it, will not change the facts on the ground. The planet will continue to warm even as the developed economies will continue to rapidly convert from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources.

Nonetheless, the Trump administration’s decision to leave and potentially renegotiate the agreement has been met by near unanimous criticism from the media, the Democrats, and the international community.

Yet, much of the criticism rings hollow given that many of these voices decrying Trump today were also denouncing the agreement nearly two years ago when it was signed in Paris. The central feature of the agreement most criticized at the time was its nonbinding nature and lack of enforcement mechanisms.

Writing for The New Yorker, John Cassidy summarized in a 2015 article the inherent weakness of the Paris Agreement:

“The only way to ensure the participation of the United States and China was to make the agreement nonbinding. The Obama Administration insisted on it, well aware that the U.S. Senate wouldn’t ratify a formal treaty…If a country fails to live up to what it promised in Paris, there is no obvious recourse beyond naming and shaming.”

Perhaps the most damning indictment of the Paris Agreement came from the very scientists the Democrats today use as cudgels to shame “climate deniers” and other critics of the Paris Agreement.

Former NASA scientist James Hansen, one of the first scientists to document how greenhouse gases are putting the planet’s climate at risk, said of the Paris Agreement, “It’s a fraud really, a fake. It is just bullshit for them to say: ‘We’ll have a 2-degree Celsius warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.’ It’s just worthless words. There is no action, just promises. As long as fossil fuels appear to be the cheapest fuels out there, they will be continued to be burned.”

“The emissions cuts promised by countries (in the Paris Agreement) are still wholly insufficient,” said Corinne Le Quere of the University of East Anglia, who studies global emissions, about the agreement when it was signed in December, 2015.

“The deal in Paris may well have been the best deal possible,” wrote New Scientist writer Michael Le Page. “But the protesters outside the summit are right when they say it will not save the planet.”

Nothing has changed in the Paris Agreement since Dr. Hansen and Dr. Le Quere made those comments in 2015. So what justifies the hysterics we now hear about the Trump administration’s decision to leave the agreement? The nonbinding nature of the Paris Agreement that was once declared as the agreement’s fatal flaw, is now portrayed as part of its strength. Critics of the Trump action further suggest the U.S. will cede its leadership position in the world by leaving the agreement.

“Its a shameful moment for the United States,” says former Secretary of State John Kerry, who helped negotiate the agreement.

“This was a crushing blow,” says Alice Hill. who helped negotiate the agreement for the Obama administration. ”

“A profound abdication of world leadership,” says former U.S. Senator Max Baucus. “This is a huge opportunity for China.”

Its not clear how China becomes a world leader on climate policy, given their own reluctance to adhere to binding and enforceable CO2 emissions cuts, but we are asked to accept this inevitable shift in power without examination.

What seems more likely from the Trump move is that climate change science will become even more politicized which doesn’t serve anyone’s interest.

The distress over the Trump decision is motivated by more by the politics than the science.

That’s not a criticism of Trump’s critics. Of course, politics is a big part of this debate. We are potentially talking trillions of dollars in costs and wealth transfers as the impact of global warming becomes increasingly evident over time. When money on that scale is involved, we can’t let scientists unilaterally make the substantive policy decisions that address global warming. Scientists are not elected representatives and they won’t suffer the consequences the way politicians will should the transition to a renewable energy economy cause significant economic dislocation.

Furthermore, since the Paris Agreement is voluntary and nonbinding, the most likely impact of the U.S. withdrawal will be in perceptions. Where the Obama administration portrayed itself as a leader on the issue (it wasn’t), the Trump decision has left a perceived power vacuum likely to be filled by the Europeans in the near-term and potentially by China in the long-term.

But the truth is even more complicated. China and other rapidly developing economies can’t afford energy prices to rise too fast — which will happen if the conversion to renewable energy sources occurs too rapidly. Its a balancing act that determined the shape of the Paris Agreement and ultimately limits its impact on global temperatures.

The claim that China will assume leadership in the new technologies behind renewable energy because of the Trump action is a baseless canard. China and Europe were catching up in those technologies (if not already surpassing us) while the U.S. was part of the Paris Agreement. Trump’s action doesn’t change that — and nothing prevents this country from keeping its leadership in these technologies. Economic demand will drive technology development, independent of the Paris Agreement.

The Trump decision is predicated on a political calculus that presupposes millions of fossil fuel-based jobs will be jeopardized if we adopt the Paris Agreement targets. You can argue they are wrong, but its hard to deny why they would be concerned about these potential job losses.

“Paris represents an international agreement that puts the U.S. at a disadvantage and does little to change global warming,” says U.S. EPA chief, Scott Pruitt. “The U.S. has made significant advancements in CO2 emissions. We have nothing to apologize for.”

Its hard to ignore the irony in Pruitt’s statement. It is because of the active efforts of the Obama administration that allows him to highlight this country’s achievements in reducing CO2 emissions. That the Trump administration is already rolling back regulations that could reverse these gains is left unaddressed by Pruitt.

But Trump’s critics ignore the realities of climate change as well. The science says the Paris Agreement will be insufficient in stopping the planet’s 2 degree Celsius temperature rise from the pre-industrial baseline.

So what are we left with?  Not much. Global temperatures will continue to rise. The Europeans, China and the U.S. are likely to continue unabated in their  efforts to convert from fossil fuel-based to renewable energy-based economies. And those efforts may not occur soon enough to avoid the significant costs of global warming.

But that is where this has always been heading and no politician, country or political movement is positioned to change that fact.

You contact the author at: kentkroeger3@gmail.com

About the author:  Kent Kroeger is a writer and statistical consultant with over 30 -years experience measuring and analyzing public opinion for public and private sector clients. He also spent ten years working for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness and the Defense Intelligence Agency. He holds a B.S. degree in Journalism/Political Science from The University of Iowa, and an M.A. in Quantitative Methods from Columbia University (New York, NY).  He lives in Ewing, New Jersey with his wife and son.

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source: NuQum.com, May 28, 2017)

It is always prudent not to jump to conclusions when a news story first breaks, particularly when it relates to U.S. intelligence.  Case in point is the latest twist in the Trump-Russia connection coming from Washington Post writers Ellen Nakashima, Adam Entous, and Greg Miller.

The  entire May 26th story can be read here.

Their story reports about a meeting between President Trump’s senior adviser Jared Kushner and Russian U.S. Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in which it is claimed that they discussed creating a secure communications channel between Trump’s transition team and the Kremlin.

The first two paragraphs of the story are most important:

From The Washington Post:

About the author:  Kent Kroeger is a writer and statistical consultant with over 30 -years experience measuring and analyzing public opinion for public and private sector clients. He also spent ten years working for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness and the Defense Intelligence Agency. He holds a B.S. degree in Journalism/Political Science from The University of Iowa, and an M.A. in Quantitative Methods from Columbia University (New York, NY).  He lives in Ewing, New Jersey with his wife and son.

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source: NuQum.com, May 5, 2017)

Heading into Mother’s Day weekend, I intended to write about my 86-year-old mother, a retired Iowa public school teacher and a great lady.

But…it will need to wait, as I’ve been thinking a lot about my father recently…and Donald Trump.

President Trump’s recent SiriusXM Radio interview triggered my latest reflection. This is the interview where President Trump wondered out loud, “Why was there a Civil War?” According to Trump, President Andrew Jackson would have found a way to avoid the Civil War if he had been around near its start. I’m being charitable in my interpretation of the Trump’s comments.

Link: Trump Speaks About Andrew Jackson and the Civil War on SIRUSXM Radio

I don’t know how I made it  a week before hearing the SiriusXM Radio interview. But, I did — until a former colleague sent it to me.

“This is your president,” she wrote. “Enjoy.”

Full disclosure. I am a Obama-Trump voter (and I caucused for O’Malley). The New York Times, among others, have concluded that the shift of people like me from Obama (in 2012) to Trump (in 2016) explains much of why Clinton lost what was considered a very winnable race for her.

Click here to read Global Strategy Group’s Matt Canter give a more substantial understanding of this shift from Obama to Trump.

Suffice it to say, I had my reasons (such as her aggressive support of a reckless, neocon-inspired foreign policies) and nothing has changed to make me regret my vote. I share actor James Woods’ sentiments on the 2016 election ==> here:

But the Trump interview on SiriusXM was unsettling, nonetheless. He mangled history in a way that would have made my father cringe. It should stagger anyone that values rational thought.

Historical events and figures can have varying interpretations depending on the historian. However, there are socially accepted boundaries that generally limit where insightful historical analyses can tread. This engenders an intellectual elitism found with most academic historians —  but for that modest cost — we, as a society, gain a common understanding of our culture, our nation and ourselves.

Donald Trump wandered into an uncommon place — and it was built from his own synaptic impulses that don’t always serve him well. In the SirusXM interview he offered a nonsensical description of an interesting American political figure (Andrew Jackson) and clumsily tried to pivot into an understanding of the Civil War.

It sounded like something Steve Bannon dreamed up and Trump tried to regurgitate, as best he could, close to its original form.

The attempt failed.

And after hearing the SiriusXM interview, that’s when I thought of my father, Glenn Kroeger.

Though trained as a physicist and engineer, he was an historian at heart. He loved history more than the profession that helped him build a home, raise a family and comfortably retire before his death in 2001.

Growing up in the Great Depression, history books were his escape from the soul-grinding realities of eastern Colorado in the early 1930s.  And unlike our current president, my father cared about how historical knowledge was conveyed. Verbal Incoherence suggests laziness and insults the listener.

My father was trained in math and science. H expressed history as would a mathematician who put a premium on causal ordering and trends. His dinner table dissertations on history didn’t just retell stories, but were interlaced with causal explanations.

His over-arching causal model was a simple one. While often riddled with ignorance, suffering and death, my father saw history as the near monotonic march of progress. The arc of human achievement was an upward trending line with occasional perturbations followed by a regression back to the mean and a return to the onward march of progress.

His optimism mirrored the views at the time of Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, who coined the term “creative destruction” when describing capitalism’s role in advancing society. For someone growing up in deep poverty in the rural plains in the 1930s, my father’s attraction to such a deterministic perspective was understandable. It became part of his political DNA, even as his immediate views on contemporary political issues were often shifting and malleable.

In sharing his love of history with me, my father would often return to what I call his origin stories. These were the historical figures and events from which his personal life philosophy arose.

He talked so often of Genghis Khan, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Otto von Bismarck, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, and General George Marshall, I thought they were blood relations. (They weren’t.)

He talked  with awe about the rise of Genghis Khan and how his Mongolian horse archers conquered nearly all of continental Asia, the Middle East and parts of eastern Europe. His descriptions of how Genghis Khan’s army vanquished great cities were so vivid, I thought perhaps he lived through it. (He didn’t.)

My father’s paperback copies of Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” and “The Age of Reason” were so greasy and feathered, I always intended to buy him new, hard bound copies before he died. (I didn’t.)

You knew not to say the name, John D. Rockefeller Jr., in my father’s presence. Growing up poor in Sterling, Colorado in the 1930s meant you knew chapter and verse how Rockefeller, the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, and their hired goons brutally ended a miners strike in the town of Ludlow.  To end the strike, two dozen people died on April 20, 1914, including some women and children. It was one of my father’s origin stories even though neither he, nor anyone from our family, was directly involved.

There were other dinner table stories I will always remember.

He never forgave Captain Smith for the arrogance that precipitated his driving the Titanic into a rogue iceberg in the north Atlantic. When he would describe in detail how the ‘steerage class’ were prevented from reaching the lifeboats, I can be forgiven if I once believed he was one of the Titanic‘s few third class passengers to make it to the Carpathia.

My father loathed inherited wealth and he used the Titanic story as an exemplar tale. When the richest man in America at the time, John Jacob Astor IV, was found dead in the water by one of the returning lifeboats, my father’s regret was that he didn’t sink to the bottom of the icy Atlantic.

My father’s opinions often lacked gentility. They were sometimes as dry and harsh as the tumbleweed that would sweep through eastern Colorado in the dust bowl years. He would often punctuate political discussions with the question, “Who benefits and who loses?” Years later, in college, I would read Howard Zinn’s, “The People’s History of the United States,” and think, this sounds familiar.

Would you be the savior of the broken, the beaten and the damned? is a line from one of my favorite bands is also a nice summary of my father’s philosophy.

But my father wasn’t a socialist, but close. He was a Democrat, and though he opposed his party on some of its biggest issues (Equal Rights Amendment, busing, taxes, affirmative action, Middle East policy), he despised the Republicans too much to ever consider changing his party registration. He was a disgruntled Democrat to his end.

He joined the U.S. Army near the end of World War II when he was 16-years-old, doctoring his birth certificate to make it look like he was 17. And while he lamented the war ended before he could really participate, I always thought it seemed like the perfect time to join.

He would express to me his admiration for what he called the “Big Three” U.S. Army Generals:  Marshall, Bradley, and Eisenhower. Due to his older brother’s immense suffering in the war’s Pacific theater, he despised  Generals MacArthur and LeMay.

But his deepest animus was towards Harry “ass” Truman, often talking about his approving the needless dropping of the atomic bombs on Japanese civilians in World War II and suggesting he along with LeMay should have been included in the war crime trials after the war.

At the same time, he thought the Western allies should have pushed Stalin out of eastern Europe. While some liberals at the time were expressing admiration for the Russian dictator, my father saw just another example of power elites taking advantage of the common people.

Until his death, my father also blamed Truman for starting the fire that today keeps the U.S. in a near-permanent state of war in the Middle East. At the end of World War II, he didn’t understand why Truman didn’t allow more Jewish refugees into this country. When Truman championed the creation of Israel, my father lamented his callousness in turning a blind eye to the Palestinian people when they were driven from their homes and cities during Israel’s creation.

Over his views on the Palestinians and Israel, some of my father’s friends from the Unitarian Church that we attended would call him an ‘anti-Semite’ behind his back. From that experience I learned the treacherous ease with which liberals like to label others as’racist.’

My father was many things — not all of them admirable.  But he was not a racist. Far from it. Rather, everything he read and experienced passed through historical lenses more sensitized to class and economics than to issues of race and ethnicity. When identify politics took over the Democratic Party in the 1960s and 70s, he knew his party had left him for good. All too familiar under present circumstances.

But my father didn’t hate all politicians. He loved FDR and Ike and cried like a grieving brother when JFK died. {But, Dad, didn’t you often call the Kennedy family a ‘bunch of bootleggers and smugglers’ that can’t be trusted? I would learn years later about how some people are good at compartmentalizing their opinions.}

However, his thoughts towards LBJ and Nixon were consistent and mostly negative.

As for Reagan, my father saw him as a puppet to Republican elites; though, when Reagan took down the PATCO union, my father would say it was about time someone stood up to the powerful unions. This coming from a man that would almost cry relating the story of the Ludlow massacre. This disconnect did not go unnoticed, even by my father, who admitted to me that 20 years in the white collar world as an engineer had changed his views on a lot of things. This is why I laugh when political analysts tell us that the Millennials will  put and keep the Democrats in power for a long time. Yeah, right. Lets see how that turns out.

As he aged, my father became particularly sensitive to politicians’ honesty. He was convinced they would conspire to steal his Social Security and retirement nest egg. He was especially distrustful of  Bill Clinton — and Clinton didn’t disappoint. Regarding the ‘the kid from Hope, Arkansas,’ he would say, “he tells lies even when the truth would sound better.”

He despised Bill, but admired his wife.

Yes, it is hard for me to fit my father’s politics or general philosophy to any coherent governing framework. It covered a lot of ideological territory.

My father’s egalitarianism was non-doctrinaire and elastic, for while history taught him that concentrated wealth hindered the general prosperity of a nation, he also recognized some people are endowed with great ideas and should be encouraged to enjoy the fruits of those inspirations. Hence, even though he admired FDR and the New Deal, by the 1970s he thought the U.S. government had evolved into a tool for laggards, the envious and the over-educated to take away other people’s hard work.

My father was a textbook Reagan Democrat except that, as I mentioned, he despised the Republicans – and, yet, still voted for Ike twice,  and Nixon and Ford once each.

The lesson here? If you assume someone will vote one way because of their identify or past voting history,  you do so at the risk of being wrong…very wrong.

Today, I still find myself drawing chestnuts of wisdom from one of my father’s political rants. He was driven by his childhood traumas and adult insecurities more than from a tight political ideology. That’s OK. Cognitive dissonance never bothered him. He swam in it. As we all do. As Donald Trump seems to do with relish.

By writing about my father here, perhaps I now see Trump in a more understanding light?

Uh….no.

Donald Trump talks about history like someone who had no time for it  when he was still a student. His historical musings are devoid of substance, depth, and utility. Its a nutrition-free gruel of superficial knowledge held together with stunted syntax and sudden pauses, all meant to convey to the listener that its chef is a really, really, really smart guy. Of course, it does the exact the opposite — and I think he knows it.

I see the embarrassment in his face sometimes as it turns increasingly red the more he talks. In those moments he is showing the physiological attributes of chronic embarrassment – not dementia or narcissistic personality disorder as many want to believe. Donald Trump is painfully aware of his severe knowledge deficit.

I genuinely believe Donald Trump sits up at night kicking himself for all the stupid things he said during the day.  By 3 a.m., that regret and embarrassment turns into anger — and then we get the tweets.  Loads of tweets.

To be fair, my father also had some quirky interpretations of history (such as, ‘the Germans nearly won World War II’). But even when my father was wrong, it was rooted in a common reality that anyone could at least understand, if not share agreement.

My father said history mirrored the massive rivers that cut through the plains he grew up on. From a surface view, the North Platte River often meanders in inexplicable directions, snaking across the prairie like a rattlesnake. But from a much higher perspective, the river churns through our nation’s midsection with the clear purpose of finding the nearest ocean.

But where rivers seek the geographic low point, my father saw human history as driven by a different but equally deterministic dynamic. In the immediate, it is full of strange cul-de-sacs that defy explanation — but over the long arc of time it reveals its larger mission. Collectively, we humans always seek the next highest point. And from there, the next, and then the next. We can’t help ourselves.

That was how my father came to understand history. His views are never far from my thoughts.

[Mom, I will write about you on Father’s Day, I promise]

The author can be reached at: kentkroeger3@gmail.com

About the author:  Kent Kroeger is a writer and statistical consultant with over 30 -years experience measuring and analyzing public opinion for public and private sector clients. He holds a B.S. degree in Journalism/Political Science from The University of Iowa, and an M.A. in Quantitative Methods from Columbia University (New York, NY).  He lives in Ewing, New Jersey with his wife and son.

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source: NuQum.com, May 2, 2017)

Motivational speaker Zig Ziglar once said, “If you learn from defeat, you haven’t really lost.”

He must have had Hillary Clinton in mind because after watching Clinton’s CNN interview today with Christiane Amanpour, it is clear — Hillary Clinton has learned nothing from her defeat last November.

While some have suggested she accepted her culpability in November’s defeat, the opposite was on display in the CNN interview.

I understand her need to blame others. We all do this, consciously or unconsciously. And, frankly, she is correct in saying Putin had it in for her and Comey didn’t do her any favors.

But this is exactly why the Democrats need to hold her accountable for last November’s election debacle. She was damaged goods going into the election and she lost to the most unprepared candidate in U.S. presidential history.

Why did she lose? For the very reasons she cites for her own exoneration. She made Comey and Putin powerful enough to influence a U.S. presidential election. Hillary Clinton lost because of her own inherent flaws.

She had been in the public spotlight too long, made too many powerful enemies, was overly paranoid (with cause) and was so protective of her privacy that she demanded her State Department work emails be stored on servers she could control with absolute certainty.

The personal email server was Clinton’s creation. Whether the press pursued this story too long is debatable. We know from the State Department’s Inspector General report that this server setup was not to be questioned by the State Department’s IT staff – who did not sanction the setup.

Given that unmarked classified documents were found on Clinton’s home server suggests — at a minimum — a reckless disregard for the security requirements of classified intelligence.  At worst, it suggests criminal behavior was involved, such as removing classified markings from intelligence documents. It would have been a dereliction of duty had the press not pursued the Clinton email story to the extent they did.

Saying the press wouldn’t have pursued the email story if the candidate was a man is overwhelmed by contrary evidence. The Clinton email story had too many angles for the press to ignore:  the potential exposure of state secrets to foreign adversaries, destruction of emails subpoenaed by Congress, and evidence from investigation-obtained emails showing Clinton conducting Clinton Foundation business while serving as Secretary of State. The latter point she had promised in writing to President Obama she would not do. She did anyway.

That’s not Comey’s or Putin’s fault. It’s Hillary’s fault.

As for Putin, it is no surprise the Russian’s were mucking around in our election. I would be surprised if they hadn’t. What does bother me is the extent and sophistication of the Russian information operation to influence the election. It is not an act of war, as some have suggested, but it is a provocation that will negatively impact U.S.-Russian relations for a long, long time.

Yet, to claim the Russians, through Wikileaks, changed the outcome of the election is an academic question on which we will never get a definitive answer. In fact, a persuasive argument could be made suggesting the Russian hacking was so well-known by mid-October that many voters could have turned to Clinton over Trump out of sympathy or a sense of patriotic duty. By Election Day, I had been lectured multiple times about why voting for Trump would be a vote for Putin.

That many voters didn’t care and still voted for Trump is, to my mind, more evidence that Clinton was the problem, not Putin.

We are seven months removed from the election and Hillary Clinton remains unwilling to help her own party come to grips with their defeat. Her supporters even suggest looking for blame distracts the party from the more critical task of opposing President Trump.

But Journalist Glenn Greenwald disagrees: “Trying to understand why the Democrats have so spectacularly failed isn’t a distraction from battling Trump — its the key prerequisite for doing so.” Unfortunately, Greenwald will be disappointed by any attempt to explain the 2016 elections.

Hillary Clinton isn’t the distal cause of anything, including her own defeat.  She was done in by forces outside her own volition.

Political leaders like Clinton are more passengers than drivers of history. They navigate waters they didn’t create and which drive them to their unique moment in history. Only Nixon could go to China. Only Reagan could bring down the Iron Curtain. And only Hillary could lose to Donald Trump.

The author can be reached at: kentkroeger3@gmail.com

About the author:  Kent Kroeger is a writer and statistical consultant with over 30 -years experience measuring and analyzing public opinion for public and private sector clients. He holds a B.S. degree in Journalism/Political Science from The University of Iowa, and an M.A. in Quantitative Methods from Columbia University (New York, NY).  He lives in Ewing, New Jersey with his wife and son.

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source: NuQum.com, April 18, 2017)

I admire Ruy Teixeira’s optimism.  He is Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss minus the syphilis.  Reality fails to deter him.

The co-author of “The Emerging Democratic Majority” (with John Judis) and the intellectual architect of the Democratic Party’s current electoral strategy to win elections mainly through mobilizing its base (at the expense of voter persuasion efforts) has given the Democrats even more reasons to be confident about their future.

Seven reasons to be exact.  However, towards the end of his Vox.com article, when he says that “Trump can’t solve people’s problems (but) the left can,” he unwittingly highlights exactly why the Democrats remain disconnected from political reality and will likely fail to capitalize on any future public dissatisfaction with the Trump administration and the Republican Congress.

According to Teixeira, we just need to spend more money in the appropriate areas. Trump’s building a wall, renegotiating trade agreements, and lowering taxes are political bait-n-switches doomed to fail.  It is the Democrats, says Teixeira, that have the”feasible” ideas that will produce sustainable growth.

“The Democratic Party is more or less united around a programmatic approach to the economy that could actually produce such growth,” says Teixeira.  “This includes universal pre-K, free access to two years and some four-year colleges, paid family leave, subsidized child care, higher minimum wages, a commitment to full employment, and robust investments in infrastructure and scientific research, especially around clean energy.”

All defensible policy ideas that — according to my back-of-the-envelope estimate — would add to our nation’s annual budget about 500 billion dollars in new spending, plus an additional $1 trillion spread out over  5 to 10 years to cover just the new infrastructure spending.  Some of this spending could be pushed to the state-level, but apart from states like South and North Dakota, few states have the capacity to take on new spending on that scale.

But think of all that additional economic growth it will create to pay for these programs, you ask?  I’m thinking about it and the only firm conclusion I can muster is that there is no problem the Democrats aren’t willing to spend your money to try and solve.

This is 2017, not 1932.  The United States has one of the highest debt-to-GDP ratios in the developed world — fifth out of the 36 OECD countries, according to the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

And, while we are not broke in the near-term (not even close), it does represent a financial ceiling, of sorts, that makes the likelihood of creating more big-ticket government programs very unlikely.

Obamacare is “sticky” and repealing is now unlikely.  But it also stands as a deterrent to passing other broad government programs.  As a nation, we lack the political consensus (much less the money) to add more spending on such a large scale — unless we are talking about defense spending (but that’s for another article on another day).

By suggesting these large policy initiatives represent the Democrats’ advantage over the Republicans in ideas, Teixeira only highlights how the Democrats lack any new ideas and remain deeply out-of-touch with political and economic reality.

Teixeira could have used the opportunity to describe the growing Do-It-Yourself (DIY) and maker-community phenomenon and how this intellectual revolution could be directed towards solving society’s biggest problems in a more cost-effective manner.  Where many government programs lack the ability or funding to create solutions tailored to each program recipient, the DIY ethos of focusing at the individual-level creates a level of efficiency a government program could never approach.

Far from being wishful forecasting on my part, DIY-inspired curricula are already working their way into our schools to where many teenagers have stopped buying pre-built computers, but are instead building their own to meet their often massive computing requirements – at a fraction of the cost. Home security, artificial intelligence-controlled home energy consumption, local food production, among other daily tasks, are already being impacted by DIY solutions.

The DIY ethos is capable of changing the world for the better without relying on public spending for its advance.  Quite the opposite, it could kill off large swaths of what today we assume to  be the exclusive domain of our local, state and federal governments.

But this social revolution hasn’t penetrated the political elite class yet, if Teixeira is any indication. Instead, he just proposes a handful of big, new government programs, as if all we need to do is get an FDR-like Democrat in office, along with a Democratic congressional majority, and away we go…

I give Teixeira credit. Though humbled by the 2016 election, he hasn’t let one titan-class prediction failure stop him from making more predictions. And while doing so, slips in his tragic and flawed ’emerging Democratic majority’ thesis to argue that the Democrats’ likely success in the 2018 midterm elections will begin to validate his original predictions.

Yet, predicting the Democrats will do well in the 2018 midterm elections (and beyond) might be acceptable for Capt. Obvious, Teixeira and other political analysts must esteem to answer the tougher question: To what extent will the Democrats’ likely gains  in 2018 be due to the electorate’s fundamental alignment with the Democrats’ agenda versus a predictable reaction to the real and perceived failings of the Trump administration.

Its on this more germane question that Teixeira’s assertion of the Democrats’ unstoppable ascendancy may come up up short, again.

There is much in Teixeira’s newest argument that is prescient and will work in the Democrats favor going forward.  Most notably, he correctly points out that the Democrats’ policy gains from FDR to Obama will be hard to reverse.  He calls them “sticky” gains and the recent failure of the U.S. Congress to replace and repeal Obamacare gives us vivid evidence of this stickiness.  He also cites Social Security and Medicare, two social safety net programs launched when the Democrats were the ‘party of ideas’ and the dominant governing party.  That those two programs not only remain intact but have grown (a lot!) since their creation is a testament to the power of growing tax revenues and its ability to seduce politicians into increasing the pervasiveness of the government in our everyday lives.

My wife likes to tell me, especially when I’m on a rant about the size of government, that I would miss the government if it went away.  Would I?  I guess we’ll find out because that is a big part of the Trump experiment going on right now. We may soon find out how much we will miss many of our State Department’s functions, or the EPA, or the National Endowment for the Arts, etc.

Teixeira also highlights the strategic advantage the Democrats possesses on issues like technological change and the growth of “office jobs” (who can’t get excited about that?!), globalization as a force for good (particularly for people that aren’t Americans), and the clean energy revolution.

Right. Right.  And right.  He is probably not wrong on any of these fronts. All are happening as we walk and breathe today and, perhaps, the Democrats have an inherent advantage to capitalize on these social trends.

He could have cited recent polling data from the 2016-17 American National Election Study (ANES) showing a remarkable shift in the American electorate along the “free trade/globalization” vector.  Where once Republican partisans were the dominant free-trade advocates, the Democrats now lead. The passive-aggressive neglect of working-class union voters by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign was not an accident.  It was a calculated message to the former bedrock of the Democratic base to ‘find some new friends.’

The Clinton campaign’s hubris was informed and emboldened in large part by Teixeira’s prediction in 2004 of the Democrats’ political dominance by 2016.  But while I could beat the drum all day about why the emerging dominance theory was (and is) wrong, I invite you to read an analysis by Slate’s Yascha Mounk that details why the ’emerging democratic majority’ thesis has been slow to materialize.

With laser-guided precision, Mounk’s truth-bombs porpoise down to their targets to lay waste to one of the biggest flaws in the Teixeira/Judis thesis.  “There is evidence that Latinos and black Americans don’t actually see themselves as particularly liberal,” writes Mounk, who adroitly points out that a few decades ago Irish Americans voted monolithically for Democrats while today they mostly vote Republican.   “Projecting the future voting behavior of Latinos and black Americans is impossible.”

Amen.

Economists like to share the story about a government economist who was asked why he makes economic predictions for policymakers even when he knows he’s not really good at it:  “I predict the future, not because I can, but because they ask me to.”

I can’t fault Teixeira and Judis for attempting to describe the future — I understand the incentive to do so — but I chafe at how frequently these attempts fail. And the Democrats, in particular, have been harmed by the arrogance that often accompanies these predictions. We all want to believe we are working within a bigger, causal framework that in the end leads us to a better place.

Towards the end of Voltaire’s Candide, the title character reminisces with Dr. Pangloss about their many and often difficult life experiences.  About which Dr. Pangloss concludes, by necessity, all has worked out for the best. Candide, however, dismisses Pangloss’ undeterred optimism and eschews all philosophies, replacing them with the simple, individual task of working on his own garden.

The Democrats will not be the ‘party of ideas’ until they relinquish their own unfounded assumptions about how the world works. This is not 1932. There will be no more big government programs coming out of Washington, D.C. anytime soon.  The political and financial capital they require has been spent (and then some).

But, even as I disagree with Teixeira’s unstoppable contention that the Democrats will be primary benefactor of our nation’s social and demographic changes, I respect his intent. And, to be honest, someday he may well be proven correct.

Rather, if I were a partisan Democrat, I would keep at arm’s length these grand assumptions and their optimistic forecasts about the future and focus, instead, on tending your garden in the here and now.

The author can be reached at: kentkroeger3@gmail.com

About the author:  Kent Kroeger is a writer and statistical consultant with over 30 -years experience measuring and analyzing public opinion for public and private sector clients. He holds a B.S. degree in Journalism/Political Science from The University of Iowa, and an M.A. in Quantitative Methods from Columbia University (New York, NY).  He lives in Ewing, New Jersey with his wife and son.

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source: NuQum.com, April 17, 2017)

The mainstream opinion factories continue to kick out articles about how the 2016 elections failed to represent the true nature of public opinion in the U.S.

“We live in a country where the majority agree with the “liberal” position,”  according to filmmaker Michael Moore.  “We just lack the liberal leadership to make that happen.”

Given that the man pretty much called this last presidential election long before anybody else ever did, its hard not to take his opinion seriously.

And Moore isn’t alone in this opinion.  After cherry-picking issues and statistics,  Wired’s Issie Lapowsky and The Atlantic’s Peter Beinart, also concluded this country has been transforming into a Center-Left country for a long time now because we increasingly support gender pay equity, marriage equality, abortion rights, and stronger gun control legislation.  All true, by the way.

But none of these astigmatic expositions come close to the hyper-partisan rage of the Daily Kos‘ Fred Bur and his February 18th article, “The “center-right country” myth and smoldering dog sh*t.”

After dismissing the distinguished career of pollster Douglas Schoen because he hadn’t heard of him before, Bur went on to list why anyone that thinks this is a Center-Right country is peddling “smoldering shit from the dog the size of Neptune.”  A great line. Unfortunately, it was buried in its own pile of pooh posing as a serious argument meant to convince readers that we, in fact, live in a Center-Left country.

Here is a short summary of his argument:  Those people that say we are a Center-Right country are selecting biased polling data that fits their narrative; now here is  my biased selection of polling and election data that proves we are a Center-Left country.

Bur left me unconvinced. I require a more structured, systematic look at the data.  And, luckily, the 2016 American National Election Study fielded jointly by Stanford University and the University of Michigan provides that.

You can get more detail about the ANES methodology  here.  The most important thing to know about this study is that it has been fielded for every election cycle since 1948, had a sample size around 3,600 people in 2016, and is representative of vote-eligible Americans. In other words, they don’t interview children, prisoners and illegal aliens.  Everyone else was potentially on their contact list.

And what does the 2016 ANES tell us?  It tells us how the Democratic Party could nominate the most qualified presidential nominee in modern U.S. electoral history, face the most unprepared opponent imaginable, at a time when the U.S. economy was growing, and still lose the presidency, the U.S. House, and most state legislative and gubernatorial races.

More broadly, the 2016 ANES reveals the most lucent feature of America’s vote-eligible population:  Most Americans are neither Left or Right in terms of their issue positions — though, on average, they lean slightly to the Right on the issues that matter most at election time.

On his point that the Democrats are more than competitive in U.S. elections, Bur is correct. It will not require a monumental sea change in public opinion for the Democrats to win most elections once again.

But, right now, when looking over a broad selection of issues, the Democrats are not in alignment with the majority of Americans, particularly those issues that drive election outcomes.  The Democrats are a Center-Left party in Center-Right country.

Remember, the Democrats didn’t just lose the presidency.  They lost every level of elected government we have in this country. Is that not the best indication of our nation’s right-of-center partisan bias? It our nation’s factory-setting.

Even if we allow that Clinton was more popular than Trump as measured by the popular vote (though we didn’t hold a popular vote presidential election in 2016), we have U.S. congressional and thousands of state-level races to explain.

And the 2016 ANES does that.

Using a simple statistical technique, I clustered the 3,649 ANES respondents as either Left, Middle or Center based on their responses to a wide range of issues (the data and computer algorithms can be provided upon email request to: info@olsonkroeger.com).  It should be noted that the 2016 ANES was conducted in two pre- and post-election waves.  Most of the issues cited below were asked in the post-election wave.

Overall, I categorize 51 percent of Americans as in the Middle of the ideological spectrum, while only 22 percent are on the Left and 27 percent on the Right.  Politicians and opinion journalists may be polarized.  The people that spend an inordinate amount of time on Twitter promoting the #MAGA or #ImStillWithHer hashtags may be polarized.  But not average Americans.

This is good news if you want future U.S. elections to be competitive between the two major parties.  Its bad news if you think Donald Trump’s victory was a stolen one and will be rectified over the next two election cycles.

When viewing U.S. public opinion over many decades, the 2016 ANES results are unsurprising.  The American Voter, authored in 1960 by Angus Campbell, Philip Converse, Warren Miller, and Donald Stokes, found a similar American electorate.  In their study, most Americans were in the ideological center, often holding contradictory opinions when compared to more ideologically consistent partisans.  The American Voter’s oft-cited finding that politics is just not that important to Americans still holds up today and helps explain why ideological purity matters more to political partisans and journalists than it does to average Americans.

In 2014, writing in response to a Pew Research Center report on the polarization of the American electorate, Stanford political scientist Morris Fiorina concluded, “The country as a whole is no more polarized than it was a generation ago.”  Citing the General Social Survey among other data sources, Fiorina argued that, “with occasional small exceptions, moderate remains the modal category today just as it was in the days of Jimmy Carter.”

Fiorina’s conclusion shouldn’t change given the 2016 ANES results.

To avoid analytical cherry-picking, Figure 1 below shows a large selection of issues used to cluster the 2016 ANES respondents.  For comparability across the ideological groups, all responses are normalized where a negative value indicates the group’s average response is below the mean (Disagree/Oppose) and a positive value indicates the group’s average response is above the mean (Agree/Favor).

Figure 1:  OPINIONS OF VOTE-ELIGIBLE AMERICANS BY IDEOLOGICAL GROUP
(Source:  2016 American National Election Survey)

CLICK TO ENLARGE

On most issues, centrist Americans are equidistant from the two ideological extremes.  For example, take the question of whether the federal government should be doing “more, not less” (the 6^th item from the top in Figure 1).  Right-leaning Americans are almost one standard deviation below the average response.  In other words, they disagree by a lot (!) that the federal government should be doing more.  Conversely, Left-leaning Americans are much more likely to agree with that statement and “Middle-of-the-Road” Americans, as their label suggests, are at the average.  Not surprising.

Partisans, by definition, are polarized on most issues.  Lacking any creativity, I call these issues — “polarizing issues” — as they are the topics that also tend to dominate our news media’s conflict-focused discourse:  the role of government, Syrian refugees, Black Lives Matter, border walls, immigration, climate change.

Conversely, we also see those issues where the ideological extremes don’t distinguish themselves.  Examples include free trade agreements, Social Security spending, limits on campaign spending, and gender pay equity.

But Figure 1 really gains its value when it identifies those issues where the Middle is not equidistant from the Left or the Right.  These are the tactical issues the parties should emphasize in their effort to win elections.

In Figure 1, we see the issues where, at present, each party possesses a tactical advantage over the other party.  For the Democrats (Left), they are aligned with most Americans (Middle) when they:

• Advocate for higher taxes on millionaires (and, more generally, aim to reduce economic inequality)
• Promise to protect Social Security
• Acknowledge that global warming is real
• Promote policies to protect the environment

For the Republicans (Right), they are with most Americans when they:

• Defend the interests of the private sector
• Promote policies that support law enforcement and reduce crime
• Defend the federal government’s anti-terrorism efforts (such as domestic wiretapping)
• Advocate for the defense of traditional values
• Work to protect American jobs from illegal immigration
• Express concern over perceived declines in American culture

The implications of the 2016 ANES data are not subtle.  Going forward, it is to the Democrats’ electoral advantage to convince the Middle that issues, such as the environment, are among the most important issues facing Americans.  Conversely, the Republicans are in a superior position electorally when the Middle perceives the promotion of free enterprise, security, and traditional values as the most important issues facing this country.

Unfortunately, the 2016 ANES has yet to release the data on what issues were most important to Americans in 2016.  However, we have other sources, such as Pew Research and the Gallup Organization, that found issues such as jobs, the economy, terrorism, national security, crime, and immigration were among the most important issues to Americans going into the 2016 elections.  Concerns about the environment simply did not drive most voters’ choices last November.

In general, the Republicans have the tactical advantage on the most important electoral issues – the economy and national security.  However, despite recent losses, there is reason for optimism among Democrats, and not because of any expectation that the FBI will prove collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians or that this country will slide into chaos during the current administration.  Those expectations rest more on hope than the facts, as of now.

No, the better source of buoyancy for Democrats’ hopes is that the post-materialist issues, such as the environment, social justice and civil rights, may someday attain a level of importance with voters that issues like the economy and national security do today.  Which is not to say the Democrats can’t also be competitive on the materialist issues.  But the Democrats’ wheelhouse remains civil rights and social justice issues.  And that’s not going to change any time soon.  Just as it is unlikely the Republicans can quickly pivot into a neo-Green party.

How ironic would it be if, over the next four years, the American economy prospered and the ISIS threat diminished so much that Americans turned their political attention more to the environment, economic equality and social justice.  Ask Winston Churchill about such irony.  He led the British through the darkest days of World War II to an impending victory only to be rewarded with an electoral defeat in 1945 to Clement Attlee’s Labour Party.

Voters are funny that way.

CURRENT AND FUTURE POLITICAL BATTLES

Where we sit today, we do not have a polarized electorate – even if our elected leaders are more polarized than ever.  The Left and Right are both competitive and the Middle still determines electoral outcomes.

But to acknowledge that most Americans are centrists does not mean there aren’t polarizing issues in this country.  There are and Figures 2 through 6 below show most of them, as well as issues where Americans have reached a social consensus and the issues where people are still sorting themselves out.

This key shows how we defined these issue categories and how we assigned each issue to them:

Figures 2 through 6, show the percentage of vote-eligible Americans in each agreement category for a selection of issue-items in the 2016 ANES.  For example, 77 percent of vote-eligible Americans agree that it is important to reduce government deficits; only 7 percent disagree with that statement and 19 percent are unsure.  This issue, therefore, is a prime example of a “consensus” issue.

     THE CONSENSUS ISSUES:

One of the more interesting findings from the 2016 ANES is that on many issues Americans have achieved an apparent consensus:  reducing deficits, favoring higher taxes on the top income brackets, increasing investments in crime prevention, support for marriage equality, support for the 2^nd Amendment, equal pay for men and women. the reality of global warming and the belief that we can protect the environment without jeopardizing jobs.

Abortion, while not a consensus issue, it is close to being one with 45 percent of Americans supporting few if any restrictions on abortions and 41 percent supporting abortion rights but with strict restrictions.  Only 14 percent of Americans are against it under all circumstances.

While all these consensus issues were visible in the 2016 presidential election, none of them could be considered the dominate issues in that race.

     THE POLARIZING ISSUES:

Polarizing issues are a different matter altogether.  Few should be surprised that whether to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border divides Americans.  Thirty-three percent of Americans support it, 46 percent do not, and 21 percent are still unsure.  But it is not the most polarizing issue in America.

According to our analysis, gun control, as in “making it more difficult to buy a gun in this country” is the most polarizing issue we face.  Fifty-four percent of Americans think it should be more difficult, but 40 percent oppose such restrictions.  Only 6 percent of Americans are still unsure.

Other divisive issues in this country are the transgender (bathroom bill) controversy, and whether to move towards a government-based health care system.

Notice that the polarizing issues were all prominent in the 2016 presidential election.

     THE GROUND BATTLE ISSUES:

Finally, the 2016 ANES shows us the many issues we, as a country, are still sorting through.  These are issues where most Americans’ preferences remain undecided or tentative.  These issues include whether government wiretapping has gone too far in the name of security, whether American businesses should face more regulation, whether the U.S. should pursue more free trade agreements, whether recent global warming is mostly anthropogenic in nature, and whether fracking is an acceptable way to extract natural gas for our nation’s energy needs.

The strong partisans portray these issues as settled.  Among Americans, they are not.  Subsequently, these issues will be ripe for exploitation by either party depending on which direction American public opinion ultimately breaks.

CLINTON WAS A CENTER-LEFT CANDIDATE IN A CENTER-RIGHT COUNTRY

The empirical evidence says, despite the many contentious, undecided issues we face, we are not a divided nation.  In general, Americans are moderates with an ideological hue towards the right of center, particularly on the issues that matter most at election time – namely, the support of free enterprise, limited government, a strong national defense posture, controlled immigration, and the defense of traditional family values.  These are not winning issues for the Democrats.

That is why Clinton lost to Donald Trump.

Unless the Democrats move to the right or convince the American people that civil rights, expanding the social safety net, reversing climate change, and economic equity are the most important issues facing this country, they will continue to face a strong headwind on election day.  To become a durable governing majority, the Democrats must acknowledge their current weakness is not just a process or organizational problem.  The Democrats are losing to the Republicans on the level of ideas.

Until the Democrats come to grips with that problem, the Republicans will continue to disproportionately benefit from the distribution of opinions currently observed within the American public.

But, Democrats, do not despair.  There is a stubborn level of unanimity in the U.S. and that all but guarantees, in the long-run, both parties can go from widespread electoral defeats in one election to convincing victories in the next election.

Yes, our political and media elites are more divided than ever, but it is overlaying a polity that does not mirror this division and, by many indications, would prefer to see it end and be replaced with a political system capable of solving today’s biggest problems in a civil and productive manner without all the drama.

In that opinion, I hope we can all agree.

About the author:  Kent Kroeger is a writer and statistician with over 30 -years experience measuring and analyzing public opinion.  He presently manages a public opinion polling firm, The Olson Kroeger Company, with offices in Des Moines, Iowa and Ewing, New Jersey. He holds a B.S. degree in Journalism/Political Science from The University of Iowa, and an M.A. in Quantitative Methods from Columbia University (New York, NY).

He can be contacted at:  kentkroeger3@gmail.com

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source: NuQum.com, March 4, 2017)

Readers of this blog know that I’ve long argued that, ideologically, the United States is a center-right country. My argument is always capped by the chart that shows the 40-year, 2,000-seat decline of the Democratic Party in the nation’s state legislatures.  Here it is again:

I can respect any hypothesis for why the Democrats have seen this decline, as long as it can cover the last 40 years. Blaming Obama’s neglect of the state parties does not provide enough information to explain the decline. Neither does voter suppression or gerrymandering — though all of these factors can offer some explanation. A more systemic set of factors are required. In my view, its a combination of public mood, party branding  and strategic positioning efforts, and demographic changes.

On the first factor I like to reference Dr. James Stimson’s Public Mood time-series summary of U.S. public opinion since 1950 (Graph Source:  Dr. Larry Bartels):

In combination, these data argue unequivocally that this country is increasingly conservative when compared to the early 1990s.

Well, in retrospect, its not that simple.  I was reminded of this as I plundered through some of my old analytic files on my laptop.  As I was doing a ‘right-click, delete’ dance through my files I came upon a graph that I had created back in 2013 from data taken from the 2012 American National Election Study (Time-Series Panel).

I was asked by a former colleague with developing an attitudinal segmentation of U.S. eligible voters.  The task was to model and graphically display the most analytically distinct segments of the vote eligible population and to map the positions of the Democratic and Republican parties relative to these voter segments.

The analysis of 5,893 U.S. adults from the 2012 ANES was straightforward. We applied a basic K-means clustering algorithm to develop the segments.  While we investigated 12- and 16-cluster solutions, we ended up focusing on the simplest solution:  3 clusters (Left, Middle, Right). As you might imagine, the “Left” cluster tended to consistently agree with Democratic policy positions, the “Right” cluster agreed most often with the Republican policy positions and the “Middle” tended to be…well, in the middle on most policies.  So below is the chart.

Along the vertical-axis are the issue questions from the ANES survey and the horizontal-axis shows the agreement scale where negative values indicate disagreement with the policy statement and positive values indicate agreement.  The key takeaway from this chart is that most eligible voters are in the Middle segment (113 million Americans), shown by the green triangles.  The Left (red circles) and the Right (blue squares) both represent about 62 million people.  Therefore, on any given issue, if you are a Democrat, you want the Middle segment (green triangle) to be closer to the Left (red circle) than the Right (blue square).  In those cases, its the Democrats that have the consensus position.  Of the 24 issue statements below, the Left-Middle consensus occurs 12 times.  Not bad.  The Right-Middle consensus occurs just eight times.  The four other issue statements were too close to call.  It should also be noted that the 24 issues are sorted on the vertical-axis by the gap between the cluster extremes.  Hence, issues where the cluster attitudes are similar are at the top of the graph, while as you go down the vertical-axis the gap becomes greater.  In other words, when it comes to attitudes about the military and middle class people, there is little social differentiation.  On issues like the environment or government-controlled health care, the Left and Right clusters stake out more extreme positions.

The overall result from the above graph seems to argue that we live in a center-left nation. That is, in fact, what I concluded when I presented this data analysis four years ago.  The Left (Democrats) holds strategic advantages over the Right (Republicans) on a broad menu of key social issues: the environment, government support for child care, equal opportunity, and social welfare spending (particularly Social Security).

But, upon closer inspection, it is interesting to look at the eight issues  on which the center-right coalition hold the consensus.  They are: (1) Attitudes towards gays & lesbians, (2) Attitudes towards illegal aliens, (3) Attitudes towards Christian fundamentalists, (4) Level of desire for fewer restrictions on abortions, (5) Support for more defense spending, (6) Attitudes towards the private sector, (7) Desire to decrease the number of immigrants to the U.S., and (8) Attitudes towards the military.

Of those eight issues, five are directly related to issues the public felt were most important in the 2012 election according the Pew Research Center in 2012:  national security, jobs, economic growth, health care and immigration. In other words, while the Left (Democrats) dominated the consensus on issues of civil rights, the environment, and the basic social safety net issues (social security and social welfare programs), the Right (Republicans) dominated on the issues that matter most to election outcomes.  Interestingly, on government-controlled health care, the Middle (at least in 2012) was positioned equidistant from the Left and Right positions.

Of course, we’re talking about 2012 here. While Barack Obama won re-election, down ballot the Republicans held most of the gains they made in the state legislatures in the 2010 midterm elections. Obama was popular, but his charm didn’t transfer well to other Democrats.

But, has the public mood changed since then? The good news is that the 2016 ANES data will be released in April, 2017.  I’ve already set up the R-code to re-run the same segmentation I created in 2012.  I am curious to see what differences we find.  My intuition says, not that much has changed.  We are still a center-right country on the issues that matter most to voters, but there remain many strategic opportunities where the Democrats can regain an electoral advantage over the Republicans.

If the Democrats could ever discover a way to talk about the environment in a way that influenced vote preferences, it would be a game-changer.  But I will save that for another column at a later date.

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source:  NuQum.com, February 20, 2017)

Author’s email:  kentkroeger3@gmail.com

The Democrats know their party must change. But what kind of change?   If the two front runners for the DNC chair position are any indication, it won’t be much change at all.

The election of a new Democratic National Committee (DNC) chair this week in Atlanta features two Beltway veterans, Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison and former Secretary of Labor Tom Perez, as the favorites to be the next DNC chair, though neither appears to have the race locked up heading into the winter meetings starting on February 23rd.

Is there still a chance for the next party leader to come from outsider the Washington establishment?  In joint appearances across the country this past month, the DNC chair candidates agreed on one major problem facing the next chair: The party has become too Beltway-centered, giving too little attention to the state parties, which has led to a steady decline of elected Democrats in the state legislatures.

And while the candidates speak convincingly about their commitment to the state parties, most are themselves part of the same Beltway establishment they are now running away from. That is, except one candidate, who genuinely can claim the “outside the Washington establishment” label. Sally Boynton Brown has served as the Executive Director of the Idaho Democratic Party since 2012 and knows firsthand how the state parties have suffered, particularly state parties in red states like hers.

“We need to take our party out of Washington (and) start making significant investments in our state parties,’ says Boynton Brown. “We must have an expanded state party strategy so we are investing not only in blue states and purple states but also red states like Idaho.”

Boynton Brown also points out that the disinvestment in the state parties was largely driven by changes in campaign finance law. “Since McCain-Feingold (The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002) the focus of the DNC has been to elect a President,” she says. “We need a fundamental shift in the role of the DNC; it needs to become a service organization designed to work as a full partner with state parties.”

Her strategic approach to party-building includes investing in regions currently unfavorable to Democrats.  This strategy is reminiscent of former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack’s approach to elections in Iowa. When asked how he broke the 30-year choke-hold Republicans had on the Iowa governor’s seat in 2000, he said, “I went to every county fair and BBQ in those rural counties where the Republicans historically would win by 50 points, but I got it down to 20 points.”

While this ‘99-county” approach made sense for a candidate in a gubernatorial popular vote election, it also paid dividends to the Iowa Democrats in local and state legislative races. After Vilsack’s 2000 victory, the Iowa Democrats began winning more close elections in some of those Republican-dominated rural areas and, by 2007, the Democrats controlled both houses of the Iowa legislature.

Yet, as Vilsack demonstrated how a Democrat can win in a Republican-leaning state like Iowa, the national Democrats went in a different direction. A headline in The Daily Kos declared going into the 2014 midterm elections, “If our voters turn out, we win.” The Democrats lost 13 U.S. House seats and 9 U.S. Senate seats in that election.

The Democrats’ emphasis on getting its voters to vote had solid reasoning behind it. Inspired by the “emerging Democratic majority” thesis advanced by political scientists Ruy Teixeira and John Judis, the Democratic Party in the Obama-era shifted towards using social media and big data analytics to inform GOTV targeting efforts at the expense of efforts to persuade undecideds and weak Republicans.

This strategy worked for a transcendent candidate like Obama who attracted the ideological center of the country. For many of the party’s other candidates, particularly when Obama was not on the ballot, the strategy has failed and the party has paid a steep price for the its “emerging majority” hubris.

Today, the Democratic Party is at a critical juncture. Not since the Great Depression has the party been so removed from power and where it goes from here will be, in part, managed by the person elected as the DNC chair.

While some of the 447 DNC voting members remain deeply divided between the progressive (Bernie Sanders) and pragmatist (Hillary Clinton) camps, the DNC candidates themselves are not separating themselves along ideological or factional lines. Of the ten leading candidates, all to varying degrees describe themselves as progressive.
Raymond Buckley, chairman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party who has recently dropped out of the race and endorsed Ellison, provided the best summary of the candidates’ ideological unity when he said at the February 4th DNC candidate forum in Detroit, “There is not a word that anybody is saying that we do not agree with.” The Borg on Star Trek wasn’t that unified.

Instead, the distinctions rendered by the candidates are more on their strategic priorities, managerial accomplishments and field experience. In announcing his candidacy, former Labor Secretary Tom Perez distinguished himself from the other candidates by noting his experience running the 17,000-person labor department. “I have had a lot of experience in trying to build one Department of Labor where we all have our oars in the water, rowing in synchrony.”

Taking a more decentralized management approach, South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg said, “We’ve got to recognize that not all of the (Resistance movement) energy needs to funnel through the Democratic Party.” Instead, Buttigieg contends the DNC must support the protest movement without attempting to own it.

Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison emphasizes his congressional district’s grassroots organizing success and calls for recharging the party’s ground game by “knocking on every door in this country if we can.” At the Detroit forum, Ellison also emphasized the need for the Democrats to reconnect with working families. “We start with the idea that the Democratic Party is the party that works for working people all the time and never lets up,” said Ellison.

“We lost of a lot of trust in this past election,” said Jaime Harrison, chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party, in Detroit. “This party has to go to where the people are instead of hoping that people will come to where we are.”  Harrison’s advice is particularly credible given his party leadership experience in South Carolina, a state that has been under unified Republican control since 2002. But it also highlights where most of the candidates lack any distinctiveness and why Boynton Brown is exceptionally positioned to move the DNC in a new direction. All but Boynton Brown have spent most of their political careers either in Washington, D.C. or in an area with a strong Democratic party presence.

In contrast, Boynton Brown leads the party in a state the Gallup Daily Tracking Poll identifies as the 3rd most Republican state in the country. Boynton Brown operational skills have been tempered in a western, deep red state.

While Fox News analyst Jehmu Greene and Voto Latino President Maria Teresa Kumar hail from Texas and Harrison is from South Carolina, these red states have seen Democratic control of its state house or the governorship since 2000. Idaho’s last Democratic governor was Cecil Andrus, who left office in 1995 after first being elected in 1971, and the state legislature has been comfortably controlled by the Republicans since 1992.

Yes, South Carolina and Texas are tough for Democrats, but nothing like Idaho. Prior to the 2016 election, Gallup estimated Republicans had a 25 percent advantage in Idaho (% Republican-leaning minus % Democrat-leaning). The Republican advantages in South Carolina and Texas were less than 10 percent.

And nowhere do your party’s strengths and weaknesses (and those of your opponent) become more vivid as when you are fighting for your very survival. Where the national party is only now accepting the depth and scope of its electoral problem, Boynton Brown has spent her political career behind enemy lines fighting this existential battle.

Activists like director Michael Moore and TV comedian Bill Maher peddle an ‘alternative fact’ that is harmful to the Democrats’ cause: The notion that America is a center-left country more closely aligned with the Democrats’ policy preferences than with the Republicans’. While true on many civil rights and social justice issues, on the issues that drive elections, this simply isn’t true.

“America itself remains a fundamentally center-right nation,” Democratic pollster Doug Schoen recently wrote on FoxNews.com. “A fundamental belief in national sovereignty and individual responsibility, married to cautious skepticism of government and deeply held moral convictions, continues to govern how most Americans think about politics.

New York University social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, provides an even more sobering message to the Democrats. “Democrats often seem to think of voters as consumers; they rely on polls to choose a set of policy positions that will convince 51 percent of the electorate to buy,” says Haidt. “Most Democrats don’t understand that politics is more like religion than it is like shopping.” This disconnect is a significant reason why Clinton’s massive big data efforts in 2016, built largely around consumer and online behavior databases, failed to capture the critical weaknesses in Clinton’s support.

The Democrats have other problems as well. In his book, E Pluribus Unum, Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam finds an emphasis on ethnic diversity can reduce social cohesion which can lessen a community’s capacity for collective action. Haidt references Putnam when suggesting that, by emphasizing diversity, the Democrats are at a disadvantage to Republican’s “rally around the flag” messaging when building electoral coalitions.

Haidt counsels Democrats to do more to build a shared sense of national identity across the diverse groups in its coalition. This recalibrated message would be controversial among many Democrats and would represent a big challenge as they try to build a durable electoral coalition.

It is here where Boynton Brown would be most relevant to fixing the DNC’s problems. In her Blueprint for the DNC, she says the DNC needs to “have fully staffed regional offices that are steeped in the political realities of the states they work with.”

As part of her call for a more decentralized party structure, she does not think the DNC chair should be driving changes in the party’s policy platform positions. In her view, that is where the party’s candidates and elected leaders must bring their local and regional perspectives to the national party’s platform deliberations.

Is Boynton Brown’s decentralization plan contradictory to Haidt’s advice that the Democrats need to build a unifying, national strategic message? That will be the challenge regardless of who is elected the next DNC chair. As Vilsack experienced in Iowa’s Republican-dominated rural counties, by committing sustained resources to those areas the Iowa Democratic Party was soon viewed as more connected to the issues of rural, conservative Iowa, even as the party maintained its strong support in Iowa’s urban centers.

“Our party narrative must be built from rural values – when we spend time talking to every American, we win,” says Boynton Brown. “When we silo off our communications to certain segments we will always suffer somewhere. Changing the hearts-and-minds of voters requires building our relationships with our neighbors and once we begin doing this work we can first start to lose by less which will lead to future wins.”

Taking Vilsack’s approach to the national level is where Boynton Brown offers the clearest vision on how to make the Democrats a 50-state party again.

The Democrats now see the consequences of its lack of investment in state parties, but Boynton Brown understands the inherent conflict in a coastal-elite-driven party agenda centered on identity politics at a time when the party also needs to develop a compelling, unifying principle that attracts a broader segment of Americans.

If the Democrats do not listen closely to Boynton Brown and other Democrats from red-state America, the Democrats may be years away from making the kinds of strategic changes necessary to be the nation’s preeminent political party again.

Author’s email:  kentkroeger3@gmail.com

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source:  NuQum.com, February 8, 2017)

Author’s email:  kentkroeger3@gmail.com

I was born a Beatles fan – or so my family tells me.  And, as a fan, I find myself occasionally taking current events and asking things like,  “What is an eggman?” or “I wonder how John Lennon would describe Donald Trump?”

That second question is an easy one.  I think John would call him ‘daft’ or use some other everyday Liverpoolian idiom that an American like me would consider charming and funny.

And then there are times when I’m really bored and seriously overthink about the relevance of The Beatles.

For example, during the halftime of Super Bowl LI when I really thought the game was over, I began to think about how Beatle songs could help the Democrats win more elections.

By the late 3rd Quarter, when Tom Brady was about to bring the Patriots back from the dead, I was in Pepperland.  Or, rather, in the no-man’s-land between Pepperland and  Trumpland (USA).

It is there that I see the Democrats residing today – at the gates of Trumpland (USA) in a stand-off between The Beatles and their arch enemies, the Blue Meanies and the Apple Bonkers.

Seriously, if you have no idea what I’m talking about, it might be best if you either Google ‘Yellow Submarine movie characters’ or just move on from this essay.  For the rest of you, sit back and picture yourself in a boat on a river contemplating how The Beatles can save the Democrats.

Let me take you down…

In an election where Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump took their charm deficits and untrustworthiness to thermonuclear levels and where their surrogates’ daily press avails usually left me feeling sick, I often turned to music to settle my mind down at nights.

It is easy to exaggerate the significance of our favorite songs, but we all have those lyrics or melodies that, for various reasons, bring us back into an emotional equilibrium.

In this last election, I have found the Fab Four especially relevant, particularly with regards to the state of the Democratic Party.

Even as the Democrats are regaining some of their footing as an opposition party to the Trump administration, the cold truth is that they still find themselves out of power in a way they haven’t seen since just prior to the Great Depression.  And, inevitably, pundits and experts offer Democrats advice on how to re-emerge from their voter-imposed exile:  “Move to the center.”  “Don’t move to the center.”  “Organize.”  “Mobilize.”  “Resist!”  “Change the message.”  “Change the leadership.”  And, on and on.

For better or worse, Donald Trump has launched the classic laws of politics into space at escape velocity.  We will never see those laws again, leaving the Democrats to ask, “What do we do when the laws of political physics no longer work?

Welcome to Pepperland.

In my experience, during times of disequilibrium, you turn to long-trusted heuristic devices to make sense of events.  And for me, that means The Beatles and their hook-driven, aural salves that drown out life’s unsettling noises.  And nowhere has Beatles music become more relevant to me than in the realm of politics.  Many of the principles I bring to politics are reinforced by a Beatles song, sometimes through a simple lyric, the overall mood the song generates, or an unexpected vocalization (…I still find John’s breathing on the song ‘Girl’ unsettling).

With the cruelty of this past election, and I mean that from both sides of the political aisle, the relevance of The Beatles to our political culture is greater than ever and can, I truly believe, help stabilize a Democratic Party that, according to Ohio congressman Tim Ryan, is lost.

Every Beatles fan has their own carte du jour of Fab Four songs that speak to them personally.  My list is specific to me.  What wisdom I pull from a song may have nothing to do with the songwriter’s intent.  Besides, finding life’s truths from popular music is an apophenic exercise where we often see meaningful patterns from what is, in reality, random nonsense.  “I am the eggman, they are the eggmen, I am the Walrus” is not a meaningful statement about anything, including eggs or Walruses.  It is nonsense.  Funny nonsense.  But, nonsense nonetheless.

So, with this caveat, here are the specific political lessons I believe The Beatles offer today’s Democratic Party

Nobody likes taxes!

“If you drive a car, I’ll tax the street
If you try to sit, I’ll tax your seat
If you get too cold, I’ll tax the heat
If you take a walk, I’ll tax your feet”

George Harrison’s song, Taxman, is not subtle.  George hated taxes, for good reason.

The top tax rate in Britain when George wrote this song in the mid-1960s was 83 percent.  Let that number sink in for a moment.  It really is staggering.  Yet, at that time, Harold Wilson’s Labour government decided to introduce a supertax rate of 95 percent for extremely high money earners – which The Beatles had become.

There is a good reason John Lennon moved to New York City and fought to get his green card so he could stay there.

Despite the image some have of The Beatles as irreverent prophets of the flower generation, The Beatles, particularly George, had an emphatically middle-class, bourgeois understanding of the world.  When George visited San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district in the 1967’s Summer of Love, his description of the place when he returned to London was, “It turned out to be just a lot of bums…dropping acid.”  Pat Buchanan or Billy Graham could have just easily had that reaction.

My father use to say, “There is no problem the Democrats aren’t willing to use your money to solve.”  And he was a Democrat!  When I hear politicians, regardless of party, talk about social problems and the budgetary tools at their disposal to address them, George’s Taxman immediately comes to mind.  For good reason:  Polling in this country consistently shows the resistance of independent voters to raising taxes, increasing spending, or creating new regulations to solve our nation’s problems.  You don’t have to agree with them, but understand, these are the people that often decide who wins our elections.

We live in a country where its public debt exceeds its annual GDP – about 105 percent of GDP, according to the most recent estimate by Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.  Only five other major economies have a larger public debt (in decreasing order):  Japan (229%), Greece (179%), Italy (132%), Ireland (118%) and Singapore (111%).  Economically, this not good company to keep.

A week after Barack Obama’s 2008 election, amid a deep worldwide recession, Newsweek declared a ‘new era of big government’ had returned.  The exact opposite was true and the Democrats have yet to realize this fact.  The governments in the advanced economies cannot account for much more of the total economy than they already do.  There is no money to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico.  You can talk about a $1 trillion infrastructure program all you want, but it is not going to happen in today’s economic reality.  We, the U.S., do not have $1 trillion to spare for infrastructure.

Republicans say it’s a tax-and-spend problem; Democrats says the top 1 percent aren’t paying their fair share.  In truth, it’s a problem they jointly created and perpetuate.  So, my advice to the Democrats is to listen to George’s Taxman where he takes on the government’s voice, “Should five percent appear too small, be thankful I don’t take it all.” Voters know what George was talking about – the government will take it all — if you let them.

When the marching is done, can you show us a plan?

John Lennon’s Revolution, written in 1968, was The Beatles’ second overt political song and probably the band’s most dissected.

“You say you want a revolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world

…But when you talk about destruction
Don’t you know that you can count me out”

You say you got a real solution
Well, you know
We’d all love to see the plan
You ask me for a contribution
Well, you know
We’re all doing what we can

But if you want money for people with minds that hate
All I can tell you is brother you have to wait

Don’t you know it’s gonna be alright?”

These lyrics hardly sound like those of a leftist  revolutionary.  They weren’t.  The song’s overt skepticism about the U.S. antiwar movement led many self-described “Trotskyist,” “Leninist” and “Maoist” activists to spurn Lennon (and the Beatles) in the last 1960s.  The Rolling Stones’ Street Fighting Man was much more to their liking.

Though Lennon was hardly a conservative, he had the common sense to put a substantive gap between his personal views and those of the radical left.

Lennon, like his fellow Beatles, grew up a working-class kid with the political sensibilities that came with such an upbringing.  Since his single mother couldn’t take care of him, John was raised by his aunt and uncle, Mimi and George Smith, the latter making his career in the bookmaking business.  John’s uncle would ultimately gamble away the family’s meager savings and John took that experience with him as he gained his own substantial wealth.  In fact, as John’s fortunes grew, more and more political groups would ask him for financial support, assuming his left-leaning politics meant he would happily part with his newly-acquired financial largess.  They would be disappointed.  He was more than happy to donate a song (e.g., “Give Peace a Chance”), but give money?  Don’t forget one of John’s favorite childhood songs was Berry Gordy’s Motown song, Money, which included the lyric: ‘Money don’t get everything, it’s true, but what it don’t get, I can’t use. I need money, that’s what I want.’

British journalist, Maurice Hindle, who first interviewed Lennon in 1968, said “Lennon much regretted his earlier associations with the radical left.”  The song Revolution was Lennon’s sharp reply to these activists that he viewed as directionless and inherently prone to violence.

If I were the Democrats, I would share Lennon’s skepticism when viewing today’s resistance movement against the Trump administration.  This is not the same as saying that the Democrats shouldn’t oppose Trump.  Of course, when appropriate, they should.  But, what it means is keeping the “resist movement” at a safe distance and even as you borrow its energy.

But Revolution’s most poignant line is in its chorus: “Don’t you know it’s gonna be alright?”  If there is one message The Beatles can impart to partisan activists of all persuasions, it is that even where serious problems persist, very few of them are existential.

When I hear this Lennon line, I immediately think about global overpopulation.  Really, I do.

While appearing on The Dick Cavett Show in 1971, John Lennon was asked by a female audience member about whether he was concerned about overpopulation.  Lennon’s answer surprised her and Cavett:  “I don’t really believe it,” Lennon said. “I think whatever happens will balance itself out.  It’s alright for us all living to say, ‘Well, there’s enough of us so we won’t have any more.’. I don’t believe in that.”

The issue of overpopulation was popular on the Left in 1971.  Three years earlier, Stanford biologist Dr. Paul Ehrlich predicted in his book, “The Population Bomb,” that half of Americans would die by the late 1980s due to overpopulation and the resulting famine.

Over 40 years removed from Lennon’s critique of Ehrlich’s overpopulation thesis, the intuition of an art school-educated rock star was far more accurate than that of the Stanford biologist.

I can’t help but wonder what Lennon’s reaction would be to the current global warming debate.  I suspect he would have a similar reaction as he did to overpopulation.

Don’t get me wrong, I do believe the science on global warming.  The current rise in global temperatures is real and is primarily caused by human activities.  Since the start of the industrial revolution, the planet’s average temperature has risen about 1° Celsius.  Scientists predict the next 1° Celsius increase will occur between 2040 and 2100, depending on the climatological prediction model you choose.

The likely consequences of global warming will be more and deadlier summer heatwaves, higher sea levels forcing significant changes for people living along shorelines, more and longer droughts leaving the world’s agricultural output under increased stress, and increased numbers and durations of famines and water shortages.  All bad outcomes that should be addressed now through smarter, forward-thinking energy use policies, particularly by the largest economies.  But, the following is also true.  Our nation – our planet – will survive global warming.  Environmental activists want you to believe otherwise because if you do, you are more likely to give them your money to spend on saving the planet.

Here’s the downside to an overly aggressive climate change policy agenda and why the Democrats need to keep the climate change militants at arm’s length.  Climate change policies disproportionately hurt poor people that depend on cheap energy to move themselves out of poverty.  Due to even the possibility of this economic consequence, you are not going to see China, India or Brazil move fast enough on converting to renewable energy.  Carbon credits will not change this economic outcome, either, even if some of the revenues raised go to reducing the impact of higher energy costs on lower-income households.

Adding to the intransigence of the climate change movement, the climate scientists refuse to acknowledge two of their own facts:  (1) Their ability to predict global temperatures is deeply flawed given past performance (though it is getting better), (2) and this ability falls off a cliff when they try to predict higher order effects.  The science of climate change begs for caution, not reckless investments in technologies that are still decades away from practical deployment and levels of regulation that will undoubtedly harm the economy, if only through their impact on energy costs and job growth.

If the climate change activists really believed what they peddle, they would be at the front of the line begging the advanced economies to balance their government budgets NOW so that we will have the monetary resources available when the actual consequences of global warming are realized.

So, Democrats, fell free to worry about American energy policy.  It does matter and we can change the world for the better if we change our energy consumption behavior.  But you are going to fail in attracting the support of most Americans if you try to turn the dubious scare tactics of today’s versions of Dr. Ehrlich into a national energy policy.  The extreme predictions are probably wrong and to spend public money based on those predictions will waster more money than it saves.  So, when you feel the urge to label some Republican congressperson as an ignorant “climate change denier,” I hope you hear John Lennon’s words:  “Don’t you know it’s gonna be alright?”

To know your enemies is to know yourself

With a nod to Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu, Lennon and McCartney’s lyrics often had an introspective quality that allowed for some healthy self-critiques, even as they were making broader social criticisms.

That is why I’ve always found Lennon’s Nowhere Man and McCartney’s The Fool on the Hill to be nice companion pieces, even though written years apart.  Each song contains a lyrical twist of perspective that makes the listener look back at themselves just as they’ve become comfortable judging the nowhere man and the fool on the hill:

Doesn’t have a point of view
Knows not where he’s going to
Isn’t he a bit like you and me?
Nowhere man please listen 

He never listens to them
He knows that they’re the fools
They don’t like him —The fool on the hill

Sun Tzu’s point was that you won’t make big mistakes (in war) if you are aware of both your enemies’ motivations and abilities as well as your own.  But I think the Lennon and McCartney spin Is even more profound in that Lennon’s Nowhere Man calls for our own humility to temper our tendency to judge others.  McCartney’s Fool on the Hill, likewise, shows empathy for the beleaguered target of the people’s ire.

Both are beautiful statements with relevance to politics which is all about judgments — often harsh in nature and effect.  In the real world of politics, there are winners and losers and people are dedicated on both sides to fight the ‘good fight’ to the bitter end.  In Trumpland (USA) compromise and humility is for losers, literally.

If you’ve spent any meaningful time on Twitter or Facebook and tried to have a civil political conversation about a topic-of-the-day, you’ve undoubtedly experienced this: Mean, ugly people.  Strict partisans unwilling to even consider your point of view as it is a direct attack on their self-esteem and is promptly rejected, often punctuated with a lively dash of F-bombs and other forms of profanity and ill-will.

In practical terms, the lessons from Nowhere Man and The Fool on the Hill are simple to articulate but hard to implement.  The next time you argue a Democratic position, such as ‘pro-choice,’ attempt to not only understand the ‘pro-life’ argument, but spend time marinating in it.  Read about it and live it.  Argue its central tenants with your ‘pro-choice’ friends.  Remove yourself from the argument and dive into someone’s point of view, regardless of your perception of its legitimacy.  Its more than just the “walking in another person’s shoes” aphorism.  It’s the conscious removal of one’s own biases and experiences from the question at hand and doing so without condescension or pre-judgment.  Easy said, but hard to do.

For the Democrats to unilaterally break the rhetorical toxins that have polluted the well of American political discourse, I suggest a little Nowhere Man humility and Foot on the Hill empathy.   Try it and it might help break our current political logjam.  And I believe the party that breaks this logjam will be rewarded by the voters.

Democrats:   Problems are best resolved locally

For those of us that know what an ‘A-side and B-side of a 45’ means, there is no single music record as influential in the Pop Music-era as The Beatles’ Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever.  Released February 1967, prior to the Summer of Love, these two songs represented Lennon and McCartney at the peak of their creative talent and worldwide influence.  They were at the top– the tippermost of the toppermost, as they would say.

For political wisdom, people often refer to John’s line in Strawberry Fields that goes: “Living is easy with eyes closed; misunderstanding all you see.”  And, while that is a great line with obvious political meaning, that is not what comes to my mind for me.

I find the relevance of those two songs in that Lennon and McCartney were writing specifically about their childhood homes and their common roots.  And not just as a nostalgic indulgence for two men that were now the most famous people to ever come from Liverpool, England.  [The Titanic doesn’t count as it was a ship].  The two songs are charming and evocative:

In Penny Lane there is a fireman with an hourglass,
And in his pocket is a portrait of the Queen.
He likes to keep his fire engine clean,
It’s a clean machine.

Let me take you down
‘Cause I’m going to Strawberry Fields
Nothing is real
And nothing to get hung about
Strawberry Fields forever

When I hear the two songs today, I know they are singing about Liverpool, but in my mind I see my hometown, Cedar Falls, Iowa.  I’m 10-years-old and in my friend’s unfinished basement roller skating on the concrete floor as we play Strawberry Fields Forever over and over and over again.  With each listening, trying to decide, is Paul really dead?  Is John really singing, “I buried Paul.”  What is LSD?

More pertinent to the discussion at hand, these two songs also remind me of a time when problems were solved and they stayed that way.  I broke the neighbor’s window.  I earned the money to fix it.  Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill is famous for saying, “All politics is local.”  I would offer this addendum:  All problems are local.

Of course, neither statement is exactly true.  However, I believe they offer a wisdom that today’s Democrats tend to reject for the wrong reasons.  [Note:  If your Twitter account description includes anything like: “Resist!”, “I’m with Her” or “He’s not my President,” you may need to skip to the next paragraph.  Consider yourself warned.]  Here it goes:  The federal government does not solve problems.  It institutionalizes problems.  It builds a bureaucracy around problems and constantly reminds us about how great they are at solving these problems while at the same time telling us these problems will not go away until we build an even bigger bureaucracy around these same problems.  Yes, we have cleaner water today than we did 50 years ago — unless, of course, you live in Flint, Michigan.  And, yes, we did beat the tar out of the Nazis.  But, generally, the endemic problems – poverty, the national debt, crime, terrorism – never go away.  And the federal government will never make them go away.  I’ll take bets on that right now.

Donald Trump is the visceral reaction of a large percentage of the population (about 46 percent of the population) to this realization regarding the inefficacy of the federal government.  They just aren’t buying the con anymore – and it is not just angry white men or the women that marry them that are saying this to our political leaders.  As a pollster, I’m hearing similar sentiments across a diverse swath of the American populace.  Black and Hispanic voters are saying the same things, they’re just not voting in large numbers for Republicans…yet.

I view the current state of the Democratic Party as a branding problem.  To be frank, their brand is stale and outdated.  Even as with each day we learn that Donald Trump and his closest advisers do not know how to run an executive branch of government, the fact remains that the Democrats are not going to fully reap the benefits of any future Trump mistakes without a brand update.  The Democrats remain moored to the dock of ‘big government’ and independent voters are not about to let them walk away from this image.  And Democratic leaders like Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren show no inclination to walk away from this image.

But they must.  The economic realities have changed.  The Trump administration will not be able to take the U.S. economy back to the 1950s.  At the same time, the Democrats can no longer attack every social problem with a government-focused response.  We can’t simultaneously fight a hot war in Asia, a Cold War with Russia, and a War on Poverty back home as we did in the 1960s.  In the remainder of our political lifetimes, the trend is towards moving solutions to the local level because that is where they are more likely to get solved.  Yet, the very idea of localism turns many Democrats red-in-the-face because it means taking power away from the party’s Washington, D.C. elites.  To them, localism means surrender.

Yet, for the Democrats to be perceived as they party that can solve problems, they must return home.  They must regain power by going local.  That doesn’t mean ceding control of the federal government to the Republicans.  It does mean changing the party’s current DNA programming that dedicates itself to pushing as many resources as possible to the federal level.

And, no, this is not a call for the Democrats to do more grassroots organizing.  The last time grassroots organizing made any real difference it was led by an impossibly handsome guy in comfortable footwear named Jesus Christ.  And, in the end, the government got him too.  OK, Martin Luther King also led a successful grassroots effort.  But, Democrats, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, there is no Martin Luther King-level talent in your party right now.  I love Bernie Sanders. He is genuine and it says a lot about him that even when I disagree with him I still like him.  He doesn’t lie.  However, Bernie is not the Democrats’ way forward.  Not unless you are prepared to cut the Department of Defense budget it half.  I’m not.

Instead, the Democrats need to organically reconnect with voters.  Find local solutions to national problems (health care, voting rights, Planned Parenthood, student debt, etc.). Democrats, each of you must go home and find your own Penny Lane.

At the end of the day politics is about making people’s lives better

I shared my thoughts on this essay with my wife, who happens to be a liberal Democrat right out of central casting:  A Unitarian.  A Ph.D. in French literature.  Finds ways to work tofu into everything we eat.

Her reaction to my Beatles-thesis was immediate:  “You can’t ask Democrats to stop being themselves, to stop acting on their values.  We don’t need a second Republican Party that just wants limited government and lower taxes.”

She is right.  The Democrats aren’t going to become the party of limited government.  Which brings me to one of The Beatles’ great signature songs, Hey Jude.  The McCartney-penned anthem was originally meant to be a tender ballad of encouragement for John’s son, Julian, who was in the middle of his parent’s divorce at the time.  It’s the first verse in the song that, for me, summons the most meaning:

Hey Jude, don’t make it bad, 

Take a sad song and make it better.

Don’t carry the world upon your shoulders
For well you know that it’s a fool who plays it cool
By making his world a little colder

There you have it.  Whatever the Democrats and its leadership decide about the path forward, you cannot go wrong by occasionally asking yourself, “Am I really making things better or am I just making the world a little colder?  Maybe that question and its answer doesn’t change a single thing you believe or do.  Nonetheless, I believe if you genuinely put in the effort to answer the question in an intellectually honest manner, you may be surprised at what you find out about yourself and your party.

The Democrats have done many great things.  Social Security.  Medicare.  Voting Rights.  Anti-Discrimination laws.  Pell Grants.  Unemployment insurance.  But that is all very much in the past.  Defending those programs and rights are important, but I do not believe, collectively, they inspire most Americans anymore.

Instead, you need to clear some intellectual brush to create a new path for the next generation of Democrats.  And, in that effort, take a journey back to Pepperland so you will remember these simple political truths:  (1) People don’t like taxes (and the big government that comes with it), (2) you should not trust ideological militants, (3) ask for a plan, (4) doomsday predictions are always wrong, (5) show genuine humility and empathy even as you criticize others, (6) start problem-solving from the premise that ‘all solutions are local,’ (7) always try to make things better, (8) and, figuratively speaking, don’t make your world colder.

So, there you go Democrats.  The Beatles just solved your party’s problems by giving you eight simple rules to follow going forward.  Donald Trump typically violates at least five of them with every tweet.

Author’s email:  kentkroeger3@gmail.com

By Robert Dresden (Source:  NuQum.com, January 19, 2017)

After reading my colleague’s column, “Reality Sucks for the Next DNC Chair,” I am compelled to reply:

In his January 17th article, he made a couple of points with which I strongly disagree. First, he claims the Democrats have become increasingly a ‘presidential party’ at the expense of down-ballot offices. This point has been made by many other pundits, most recently in Politico by Edward-Isaac Dovere. While the claim is defensible, the campaign finance evidence is mixed, if not contradictory.

Have the Democrats’ increasingly funneled money to the party’s presidential campaign when some of that money should have gone to Democrats in down-ballot races? The problem is with the data.  Its difficult to prove this claim one way or the other, in part, because there is no central resource for knowing exactly how much money is spent by politicians in state and local races.  Campaign finance compliance and reporting rules vary by state and aggregating all of this money into a total number is problematic.

Yet, we can look at the percentage of federal election campaign expenditures that go to the party’s presidential campaign versus the U.S. House and Senate races.  If the Democrats have become more of a ‘presidential party’ we should see a higher percentage of campaign expenditures spent by Democratic presidential candidates compared to the total spent by Democrats running for the U.S. House and Senate.

The chart below summarizes the campaign expenditures of Democratic presidential candidates relative to other federal races since 1976.  It may surprise some that Jimmy Carter’s 1976 campaign accounted for a higher proportion of total Democratic campaign spending than any campaign since.  Only the two Obama campaigns come close (56 and 54 percent, respectively).  Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign accounted for only 42 percent of all Democratic federal campaign expenditures — which is about average.

If you want to argue that the Democrats are losing U.S. congressional and state legislative elections because of an over-emphasis on presidential campaigns, it will require a more sophisticated understanding of how campaign dollars impact elections at all levels and how this spending interacts. For example, do local and state candidate gain more or less synergy from higher presidential-level spending than they do from spending by U.S. House and Senate campaign?  Or perhaps there is no relationship?

Its also important to note that the loss of local, state, and U.S. congressional seats also occurred for Democrats in midterm elections which are not affected by a presidential race. So, blaming the fundraising prowess of Democrats’ presidential candidates for the party’s declining success in other races seems unwarranted.

The second point from the Kroeger article that eats my grain is the contention that the Democrats are so far behind the Republicans at all levels of government that it will take a decade to recover.

When you recite the current numbers it does sound bad:  the Democrats are down 47 seats in the U.S. House, down three in the U.S. Senate, have just 16 Governors and control only 18 state legislatures.  But I will contend that the party’s troubles are exaggerated at all levels of government, but particularly at the national level.

I agree that the Clinton popular vote is a biased measure of the Democrats’ national strength, but it is equally foolish to think the Democrats aren’t close to having a winning presidential coalition.  They are close.  Very close.  And only minor shifts in turnout and support levels in a few key demographic segments (most notably working-class voters) would have changed the 2016 results in Clinton’s favor.

The task for the Democrats is greater at the congressional level, but far from irreversible. Regaining the Senate will have to wait until after the 2018 midterms where the Democrats are protecting 10 incumbent Senators in states Trump won.  They will be lucky to hold serve in 2018.  It’s 2020 where the Democrats will need to focus on getting back the Senate.

As for the U.S. House, it will take 24 seat flips for the Democrats to regain power. If we look to history as our guide, that is not a big number to turn in just one election cycle. Since Eisenhower, four out of nine midterm elections under a Republican president saw the Republicans lose at least 24 seats to the Democrats.

I do not dispute that the Democrats are in the political wilderness right now. Their most prominent leaders are old, they rely too much on a patchwork of unconnected issue positions, and don’t provide a coherent organizing principle voters can use as a heuristic device to navigate the political environment.

Yes, the Democrats are in the forest, but its Virginia’s Shenandoah Forest not Alaska’s Tongass Forest. They are close to regaining power at the national level and are far from facing an existential crisis at the local and state levels. Add to this optimistic view that the long-term demographic changes in the U.S. will most likely work in the favor of Democrats and it is hard to feel to bad for them.  The greater challenge may be convincing the Republicans that can’t continue their success without winning the support of more women, minority, and younger voters. In my view, those are the battle lines that will define future elections and the Democrats are more than capable of winning on those fronts.

Democrats, here’s my short-term advice:  Don’t watch TV tomorrow or this weekend.  Go to the movies and see Rogue One for the second time, or just go to dinner and relax.

R-E-L-A-X.

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source: NuQum.com, January 17, 2017)

Author’s email:  kentkroeger3@gmail.com

“The Democratic Party has always represented the people and now more than ever we must blow the walls off our tent so everyone feels welcome,” Sally Boynton Brown said as she announced her candidacy for the leadership of the Democratic National Committee. “If people haven’t noticed, our country is becoming more Republican.”

Boynton Brown’s last comment shouldn’t startle most people. But within the Democratic Party and its scholar-bureaucrat class, her voice is almost alone in contending that this country has taken a definitive turn to the right.  In fact, the Democrat literati continue to push an astigmatic fiction that this country is becoming more liberal and the American people are more aligned with the Democrats than the Republicans on an issue-by-issue basis.

Issie Lapowsky’s Wired article, “Don’t Let Trump’s Win Fool You – America’s Getting More Liberal,” provides one of the better attempts at justifying this conclusion, but there are others as well.  Peter Beinart’s Atlantic article, “Why America is Moving Left,” comes to mind because it came out just as the 2016 primary season started and seemed destined to find its own proof in the election of a Democrat (or reasonable Republican) president in November.  Ooops.

But more people are probably exposed to the ‘liberal America’ case from the news entertainment class, where the argument burns white hot. Filmmaker Michael Moore made the claim in 2011, and did it again recently with Bill Maher in their 2016 post-election wake.  Moore even suggested firing the pollsters, which is a good idea if you want the policy preferences of Americans to be determined by media decree rather than by listening to the American people themselves.  Understand, I love Michael Moore.  He’s not just talented and funny, but unlike his ideological counterparts, he actually understands the lives of people outside the east and west coast elite circles.

If Hillary Clinton had heeded his advice in this past election, she would be the president-elect today, instead eating over-priced New York City hamburgers with billionaire designer Ralph Lauren.  And for those of you hard-working, 9-to-5 Democrats that thought Hillary Clinton understood your life and your issues, trust me, she’ll be spending the rest of her life avoiding people like you and your issues.  Only billionaires and Hollywood celebs need apply to be her next dinner companion.

Clinton’s tin ear to working-class people is a sharp contrast to Moore who is an empathic savant with respect to their daily lives.  Yet, when Moore says we live in a liberal nation, he is just plain wrong.

To refute his and others’ notion of  ‘liberal America,’ I turn to Lapowsky’s article as she offers the most compelling argument in its favor.  And, in her defense, I enthusiastically agree with her conclusion that America is increasingly a tolerant, inclusive society that welcomes immigrants, supports women’s privacy, is open to reasonable gun control legislation and expects the rights and dignity of all of our citizens to be protected, regardless of sexual orientation, religious preference, gender, race, and ethnicity.  That is the America we live in, even if it did just elect Donald Trump.

However, here’s the problem. Lapowsky (like others making the same claim) cherry-pick those issues where this country is more liberal and tolerant and subsequently avoid most of the bread-and-butter issues — attitudes towards taxes, regulations, national security, crime and the role of government — that play a much bigger factor in people’s vote decision.  When analysts and academics look at a broader palette of issues they see a country that is more conservative today than at anytime since 1980.  The chart below shows one such analysis conducted by the University of North Carolina’s James Stimson who has created a “policy mood’ index derived from thousands of responses to hundreds of specific policy questions over time.  A more detailed description of his methodology can be found on his website.

In contrast to Lapowsky’s selection bias problem, Stimson’s comprehensive accounting for a much wider range of policy opinions reveals meaningful changes in America’s public mood that correlate with shifts in political and policy outcomes.  For example, we see the peak of conservatism in the late 1970s leading to Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980.  Subsequently, as Reagan’s policies were implemented, we see a public mood swing back in the liberal direction, a predictable “correction” process that often occurs when new presidents take office and inevitably over-reach in their pursuit of their preferred policy initiatives.  This correction process is also evident soon after Bill Clinton took office in 1993 and after Barack Obama entered the White House in 2009.

Quite markedly after Bill Clinton’s first presidential election, the change in public mood (in the conservative direction) has tracked  closely with the secular decline of Democrats in our nation’s state legislatures (see chart below).  Apart from a temporary recovery during Obama’s rise, the trend for Democrats has been a virtually uninterrupted, monotonic decline in our state legislatures.

Today, there are almost 1,000 fewer Democratic state legislators than Republican.  If past variation is an indicator, it will take a decade for the Democrats to close that gap.  Of course, an over-reaching Trump administration accompanied by disastrous results could speed up that recovery process; but at this point, if I were the Democrats, I make no assumptions in that regard.

The current obsession among Democrats with Russian electoral shenanigans and FBI Director James Comey’s letter postpones their need to assay their electoral decline.  Whatever the final conclusion of the likely congressional inquiries into Russian interference in this last election, it will not provide information about the health of the Democratic Party.  The impact of the Russians and the Comey letter are limited to 2016. They tell us nothing about why, at every level of government, the Democrats are worse off than any time since the Great Depression.  The Democrats’ problems are deep-rooted, not transitory phenomena.

Boynton Brown’s competition for the chairmanship include Minnesota U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison, Labor Secretary Tom Perez, South Carolina chairman Jaime Harrison, and New Hampshire party head Ray Buckley.  Among them, only Boynton Brown has taken the first step necessary to solve any problem.  She recognizes the problem.  The Democrats are in decline, in a serious way.

I’m not surprised someone from a red state like Idaho would be speak so realistically about her party.  In my own experience, having recently managed a Democrat challenger’s state legislative campaign in Iowa in 2016, I saw up close the disconnect many working-class Democrats feel with their national and state party.  The Democrats just don’t talk to them anymore.  Virginia Senator James Webb summarized this attitude best:  “They don’t think Democrats like them.”  Boynton Brown is correct when she says the Democrats need to do more than just expand their tent, they need to “blow the walls” off their tent.

So when Ellison talks about “championing the challenges of working families and giving voters a reason to show up at the polls in 2018 and beyond,” or Perez says,”I’m in this race because we’ve got a lot of fighting to do, we’ve got a lot of advocating to do,” it demonstrates their poor understanding of the Democrats’ intrinsic problem.  The Democrats have a strategic problem, not a tactical one.  By deceiving themselves into thinking they are still the majority in this country and if they just work harder they will return to power, the Democrats are avoiding the tough questions.  Boynton Brown nailed the issue right out of the gate:  This country IS becoming more Republican and if the party leadership doesn’t recognize that reality, the Democrats will be a minority party for a long, long time.

Many Democrats will now often respond, “Didn’t Hillary Clinton win the popular vote by almost 3 million votes and doesn’t that prove we out-number the other side?”  No, it doesn’t, and here’s why:

Yes, 66 million people voted for Clinton to Trump’s 63 million.  But, overall, 71 million people voted against her.  Furthermore, Clinton’s popular vote advantage reflects the significantly more money she had to spend on national TV advertising; such that, in states like California or New York, the presidential campaign they saw was measurably different from the election voters witnessed in Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania.  Include the national media’s total coverage of Clinton being more positive than Trump‘s (even with the help he received from the Russians and Comey), and you can see why Clinton had a quantitative advantage in the non-swing states.  That is the source of Clinton’s popular vote victory.  It was not a function of the Democrats being more popular than Republicans; and by not realizing that, the Democrats postpone their own recovery going forward.

The Russians and Comey are tactical factors specific to one election.  To explain the 40-year decline in Democratic state legislators one must investigate strategic factors such as the Democrats’ core messages or the disproportionate share of fundraising dollars going to presidential campaigns (Clinton, Gore, Kerry, Obama) at the expense of local and state races.

The Clinton’s were master fundraisers.  By aligning their messages (especially their private ones) with the financial, high technology, pharmaceutical, and entertainment industries, the Clintons beat the Republicans at their own game.  It was brilliant and it kept them in control of the Democratic Party right up until they were eclipsed by Obama who had improved on their fundraising model.  This strategy was great for the Clintons and Obama. Unfortunately, it also sucked the oxygen out of the rest of the party.  For the Democrats to rebound in the legislatures and governors offices that fundraising model must change.

But the Democrat’s decline isn’t just caused by the flaws in their money model.  The core Democratic message is out-of-date.  Ellison and Perez, along with most other Democratic elites, seem to think message tweaks and redoubling organizational efforts to mobilize core constituencies (including working-class voters) will turn the tide.   The Daily Kos even posted recently a renewed call for Democrats to read Saul Alinsky’s seminal activist guidebook, “Rules for Radicals.”  “This classic work of political strategy not only explains much about our current dilemma but more importantly, provides a path forward to escape it,” writes the Daily Kos.  This is the “classic work” with such utter condescension for working-class people that it writes:  “(the working class) are a fearful people, who feel threatened from all sides (and whose) emotions can go either to the far right of totalitarianism or forward to Act II of the American Revolution.”

Put aside the book’s title that already alienates most voters, that attitude towards the working-class is indicative of a viewpoint that sees working-class people as lab rats to be manipulated, not as human beings.

Furthermore, the polling data and the empirical research continually show how un-radical most Americans are when it comes to politics.  And that’s a good thing because when the Trump administration over-reaches, it will be punished by the American voter.  You can count on it.

Sadly, that mainstream view Democrats can’t pull their messages from the same playbook and expect the electoral outcomes to be any different.  They must throw out the playbook and reinvent itself.  That will take new leadership from outside the beltway, be it someone like Boynton Brown, and a willingness to set aside past assumptions and to look at the American political landscape as if seeing it for the first time.

That means the stilted rhetoric that still dominates Democratic communications must be abandoned.  Through an open-minded inquiry, the Democrats must rebuild their brand by locating the strategic weaknesses in the Republicans’ brand — and there are many — and setting forth a vision that combines the party’s highest ideals, on the one hand, with the realities of governance, on the other.

In Part 2 of this essay, I will provide some empirical evidence to show that whatever policies are advocated by the Democrats and Republicans in the future, they will be severely constrained by demographic and economic realities.  As we stand today, the Republicans have a core message that works as well in today’s economic environment as it did when Ronald Reagan rolled it out in 1976 when he took on the American political establishment:  Less government, more freedom.

That message sells.  If you don’t think so, you need to stare at that second chart in this article showing the rise of the Republicans in the state legislatures.  The Republicans are growing their market share; the Democrats are not.  This didn’t just happen.  Its been going on since 1980.  And now the Democrats must finally address the problem.

The governments in today’s advanced economies are about as big and intrusive as they can get relative to their total size.  What voters will expect, therefore, is a party that can address the seen and unforeseen needs endemic to all societies (security, growth, opportunity, health), hold the government and its elected officials accountable when it fails to address those needs, all while ensuring the long-term fiscal health of the state well into the future.

Not an easy task.  And it will require ending government intrusions where they fail to help and moving some government functions to the lowest level of jurisdiction possible so that people can once again feel like they have some control over their lives.

Author’s email:  kentkroeger3@gmail.com