Month: June 2019

I’ve had two main experiences with presidential debates. In some cases, pollsters found that the person who I thought had the best performance actually lost. More often, the people agreed with my assessment but it didn’t seem to make any discernible difference (at least in the Electoral College results). I long ago concluded both that I’m a poor judge of debates and that debates are overrated in importance.

I’ve also found that the coverage of the debates seems to have more influence than the debates themselves, but this is also more complicated than it might look at first. The immediate reactions from cable news talking heads and spin room operatives are often as wrong and insignificant as my own hot takes. But when the media replays the highlights of the debates on a loop for the next few days, one good zinger or particularly effective comeback can be more valuable than ten good, substantive answers. Candidates have figured this out, too, and they actually prepare to create moments that can go “viral.” In the social media age, this is easier to accomplish because the traditional media can’t serve as the gatekeeper.

The opposite is true, too. One terrible moment in a debate can be devastating, as Rick Perry discovered with his “Oops” moment in 2011.

It’s also possible to have an “Oops” moment that virtually no one notices. This happens when a candidate takes a position in the debate that can be later used very effectively against them. It’s more likely to happen in a primary debate than in a general election debate for the simple reason that partisans tend to have differences of degree rather than type. In all-Democratic or all-Republican debates, it’s easy to miss when one candidate goes so far out on the right or left that they cause permanent damage to themselves with the middle.

Looking at the coverage this morning, I see that several people have concluded that Elizabeth Warren had this kind of “Oops” moment last night. You can see it hinted at in the New York Times: 

“The strength of the party’s progressive wing was on vivid display in South Florida, starting in the first minutes of the debate when Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts branded the federal government as thoroughly corrupt. Ms. Warren, the highest-polling candidate onstage, called for the government to bring to heel oil companies and pharmaceutical companies, and embraced the replacement of private health insurance with single-payer care.

“‘We need to make structural change in our government, in our economy and in our country,’ Ms. Warren said, setting the tone for the handful of populists in the debate.”

Jonathan Chait seizes on Warren’s single-payer answer as a major mistake that badly hurt her electability.

Early in the first Democratic presidential debate, all the candidates were asked who would abolish private health insurance. Only two raised their hands: Bill de Blasio, who is not going to be the party’s nominee, and Elizabeth Warren, who might be. Should that possibility come to pass, her frank answer could prove deeply harmful and perhaps deadly.

For Chait, the phrasing of the question was particularly important. Moderator Lester Holt said, “Who here would abolish their private health insurance in favor of a government run plan?”

Warren went on to explain:

“Look at the business model of an insurance company. It’s to bring in as many dollars as they can in premiums and to pay out as few dollars as possible for your health care,” she said at Wednesday’s debate. “That leaves families with rising premiums, rising co-pays, and fighting with insurance companies to try to get the health care that their doctors say that they and their children need.

“Medicare-for-all solves that problem,” she continued. “There are a lot of politicians who say, ‘Oh, it’s just not possible, we just can’t do it,’ have a lot of political reasons for this. What they’re really telling you is they just won’t fight for it. Well, health care is a basic human right, and I will fight for basic human rights.”

If Warren is the nominee, the Republicans won’t run advertisements of her lengthier explanation. They’ll show her raising her hand in response to Lester Holt’s question about abolishing people’s existing health plans. As Chait points out, polling shows that many of the goals of Medicare-for-All are popular but doing away with private insurance is actually very unpopular.

So, does this mean that Warren actually lost the debate last night? Most people gave her good to middling reviews, and her answer is sure to much less unpopular with Democratic primary voters than it is with the public at large. Yet, could it be that she planted a bomb that will explode later?

On Wednesday, Nancy LeTourneau wrote a piece that looked at the electability question from an interesting angle. What happens if you ask Democrats who they intend to support for the nomination and then follow that up by asking them who they’d pick if they could wave a magic wand and make them president. When the research group Avalanche ran this experiment, they found that Biden was far ahead of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren on the first question, but given a magic wand, Democrats actually gave Warren a narrow lead.

What this seems to indicate is that a lot of people prefer Warren to Biden and Sanders but don’t think she can win and so intend to vote for the former vice-president. Her challenge, then, isn’t just to win the hearts of Democrats but to convince them that she can be relied upon not to blow the election and give Trump a second term.

For this reason, she may have created a problem for herself in the debate, but some of that depends on how many Democrats read the New York Times and Jonathan Chait, and also on how willing her competitors are to try to exploit this opening.

It’s important to remember, too, that this isn’t an opening Bernie Sanders can exploit. Warren’s sin, if she committed one, was saying that she agrees with Bernie Sanders on private health insurance. If the same question is put to the candidates on Thursday night, we know Sanders will also raise his hand.

In this sense, Warren helped herself by not allowing Sanders to get to her left on the issue. She’s competing with Sanders right now to be the main alternative to Biden, and poaching Sanders’ supporters helps her accomplish that. Is she looks like the more electable of the two, she’s going to win that battle, and most people think she looked like presidential material during the debate.

It could be that she helped herself in the battle for the nomination but at a high cost for her prospects in the general. It could be that her answer won’t come back to haunt her as much as some people fear. I’d be very surprised if a referendum on Trump’s presidency turned on Warren’s answer to a health care question in June 2019. But, as I said at the top, I’ve almost given up on knowing how the American public will respond to debates.

Republican strategist Liz Mair ponders who will become the heir to Trump after he leaves office, but she never mentions Mike Pence. It’s seems like a pretty glaring oversight to me.

Since FDR passed away in 1945, we’ve had twelve presidents. Five of them (Truman, LBJ, Nixon, Ford and Poppy Bush) were vice-presidents before they took over the helm in the Oval Office. It’s true that three of the five took office due to death or resignation, but death and resignation (as well as impeachment and conviction) are ever-present possibilities. It’s clear that vice-presidents are more likely to become president than people holding any other position. The fact that Joe Biden is currently the poll-leader among the Democratic candidates just reinforces this point.

Of course, there are no guarantees. Dan Quayle could never get any traction for a presidential bid. And just because you win the nomination, as Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale and Al Gore did, doesn’t mean that you’ll ever be president.

Sometimes people rocket to the top, seemingly out of nowhere. No one thought of Dwight Eisenhower as a politician before he became one. John F. Kennedy was a young senator much like Barack Obama. Few people saw the rise of Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton, and most observers thought it would be Jeb rather than George W. Bush who followed his father into the White House. Donald Trump is in a category all by himself.

What seems rarest is the well-known Washington figure who hasn’t served as vice-president becoming a party standard bearer. When it has happened, it hasn’t worked out too well. George McGovern was destroyed. Bob Dole won the 1996 Republican nomination but was trounced from the beginning to the end of the campaign. John McCain and Mitt Romney both fell far short of expectations. Obviously, Hillary Clinton suffered a shocking defeat.

Yet, Liz Mair focuses almost exclusively on these kinds of politicians. She mentions Sens. Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, Ben Sasse, Lindsey Graham, and Josh Hawley. The only partial exception on her list is former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador Nikki Haley. Her biography matches Adlai Stevenson’s fairly well, and we’ve seen southern governors rise to the top before. The rest of these pols don’t have history on their side.

To me, is seems likely that Trump’s heir will be Mike Pence, and if it is not Mike Pence then it will probably be someone from outside of Washington, DC who we don’t know much about. It could be a governor or it could be someone from the private sector who is famous for some reason or another. Maybe it could even be a general or admiral.

The senators that Mair mentioned are certainly ambitious and I don’t doubt many of them will seek the presidency at some point. None of them strike me as likely heirs to Trump though. I guess I am thankful for that.

I’m not qualified at all to translate Persian into English, so I look to people who are fluent in Persian to do that kind of work for me. Professor Juan Cole tells me that Iranian president Hassan Rouhani said our president has a mental illness. To explain his translation, he does a little philology which seems reasonable to me.

[Rouhani] said that in addition, “the White House is confronting mental illness (ma`luliyat-i dhihni).”

The phrase he used comes from medieval Arabic medicine. An `illah is an etiology or cause for a disease. Someone stricken with a symptom is `alil, i.e. sick. Some purists have argued that `alil, which signifies a person to whom something has been done, is more accurate than ma`luliyat, which has the marker of an abstract noun (like the English “-ness”) attached to a passive participle. But be that as it may, both `alil and ma`lul have come to mean “ill” in Persian, with these high-falutin’ Arabic words equivalent to the simpler Persian bimar.

Ma`luliyat-i dhihni is thus means precisely “mental illness.”

It does not suggest impaired intelligence, just impaired sanity.

I have no reason to doubt the accuracy of what Professor Cole is saying here, although I’m certainly willing to listen to other opinions. Even in English, the term “mental illness” is poorly defined, but it is not commonly applied to people who are born with mental disabilities. The suggestion is usually that something has gone wrong. A person has become ill.

Nonetheless, my phone sent me an alert from the New York Times this week informing me that Mr. Rouhini had just called our president “mentally retarded.” Some people will take offense at a foreign leader launching childish insults at our head of state. Others will be offended at the particular term, as “mentally retarded” is now considered the kind of politically incorrect insult that can get your kid suspended from school.  It seems like a prejudicial and inflammatory thing to do to blast out a nationwide message to people’s phones that inaccurately translates what the Iranian president said in a way that will anger most Americans in one way or another.

Ordinarily, I’d see this as irresponsible but not very consequential. But this isn’t a questionable translation from Norwegian. President Trump authorized and then called off military strikes against Iran on Thursday of last week.   One reason Trump may have refrained from going through with the attack is that he knows public opinion does not favor war with Iran. Sending out prejudicial blast messages to people’s phones seems like a good way to change public opinion on that score, so unless news agencies want war they should be more diligent and cautious about what they report. Reporting that the president of Iran said that “the White House is confronting mental illness” doesn’t have the same effect as reporting that he called Trump “mentally retarded.” I don’t think too many people will fail to see the difference.

What’s more, Rouhani’s made extended remarks which provided context for the “mental illness” statement. He didn’t just walk up to a podium, launch an insult, and drop the mic.  He was responding to a near attack on his country that was followed by the imposition of new sanctions that impact the country’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. As Professor Cole explains, as Iran’s senior cleric, Khamenei receives religious donations from all over the world which he redistributes as charity, much like Pope Francis does in the Vatican. According to Rouhani, the new sanctions will impact these religious donors. We may not care about this side effect, perhaps because we don’t think Khamenei distributes this money exclusively for religious purposes, or because money is fungible and we just want him to have less of it to throw around. But it’s not hard to see how others might see this policy as an affront to their religion and an extreme overreaction.  I don’t know what people expect an Iranian politician to say in this context when our president is seriously considering bombing their country and imposing sanctions on the devout. Accusing the “White House” of mental illness actually seems rather mild to me.

I didn’t get any of this context when my phone sent me the alert about “mental retardation.”  It’s not going too far in my mind to say that this kind of reporting could start a war and get a lot of people needlessly killed.

Republican Senator Susan Collins (ME) is having trouble escaping from under the Brett Kavanaugh cloud that follows her everywhere. Her approval rating among her constituents is in the toilet, her state went blue, she’s got what looks like a strong Democratic challenger, and now she’s getting uncomfortable questions about her rapey president.

Collins, who cast the controversial key vote to confirm Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh after he was also accused of a decades-old sexual assault, said on Monday she didn’t know enough to comment on E. Jean Carroll’s claim Trump assaulted her in a Bergdorf Goodman fitting room in Manhattan in the mid-1990s.

But she said his response that he didn’t find his accuser, a columnist for Elle magazine, attractive was odd.

“I thought the president’s comment, ‘She’s not my type,’ or something along those lines was extremely bizarre,” Collins said.

That line —”the controversial key vote to confirm Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh”— will follow Collins to both her political grave and her actual final resting place. It will appear in her obituary. I have no doubt her vote will be the only thing Maine voters remember about Collins, and it will likely be the only entry in the history books (should we survive the current unpleasantness) under her name. Collins protestations of President Trump’s “extremely bizarre” response is an attempt —and a weak one at that— to signal to Maine voters that she’s still a moderate. But given the headwinds she’s facing, I don’t know if Maine voters are listening.

So with apologies to the Everly Brothers…

Too late, little Suzy too late!
Too late little Suzy, too late!
Donald Trump is a creep
He’s the company you keep
Your Kavanaugh vote got Mainers mad
Now you’re in trouble deep
Too late little Suzy! Too late little Suzy!

It’s time to go home.

You can donate to Maine House Speaker Sara Gideon, who’s challenging Collins, here. If you enjoy what we’re doing here at Progress Pond, please consider subscribing.

Hello music lovers!

While I am driving for very long stretches I prefer something relaxing. After all navigating the highway and freeway systems can be more than a little taxing. Although a lot of my chillout music is electronic, I do like to kick it old school from time to time. Here’s a jam by Jimi Hendrix that always hits the spot:

The infinite jukebox is ready and there is always a bartender on duty. So let’s see what’s on tap.

Fox and Friends’ Brian Kilmeade has an interesting defense of President Donald Trump’s concentration camps: “it’s not our kids.” He really said that. You can actually see Kilmeade’s face kind of jerk around, as what I assume is the last smoldering ash of his conscience cries out No, Brian, NO, before commencing its death rattle. It’s really quite remarkable, if sickening, to watch.

This is the same Brian Kilmeade who thinks abortion should be banned to prevent women from killing babies. I was looking around for more topics to highlight Kilmeade’s hypocrisy but after about five minutes, I figured why bother?. The dude is utterly repellent, well-known as a racist, xenophobe, and professional liar. Brian Kilmeade is going to keep promoting shitty “ideas” in the shittiest way possible, probably until the day he drops dead, which sadly will likely be a long time from now.

But yeah, that’s what millions of people are seeing every morning. Well-fed, smirking toady Brian Kilmeade, a man who looks like he eats flies, telling them it doesn’t matter what happens to little kids, because they’re not “ours.”

I wonder what Kilmeade say if one of his kids was run over by a bus, and the driver slowed down to yell, “not my kid, who gives a shit,” before driving off. Or if one of his kids got cancer, and the doctor refused treatment, saying “it’s not my kid, suck a bag of salty dicks.” Or if Kilmeade learned one of his two daughters was molested and no one reported anything because “it’s not my kid.”

I think it’d be a different situation if it was his kids. In the meantime, don’t hire Brian for any babysitting. He doesn’t give a shit what happens to your kids.

After World War One, the French built the Maginot Line as their defensive strategy against a repeat invasion from Germany. It was a spectacular and expensive failure, and now serves as an analogy for all costly and stupid backward-looking endeavors. No two wars are the same, and no two presidential elections are the same either. For this reason, figuring out why Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 is important but not necessarily that helpful for figuring out how to avoid defeat in 2020.

There are many possible mistakes the Democrats could make. They could decide that Clinton was too moderate and did too little to engage the base, without realizing that the base is going to be engaged this time no matter who the nominee is or what they espouse. They could take the suburbs for granted and pursue policies that make them deeply uncomfortable and willing to stay home, vote third party or even go for Trump. They could write off all of small-town and rural America as hopelessly and irredeemably deplorable and let Trump roll up even bigger numbers in those areas. I don’t normally take advice from Charlie Sykes, but he’s not wrong about this:

…Trump could still win reelection, because he has one essential dynamic working in his favor: You.

Trump’s numbers are unmovable, but yours are not. He doesn’t need to win this thing; he needs for you to lose it. There are millions of swing voters who regard Trump as an abomination but might vote for him again if they think you are scarier, more extreme, dangerous, or just annoyingly out of touch.

There are some indicators that can be taken to support and rebut what I am saying here. For example, new survey results from Emerson Polling show that both Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are leading Donald Trump nationally by a wide ten-point margin. This supports my contention that ideology is overrated for motivating the base while undermining my contention that ideology can depress the middle. What I think it really shows, however, is that Trump is a dead man walking and his only hope is for the Democrats to screw up. So, the question then is, “how can the Democrats blow this election?”

Clinton’s loss can most easily be explained as a failed experiment in swapping votes. She took millions of votes away from the Republicans in the suburbs but lost even more in small towns and rural areas. It’s a realignment that has continued during Trump’s presidency and could be seen in the results of the midterm elections. What changed is that Trump’s rural advantage contracted while the Democrat’s suburban advantage exploded. If the trend continues, the Democratic nominee really could win by an almost unheard of ten points, or even more.

If the Democrats continue to eat away at Trump’s areas of strength while maintaining their suburban advantage, they should be successful in 2020, but their base is not rural and the base still considers itself urban even if it’s really now an unnatural urban/suburban alliance.

Maybe it’s because I am from the Mid-Atlantic region, but these dynamics are not new to me. Successful Democrats in this area are not the kind of folks that bring a pitter-patter to progressives’ hearts. They’re people like Andrew Cuomo, Chuck Schumer, Ed Rendell, Bob Casey Jr., Joe Biden, Tom Carper, Cory Booker, Bill Bradley, Chris Dodd and (I hate to say it) Joe Lieberman.  They’ve been winning with the support of liberal-minded rich white suburban professionals for a long time because they had no real alternative.

I never thought this was a desirable national model because I come at politics from the perspective of looking out for the little guy first, and pandering to people who are already comfortable usually comes at a cost for those who are most vulnerable. I’ve tolerated Mid-Atlantic Democrats more than admired them, and I’ve generally judged them by a different standard than national Democrats. For me, growing up in New Jersey, clean politicians like Bradley and Booker were godsends compared to the Hudson County machine politicians we usually had to stomach. If they were a little too friendly to the financial services sector, well, Louisiana and West Virginia Democrats are too friendly to the energy sector, and at least they didn’t belong in jail.  It also helped that they had a formula for success, because who wants to be governed by Chris Christie or Tom Corbett?

Unfortunately, the country as a whole has come to more closely resemble the Mid-Atlantic. Not only that, but Pennsylvania is now one of the pivotal states that will decide the next election, so the formula for winning the Keystone State is pretty close to the formula for winning nationally.

The good news from my perspective is that Trump’s ceiling is so low that it should allow a good margin for error. The bad news is that the Democrats could easily blow past that margin if they they’ve learned the wrong lessons from the last war.

Here’s what I mean by that.

Trump’s formula barely worked. He traded suburban votes for small-town and rural votes and it was enough to get him an Electoral College win even as he was trounced in the popular vote. The trend-line since the 2016 election have continued in a way that is unfavorable to him. This is why he’s trailing badly in both public and internal polling. The Democrats will probably win as long as they don’t interfere with this movement.  The best way to keep it going is to recognize that the goal is to hold down Trump’s small-town/rural votes while maximizing their own suburban vote. In other words, don’t tamper with a formula that failed in 2016 but should work in 2020.

In fairness, part of the reason it failed in 2016 is because the Democrats didn’t realize that their gains in the suburbs were more than being wiped out in the sticks. They can’t let that happen again.

The good news is that was immediately obvious after the midterms that many Trump voters and lifelong Republicans had turned out and cast a vote for the Democrat. While Trump remains popular in small-town and rural areas, his support is waning and he’s showing vulnerabilities on several issues, including health insurance and the cost of prescription drugs. Few people realize it, but the supposedly unmovable “deplorable” vote has already moved against the president to a measurable degree.

Voter-file analysis recently conducted by Catalist, the Democratic data firm, indicated that the party’s gains in 2018 House races were actually strongest in rural areas, not the suburban ones that got more media coverage, relative to the results of the 2016 presidential election. The gains “weren’t enough to get over 50 percent and win seats in many rural districts,” Catalist’s Yair Ghitza wrote — but winning a bigger share of the rural vote in key swing states in 2020 could put Democrats on a path back to the White House.

To get back to Charlie Sykes point, the Democrats can screw this up by sounding too out of touch in rural areas and by appearing “scarier, more extreme, dangerous” to their suburban base. This is about the last thing progressives want to hear, and I don’t blame them. This is the kind of political alignment I grew up with in New Jersey and didn’t like and didn’t want for the country as a whole. But it’s the alignment that Trump has created with his racist and populist messaging. It changed the winning formula for both parties whether we’re happy about it or not.

Having said that, I am not particularly concerned that the Democrats will alienate people through progressive policy prescriptions. While a candidate exclusively focused on climate change might seem out of touch to a lot of rural voters and a candidate who constantly berates anyone who works in the financial services will lose a lot of suburban support, a balanced approach that looks for solutions on health costs, a fairer less monopolized economy, more affordable education, a serious approach to climate, solutions for the gun violence and opioid crises, and a cleaner and better-protected electoral system can probably include some very progressive proposals and still fall within the margin of error. The Democrats don’t need to nominate an Andrew Cuomo to win. One of the advantages of Trump being such an outlier is that it opens up the middle for more progressive solutions.

The key is to make sure that it’s solutions that are being offered rather than infighting and grievances. And the battle is to keep the middle open and to own it.

According to reporting from Axios, media companies have discovered that President Trump isn’t driving traffic the way he used to and it’s hurting their profitability.

Digital demand for Trump-related content (number of article views compared to number of articles written) has dropped 29% between the first 6 months of the Trump presidency and the most recent 6 months, according to data from traffic analytics company Parse.ly.

Evidence that Trump’s social media star power was also beginning to wear off surfaced last month, when Axios reported that his tweets were receiving less than half the engagement that they got when he first took office.

Contrary to the president’s constant insistence that the New York Times is “failing,” the newspaper actually saw a large spike in subscriptions after Trump became president. Apparently, that boon ended in mid-2018 and hasn’t returned. Cable news ratings have been declining since the night Trump was elected, but they’re down more sharply over the last year. They stopped carrying live coverage of Trump’s rallies when those rallies ceased proving any ratings bump.

So far, the Democratic presidential contest hasn’t picked up the slack, and media executives are pessimistic that the upcoming debates will attract large audiences.

From my perspective, writing daily about politics, there’s a definite sense of Trump fatigue. It’s boring to write about the same kind of outrages and behaviors over and over again, and it seems like the verdict is in and we should just vote now rather than waiting another 16 months. I think it must be almost equally enervating to read about these stories over and over again.

Part of this is driven by the backdrop. Since Nancy Pelosi seems determined to have this settled at the ballot box rather than in an impeachment inquiry, that resets expectations for everyone else. There’s not much else to do but watch things wind themselves through the courts, and wait. It’s a bit like expecting people to maintain an interest in baseball when spring training lasts for a year and a half. We had the excitement of the midterm elections but they didn’t result in the kind of resistance people expected, and there’s just not much to keep the ratings up.

What’s interesting about this is that people are telling pollsters that they’re massively engaged in politics and have an unusually high intention to vote in 2020. They just don’t seem to want to watch this shitstorm anymore, which means they’re tuning out a lot of the day-to-day noise.

I was interested to see on Monday that Fox News veteran Carl Cameron has teamed up with Joseph Romm of Think Progress to found a new media company that is supposed to be the progressive answer to The Drudge Report. The problem they’re trying to address is one that is very noticeable to progressive writers and bloggers.

The concept stems from Romm’s love of Internet metrics. Over 13 years of blogging at ThinkProgress, Romm has tracked the Web prints for his thousands of postings, with a particular focus on traffic sources. Over the years, he has watched as referral engines for his stuff have gone poof. Years ago, the Huffington Post drove good numbers; the modern, rebranded HuffPost doesn’t. Years ago, Yahoo provided helpful aggregation; no more, he says. And when Facebook changed its algorithm in 2018, says Romm, ThinkProgress traffic took a “big hit.”

“Facebook was the equivalent of a programmable aggregator, but they got beat up over and over by the right wing, so they can’t be seen as favoring progressive news,” says Romm.

Something was missing, he concluded. “I came to realize that there were just huge gaps in the progressive infrastructure … There is no progressive content aggregator,” says Romm, who lays out his ideology about Internet influencing in his book, “How to Go Viral and Reach Millions.” “There is no progressive equivalent to the Drudge Report.”

FrontPagesLive.com is their answer for this, and I have no idea if they’ll have any success. I hope they do, because conservatives are having a much easier time spreading their comparably terrible content and it gives them a political and financial advantage.

According to the article, Romm was unable to get seed capital for the venture from rich Democrats, which seems like a symptom of the problem he’s trying to address rather than its cause. The left seems to have a lot of faith meritocratic systems which doesn’t work very well when the other side spends most of their time trying to game the system precisely because they lack this faith. The left will compliment you and say they don’t understand why you don’t have higher readership, but the right will link to you and aggregate your content so that even garbage gets a big audience.

The left treats the media landscape as a marketplace of ideas, while the right treats it as daily battle that must be won. That makes them far better prepared for a political environment like the one we’re in presently, because we’re far more reliant on organic interest. If people don’t come on their own, they’re not coming, because no one is sending them.

If the big Democratic donors don’t get this, maybe the grassroots can do better. People should really share more content with their networks, subscribe to publications and bloggers they value, and do their small part to wage the battle the is going on daily whether the bigwigs realize it or not.

Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut represents the 23rd-richest congressional district in the country, but that doesn’t prevent the Bernie Sanders-supporting Roots Action organization from describing his constituents as “largely middle class.” Perhaps it is largely middle class, but it also includes some of the most obscenely wealthy communities in the country, including Greenwich, Darien and Westport. One of the stranger aspects of the 2016 election was how these southwestern Connecticut, old money Yankee communities defected from the Republican candidate in large numbers.

Roots Action is targeting Himes in a new report they’ve put out of 15 House Democrats they’d like to defeat in a primary. The section on Himes notes that he used to work at Goldman Sachs, has gotten a lot of support from the financial services industry, and has been a fairly reliable friend to Wall Street even in the aftermath of the 2007-8 economic collapse. That’s pretty standard stuff, and I don’t have any substantive problem with the idea that Himes is far from a progressive Democrat on economic issues. If I have a quibble, it’s that he’s representing a bunch of incredibly wealthy people who are now voting Democratic, much like his colleague Josh Gottheimer in New Jersey’s 5th District (who is also on their list). It’s misleading to suggest that these districts are historically Democratic or that they’re typified by some kind of middle class ethos.

Nonetheless, it could be true that these districts have turned so hard against Trump that they’d support much more progressive representatives in Congress. The hope is that by issuing a warning shot, Roots Action will get better responsiveness to the needs of ordinary citizens, and that seems like it could make this a worthwhile effort.

Himes may have a different idea about how to cover his flank, however, as he’s just come out in favor of opening an impeachment inquiry. He serves on the House Intelligence Committee, so he has more information than most about full contents of the Mueller Report and other classified aspects of the Trump-Russia investigation. He’s also getting a firsthand taste of how Trump’s unprecedented obstruction is impeding congressional oversight. That he’s coming out for a formal inquiry may be based solely on the merits, but it could also be in reaction to having a big target put on his back by Roots Action.

With the first Democratic primary debates coming up this week, Bernie Sanders has seized the initiative with a well-timed attention-grabbing free college proposal. He ran on something similar four years ago, but this time he’s taking the policy to eleven. It now involves a $2.2 trillion plan for total retroactive college loan forgiveness funded by a Wall Street transaction tax.

The progressive critique of free college plans is that they redistribute wealth inefficiently because they take a scare resource (in this case, funding from Wall Street speculation) and spend a lot of it on people who don’t really need the help. First, many families don’t struggle to pay even expensive tuition, and second, the aid definitionally goes only to those who have attended at least some college. The same thing can be said for the debt forgiveness component. Some people make enough money right out of college that repaying their loans is not much of a burden. This is Elizabeth Warren puts a $250,000/yr income cap on her loan forgiveness plan, which makes it about half as expensive as what Sanders is proposing. This gives her an extra trillion to spend on other things, including things that might help people who don’t pursue higher education.

The Sanders campaign has an answer for these critiques:

“We believe definitionally that if you are the upper elite, that you by definition would not have had to take out student loans,” Keane Bhatt, Sanders’s spokesperson, told Vox. “There is something to be said about simple, intelligible policies that build broad constituencies.”

This is a good answer in a political sense, but it sidesteps the point. A college graduate who lands a job at Goldman Sachs may not have come from “the upper elite,” but they’re in the upper elite now. Do they need all their college loans wiped out when they won’t even notice the change in their budget? Remember, the money we give this person is money no longer available for something else.

But Sanders has an ideological reason to avoid means-testing loan forgiveness.

One of the other biggest criticisms of universal free college and debt relief proposals is an argument Clinton made in 2016: The government shouldn’t be subsidizing school for people who can easily afford it.

“Getting to free college for everybody is not a very progressive way to approach this because a lot of wealthy kids will benefit from that,” Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO), who’s running a more moderate Democratic presidential campaign, told a voter at an Iowa campaign event in May. Buttigieg made a similar argument in April.

But in Sanders’s book, Americans are entitled to “the right to a complete education.”

This is why he isn’t just proposing free college in the future, but total retroactive forgiveness of college loan debt. It’s a principle. College education, in his book, ought to be a human right. The best way to recognize that right is to make college free for everyone. We don’t ask people to pay for their right to free speech and we ban poll taxes that require people to pay to vote. Obviously, there are people who could easily afford to pay fees for those rights and others could borrow money if they needed to in order to enjoy the full fruits of citizenship. But that would be wrong.

If you agree with Sanders on this, you’ll probably see any discussion of priorities as beside the point. However, if you think that this is a big giveaway of precious money to a lot of people who don’t need the help, you’ll see it as an irresponsible plan that is not very progressive at all.

The retroactive aspect of the new plan does make it more palatable to people who are saddled with college debt and wondered why they were left out of the old one. According to Vox, there are 45 million Americans who owe a total of $1.6 trillion in student debt. Wiping out that debt in one fell swoop may be inefficient and expensive, but it would give a lot of people a lot of newfound freedom to take risks, change career course, start their own businesses, or pursue their dreams. A wider pool of recipients would make it easier to enact and harder to repeal.

Enacting it would be a heavy lift in any circumstance. Conservatives with have a plethora of objections, many of them familiar from the Medicaid expansion debate. In order to convince state colleges and universities to offer free tuition, the plan showers them with billions of dollars in federal money, but it does so with strings attached. And even though the plan isn’t efficient in its redistributive effect, it’s still a huge socialistic program in the minds of Republicans. They won’t be providing any votes for this plan, which means the Democrats would have to do it all on their own. They’d also have to either scrap the legislative filibuster or follow Sanders’ plan for enacting Medicare-for-All.

There is no plausible path by which Democrats will have 60 votes in the Senate. Even a simple majority will be hard. As such, Sanders had proposed an agenda whose passage was unthinkable under the current Senate rules…

…On Wednesday, Sanders squared the circle. He’s not going to change the rules so much as command his vice president, who will be the presiding officer of the Senate, to ignore them.

Sanders wants to keep the legislative filibuster but get around it by using the budget reconciliation process. When his programs run afoul of the the rules for budget reconciliation, he plans on having his vice-president just arbitrarily say that there is no violation.

Delving into the merits of this proposed gambit is a subject for another day. Suffice to say, Sanders is unlikely to have the votes he needs from the Democrats to enact his college plan, so the filibuster is a bit irrelevant. And it’s not just so-called moderate Democrats who aren’t sold on free college and total debt forgiveness regardless of need. There are plenty of progressive Democrats who would rather spend the money on programs that help people who never went to college or don’t plan to in the future.