Author: bento

The talk of Calexit right now might seem still at the level of fringe grumbling, but one in three Californians support it, and the first stage has been OK’d for the 2018 ballot. The Civil War demonstrated that secession is impossible without cooperation of the national government. What if such cooperation were provided? In fact, what if the national government were the primary impetus? Keep in mind that Trump has already threatened to defund Berkeley over rioters closing down Milo’s speech, and California over its sanctuary status.

Why would Trump want California to secede? With Trump, it is always wise to look for the pettiest, stupidest, and most spiteful explanation available. Trump’s loss of the popular vote is clearly eating him, and with California out of the picture, he can honestly say he is governing a country where he won the majority of the popular vote.

There is also the Russian vote. The leader of the Calexit movement has been linked to Russia. He even lives there. So a powerful covert Trump constituency is already pushing this. We should keep in mind that from Russia’s perspective, Trump is in part payback for Yeltsin, who oversaw the disintegration of what had been the Soviet Union, and even some of what had been Russia before that. Russian interference in our election is trivial compared to our intervention in Yeltsin’s.
It would be very hard to let California secede, or to push it to,  without the cooperation of the Republican Party, however, Why would they do it?  Trump is already at record disapproval for a new President. The Republicans can see that this is their big and probably their last chance to gut entitlements. They’re going to go for it. Actually gutting Obamacare will be politically costly, but they’re committed to that too. Given those two things, can they retain power in two years? Maybe. The map does favor them. In four years? If the country is still democratic at all, they will be in very bad shape, not because of demographics, but because their President and their own actions will be deeply unpopular.

What happens if you take California out of the picture?

Trump’s electoral victory would have been 306 to 177, almost 2 to 1.
Clinton could have won every swing state and still lost.
The Republican 247 to 188 majority in the House – a margin of 29 – becomes 233 to 150 – a margin of 42.

The picture is even worse if Oregon and Washington go too, and they, particularly Washington, have also been openly feuding with Trump.

How could this happen?

Gov. Brown is going to seek $182 million is federal emergency aid for flooding. The media itself is saying Trump’s approval is in doubt, because he has already threatened to defund California. And we already saw in the aftermath of Sandy that Republicans will play petty politics with emergency relief.

Of course, $182 million is well under 1% of California’s budget. Denying that would not actually be devastating to the state. But Oroville is not out of the woods. In case you hadn’t heard, yesterday local authorities announced that the Oroville dam, the highest in the nation, was likely to break and evacuated the area. Luckily, the dam did not break, but  it has been weakened and it looks like another solid week of rain starting Wednesday. If, God forbid, the dam goes, the bill skyrockets. Luckily, most have already been evacuated and hopefully will stay that way. As well as Oroville, two of the three large towns in the area – Yuba City and Marysville – and several smaller ones would be mostly destroyed (the third large town, Chico, is North of the dam). Now we’re well into the billions.

What if Trump refuses to pay for that?

The optics are horrible, of course. Not as bad as Katrina, because people will not be abandoned in the ruins, and most have gotten out in time. But Bush did not deny relief to New Orleans either.  Trump’s tolerance for bad optics is spectacular though. The bitter irony is that the three counties that would be most affected by failure of the Oroville dam – Butte, Sutter, and Yuba – all went for Trump. These may be Californians, but they are white rural Californians, largely farmers. Trump supporters all over the country will see themselves in these people. Will Trump care? Does he ever?

I have heard many Californians snort at the threats of defunding, saying we contribute more to federal coffers than we receive. This is true, but that linkage is not automatic. You must make it. Just because Trump cuts off federal dollars for one purpose or another does not remove your legal obligation to pay your income tax.

If Trump starts defunding – especially if he refuses to fund emergency recovery in a spectacular case like a dam failure, but under any circumstances – will people start refusing to pay their federal income taxes? I bet so. Not everyone, of course, but significant numbers. Will they also refuse to pay state? A lot less philosophically defensible under the circumstances, but it will be easier to get away with refusing federal taxes if you don’t file at all. Will the state continue to cooperate with the feds by sharing information? There are many ways things can go from here, but if people start refusing to pay taxes in significant numbers because the federal government is discriminating against California and denying it needed emergency aid, we have already moved a considerable way towards national disintegration.

It would also have to end up in court. The Supreme Court would have to decide that people still have to pay federal income tax even if the federal government is withholding money to punish the state for not using state resources to enforce federal law, a constitutional right.  I think the court would choose to compel allocation of the money, but I don’t know if they constitutionally can. Spending is clearly out of their purview.

We are now in completely uncharted territory. Keep in mind what losing California would do for Republican electoral prospects.  And it may not be just California. The Pacific Northwest is also being very defiant of Trump. They could go too. More good blue riddance.

Of course, the Republicans would rather not do it over a dam breaking over rural whites. Defunding Berkeley sounded a lot more fun. There are many ways the defunding threat could play out. Emergency aid is a good opportunity, because Trump could just veto the bill, the Republicans don’t have to refuse to pass it. Of course, the Democrats should rightly pressure them to override the veto, but that would mean civil war in their party. Who knows what they would do?

Also, once secession seems likely, the big sort will go into overdrive. Conservatives or those for whom secession is just too scary will flee to the United States. Liberals and Progressive will flee to California to avoid being condemned to a purely red America. More people will come to California than leave it because that flow will be coming from the whole country. That flow will skew young and educated. and It will skew non-white, though it will probably be difficult for most of the poor to come. This will leave rump America worse off, with an older and somewhat less educated population.

Of course, the logistics of secession seem impossible. The infrastructure, the legal systems, the communications, the companies, all are integrated across the country. Would California inherit 10% of the national debt? Of the military? Will it inherit part of America’s international role and treaty obligations? Can it generate a viable national government quickly? (The US will want to keep Silicon Valley, but the Valley probably would rather stay with California, particularly if Seattle comes too. It’s easy to say don’t give them a choice, but it is hard to take by force an industry whose power is largely brain power and established network effects. You would disrupt the networks and have a hard time corralling the brains).The whole thing is inconceivable. Yet, the disintegration of the Soviet Union was as well, a few years before it occurred. Russia may enjoy showing us what is possible in this area, as we showed it to them.

Personally, I would bet on secession becoming a serious topic of discussion, but not happening. Big business does not want this, and they have a way of getting what they want.  But I bet against Trump becoming President too.

Today, Krugman tweeted this:

Thought: There was (rightly) a cloud of illegitimacy over Bush, dispelled (wrongly) by 9/11. Creates some interesting incentives for Trump

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) December 16, 2016

The incentive is certainly clear, but this sort of thinking has been verboten on the left.  What do people think?

Josh Marshall has a good article today pointing out that Russian hacking was announced during the election and greeted with ostentatious yawns by Republicans. What he misses is why the Republicans do care now. The post-election CIA announcement includes the fact that the RNC was hacked too, although none of those emails were published. The Republicans are now scared of what Russia has on them. When it was just a question of throwing the election their way, they were delighted, and they certainly don’t want that outcome challenged, but now they are feeling cold Russian fingers on their own balls.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/we-all-knew-this

Every day brings more proof that Donald Trump will be an absolute disaster as President, one thoroughly dwarfing the disaster that was George W. Bush. The CIA statement of Russian interference in the election creates a further case for the Electoral College to deny Trump the Presidency. I think this is very unlikely, and, further, if it happened, I think it would create massive, well-armed unrest that would destabilize the country. Several days ago, the Washington Post suggested that Hillary free her electoral members to vote for another Republican in the hope that at least 37 Republicans would join them and choose another Republican over Trump. This implies that there are at least 37 out of 306 Republican electors who are Americans first and Republicans second. The ratio I’ve seen in recent decades seems much lower than that, but who knows anything about these electors, so I guess it is possible. Let’s game it out.

The Post suggests Romney as an example of someone to throw to. A pretty acceptable compromise to me, but absolute death for the Republican base, and the big problem for Republicans in doing this will be getting their base to accept it. The base tried as hard as they could not to nominate Romney, lining up behind the likes of Bachman and Cain. Ultimately, the anyone-but-Mitt vote could not coalesce behind a credible candidate, so Mitt was successfully shoved down their throats with only one basis: he was the man that could  win. And he lost. After Clinton, Romney would be the least acceptable person to the Republican base.

The name of Kasich has also been floated. The Republicans resoundingly chose Trump over him in the primary, and he became a leader of the anti-Trump forces. The base will not accept him either.

I think the best Republican to throw to, in the sense of the shortest of the very long shots, is Paul Ryan. Ryan has always been the most beloved pet of the donor class, who we now see has a lot more juice in the Trump administration than was being signaled during the election, and who in any case have no doubt tremendous juice with the electors. He was not actually defeated by Trump, like Kasich, or by the voters, like Romney. The two did publicly quarrel, but also publicly reconciled, more or less. It would be the Republican establishment, in alliance with the Democratic establishment, protecting the country from the lunacy created by the Republican base.  

Would Ryan actually be an improvement over Trump? Absolutely. Ryan’s agenda of maximal damage to the welfare state, coupled with as little taxation and regulation of the elite as possible, has been embraced by Trump anyway, his campaign rhetoric to the contrary spectacularly notwithstanding. Further, Ryan would have to pursue it with reduced legitimacy, with Trump calling him a traitor, and with massive unrest to try to quell. He’s going to have a lot of distractions, and is going to need a lot of Democratic help, because he will be facing civil war in his own party, and blood in the streets. Ryan has shown that, though he is an ideologue, he is also a conventional politician, who makes deals when he has to. .

Which is why I’m scared that Ryan will exact a price, and it is Democratic cooperation in dismantling Social Security and Medicare. In fact, for any mainstream Republican, I think that will be the price, probably not stated publicly. It has been for decades their wettest dream, but they are afraid to go there alone. If Democrats are willing to pay that price, there will and should be a revolution in the party. Now we have complete realignment. Both parties will be complicit in very unpopular changes (especially unpopular once they are actually made), in a state of civil war, and basically universally reviled. At that point, we become the non-violent resistance to contrast with the violent, and push a social welfare program that starts from the ground up. Medicare is gone? Let’s have socialized medicine, or at least single payer, full stop.

Beyond all that, Ryan will at least take the job seriously and approach it with the temperament of an adult. He will take security briefings. He will not appoint grossly-unqualified people to the cabinet, though he will put the EPA, public education, and such in the hands of their ideological opponents, as Trump, too, has done. The alt-right will not have a voice in his administration. Civilian control of the military will be clearly maintained.Thuggery in the streets will not be feeling so empowered.

Will the plutocrats prefer Ryan, even though they are getting the same agenda on the issues they care about with Trump? Possibly, just because Trump is so clearly destabilizing, and most of the elite do not want that. Ryan is also destabilizing because of the unrest that would result from his installation. They would have to choose their poison blind, just like the rest of us. I don’t know what they would choose.

Will we still face a massive armed uprising? Yes, but probably less massive than with Romney, and certainly less massive than with Clinton, whom the base has been trained to despise for over two decades. From the perspective of Sanders Democrats, violent Trumpistas vs. an alliance of the Republican and Democratic party establishments has a “let’s you and him fight” quality, but we are all stuck on the battleground. Many people will be repulsed by both sides in that conflict, which means our actual support is likely to increase. That said, the threat to the country from violent insurrection should not be dismissed. Those who think people in their own land with light arms and homemade bombs would stand no chance against the US military were not paying attention in Iraq. And the loyalties of the soldiers would be divided. One half of one percent of Trump voters is an army of 320,000. Many with guns and military training. Many with many guns, capable of arming others.

Should the Electoral College open Pandora’s box by rejecting Trump? I have seriously mixed feelings. Those who think things cannot be worse than with Trump dangerously lack imagination. OTOH, if there must be a bloody insurrection, let it be against the Republican Party, especially the Ryan division. Both the Trump Presidency and violent insurrection are so extreme that it is impossible really to game them out with any confidence.

Finally, let’s set aside the argument that it matters much that the campaigns would have been conducted differently if it were not assumed that the Electoral College would vote according to the state results. That is no doubt true, but the right of voters to choose their leaders is not generally supposed to include a right to be addressed in a certain way or with a certain strategy. The argument about confounding expectations (not really breaking the rules, since the rule is that electors vote as they please) is basically an argument about what is fair to the campaigns. It is not fair to a campaign to be judged by different standards than what you competed on. But democracy ultimately serves voters, not campaigns, and fairness to voters must trump fairness to campaigns. I think following the popular vote is ultimately the fairest thing to the voters. The implication is that the electoral college has got to go and soon. All that would be happening here is the College’s independence being used to solve at great cost to governmental legitimacy a problem it itself created. It was created, in theory, to prevent a victor like Trump, but, in fact, it has made him possible.

We must win.  We have no choice.  The world cannot afford for us to lose nobly. We must win.

This is not just a matter of better policies as opposed to worse. It is not even just a matter of justice.

It is a matter of survival, and survival trumps all.

Not only our survival, but the survival of hundreds of millions of people and the survival of our civilization. That is how serious climate change is, and how serious the threat Trumpism poses to it is.  We are at a crucial juncture. It was always debatable whether the path we were on was remotely adequate, but the path Trump will set us on is the path to unmitigated disaster.
We must take back at least one house of Congress in 2018. Without that, we have no institutional power to push back against the Republican Party.

The conventional wisdom will tell us this is impossible. There are only 8 seats in the Senate currently held by Republicans that are up for grabs. There are 23 Democratic seats,  plus two independents who caucus with the Democrats. The House majority is securely gerrymandered into place.

But the convention wisdom told us it was impossible for Donald Trump to win the nomination. The conventional wisdom said Bernie Sanders would not last past the first two primary contests. The conventional wisdom insisted that Clinton had the election in the bag.

Even on the morning of election day.

Voter suppression is about to go into overdrive. There is nothing holding it back. That means most of the groups likely to vote Democratic: college students, nonwhites, will have a hard time voting. This is why we actually cannot settle for doing as well with the white working class as Obama did. We must do better. It is very irksome to have to cater to the other side’s base because the people they voted for are discriminating against your side, but we cannot fix the discrimination until we have power. So we must pander to the voters who have just made it clear they are very angry at us. The Republicans cannot suppress their own constituency.

Luckily, the Republicans will give us a lot of ammo. They already are. Going after Medicare will hurt them deeply. Going after Obamacare is already a lot less popular with Republicans than it was two months ago. Our big advantage has always been that our policies are more popular overall. Where we get killed is in symbolism.  We think we’re good at symbolism, but we judge it in an echo chamber, and we let our normative positions distort our estimation of its impact. Trump is also making it abundantly clear that he is going to govern like a surly drunk who thinks he’s funny. It was not just an act. The disastrous nature of this will become obvious, hopefully at less than devastating cost.

Trump has unleashed the most vile bigotry that was hidden in the crevices of our culture. And we must fight that utterly. But that is not where we prefer to be fighting, because the votes from it are the votes we already have, not the votes we need, and we must win. I’m not saying we don’t resist. But we don’t pick fights ourselves in this area because it doesn’t help us with the only voters who can save us. We will have plenty of purely defensive fighting to do in this arena without picking other fights, but this is not the arena where we can win. That is identity politics. That is what has just failed catastrophically. The main fight has to be on policy, and on the general failures of Trump.

Taking back power will mean winning back votes from people who just voted for a candidate who said he wanted to put Muslims on a registry and halt Muslim immigration. That may not be why they voted for him, but it was not a deal killer. That is how deep the fear of Muslims goes now, and if there is another big terrorist attack – very likely with how belligerent, reckless, negligent, and stupid Trump is – it will quickly get much deeper.

Which is why I say the stupidest thing we could possibly do is put Keith Ellison in charge of the DNC. Personally, I like Ellison and would probably support him on the merits. But I know it would be politically suicidal to do this. Because he is Muslim. Because the ADL accuses him of supporting antisemitism, a charge we will probably be leveling at Trump, given his alliances, and will have neutralized by having to defend against the same charge. What Ellison did was defend the right of Nation of Islam to speak. I agree with that. I have no sympathy for Nation of Islam, but I am big on free speech. But the substance of Ellison’s position is not important. Winning is what is important.

The Republicans got where they are by, among other things, pretending a black President was secretly a Muslim. Now we’re going to give them a black man who is an actual Muslim as the official face of the Party? For their voters, it will confirm the worst things they have said. For them, it will mean that the talk radio crowd was right all along. It may seem that DNC head is not that visible a position, but if that position is filled by a Muslim, it will be the most visible political office in the world. The Republicans will frequently not want to talk about Trump, so they will talk about Ellison instead. They have their own media and social media. Ellison will be at the center of the political conversation, because it suits Republicans to put him there, and they can. Trump, of course, will be very cooperative in this, and it is impossible to simply ignore what the President says.

I am not saying we have to nominate a straight white man. Black, gay, female, latino – all fine. Blacks, women, and latinos have been Republican primary contenders, after all. Not open gays, but I don’t think Republicans could make the gayness of a DNC head into an issue. Muslims are a different category. They have attacked the country and probably will again. And, yes, I know that is not all Muslims. I am not arguing the merits here. I am arguing political impact.
Do we want to spend the next two years talking about how the Republicans are destroying Medicare and how Trump is completely out of his depth, or do we want to spend it denying that the head of our Party is secretly on the side of the terrorists? We will have no shortage of opportunities to fight bigotry against Muslims, and they will be on matters of actual consequence, not the mere symbolism of having a Muslim in charge. I know people are supporting Ellison primarily on the merits, not the symbolism, but it doesn’t matter. If Ellison becomes head of the DNC, the main thing he will achieve is making the political discussion revolve around his religion rather than the horrors that the Republican Party is about to unleash. We may feel that nominating him anyway is the right thing to do, but not if it means we lose. There are too many lives that would be sacrificed to that symbolism, or to that sense of fairness applied to a question of relatively little consequence. The consequences of this game are too serious right now for us to treat all our decisions as abstract questions of principle.

And we are fighting uphill. The Congressional landscape for us is terrible. Our voters will be heavily suppressed. Our only hope is in appealing to their voters, who do not respond to our values. And in keeping the conversation on the Republicans’ horrific actions, not anything else.

And we must win.

The lawsuit filed by Republican PACs against the Wisconsin recount argues that the “intent of the voter” standard for interpreting votes is Wisconsin is, as that in Florida, too vague to ensure that all votes will be counted equally, and therefore violates equal protection of the law. It may be important that BvG was a decision that the Florida Supreme Court had not interpreted correctly Florida law, and presently the Court is not revisiting a state Supreme Court case. Also, technically, BvG did not stop the recount. It just insisted that it be reinitiated under new standards and completed by the safe harbor deadline the next day, which was obviously impossible.

Some have argued that language in BvG disallows its use as a precedent, but this is ambiguous, and, according to wikipedia, it has been so used. Nonetheless, I think the Supes must be embarrassed by the decision, and the transparent cynicism and dishonesty of this attempt to use it again to shut down a recount will piss them off, particularly Kennedy, the historic swing vote. The case won’t be heard will till the 9th, and I wouldn’t guess it looks good, although a lot probably depends on whether the recount will have seemed to be making a difference by then. By which I mean, fi the lower court decides for the plaintiff, I think the Supes may step in. After all, if it is too late to restart the recount at that point, it would be the lower court’s own fault for not granting the halt and hearing the case earlier.

Here is the text:

http://support.greatamericapac.com/recountdocs.pdf

The Republicans have issued a legal complaint against Jill Stein’s recounts in Wisconsin and Michigan on the basis that Stein is the one legally compelling the recount, but the only possible beneficiary is Clinton. That clearly implies Clinton could possibly benefit. They also allege coordination in fundraising. I don’t know the law on coordination, but the assertion that Clinton could benefit, but Stein could not, implies that the recount could give Clinton victory in the state. If the “benefit” in question is merely the PR benefit of an increased vote total not changing the outcome, Stein is as likely to benefit as Clinton. The only benefit that could possibly accrue to Clinton, but not to Stein, is victory in the contest, and that is only true if you consider victory a realistic possibility in Clinton’s case, but not in Stein’s.

By making this argument in court, the GOP has put itself on record as acknowledging the possibility that the recount could turn the states to Clinton.

Here’s a good site to track developments, which the liberal press is mostly not covering:

http://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2016-11-30/the-latest-stein-to-seek-presidential-recoun
t-in-michigan

What are Republicans who recognize that Trump would be a disaster as President supposed to do? Some will outwardly support him, while hoping that he loses and perhaps working quietly to undermine him if it appears he might win. But that means tacitly supporting Hillary Clinton. Some will, for political or even possibly principled reasons, find it impossible to endorse Trump. Does that mean openly supporting Clinton? The day Clinton wins election, Trump becomes irrelevant, and the job of the Republican media machine will be to maximally vilify her, as they have been doing, and as they did to her husband and to Obama.  How will it feel then to be a prominent Republican who endorsed Hillary?  How can you function in the party?  If you are a donor, you will be welcomed back, because money is always greeted with warm hugs, but if you are a politician, an operative, a pundit? If Hillary wins, the dangers of Trump will never be realized and therefore never be proven to those who don’t want to see them. It will be possible retrospectively to pretend those dangers were never real, as there is no possibility of otherwise being proven.

Jonah Goldberg, discussed by Booman in a recent post, is a case in point. He doesn’t want to endorse Trump, because he doesn’t want that hanging around his neck later. But endorsing Clinton would be worse for him, particularly if Clinton wins, as that endorsement will never become irrelevant while she sits in the Oval Office. You notice Colin Powell has remained a non-entity on the right since endorsing Obama.

His way out would be to endorse the Libertarian ticket, Gary Johnson and Bill Weld. Here is a recent ad of theirs, currently making the rounds on social media:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQv_6GXVbDw

Unlike almost all third party candidates in history, and unlike Donald Trump, these men are former governors and therefore both qualified for the Presidency by conventional standards. Their platform conserves the pro-wealth, pro-business core of the Republican platform, which Trump does not, entirely, and which is what the Republican elite really cares about. It does mean cutting the religious right and the militarists loose, but neither of those are pulling much weight in the Trump campaign either, and the consequences are limited since these men are not likely to take office and that would not be the point of endorsing them.

If Hillary Clinton takes office, the Republicans are facing the prospect of 16 consecutive years of a Democratic Presidency, something that has not happened since Roosevelt/Truman.  It will leave the Supreme Court with a center-left majority impossible to surmount for decades. And this will happen while the Republicans are in disarray, trying to reassemble their ideology, party, and coalition from the smashing Trump has provided. Many of them will want to roll the dice on an alternative.

And Johnson/Weld don’t have to win. They only have to carry a few states, enough to deny either candidate an electoral majority. That throws the election to the House. Each state in the House gets one vote, which will actually increase the Republican majority. The House is nutty enough to choose Trump. Impossible to imagine they choose Clinton. And if they fail to decide, I believe it would go to Ryan by default (hat tip N1chlas for pointing this out), which is an outcome most of them and certainly the Republican establishment would prefer anyway.

What could Johnson/Weld achieve with real money behind them and with the media covering them and taking them seriously, which would happen if they found support among the Republican elite?  They are both apparently popular in their homes states. If Weld took Massachusetts, that would be a huge blow to Clinton. There are also swing states with Libertarian leanings, like Colorado and Wisconsin. It could only take a few to deny Clinton an electoral majority.

The pot vote could be a minor factor. Clinton will find it hard to give in on this, even though she probably smoked along with Bill, back in the day. Hippy-punching is instinctive for her. The Libertarian Party has been pro-legalization, no ifs, ands, or buts, all the way back to the 70s and has never wavered. If all you care about is pot legalization, they have earned your vote. However, there are bigger issues, and I think most of the pro-pot voters will see that and will see as well that at this point they are winning, and Clinton is not going to spend that much political capital opposing them, just as Obama did not. Still pot may be good for a few percent at the margin.

One more point. Clinton is already going heavily negative on Trump and rightly so. Trump will go heavily negative on her as well, because that’s all he knows how t do. In a two-person race, this is zero-sum. But if Johnson gets any traction at all, having the two major candidates do their best to make one another toxic can only help him.
Updated

With the Democratic Primary winding down and Sanders in a strong position to exact concessions, there is the question of what is important for him to get. I think the head of Wasserman-Schultz almost worthless though it may help appease his supporters. Likewise, I don’t think the platform is that important because it won’t necessarily determine what Clinton does once elected, especially to the degree it is imposed against her preferences.  What is important is that this movement progress beyond the Sanders candidacy that has triggered it. It would be tragic for all this mobilization to evaporate at the convention, but also tragic for it to continue in a purely oppositional stance that ultimately serves the interests of Donald Trump and the Republican Party.

Since Bernie’s agenda primarily concerns domestic policy anyway, the effort now should go to the place that policy is primarily determined: the US Congress. The GOP has had two spectacular successes in recent decades using fundamentally the same strategy, invented by Newt Gingrich: the Contract with America in the 90s, and the Tea Party in the 2010s.  What both of these did was make Congressional campaigns national and ideologically intelligible While one can identify contradictions in the platforms of both those campaigns, they were intelligible in the sense that people at least thought they knew what they were voting for.  Most people know nothing about their Congresspeople, especially in the House. They vote party, but without enthusiasm, and don’t vote or vote blindly in the primaries. When candidates endorse the Contract with America or join the Tea Party, it instantly tells their potential supporters what their platform is and who their allies are.  This strategy gave the Republican Party the House and gave the Conservative Movement the Republican Party. The results have been disastrous, of course, but that shouldn’t blind us to the brilliance of the strategy.  Alinsky said of his strategies that they were just strategies that could be used for good or ill; the same applies to the strategies of Gingrich.  There is also something to be said for people voting on an ideological basis, rather than pure partisanship or name recognition.

Sanders now has a name and a platform pretty well known to the party and the public. It has considerable support. It may be impossible for Sanders to win the primary now, but if it were starting now, his chances would be much better, because he is better known than he was at the beginning, and the better he is known the more support he generates. “Sanders” now is both a brand and a political substance, and it is time to use it to win back the Congress for not just Democrats, but progressive Democrats.

So I suggest the Sanders campaign morph into the Sanders Slate, a well-defined platform, brand, and grassroots fundraising device that Democrats can join. Voters will instantly have some idea what Sanders Slate supporters stand for, just as they did for Tea Party candidates. To the extent possible at this late date, this should be put in place for this year’s election, but the groundwork should definitely be laid for 2018 and beyond.

What Sanders must get from Clinton in return for his support is a promise to stay out of it. Clinton herself, the DNC, and the other organs of the Democratic Party establishment must stay neutral in primary challenges.  The ouster of DWS, if it happens, could be most useful for starting this discussion. If and only if the Democratic establishment does this, they can call on the Sanders Slate to support the nominee if they lose the primary, but that swings both ways. If the Sanders Slate candidate wins, the establishment cannot undercut them. All these promises must be made publicly because the only enforcement possible will be the public discredit from betraying them

Like the Tea Party, the Sanders Slate should also target state governments.

We don’t know yet how far the disintegration of the Republican Party could go. Many seats could become competitive that have not been. The fact that Sanders does better against Trump in head-to-head contests than Clinton does bodes well for the prospects of Sanders Slate candidates taking seats that centrist Democrats cannot take. If the Sanders campaign is a movement not just a candidacy, it is time to make that transition.

Both times Barack Obama ran for President,his campaign compiled an extremely sophisticated database of the electorate, enabling them to target potential supporters very precisely. This was a major weapon in his arsenal. Now this database is presumably property of the Democratic Party. But will all primary candidates have access to it? I frankly suspect that Clinton will and that Biden, should he run, will too.  Sanders? I very much doubt it without a lot of pressure. I can’t think of a reasonable justification for the party to pick favorites in this way and find it almost impossible to think they will not, at least if they can get away with it. Does anyone have any inside info on this?