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The path to 2020 for Democrats: Get something done

Emboldened by their new majority in the House of Representatives, Democrats are understandably eager to exercise their power.

Some House members believe the way to do that is with an aggressive, sharply partisan agenda aimed at both calling out President Trump for his egregious behavior and demanding immediate action on longshot legislation such as single-payer healthcare.

A new survey commissioned by the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) and conducted by Expedition Strategies suggests that’s a terrible idea. To win in 2020, Democrats should resist the urge to turn the House into the new headquarters of the anti-Trump resistance or to initiate battles over legislative priorities favored by party liberals that have no hope of passage.

Continue reading at the Los Angeles Times

America’s Resilient Center and the Road to 2020

Via Progressive Policy Institute

For the past two years, many people have fretted that American democracy was in its twilight. In 2016, voters elected as president Donald Trump, a volatile demagogue with a predilection for peddling conspiracy theories and a soft spot for dictators and white nationalism. Our politics seemed hopelessly polarized, with gridlock the new normal, seemingly into perpetuity.

The 2018 election, however, provided tangible proof that 2016 could be an aberration – a glitch but not a feature of the politics to come. Turnout broke modern records for midterm elections, including among first-time and youthful voters. But the real revolt came not from the activist base but from the suburbs, from a once quiescent but a newly resurgent center. Led by suburban women disgusted by Trump’s misogyny and blatant race baiting, suburban voters gave Democrats the lion’s share of their gains in the House – including among many districts that had voted for Trump in 2016. These districts handed Democrats their new majority, and their defection from a Trump-dominated Republican party creates an opportunity for Democrats to broaden their coalition and build a truly national party.

The crucial question now for Democrats is how to wield the power they now hold.

To help meet this challenge, PPI and Expedition Strategies surveyed 1,090 likely voters on the eve of this crucial election. Our goals were to gather data to put the current results into context and to gather clues about the kind of agenda progressives should craft as we barrel headlong into the 2020 presidential sweepstakes.

The good news for Democrats is that they have the potential to build a durable majority. In our poll,48 percent of respondents identified as Democrats or as independents who lean Democratic, while39 percent said they were Republicans or Republican leaners, and 13 percent were true independents, with no allegiance to either party.

But for Democrats to maintain and expand this near-majority advantage, they must craft a broadly appealing agenda that brings or keeps independents and less committed partisans – the majority of whom call themselves “moderate” – under the tent. Also vital will be winning over for the long term the suburban women who led the revolt against Trump. According to one poll by CNN immediately pre-election, 62 percent of women wanted Democrats to take control of Congress, and 63 percent disapproved of Donald Trump – sentiments these voters acted on with a vengeance, not only through their energetic turnout but by sending a record number of women to Congress. While our survey shows that women – and white college-educated women in particular – are more liberal and more Democratic than men or the electorate at large, the plurality of women are still “moderate,” and their views do not conform in many ways to those of the liberal activist Democratic base.

Continue reading at Progressive Policy Institute…

The Manufacturing Jobs Program Trump Wants to Kill

The little-known Manufacturing Extension Partnership program has helped grow small businesses like Michele’s Granola.

Via Washington Monthly

Walk into Michele’s Granola factory in Timonium, Maryland, and you smell the homey aromas of toasting oats, brown sugar and vanilla. The facility produces 2,500 pounds of granola a day in eight different flavors—from classic vanilla almond to more exotic varieties like pumpkin spice, lemon pistachio and ginger hemp. This granola is not the heavy, sticky mass-produced stuff you bought at the supermarket and find months later, congealed in a tub in the back of your pantry. It’s airy, light and practically crackles in your teeth.

“The granola has a very unique texture,” said company founder Michele Tsucalas. “We use just five to seven simple ingredients—nothing you wouldn’t find in your home kitchen.”

Tsucalas began baking her own granola more than a decade ago, experimenting at home as a weekend distraction from her day job as a nonprofit fundraiser. Once her recipe was perfected, she started selling her granola at farmers’ markets in northern Virginia and then at a food co-op in Maryland. Sales started catching fire, and today you can find Michele’s Granola in a dozen states, including at Whole Foods stores throughout the mid-Atlantic United States, and in Wegmans stores in the northeast. Since her first farmers’ market in 2006, Tsucalas’s business has grown from a one-woman concern operating out of leased space in a commercial kitchen to a sleek boutique business with 35 full-time workers.

But the secret to her success is more than a great product. Also instrumental was a little-known but decades-old government program—the Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) program—aimed at helping small and medium-sized manufacturers like Michele’s Granola grow. It’s also on the chopping block in President Donald Trump’s proposed budget, one of dozens of programs the administration wants to kill.

While Trump has lately touted his efforts at job creation, including with a recent visit to Wisconsin to promote U.S. manufacturing, his plan to zero out the MEP program would eliminate one of the federal government’s best programs for achieving exactly that goal. It’s yet another example of how Trump’s actual economic policies fail to match—and even contradict—the president’s promises and rhetoric.

Continue reading at Washington Monthly

The Challenge of Latino Retirement Security

Only 6 percent of Latino workers in California have employer-sponsored retirement savings.

America’s fastest-growing demographic group might also be the least ready for retirement.

New research by the National Council of La Raza finds that in California – home to more than a third of the nation’s Latino population – just 29 percent of Latinos have access to an employer-sponsored retirement plan and only 21 percent of those who have access participate. Taken together, this means only 6 percent of the state’s Latino workers have employer-sponsored retirement savings at all.

Continued at the Washington Monthly…