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The bellwether district that could portend a 2018 Democratic wave

Rep. Mimi Walters, R-Calif. (Photo: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call)

LOS ANGELES — At first glance, Rep. Mimi Walters doesn’t seem like the sort of Republican who’s about to lose her job.

A former investment banker who climbed the Republican ladder in ritzy Laguna Niguel, Calif., before heading to Washington, D.C., Walters has always felt like a good fit for California’s 45th Congressional District — a conservative-leaning, business-oriented patch of suburban Orange County, itself a traditional GOP stronghold. In 2014, voters there first elected Walters to Congress by 30 percentage points; two years later she won reelection by 17 points, even as Donald Trump lost the district to Hillary Clinton by 5.

Clinton’s win was unprecedented — no Democratic presidential candidate had ever captured CA-45 before — and thanks to demographic changes and local anti-Trump sentiment, the former secretary of state also flipped the rest of Orange County. Yet while Walters’s fellow O.C. Republicans have suddenly found themselves in the hot seat as a result — Reps. Darrell Issa and Ed Royce decided to retire, setting off fierce succession fights, and Rep. Dana Rohrabacher faces several strong Democratic and Republican opponents — Walters has largely flown under the radar, the assumption being that she’s the safest of the lot.

But what if the very factors that make Walters seem less vulnerable than her GOP neighbors are same factors that could make her reelection campaign 2018’s best bellwether: the race to watch for signs not just of a Democratic win, but of a Democratic wave?

To regain control of the House, Democrats need to net 24 seats. That seems increasingly doable: The party is performing better than Republicans in generic ballot polls — surveys in which people are asked which party they would support in a congressional election — and President Trump’s approval rating is historically low. Swings of 24 or more seats aren’t historically uncommon, either; they’ve happened in half the midterm elections since 1994.

A wave election, however, would be something else: A transcontinental tide more akin to 2010, when the GOP’s Tea Party momentum was so strong that it didn’t really matter how solid a particular incumbent was, or how salient some local issue. The Republican Party flipped 63 seats, and the House, and there wasn’t much any individual Democrat could do about it.

Which is where Walters comes in.

In three key ways, her reelection fight is typical of 2018 as a whole — and that’s why it could be telling.

The first factor is Walters herself. Unlike Issa or Rohrabacher — or any Republican running in a Trump-era special election, over which Democrats have obsessed and in which they have overperformed — Walters has not been the focus of national controversy or the target of national Democratic hostility. Issa was an aggressive antagonist of Barack Obama; Rohrabacher has been called Vladimir “Putin’s favorite congressman.” Walters, in contrast, is not a name politician; she is not a left-wing bete noire. She is, instead, a perfectly ordinary, mostly overlooked Republican incumbent, with views that mirror the party consensus. If Walters were to lose in November, it wouldn’t be because she is exceptional in some way; the same would be true if she were to win. She is the opposite of an outlier.

Rep. Mimi Walters R-Calif., stand to the left of Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., as he conducts a news conference with members the GOP caucus in the Capitol Visitor Center to announce a new amendment to the health care bill to repeal and replace the ACA, April 6, 2017. (Photo: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call)

Even Walters’ relationship to Trump is typical. Like most of the rest of the Republican Party, she has wagered that it will benefit her more to stick with the president than to strike out against him, despite his many deviations from conservative orthodoxy and decorum.

Initially Walters supported Jeb Bush for president, then Marco Rubio; she only came around to Trump after her preferred candidates tanked. But when Trump’s Access Hollywood tape surfaced shortly before the 2016 election, Walters refused to rescind her endorsement, or to comment in any way. And since the start of his administration she has compiled one of the most pro-Trump records in the House, voting in line with the president’s position 98.6 percent of the time, according to FiveThirtyEight — including votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act and pass Trump’s tax plan, both decisions that were broadly unpopular in California, where many voters rely on the state’s version of Obamacare and will lose valuable deductions under the new tax law.

In short, if the 2018 midterms are a referendum on the president, as most midterms are, Walters hasn’t given voters inclined to vote against Trump any particular reason to vote for her. Their agendas are identical.

The second “typical” factor at work in CA-45 is Walters’ Democratic opposition. Ever since Conor Lamb, a somewhat moderate 33-year-old Marine and former federal prosecutor, defeated his Republican rival, Rick Saccone, earlier this month in PA-18, a district that Trump won by 20 percentage points, politicos have argued over whether Lamb was a “political unicorn” — an impossibly perfect one-off candidate whose victory had more to do with his own performance than any underlying trend. The same went for newly-minted Sen. Doug Jones, the Democrat who last year defeated accused pedophile Roy Moore in deep-red Alabama. Democrats can’t possibly hope to run such idiosyncratically well-suited challengers nationwide, the thinking goes — and therefore they can’t possibly hope to keep scoring such big upsets.

This is unlikely to be an issue in Walters’ district. There are four Democrats angling to unseat the two-term congresswoman, and none of them are obvious unicorns. Instead, they make up a remarkably representative cross-section of the Democratic Party’s Class of 2018, which is defined by its abundance of rookie candidates, many of them women and/or minorities, who have decided to run for office in order to “resist” Trump’s agenda. There’s Katie Porter, 43, a Harvard-educated consumer protection attorney and law professor at the University of California, Irvine who has worked with Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris. There’s Dave Min, 42, another Harvard-educated UC-Irvine law professor and a former economic aide to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. There’s Brian Forde, 37, a former tech advisor in the Obama White House. And there’s Kia Hamadanchy, 32, the son of Iranian immigrants and a former advisor to Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown.

(L to R) Katie Porter, Dave Min, Brian Forde and Kia Hamadanchy. (Photos: Rachel Murray/Getty Images, davemin.com, forde.com, Thomas McKinless/CQ Roll Call)

Unlike Walters, who was a city councilwoman, mayor, state assemblywoman and state senator before running for Congress, none of her Democratic challengers has ever campaigned for elected office before. None is personally wealthy (like, say, entrepreneur Harley Rouda, who is running to replace Rohrabacher in CA-48). None has been touted as a top Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee recruit (like, say, stem-cell pioneer Hans Keirstead, who is also competing in CA-48). And none has benefited from a surge in out-of-state attention and donations (like, say, prosecutor Andrew Janz, who has become a progressive cause celebre because he is battling controversial Trump loyalist Devin Nunes in CA-22).  In terms of experience, fundraising, connections, national interest and raw political talent, each CA-45 challenger is close to the 2018 Democratic mean. They are your quintessential resistance candidates.

Their primary clash has been typical as well. (In California’s nonpartisan primary system, the top two finishers proceed to the general election regardless of whether they’re Democrats, Republicans or independents; with Walters a lock for first, the fight for second place basically amounts to a Democratic primary contest.) No clear frontrunner has emerged, and the two most prominent candidates, Porter and Min, have been staging a small-scale version of the argument dividing the Democratic Party as a whole: Should Dems run as proud progressives and hope the base turns out in 2018? Or should they try to convert disillusioned Trump voters by burnishing their centrist credentials?

Porter has chosen the first path, touting her endorsements from left-wing icons Warren and Harris and pushing for single-payer healthcare; Min has hewed a little closer to the center, opposing Medicare for All as “a tremendous tax increase” that wouldn’t play well in such “a conservative district,” according to his campaign manager. (“Dave is not the candidate who is furthest to the left,” she added.) The race has been very close, with Min just barely clinching the state party’s endorsement at last month’s convention — his slim margin triggered a bitter floor fight — and Porter leading in some recent polls.

Whatever happens in California’s June 5th primary, the surviving Democrat is likely to have survived because his or her campaign was more in tune with the mood of the party. And if a Democrat defeats Walters in November, individual attributes probably won’t be the biggest reason, either. Walters has enough advantages — money, incumbency, local political infrastructure — that her Democratic challenger will almost certainly need to ride a national wave to win.

Which brings us to the last “typical” aspect of the CA-45 contest: the district itself. Even though Clinton won there by more than 5 points — and even though Republicans have an 8-point registration advantage — its “partisan lean,” according to FiveThirtyEight, is actually tiny: just 1 or 2 percentage points in the GOP’s favor. This means that in presidential elections, with presidential-level turnout, the results in CA-45 almost exactly mirror the national results. The district has become a bellwether of sorts.

Rep. Mimi Walters, R-Calif., leaves the House Republican Conference meeting in the Capitol on Tuesday, Oct. 3, 2017. (Photo: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call)

Of course, midterm elections aren’t presidential elections, and a lot of voters — especially Democratic voters — tend to skip them. But demographics could play a part here as well, as Clare Malone of FiveThirtyEight has also pointed out. CA-45 is much more diverse than it was in Ronald Reagan’s day, with a population that is 18 percent Latino and 22 percent Asian; it’s also far more educated than the country at large, with 79.3 percent of residents having completed some college or more, versus 59 percent overall. In 2016, Trump underperformed among white college graduates, and even lost college women to Clinton by 7 percentage points. Combine that weakness with Trump’s widespread unpopularity among Latinos and other minorities, and you start to see why CA-45 (and the rest of Orange County) flipped to Clinton: Trump was a particularly bad fit for its evolving electorate.

And so if any voting groups are going to fuel anti-Trump tsunami in 2018, it’s these two: white suburban college grads and minorities. Both have been telling pollsters they disapprove of the president’s job performance in record numbers. Both have been propelling Democrats to victory in special elections. And CA-45 has both in droves, making it a perfect testing ground for the larger proposition.

Is Mimi Walters the most endangered GOP incumbent of 2018? Far from it. But due to the demographics of her district, the nature of her Democratic challengers and her own low-profile, pro-Trump orthodoxy, she may be the most typical — and telling. If you’re searching for signs of a Democratic wave, watch Walters. It could start sweeping through her corner of California first.

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Trump weighs in on Nevada Senate race, clearing the way for Heller. But will it be enough?

Senator Dean Heller (R-NV) reacts as U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a lunch meeting with Senate Republicans to discuss healthcare at the White House in Washington in July 19, 2017. (Photo: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

For months now, the conventional wisdom in Washington, D.C. has been that President Donald Trump, with his record disapproval ratings and chaotic leadership style, has made his party’s campaign to keep control of Congress even more challenging in the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections.

But Friday Trump surprised the prognosticators by actually doing something that could, in theory, improve the GOP’s chances in November: He asked right-wing candidate Danny Tarkanian to abandon what was expected to be a hard-fought GOP primary challenge against Nevada Sen. Dean Heller, and pursue instead the U.S. House seat that will be vacated by Rep. Jacky Rosen, Heller’s likely opponent in the Senate race.

Tarkanian quickly acceded to the president’s request.

“It would be great for the Republican Party of Nevada, and it’s [sic] unity if good guy Danny Tarkanian would run for Congress and Dean Heller, who is doing a really good job, could run for Senate unopposed,” Trump tweeted.

On Friday, Tarkanian told the Reno Gazette Journal that he planned to file for the congressional contest later that day.  In a statement, the son of legendary University of Nevada, Las Vegas basketball coach Jerry Tarkanian added that he was “confident” he would have won the U.S. Senate race and done a “great job” representing Nevada, but that the president was “adamant.” Eventually Tarkanian agreed that a “unified Republican ticket” would represent the “best direction for the America First movement.”

The switch came as welcome news in pretty much every corner of the Republican Party. Nevada’s 3rd congressional district is seen as one of the GOP’s best pickup opportunities, in large part because Rosen won there in 2016 by a mere 3,943 votes. The opponent she barely defeated? Danny Tarkanian. He will immediately vault to the front of the nine-candidate Republican primary pack.

Danny Tarkanian poses with a basketball at the Tarkanian Basketball Academy in Las Vegas in 2016. (Photo By Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call)

Meanwhile, Heller, widely considered among the most vulnerable Republicans in this Senate cycle, is undoubtedly relieved, after struggling to defend his right flank against Tarkanian while also preparing to square off against a polished, well-funded Democratic challenger in an increasingly blue state that voted for both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Early polls have showed Heller losing to Tarkanian in the primary — and losing to Rosen in the general. Without Tarkanian to worry about, he’ll no longer have to walk such a narrow tightrope.

But the question for Heller and Tarkanian is whether the damage has already been done.

During his now-aborted primary bid, Tarkanian’s strategy was simple and effective, as we’ve noted before: assault Heller for being insufficiently pro-Trump — and insufficiently principled, especially when it comes to Obamacare.

“When [Heller] has seen a political advantage in attacking Obamacare, he has done so,” Tarkanian wrote in December. “When the tide seems to be running against repeal, he has opposed it and pushed back against calls for repeal.”

Tarkanian’s pitch was resonating in the primary because had a point: Heller had been all over the map on repeal. Tarkanian was also correct that Heller has waffled on Trump, declaring in 2016 that “I vehemently oppose our nominee” because he “denigrates human beings” but sounding (conveniently) friendlier after the pro-Trump Tarkanian entered the race. So far this year, Heller has collaborated with the administration on the tax bill, backed its immigration framework and boasted that he now enjoys a “much closer relationship” with the president than before.

Meanwhile, Nevada Democrats have been leveling the same attacks on Heller, claiming that his vacillations on Trump, healthcare and other policy issues prove that he’s more concerned with politics than principle.

A backer of Planned Parenthood and critic of Sen. Dean Heller, holds a sign during a protest on Aug. 8, 2017 outside the Nevada Republican’s office in the federal court building near the downtown casino district in Reno, Nevada. (Photo: Scott Sonner/AP).

Being attacked from both sides has had a major impact on Heller’s approval rating, which fell nearly 10 percentage points during 2017, one of the largest declines in the Senate.

It appears that Heller’s biggest electoral liability wasn’t Tarkanian, per se, but the growing perception that he lacks the courage of his convictions, and that he will do or say anything to keep his job. With Tarkanian gone, Heller will now be tempted to tack back to the center. But that will only reinforce the perception of his spinelessness. To win in November, Heller had better hope than Nevadans memories are short.

Tarkanian’s brief Senate bid may also prove to be handicap for Tarkanian himself. Shortly after entering the race last August, the candidate huddled at Breitbart’s Capitol Hill headquarters with former Trump strategist Steve Bannon — and emerged with the nationalist rabble-rouser’s imprimatur.

“[Bannon] told me he supported me 100 percent,” Tarkanian claimed in a BuzzFeed interview. “He said, ‘It was nice to see a candidate that exceeds my expectations.’ So I took that as a very good compliment.”

Since then, Tarkanian has taken pains to position himself as one of the most pro-Trump, Bannon-esque candidates of the cycle, espousing a hardline position on immigration and declaring that he believes “whole-heartedly” in all of “President Trump’s ‘America first’ policies.”

Tarkanian even refused to disavow Bannon after the president publicly broke with his former Svengali. “If Mr. Bannon chooses to support me in our effort to repeal and replace Dean Heller with someone who will truly have the president’s back, I welcome his support,” Tarkanian said at the time.

The question for Tarkanian is not whether he can win a GOP primary with this sort of scorched-earth strategy; he’s won five of them before, and he’s likely to emerge again in June as the party’s third-district nominee. The question is whether he can win a general election with it — particularly this year, and particularly in a district like NV-3.

Tarkanian’s electoral track record is not strong. In 2004, he ran for state senate. In 2006, he tried for secretary of state. In 2010, he sought the nomination to run against Democratic Sen. Harry Reid, but lost in a primary to Sharron Angle. In 2012, he ran in Nevada’s Fourth Congressional District, ultimately losing to Democratic Rep. Steven Horsford, who lost the seat himself two years later. And then in 2016 he lost to Rosen.

“That’s kind of [Tarkanian’s] reputation,” a Nevada Republican strategist told BuzzFeed last year. “Like, oh God, him again?”

Republican congressional candidate Danny Tarkanian speaks during a rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Treasure Island Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, on June, 18, 2016. (Photo: John Gurzinski/AFP/Getty Images)

Tarkanian came close to defeating Rosen in 2016, with Trump atop the GOP ticket. But 2018 will be different. Incorporating the southern suburbs of Las Vegas, NV-3 is one of the most evenly divided congressional districts in America, voting for Al Gore by 1 percentage point in 2000, George W. Bush by 1 percentage point in 2004 and Barack Obama by 1 percentage point in 2012.  In 2016, Trump beat Hillary Clinton there — but again, by only a single percentage point.

In a midterm cycle when backlash against the president is likely to be powerful and Democrats have already demonstrated an ability to recapture congressional seats in districts that Trump won by 20 percentage points, running as a staunch Trump Republican in a 50/50 blue-state district will be a risky approach.

Meanwhile, Tarkanian’s likeliest Democratic opponent, education advocate and philanthropist Susie Lee, will hardly be a pushover; to date she has secured the endorsements of the incumbent, Rosen; former Vice President Joe Biden; Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto; Rep. Dina Titus and former Senators Harry Reid and Richard Bryan. Lee is also married to a casino magnate and has more than $600,000 cash on hand — and millions more in her personal bank account.

In the end, Trump’s decision to push Tarkanian out of the Senate race and into the NV-3 congressional contest was a smart political play that will help Nevada Republicans next November. Whether it will help them enough to win is another story.

_____

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As Trump visits border, Latino voters are watching and biding their time

President Donald Trump waves as he boards Air Force One before departing from Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland on March 13, 2018. (Photo: Mandel NganAFP/Getty Images)

LOS ANGELES — On Tuesday, Donald Trump will embark on his first trip to California as president, touching down at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar near San Diego before heading south to inspect various prototypes of the much-ballyhooed “wall” he hopes to build on the U.S.-Mexico border.

The visit comes one week after Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions, sued California for passing a trio of “sanctuary state” laws that have (according to Sessions) blocked the administration from enforcing federal immigration statutes — and followed it up with a fiery speech in Sacramento accusing state and local Democrats of “boldly validat[ing] illegality.”

The fast and furious response from those same Democrats — “Outright lies,” snapped Gov. Jerry Brown; “White supremacy and white nationalism,” added state Senate President Pro Tempore Kevin De León — has prompted another round of breathless California vs. Trump media coverage, with the president rallying his right-wing base around hardline anti-immigration policies and the immigrant-rich Golden State relishing its role as ground zero of the so-called resistance.

“With a handful of exceptions — North Korea comes to mind — there are few governments that have worse relations with President Trump than California,” wrote The New York Times.

Yet the political stakes here are higher than many pundits seem to realize. That’s because the latest immigration clash between California and Trump isn’t just about California and Trump. It’s also about the broader constituency the president has been antagonizing since taking office, and is now antagonizing again: America’s growing Latino electorate.

When Trump won the 2016 election, the chattering class immediately declared that the Latino vote — which was supposed to show up in force and keep the Manhattan mogul out of the Oval Office — had failed, once again, to materialize, despite the candidate’s near-constant provocations (Mexican “rapists,” “The Wall,” “bad hombres,” threatening to revoke birthright citizenship, claiming a judge could not be impartial because of his Mexican heritage, etc.).

Latinos, immigration and workers’ rights advocates and their supporters protest against Donald Trump and other Republican president hopefuls, outside the Republican Presidential Debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, September 16, 2015. (Photo: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images)

But over the last year, studies have cast serious doubt on this assumption. Subsequent elections — especially Virginia’s, in 2017 — hinted that Latino voters have become more energized and mobilized, not less, since Trump took office. And looking ahead to the 2018 midterms, it appears that many of the races set to determine control of the House and Senate are taking place in areas with significant Latino populations.

Which means that in November, backlash to Trump among Latino voters could, in fact, decide the election — especially if Trump continues to rile up the right-wing over immigration, as he seemed determined to do Tuesday in California.

“It’s a comparative status question,” says Gary Segura, Dean of the Luskin School of Public Affairs at University of California, Los Angeles and co-founder of the polling and research firm Latino Decisions. “Latinos tend not to vote in midterm elections; older, whiter, higher-income people tend to vote instead. So what will the presence of a president like Trump do? In theory, it will narrow that gap. Latinos will turn out in higher numbers than people expect — and that will make a difference in at least some of these races.”

The first data point to consider is 2016. The national exit polls showed Hillary Clinton winning 65 percent of the Latino vote to Trump’s 28 percent — a landslide, to be sure, but a smaller one than Obama enjoyed in 2012, when he clobbered Mitt Romney among Latinos 71 percent to 29 percent. Seeing that — and noting that Latinos still made up 11 percent of the electorate, the same as 2012 — pundits concluded that there had been no anti-Trump “surge” in 2016.

The only problem? The national exit polls may have been wrong. Since the election, researchers affiliated with Latino Decisions have examined precinct-level data from Arizona, California, New York, Florida, Texas and Nevada — actual tallies of how actual people voted in largely Latino neighborhoods, as opposed to the expedient sampling released on Election Night, which tends to distort minority sentiment for a variety of reasons.

What they’ve found are vast disparities between the exit polling and their own, more finely-tuned analyses.

In Nevada, for instance, exit polls reported that 60 percent of Latinos backed Clinton and 29 percent backed Trump. But last year, Francisco I. Pedraza, an assistant political science professor the University of California, Riverside, and Bryan Wilcox-Archuleta, a PhD candidate at UCLA, concluded that the split may have been more like 88 percent for Clinton versus 10 percent for Trump.

Latinos vote at a polling station in El Gallo Restaurant on November 8, 2016 in the Boyle Heights section of Los Angeles, United States. (Photo: David McNew/Getty Images)

Researchers also discovered a wider-than-reported gap in Arizona (84 percent for Clinton to 12 percent for Trump, compared to 61-31 in the exit poll). And in California (83 percent for Clinton to 11 percent for Trump, compared to 71-24 in the exit poll). And in Texas (77 percent for Clinton to 18 percent for Trump, compared to 61-34 in the exit poll). And in New York. And in Florida.

The bottom line is that, contra conventional wisdom, Clinton likely ran ahead of Obama among Latinos in key states — while Trump likely ran behind Romney. This could be part of the reason why Clinton came a lot closer to winning Arizona (3.5 percentage points) and Texas (9 percentage points) than Obama did in 2012, when he lost those two states by 9 points and 16 points, respectively. It could also be why Clinton’s margin of victory in California was 1.3 million votes larger than Obama’s.

Of course, all that additional Latino backing did not put Clinton over the top in the electoral college, which was decided in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t exist.

“The real story is that Latino turnout was up in basically every jurisdiction in the U.S.,” says Segura. “The actual precinct vote shows that about 79 percent of Latinos nationwide voted for Clinton — up from about 70 percent in recent years. Those extra nine percentage points are obviously a reaction to Trump.”

Which brings us to 2017 — the first big election of the Trump era. The Virginia gubernatorial race was supposed to be close, and the commonwealth’s House of Delegates was supposed to remain safely Republican. Neither prediction panned out. After a campaign defined largely by Trumpian tactics —  Republican gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie ran ads about “sanctuary cities” and the MS-13 gang — Democrats won the governorship by 9 percentage points and picked up 15 seats in the legislature.

Why? Early voting among Virginia Latinos was up 114 percent from the last state elections in 2013, and the Election Day participation rate in heavily Latino districts was up 5 percent, from 33 percent to 38 percent. Latinos didn’t decide the election on their own: white, college-educated voters made up a larger share of the Virginia electorate in 2017 than in 2016, and for the first time, minority participation in general held steady from the presidential election to the gubernatorial election. But Latinos didn’t stay home, either — an early sign that, with Trump in the White House, the old rules of Latino turnout may no longer apply.

All of this will be crucial in 2018.  Many of the most pivotal House and Senate races are happening in places with a lot of Latino voters — and if they show up like they showed up in Virginia, and vote as heavily Democratic as they did in 2016, then Democrats could win back control of Congress.

Take California. The Golden State is home to seven Republican-held congressional districts won by Clinton in 2016 — nearly a third of the 24 seats Democrats need to flip in order to recapture the House of Representatives. Republican incumbents Ed Royce and Darrell Issa are retiring in two seats where Latinos make up a third (CA-39) and a quarter (CA-49) of the population, respectively. Both lean Democratic, according to the handicappers at the Cook Political Report.  An additional three seats are rated as tossups; a fourth “leans” Republican. They’re all between 20 and 40 percent Latino. Another targeted district — CA-21, where Democrat Emilio Huerta is challenging incumbent Republican Rep. David Valadao — is 71 percent Latino.

A sign in English and Spanish points people to a polling place in El Mirage, Arizona, during the U.S. presidential election November 8, 2016. (Photo: Nancy Wiechec/Reuters)

Texas and Florida are similar stories. FL-27 — the Miami-area district where Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen is retiring — happens to be more than 71 percent Latino; Democrats are favored to flip the seat. Republican Rep. Carlos Curbelo’s district (FL-26) is a tossup, in no small part because it’s 70 percent Latino; Clinton won there by 16 percentage points after Obama won by 11. Meanwhile, GOP Rep. John Culberson, the most vulnerable incumbent in Texas, represents a district (TX-7, in the Houston suburbs) that is 32 percent Latino. The next most vulnerable Lone Star incumbent, Will Hurd, hails from TX-23, which runs along a majority of Texas’s border with Mexico. His district is 68 percent Latino.

On the Senate side of things, the Latino factor may be even more pronounced. To regain control of “the world’s greatest deliberative body,” Democrats need to net two additional seats. Their top targets? Arizona, where Republican incumbent Jeff Flake is retiring, and Nevada, where Republican incumbent Dean Heller has tied himself in knots over Trump’s policies on healthcare and taxes.

Latino voters could conceivably decide both contests. Arizona has America’s fourth largest Latino electorate, as a percentage of the overall voting population; Nevada, where former Democratic Sen. Harry Reid has organized a formidable Latino turnout machine, is sixth on that same list. And while national Latino turnout did not rise in 2016, it surged in Arizona and increased in Nevada, according to state-level Census data released last year — in part because of Democratic Party mobilization efforts and in part because of backlash to Trump. If Nevada and Arizona go blue, Democrats will likely take back the Senate.

There’s no guarantee that Latinos will show up later this year; white voters, and even black voters, have been almost twice as likely to turn out as Latinos in midterm elections.

Yet we’ve never seen what a midterm looks like with Trump as president. If recent history is any guide — and if Trump keeps needling Latinos the way he’s needling them this week in California — then it might look like nothing we’ve seen before.

_____

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Kevin de Leon takes on Dianne Feinstein from the left

U.S. Senate candidate and California State Senator Kevin de León and Sen. Dianne Feinstein speaks at the 2018 California Democrats State Convention Saturday, Feb. 24, 2018, in San Diego. (Photos: Denis Poroy/AP)

LOS ANGELES — Dianne Feinstein has been the senior United States senator from California for the last quarter-century. She is the first and only woman to have chaired the Senate Rules Committee and the Select Committee on Intelligence. Before joining the Senate, she was the first female mayor of San Francisco; before that, she was the first female president of the city’s Board of Supervisors. In 1994, Feinstein authored the federal assault weapons ban; during President Obama’s first term, she led a groundbreaking investigation into the C.I.A.’s controversial post-9/11 interrogation program.

And yet on Saturday night California Democrats gathered at the San Diego Convention Center and voted not to endorse Feinstein for a sixth term, making her the first incumbent senator in decades to compete in a Golden State primary without the official backing of her party.

Instead, Democratic delegates threw most of their support — 54 percent versus Feinstein’s 37 — to challenger Kevin de León, a Los Angeles politician 33 years her junior with precisely none of her experience on the national stage.

The result wasn’t a total shock, though de León’s share of the vote was bigger than expected. California’s Democratic delegates tend to be progressive activists, and progressive activists, who’ve badmouthed Feinstein’s bipartisan instincts and relatively hawkish foreign-policy views for years, have become especially eager to unseat her since last August when she refused to call for President Donald Trump’s impeachment, arguing instead that he “can be a good president” if “he can learn and change.” Also worth noting is the fact that de León didn’t secure his party’s endorsement, either. For that, he would have needed 60 percent of the vote.

Even so, de León’s strong finish raises an intriguing question: Are Democrats in California— where shifts in American politics tend to happen first — on the verge of tossing out the party’s decorous old guard in favor of a new, more pugnacious generation? Is the so-called resistance a threat not only to Trump & Co., but to Democrats like Feinstein, too?

De León certainly hopes so; his entire candidacy is premised on that possibility. President pro tempore of the state Senate since 2014 — he is the first Latino to hold the position since 1885 — he will hit his term limit later this year. With a newly elected senator, Kamala Harris, serving along Feinstein; a popular mayor, Eric Garcetti, recently reelected back in L.A.; and a 2018 California governor’s race overstuffed with high-wattage contenders, de León is a rising political star with no obvious office to rise into. And so, seizing upon perhaps the only available opportunity, he immediately set about selling himself to a shell-shocked statewide audience in the wake of Trump’s election.

U.S. Senate candidate, Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de Leon, D- Los Angeles, speaks at the 2018 California Democrats State Convention Saturday, Feb. 24, 2018, in San Diego. (Photo: Denis Poroy/AP)

“That night, the night of Nov. 8, I was stunned, just like so many of my fellow Democrats,” de León told Yahoo News shortly before Trump’s inauguration. “But the next morning I got up and got to work.”

By “getting to work,” de León means something very specific: in short, doing whatever possible to transform California into ground zero for the resistance — and to cast Kevin de León, by extension, as one of the movement’s leaders. On Nov. 9, De León and his counterpart in the state Assembly, Anthony Rendon, released a letter proclaiming that California would “lead the resistance to any effort that would shred our social fabric or our Constitution”; in January 2017, they hired former Attorney General Eric Holder to shape their legal strategy.

Ever since, de León is particular has pushed bill after bill designed to thwart Trump’s agenda: SB 54 (aka. the California Values Act), which prevents the administration from forcing local police departments to assist in the deportation of undocumented immigrants, thereby transforming the whole of California into a so-called sanctuary state; SB 49 (a.k.a. the California Environmental, Public Health, and Workers Defense Act of 2017), which mandates that California enforce environmental and worker protection standards no less stringent than the ones that existed at a federal level before Trump took office; and SB 227 (a.k.a., the Protect California Taxpayers Act) which would allow Californians to circumvent Trump’s new caps of certain tax deductions by making charitable donations to the state.

Fifteen months later, de León can credibly claim that he’s done as much as any legislator in the country to oppose the president — and, of course, that’s exactly the claim he’s making on the campaign trail.

“My name is Kevin de León, and I am the President of the most progressive legislative house in America,” he said at the start of Saturday’s convention speech. “We carved it in stone: no matter the place of your birth or the hue of your skin, you can live in California in safety, dignity and, yes, sanctuary.”

Much of the rest of de León’s address was dedicated to drawing what political consultants like to call “contrasts” with his primary opponent.

A Los Angeles police officer talks with a protester dressed as a chicken during a demonstration against President Donald Trump outside the office of Sen. Dianne Feinstein on Jan. 31, 2017 in Los Angeles, Calif. Hundreds of protesters staged a demonstration outside Feinstein’s office to demand that Congress refuse confirmation of President Trump’s cabinet picks. (Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

He didn’t pull his punches. Feinstein, 84, is currently the oldest sitting U.S. senator; if reelected, she will be 91 when her next term concludes. Twice de León mentioned “congressional seniority,” and the implication was lost on no one.

He went on to say that “the days of Democrats biding our time, biting our tongue, and triangulating at the margins are over” — a not-so-implicit rebuke of Feinstein’s measured approach to politics, which The New Yorker once described as “slightly formal in style,” with a faithful adherence “to procedure and protocol” and a belief in “settling disputes privately, by argument rather than by force.”

De León then rattled off all of the insufficiently progressive things Feinstein has done, and that he “would never” do: “I would never oppose card check, and will never vote for school vouchers”; “I would never vote to allow federal agents to spy on American citizens without warrants”: “I would never vote to prosecute 13-year-olds as adults”; “I would never call our country “the welfare system for Mexico”; “I would never vote for two different wars lasting 17 years, costing countless American lives and more than five trillion dollars.”

And, lest anyone forget, de León made sure to mock Feinstein’s gentle comments about Trump.

“In your state Senate, Democrats act like Democrats,” he said. “We demand passion, not ‘patience.’ We speak truth to power, and we’ve never been fooled into believing Donald Trump ‘can be a good president.’”

Even beyond the convention hall in San Diego, de León has had some success with this line of attack; two of the state’s most influential unions, the SEIU and the California Nurses Association, previously endorsed his insurgent bid.

Daniel Ortiz, a janitor at Boeing in El Segundo, leads a cheer as Senate President pro tem Kevin de Leon, D-Los Angeles, hosts a celebration of Gov. Jerry Brown signing SB 588, The Fair Day’s Pay Act, giving the Labor Commissioner more enforcement tools to combat wage theft at the SEIU/USWW Southern California Headquarters in Los Angeles, Calif., on Oct. 13, 2015. (Photo: Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

In December, Yahoo News followed de León to a series of campaign stops in Orange County, and found a candidate convinced that his moment has arrived. Wearing a navy-blue merino sweater, slim gray slacks and a silver Apple watch, de León appeared at least a decade younger than his 51 years; his impossibly black mop top helped to sustain the illusion. He mixed easily with Democratic regulars at the Plumbers, Steamfitters, Welders & Apprentices local in Orange, where he received a poster-size comic-book cover depicting Donald Trump as a tyrannical madman; later, he mingled with young, cosmopolitan Democrats sipping cocktails atop a luxury apartment building in Irvine.

“As God is my witness, I had no intention of running for U.S. Senate at that moment,” de León said of the day Feinstein made her remarks about Trump. “I’m the youngest child of a single immigrant mother who had a third-grade education. I never pined or aspired to be a politician. It’s never been part of my DNA. But I made a decision to send out a press release [criticizing her] that day, and I cannot tell you how many phone calls, how many texts I got, even from members of Congress, who always wanted to say this but were always afraid. I was like, ‘You’re afraid to criticize the obvious? That’s stunning to me.’ And that’s why I made the decision — that we need change, that we need a new voice. Not of the past, but of the present and the future.”

The question now is whether de León can convince California. He may be more in tune with the zeitgeist than Feinstein; he may even be more in tune with the most active California Democrats, who have embraced their new role as Trump’s top antagonists. But ultimately de León’s candidacy could prove to be a case study in the limitations of resistance politics, rather than its power.

Feinstein is formidable, despite her deviations from current liberal orthodoxy. In an ordinary state, De León might have a shot at snatching his party’s nomination away from a moderate incumbent by running to her left in the primary. But California has a nonpartisan primary system, which means the top two finishers — likely Feinstein and de León — will advance to the general election regardless of who gets more votes on June 5th. After that, moderation tends to be a plus, not a minus.

Meanwhile, Feinstein has rustled up $13 million for her reelection; de León has raised $434,000. The latest statewide poll shows her ahead by 29 percentage points (46 percent to 17 percent), up from 24 points in November. De León is fighting like mad to raise his profile, and more cash. But so far, he has only slipped further behind.

All of this is symptomatic of a larger reality: Feinstein may not be popular among self-styled resistance fighters, but how many resistance fighters are there, really — even in California? And how many are just as upset about moderate Democrats as they are about Trump Republicans? Enough to unseat a trailblazing woman who has been serving the state for decades and who won reelection in 2012 with more votes (7.75 million) than any other senator in U.S. history? Enough to replace her with a largely unfamiliar legislator who presided over the state senate during a sweeping sexual-harassment scandal?

Senate Judiciary Committee racking member Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., arrives for a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Dec. 6, 2017, entitled: “Firearm Accessory Regulation and Enforcing Federal and State Reporting to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS).” (Photo: Carolyn Kaster/AP)

Recently, Feinstein has started speaking out more forcefully against Trump. In January, she took the “extraordinary step” of releasing a key transcript from the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Russia probe without the Republican chairman’s approval, earning a nickname from the president in the process: “Sneaky Dianne.”

“I think what we’re beginning to see is the putting together of a case of obstruction of justice,” she said in December.

Whether such boldness is a political gambit meant to neutralize de León is difficult to say. But either way, it serves to remind Californians that seniority has its advantages.

“To say you would come in as a rookie and be more forceful against Donald Trump than Dianne Feinstein means people are going to care about what the hell you say, because what you do will be marginal,” Bill Carrick, Feinstein’s longtime strategist, tells Yahoo News.  “You want to have an influential United States Senator? Dianne Feinstein is the ranking member on the judiciary, where she can actually do something to stop these judges who are outside the mainstream. On the intelligence committee, she’s a senior member investigating President Trump, particularly on Russian interference. And on the judiciary committee she’s investigating obstruction of justice. It’s campaign rhetoric versus reality. And it’s pretty preposterous.”

Anyone following the California Senate race should expect to hear more of this from Feinstein in the months ahead. It’s a canny point: that resistance can take many forms, and that a quieter, more traditional approach may still be most effective. Unless De León can prove otherwise, he won’t be able to repeat his San Diego upset in November.

_____

Read more from Yahoo News:

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Photos: Chris Hondros’s life and pictures highlighted in documentary, ‘Hondros’

[andrewromanoyahoo]

Defeating Devin Nunes won’t be as easy as bashing his ties to Trump

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-CA and Democrat and congressional contender Andrew Janz. (Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: J. Scott Applewhite/AP, Howard Watkins/Fresno for Andrew Janz, AP)

For months, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (CA-48), a 15-term veteran whose resolutely pro-Russia views have earned him the nickname “Putin’s favorite congressman,” has been considered one of the most vulnerable Republican incumbents in the country.

But over the course of the past week, Democrats have started openly asking whether some of the same forces that have been working against Rohrabacher could wind up putting another California Republican at risk: Rep. Devin Nunes.

Nunes (CA-22) has certainly been in the news a lot lately. Last March, the Central Valley Republican and House Intelligence chairman seized the national spotlight by accusing the Obama Administration of surveilling members of Trump’s transition team — a baseless charge that ultimately forced Nunes to recuse himself from the ongoing House investigation into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. More recently, Nunes has reemerged as the author of a newly declassified memo insinuating that a biased FBI abused U.S. surveillance law to target President Trump.

On paper, Nunes and Rohrabacher have a lot in common. Both represent California congressional districts with an 11-point GOP registration advantage. Both have gotten tangled up in the controversy surrounding Donald Trump and Russia. Both have attracted polished Democratic challengers with the chops to compete in a general election. And both have progressive activists nationwide salivating about a formerly safe seat the party could potentially flip on its way to winning back control of the House in November.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., a close ally of President Donald Trump who has become a fierce critic of the FBI and the Justice Department, strides to a GOP conference at the Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, Jan. 30, 2018. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

In response to Nunes’s memo, the congressman’s leading Democratic challenger, Fresno County Deputy District Attorney Andrew Janz, has raked in $349,410 in donations since the document dropped on Friday, according to his campaign — $100,000 more than he raised in the previous eight months combined. On Thursday, meanwhile, Janz released a scathing anti-Nunes digital ad that has already racked up 600,000 views on social media.

“People here in the Central Valley, we have this perception, and it’s shared across the country, that Congress is broken right now,” Janz tells Yahoo News, echoing the attacks Democrats down south are lobbing at Rohrabacher. “Devin is really at the center of all this. He is the poster boy. He’s out there doing his own thing, advancing his own interests and protecting Donald Trump. He hasn’t held town hall meeting since 2010. That’s too long to go without talking to your constituents.”

Janz’s sudden visibility has Democrats wondering whether Devin could be the next Dana.

But a reality check may be in order. While the similarities between Rohrabacher and Nunes’ reelection battles are striking, the differences may have more to say about the shape of the coming election — and the limits of any potential Democratic comeback.

Take those party registration numbers. In both CA-48 and CA-22, Republicans hold a double-digit registration lead over Democrats. But Orange County Republicans and Central Valley Republicans are two separate species. The former tend to be well-off and well-educated; 41 percent of white O.C. Republicans, for instance, have college degrees. Among their Central Valley counterparts, however, that number is much lower: around 10 percent. As a result, voters in the two districts have very different takes on Trump. In the blue-collar, agricultural 22nd, the president won last November by nine percentage points — while losing to Hillary Clinton in the more genteel 48th. In other words, siding with Trump on Russia is likely to affect Nunes and Rohrabacher very differently.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, who is leading a U.S. Congressional delegation to the Russian Federation speaks during a news coference in U.S. Embassy in Moscow, Russia, Sunday, June 2, 2013. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)

Then there’s the matter of money. Both Nunes and Rohrabacher have grown accustomed to winning reelection by massive margins, often securing more than 60 percent of the vote against token Democratic opposition. But while Rohrabacher has reacted by becoming a lackadaisical fundraiser, Nunes has gone the opposite route. At the end of 2017, Rohrabacher reported having $713,144 on hand; Nunes reported having $3,844,805.

That’s a big difference, especially when you compare it to what their respective challengers have collected. In the fourth quarter of 2017, for instance, two of Rohrabacher’s Democratic opponents, stem-cell pioneer Hans Keirstead ($402,000) and real-estate entrepreneur Harley Rouda ($626,000), raised more than Rohrabacher ($272,000). Rouda currently has more cash on hand as well. Janz, in contrast, ended 2017 with $84,647. Factor in his recent fundraising bonanza and he’s still trailing Nunes by more than $3 million — a very difficult gap to close in one of the poorest parts of California, where big, Orange-County-style donors are few and far between.

Before the latest memo brouhaha, Janz’s campaign commissioned a survey from Public Policy Polling, a Democratic-leaning firm, that showed Nunes only 5 percentage points ahead of a generic Democrat. The results suggested that even then, Nunes might be more vulnerable than previously thought. But there was a telling omission, too. The campaign has declined to release the results of a head-to-head match-up between Nunes and Janz, which implies that local voters chose Nunes by a larger margin when given the choice between two real-life candidates.

In conversation, Janz is upbeat about his chances.

“We just have to keep our eye on the ball and realize this is going to be a long hard slog,” he says. “A lot of Republicans and independents are dissatisfied with what Devin is doing — or not doing. Nobody wants some politician to be in public office for 15 years unchallenged. So I think that a lot of folks, come November, will like the fact that I’m a prosecutor who’s tough on crime. They’ll like that they’ll finally have a real choice.”

When asked about the challenges ahead, however, the candidate pauses for a full five seconds.

Finally, his campaign manager, Heather Greven, steps in. “There are a lot of challenges,” she says. “Andrew is just trying to narrow it down.”

How about Greven, then? What does she see as the biggest challenge?

“Telling our story,” she admits. “There is zero infrastructure up here for a race of this size. We’re really our paving own road.”

Ultimately, Janz’s best shot at staying competitive is if Nunes stays in the news. The more riled up rank-and-file Dems get about Nunes’ antics, the more small donations they will send to his rival (as we saw last weekend). In short, Janz needs to do more than run a strong campaign. He needs to become a national cause célèbre. Anything short of that and even a Democratic wave might not be enough propel him into office.

Read more from Yahoo News:

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[andrewromanoyahoo]

Can Jeff Flake turn the tide in the Republican war on the media?

Since President Donald Trump took office a year ago, much ink has been spilled over his unprecedented “war with the media.” The incessant refrain of “fake news,” repeated every time a story displeases him (and promoted via Trump’s own long-promised, long-delayed “Fake News Awards,” now scheduled for Wednesday night). The calls for boycotts, lawsuits and license challenges. The threat to “open up” libel laws. The descriptions of reporters and news organizations as “pathetic,” “scum,” “disgusting,” “very dishonest,” “failing” and even “the enemy of the American people.”

But while Trump’s hostility toward the press may be unusual in its vulgarity, intensity and openness, pretty much every president since the dawn of the Republic has expressed some form of frustration with the institution — and over the last few decades, politicians of every rank, particularly Republican politicians, have found that trashing the media can be a very useful way to rile up their voters.

In other words, we’re sort of used to it at this point.

That’s why it was remarkable when, shortly after 10:00 AM Wednesday morning, Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona, a Republican who has mostly supported Trump’s agenda, if not his manners, rose on the floor of the Senate to deliver a blistering rebuke of the Media-Critic-in-Chief — and a passionate, unapologetic defense of the free press.

“2017 was a year which saw the truth — objective, empirical, evidence-based truth — more battered and abused than any other in the history of our country, at the hands of the most powerful figure in our government,” Flake said. “The impulses underlying the dissemination of such untruths are not benign. They have the effect of eroding trust in our vital institutions and conditioning the public to no longer trust them. The destructive effect of this kind of behavior on our democracy cannot be overstated.”

Flake’s speech was so out-of-the-ordinary, in fact — so unfashionable in its praise of the press — that it raised a previously unthinkable question: Could we be seeing the beginnings of backlash? Has Trump’s anti-media aggression forced at least some otherwise skeptical Americans to recognize that, despite its flaws, the media is more than just a political punching bag — that it actually has a vital role to play in our democracy?

In this image from video from Senate Television, Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz. speaks on the Senate floor on Jan. 17, 2017 at the Capitol in Washington. (Photo: Senate TV via AP)

In his remarks, Flake — a longtime Trump critic who announced in October with a similarly stern floor speech that he would not be running for reelection — catalogued the “most glaring” of the president’s “official untruths,” from his “bizarre contention regarding the crowd size at last year’s inaugural” to his “oft-repeated conspiracy about the birthplace of President Obama”; from his “pernicious fantasies about rigged elections and massive voter fraud” to the “supposed ‘hoax’ at the heart of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russian investigation.”

Flake went on to note that, in their own attempts to delegitimize unflattering coverage, a rogue’s gallery of repressive autocrats — Syrian President Bashar Assad, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro — have now taken to parroting Trump’s cry of “fake news” whenever the facts don’t suit them.

“This feedback loop is disgraceful, Mr. President,” Flake said. “Not only has the past year seen an American president borrow despotic language to refer to the free press, but it seems he has in turn inspired dictators and authoritarians with his own language. This is reprehensible.”

Finally, Flake chastised his Senate colleagues for ignoring Trump’s efforts to undermine the First Amendment — and demanded that they, too, speak out in the future.

“No longer can we compound attacks on truth with our silent acquiescence,” Flake said. “Together, my colleagues, we are powerful. Together, we have it within us to turn back these attacks, right these wrongs, repair this damage, restore reverence for our institutions, and prevent further moral vandalism. Together, united in the purpose to do our jobs under the Constitution, without regard to party or party loyalty, let us resolve to be allies of the truth — and not partners in its destruction.”

President Donald Trump speaks to the press during a meeting with Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev in the Oval Office of the White House on Jan. 16, 2018, in Washington. (Photo: Evan Vucci/AP)

In response to Flake’s broadside, White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders told reporters that Flake was “not criticizing the president because he’s against oppression; he’s criticizing the president because he has terrible poll numbers” and is “looking for some attention.”

It’s unlikely, of course, that Flake’s fellow Republicans will echo his comparison of Trump to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, who, as Flake pointed out, also applied the phrase “enemy of the people” to anyone he wanted to get rid of. After Flake spoke, two senators — Dick Durbin of Illinois and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota — stood to applaud and second his remarks. Both were Democrats.

Nor is it likely that Trump’s base will desert him over an issue as abstract as the First Amendment. Our politics is too tribal for that; Trump voters love when he attacks “elite” East Coast institutions, the media chief among them.

But what about the millions of other Americans like Flake: uneasy with Trump but hardly liberal, wary of the media’s biases but cognizant of its central Constitutional role? Could Trump’s rancor toward reporters backfire with that group?

The press itself is banking on it. As Vox’s Matt Yglesias has pointed out, “what’s particularly striking about Trump’s relationship with the mainstream press is the extent to which the pretense of an oppositional relationship with the White House has become a marketing tool.”

Yglesias continues:

“CNN’s ‘facts first’ branding campaign, rolled out last fall, was pitched to the press as an effort to “blunt Trump attacks” on the network. … The Washington Post, similarly, newly adopted the slogan ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness’ last year, pitching reading the Post not only as a way to be informed or entertained but also as a form of civic duty and obligation. [And] The New York Times, a for-profit, publicly traded company, last year began soliciting money from readers with a quasi-charitable pitch, emphasizing the idea that buying gift subscriptions is a means of supporting the company’s ‘mission.’”

  There are signs that the media’s Trump-Era rebranding campaign is working. Subscriptions and traffic at both the Times and the Post hit record highs in 2017, and Steven Spielberg’s The Post, a movie that dramatizes that paper’s decision to defy another hostile administration by publishing the Pentagon Papers, has beat box-office expectations.

Tom Hanks as Ben Bradlee and Meryl Streep as Katharine Graham in ‘The Post’ (2017). (Photo: Courtesy Twentieth Century Fox)

Yet if Flake really intends to counter Trump’s “fake news” onslaught, he still has a long way to go — especially if he wants the backlash to include members of his own party. According to a new Knight-Gallup poll, a majority of Americans consider “fake news” a very serious threat to our democracy, and 73 percent say the spread of inaccurate information on the internet is a major problem with news coverage today.

But the poll also showed that Republicans and Democrats disagree over what actually constitutes “fake news.” For Democrats, the term tends to mean untrue stories. For Republicans, it tends to mean “unfriendly” ones, with four in ten claiming that accurate reports that nonetheless cast a politician or political group in a negative light can “always” be dismissed as fake news. As a result, trust in the press has sunk to an all-time low among Republicans.

In 1976 — after Watergate and Vietnam; after the Pentagon Papers and “All the President’s Men” — 72 percent of Americans told Gallup that they had either “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust in the mass media. Those days are almost certainly never coming back.

Still, on Wednesday, a sitting Republican senator took an unconventional step. He argued that restoring at least some of that trust is essential — and that his own party’s president should stop working to further erode it. The question now is whether other Republicans bother to amplify Flake’s message — or whether it gets simply gets drowned by Trump’s latest antics.

Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ) walks with reporters after speaking in the Senate on Capitol Hill in Washington on January 17, 2018. (Photo: Joshua Roberts/Reuters)

In the meantime, the media itself would be wise to follow the advice of the late Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, whom Tom Hanks is currently portraying on screen in The Post.

“We hunker down and go about our business,” Bradlee once told an interviewer who asked how he handled criticism. “Which is not to be loved — but to go after the truth.”

_____

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[andrewromanoyahoo]

With key GOPers retiring, could Orange County lead the way to a Democratic wave?

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif. and Rep. Ed Royce, R-Calif. (Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via Getty Images, Getty Images (2))

LOS ANGELES — If you’re wondering whether a Democratic wave could wash away the current GOP-controlled Congress in November, check out what’s happened so far this week in the traditional Republican stronghold of Orange County, Calif.

Two short days ago, the situation was stable. Four congressional districts overlap with the O.C.; Republicans represent all four. Each of these Republicans (Ed Royce in CA-39, Darrell Issa in CA-49, Dana Rohrabacher in CA-48, Mimi Walters in CA-45) was considered vulnerable to some degree, in part because in 2016 Hillary Clinton defeated Donald Trump in their districts — a first for a Democratic presidential candidate. But thanks to the power of incumbency, and a few big war chests, the Washington consensus said that only Rohrabacher’s race was a toss-up. The rest still leaned Republican.

What a difference 48 hours makes.

On Tuesday morning, Royce, the powerful chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, stunned the political world by announcing his retirement. “In this final year of my Foreign Affairs Committee chairmanship, I want to focus fully on the urgent threats facing our nation,” Royce said in a statement. “With this in mind, and with the support of my wife Marie, I have decided not to seek reelection in November.

Then, one day later, Issa followed Royce’s out the door. “Throughout my service, I worked hard and never lost sight of the people our government is supposed to serve,” Issa said in a statement. “Yet with the support of my family, I have decided that I will not seek reelection in California’s 49th District.”

In response, the authoritative handicappers at the Cook Political Report flipped both seats from Lean Republican to Lean Democrat, improving the Dems’ odds of picking up the 24 seats they need to take back the House.

Democrats, of course, rejoiced. “The Republican agenda in Washington has been a direct attack on Californians,” crowed Drew Godinich, a spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “California Republicans clearly see the writing on the wall and realize that their party and its priorities are toxic to their reelection chances in 2018.”

But beyond the predictable partisan messaging, what does this week’s sudden upending of some the most important House contests in the country actually say about the looming 2018 midterms?

First, the DCCC may have a point. “Toxic” is too strong a word, but there has been a real conflict between the priorities of the GOP leadership in Washington — both on Capitol Hill and in the White House — and the electoral interests of blue-state Republicans.

Take 2017’s two defining legislative efforts: Obamacare repeal and tax cuts. The former, which never passed the Senate, was wildly unpopular in California, where residents have flocked to the state-run health-insurance exchange. Yet both Royce and Issa felt compelled to vote for it, despite near-constant protests from activists in their districts.

Demonstrator protest against U.S. President Donald Trump and Republican congressman Darrell Issa (R-Vista) outside Issa’s office in Vista, California in 2017. (Photo: Mike Blake/Reuters)

The Trump tax cuts, meanwhile, inspired even more Golden State outrage, largely because they slashed deductions for mortgage interest and for state and local taxes, which disproportionately benefit Californians. Both Royce and Issa publicly struggled to get to yes on the bill; eventually, Royce did, and Issa — gun-shy after securing reelection in 2016 by a mere 1,600 votes — did not. But their constituents know that what really matters is which party controls the House, and the national GOP agenda isn’t working to the advantage of most Republicans in California — or high-tax states such as New York and New Jersey, either.

This tension has, in turn, underscored the deeper Trump Era challenges facing Royce, Issa and their ilk. Clinton won Orange County — a place that had been the heart of the conservative movement, fueling the campaigns of Barry Goldwater and, later, Ronald Reagan — for two reasons (as I’ve written in the past).

The first is that Orange County is changing. In 1980, roughly 285,000 Latinos lived in the O.C. (about 15 percent of the total population). As of 2014, that number had grown to more than 1 million (or 34 percent of the total population), and Latinos are expected to surpass non-Latino whites as the county’s largest group by 2027.

In recent years, the local Asian population has surged as well. The result is a region that’s much more diverse, and much more reliant on immigrants, than it was in Reagan’s day.

At the same time, the white voters who still make up a plurality of Orange County’s electorate are, for the most part, a particular breed: wealthier and more educated than average.

Which brings us to the second force at work here: Trump. In 2016, the New York developer underperformed among white college graduates, and lost college women to Clinton by 7 percentage points. Combine that weakness with Trump’s widespread unpopularity among Latinos and other minorities, and you start to see why Trump lost Orange County by 9 percentage points only four years after Mitt Romney won there by 6. He was a particularly bad fit for its evolving electorate — and now that he’s president, his 39 percent approval rating and anti-blue-state policies probably aren’t helping matters. (The Trump administration’s decision to allow oil companies to resume offshore drilling — and then to exempt Florida, but not California — angered Californians who may still remember disastrous spills off their beaches.)

All of which has conspired to make reelection more of a slog for Issa, Royce and other suburban and/or blue-state Republicans nationwide — and to make retirement sound more appealing. The numbers tell the tale. As NPR’s Jessica Taylor has noted, there are now “31 Republicans who will not seek re-election in November: 19 who are retiring outright and another 12 who are running for higher office.”

The last time either party had nearly that many members vacate their seats during a midterm year was 1994. Twenty-eight Democrats departed that cycle — and the GOP eventually took control of Congress, gaining a staggering 54 House seats in what was billed, at the time, as a “Republican Revolution.”

So yes, the back-to-back retirements of Royce and Issa are symptomatic of something larger: an electoral landscape that is rapidly shifting in the Democrats’ favor.

This sort of momentum wouldn’t matter much if the Dems weren’t prepared to capitalize on it. But so far, they seem to be.

Six Democratic candidates are already running for Royce’s seat, including Mai-Khanh Tran, a Vietnam-War-refugee-turned-pediatrician-turned-two-time-cancer-survivor; Andy Thorburn, a teacher-turned-union-leader-turned-millionaire-businessman; and Gil Cisneros, a Navy veteran and former shipping manager who became a philanthropist after winning a $266 million lottery prize in 2010.

And four Democrats are gunning for Issa’s job: environmental activist Mike Levin, who’s raked in more than a million dollars since announcing his candidacy in March; Sara Jacobs, a former Obama administration official endorsed by EMILY’s List; Paul Kerr, a real estate investor who outraised Issa last quarter; and Doug Applegate, a Marine veteran and attorney who nearly defeated Issa in 2016 in that cycle’s closest Congressional contest.

Doug Applegate speaks in Hollywood, California in 2016. (Photo: Tara Ziemba/Getty Images)

In other words, these are not the gadflies, vanity candidates and sacrificial lambs that have tended to run against Royce & Co. in previous elections.

But before Democrats get too excited, a note of caution. This cycle’s unprecedented glut of Trump-resisting recruits could be a mixed blessing — particularly in California, and particularly in contests without a GOP incumbent on the ballot.

The Golden State, you’ll recall, has a nonpartisan primary system: Democrats, Republicans and independents all compete against each other in the primary, and the top two finishers proceed to the general election regardless of party affiliation.

Here, the risk is that splitting the Democratic vote four or six ways in a historically conservative area could allow two Republican candidates to come out on top — a result that becomes more likely when a GOP incumbent is no longer monopolizing the Republican vote and a couple of serious Republicans step in to replace him or her.

Which is probably what will happen now that Royce and Issa are gone. Though the California GOP has been decimated statewide, the party’s infrastructure remains strong in Orange County. Well-known candidates are already volunteering to run in Royce’s place, including former assemblywoman and longtime former Royce aide Young Kim, whom Royce immediately endorsed.  Also in the mix are former state Senate Minority Leader Bob Huff and Orange County Supervisor Shawn Nelson.

New Republican candidates are expected to announce soon in Issa’s district, where top names include state Assemblyman Bill Brough, who has said he’s “considering running”; Diane Harkey, chair of the California Board of Equalization, which administers taxes and fees; and Scott Baugh, a former Orange County GOP chairman.

None of these Republicans will have incumbent-level name ID — or cash. But they also won’t have congressional voting records, which means they’ll be able to put more space between themselves and the national GOP (and Trump) than any incumbent.

The bottom line is that by announcing their retirements in quick succession, Royce and Issa have emphasized how everything is set to break the Democrats’ way in 2018. But riding a wave to victory next November will require skill and strategy and maybe a bit of luck — and now more than ever, Orange County is the place to watch to find out if the Democratic Party can pull it off.

_____

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[andrewromanoyahoo]

While you were tweeting: Seven overlooked stories from 2017

In the 1985 cinematic masterpiece Back to the Future (and its sequels), teenager Marty McFly often relies on a simple but effective method to escape unpleasant situations.

“Whoa, whoa, Biff,” Marty says nonchalantly, pointing over the shoulder of his nemesis, Biff Tannen. “What’s that?”

Again and again, Biff, or one of his equally loathsome relatives, wheels around to see what Marty is pointing at — and again and again, Marty socks him and runs away.

In 2017 America’s collective news feed was like one Marty McFly after another: a nonstop succession of tweets, insults, novelties and transgressions, many of them coming from the current occupant of the Oval Office, that compelled us to look this way and that way and this way and that way.

Meanwhile, the deeper story of the day often receded into the distance, cast aside by a news cycle struggling to churn through all the conflict and chaos created by our Disrupter-in-Chief, President Donald Trump.

Now that 2017 is coming to a close, however, we thought it would be useful to look back on the year with some perspective and highlight some of the most important stories that didn’t get the attention they deserved the first time around — usually because America was too distracted by whatever that was over there.  

In no particular order:

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Trump’s campaign to reshape the courts

President Trump (Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos; AP (3))

Amid all the punditry and prognostication about the administration’s fumbling attempts to advance its agenda on Capitol Hill, the press and the public largely overlooked how successful Trump has been at leaving his mark on a different branch of government: the judiciary.

When Barack Obama took office in 2009, he had 54 judicial vacancies to fill; when Trump took office, he inherited twice that number, thanks in large part to Mitch McConnell’s strategy of halting the judicial-appointments process during Obama’s last two years in the White House. The new president has proceeded to fill these vacancies at an unprecedented rate, and his nominees have been “the youngest, whitest, male-est, and most conservative in modern memory,” as the New Yorker’s Jeff Shesol recently pointed out. As a result, Trump has brought about “a wholesale change among the federal judiciary” that will “have a significant impact on the shape and trajectory of American law for decades,” says Democratic Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware. “This will be the single most important legacy of the Trump administration.”

And the president may only just be getting started. Last month, the founder of the influential Federalist Society unveiled a plan that would allow Trump to add “twice as many lifetime members to the federal judiciary in the next 12 months (650) as Barack Obama named in eight years (325)” — and would ultimately leave the courts evenly divided between judges appointed by Trump and those appointed by the previous nine presidents combined.

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  Mike Pence prepares for Trump’s downfall — just in case

Vice President Pence at the White House on Dec. 6. (Photo: Alex Brandon/AP)

In public, Vice President Mike Pence, Trump’s staunchly evangelical No. 2, is the very picture of deference and loyalty; he has repeatedly demonstrated that he will defend the president no matter what he says or does.

But behind the scenes, Pence is reportedly thinking ahead to a time when he may no longer have to play the good soldier. In May, Pence became the first sitting veep to form a national political action committee at the beginning of his term, a move that will make it easier to campaign for other Republicans now — and later, perhaps, for himself. (Pence’s PAC has gone on to raise more money than President Trump’s.) In July Pence installed Nick Ayers, a sharp-elbowed political operative, as his chief of staff. Pence has traveled to important political events in Iowa, the first caucus state, and opened the vice presidential residence to key conservative activists. Finally, “Multiple advisers to Mr. Pence have already intimated to party donors that he would plan to run if Mr. Trump did not,” according to the New York Times.

Pence rarely surfaces in the headlines; his boss sucks up all the oxygen. But he’s worth watching. Earlier this month the Atlantic reported that after the “Access Hollywood” tape threatened to derail Trump’s presidential campaign, Pence was “contemplating a coup” — and he immediately “made it clear to the Republican National Committee that he was ready to take Trump’s place as the party’s nominee.”

As Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation digs into Trump’s finances and closest confidants — and as a potential Democratic wave builds in 2018’s House and Senate races — it’s easy to imagine Pence himself preparing for a post-Trump future that could come sooner than expected.

“It’s not a matter of when Republicans are ready to turn on Trump,” one senior GOP Senate aide told the Atlantic. “It’s about when they decide they’re ready for President Pence.”

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All talk — and little action — on the opioid crisis

President Trump greets New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie at the White House after speaking about the administration’s plans to combat the nation’s opioid crisis on Oct. 26. (Photo: Carlos Barria/Reuters)

It was one of 2016’s signature campaign issues: the opioid addiction crisis ravaging small towns from New Hampshire to New Mexico. Every candidate, Republican and Democratic, vowed to do something about it once in office, including Donald Trump. “[T]he people that are in trouble, the people that are addicted, we’re going to work with them and try and make them better,” Trump said. “And we will make them better.”

As president, Trump issued an executive order to establish the Presidential Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis, a five-member panel tasked with proposing solutions to the drug epidemic. But the commission missed its first deadline, in June, and its second one, in July, before finally releasing its report in August. Then, after insisting that “we’re going to spend a lot of time, a lot of effort and a lot of money on the opioid crisis,” Trump repeatedly promised that he would declare a national emergency “next week” — and repeatedly missed that deadline as well. When the president finally got around to making a declaration, in late October, it was as a public health emergency and not as national emergency — a distinction that meant no significant new federal funding, even though experts inside and outside of the administration argue than tens of billions of dollars would be needed to even begin to combat the epidemic.

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  The unprecedented surge of Democratic candidates

Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: Getty Images

Democratic victories in Virginia and Alabama have already gotten a ton of attention. Less noticed, however, is the fact that Democrats already have 400-plus candidates running for the House in 2018. That’s more than twice as many as either party has previously boasted at this point in the election cycle.

Political scientists say there’s a strong relationship between the number of candidates a party recruits and the party’s win-loss record on Election Day, as we’ve noted before.

In a recent analysis for the data-focused FiveThirtyEight website, Seth Masket of the University of Denver plotted the Democratic share of viable early House challengers — that is, candidates who raised more than $5,000 by June 30 of the year before the election — against the number of seats Democrats eventually gained or lost on Election Day.

He found that in every election since 2004 in which Democrats fielded more candidates than Republicans, they also wound up gaining seats — an additional 2.5 House members per each additional percentage-point advantage in early House candidates, on average. The most extreme example was 2006, when nearly 70 percent of the early House candidates were Democrats. That year, the party netted 31 seats on Election Day.

Apply the same formula to the 2018 cycle, Masket noted, and Democrats will be on track to pick up 93 House seats — the third-largest gain in U.S. history.

Will Democrats flip that many seats? Unlikely. But the party only needs to net 24 to retake the House. That’s much more plausible. The only way to lay the groundwork for a wave election is by fielding solid candidates for as many flippable seats as possible, then waiting for the national mood to turn in your favor. That’s exactly what Democrats have been doing.

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  Trump’s behind-the-scenes effort to sabotage Obamacare

The enrollment page for the Affordable Care Act on Nov. 1. (Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Republicans have made no secret of their desire to end Obamacare. They spent much of 2017 repeatedly trying — and repeatedly failing — to get repeal legislation through Congress. But while that drama was unfolding on Capitol Hill, the Trump administration was quietly doing everything in its power to set the system up for failure — regardless of whether or not it was ever officially repealed.

Over the past 12 months, Trump & Co. have cut the open enrollment period in half, from 12 weeks to six weeks. They have slashed funding for Obamacare advertising by 90 percent, from $100 million to $10 million. They cut funding for in-person assistance by 40 percent — then let the budget run out entirely. And at the last minute they pulled out of state-level open-enrollment events and stopped federal payments to insurers, driving up premiums by as much as 30 percent for some plans. All of this while hinting that the individual mandate — the fine on people who don’t have insurance — would not be enforced.

Despite these efforts, 2017 Obamacare enrollment proceeded at a faster pace than in previous years. And even with less time to sign up, the total number of HEATHCARE.GOV enrollees — 8.8 million, according to figures released by the White House on Thursday — nearly matched the figure for 2016. For now, that unexpected result seems likely to stave off the  self-perpetuating cycle of falling enrollment and price increases known as a “death spiral.”

But Republicans are still in the hunt. The party’s new tax bill eliminates the individual mandate altogether, which could wreak further havoc on the otherwise stable system in 2018. So  the next time Republicans claim Obamacare is failing, it’s worth remembering why — and who’s responsible.

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America’s neglect of Puerto Rico

In this photo from October, Arden Dragoni, second from left, poses with his wife, Sindy, their three children and dog Max, surrounded by what remains of their home destroyed by Hurricane Maria in Toa Baja, Puerto Rico. (Photo: Ramon Espinosa/AP)

The U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, whose residents are American citizens, was devastated earlier this year by Hurricane Maria. This didn’t exactly go unnoticed at the time. When President Trump traveled to San Juan and threw paper towels to survivors, or got in a Twitter war with the city’s mayor, or accused Puerto Ricans who criticized the federal response of “want[ing] everything to be done for them,” the mainland press paid attention.

But since then, the spotlight has moved on — while the island continues to suffer. The official death toll is 64, and Trump has bragged about how it’s not “in the thousands.” But a recent New York Times investigation has found that it very well may be. According to the Times, 1,052 more people than usual died on the island during the 42 days after Maria made landfall on Sept. 20. Many of these additional deaths are likely attributable to delayed medical treatment or poor conditions in homes and hospitals — consequences of the power outages and water shortages that have afflicted Puerto Rico since the hurricane.

Even now, three months later, only 64 percent of the power grid has been restored; clean water is still scarcer than it should be. At the same time, the U.S. House has included a 20 percent import tax on products manufactured in foreign jurisdictions in its tax-reform bill — a tax that could cost the “foreign jurisdiction” of Puerto Rico tens or even hundreds of thousands of jobs. The island still receives only a fraction of the Medicaid funding for which it would qualify if it were a state. And so far Congress has approved a mere $5 billion in aid — far less than the $94 billion the Puerto Rican government says it needs to recover.

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  Defeating ISIS — but backtracking in Syria

Members of the Iraqi federal police dance with children and a national flag during a celebration in the Old City of Mosul on July 2, when the grueling battle to retake Iraq’s second city from ISIS fighters was nearing its end. (Photo: Ahmad Al-Rubaye/AFP/Getty Images)

On the 2016 campaign trail, Trump famously pledged to “bomb the s*** out of [ISIS].” That’s largely what his administration has been doing. Then again, it’s largely what the Obama administration was doing before Trump.

Trump has made some changes, loosening the “rules of engagement” and allowing war planners at the Department of Defense more autonomy. But those are tactical shifts. In 2017, under Trump, the United States’ overarching anti-ISIS strategy continued to work — to the point that the Islamic State has basically been defeated, at least for the time being.

This welcome progress on one of the world’s most dangerous situations has gotten lost amid headlines about ISIS-inspired attacks, whether in London, New York or elsewhere, which lone wolves continue to carry out. The operation to take back Mosul, the second-largest city in Iraq and the place where ISIS had first declared its “caliphate,” began in October 2016  and concluded in July; in October, U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces captured Raqqa, the Syrian city that had become the caliphate’s de facto capital. These successes followed earlier wins across Iraq and Syria, and have led Iraq, Iran and Russia to declare victory over ISIS in recent weeks.

U.S. military officials warn that the jihadi group is resilient and could always stage a comeback. But with ISIS on the run, the question now turns to the larger Syrian civil war, which has killed more than 400,000 and displaced more than 10 million. Under Obama, the U.S. supported the Syrian rebels in their efforts to oust dictator Bashar Assad. But the Trump administration has backed away from that commitment, allowing Russia to fill the void. It now looks as if the war will end on Vladimir Putin’s terms — with Assad still in power.

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[andrewromanoyahoo]

As Democratic rage builds, Kyrsten Sinema tries a different approach. Will Arizona voters buy it?

Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., walks down the House steps following a vote in the Capitol on Dec. 1. (Photo: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via Getty Images)

Ask any Democratic activist in Washington, D.C., what they think of centrism — or moderation, or bipartisanship — and they’ll probably tell you the same thing.

So pointless. So naïve. So passé.

In an age of fake news and choose-your-own-reality Facebook feeds, of Infowars and Breitbart, of a Republican Party that lurches further right with each election and a president whose agenda seems to consist solely of sledgehammering his predecessor’s legacy, the only sane response, these Democrats have concluded — and the only real way to regain power, starting with the 2018 midterms — is to veer left with similar ferocity and “resist” at every turn.

“The problem with the Democratic Party is that they have been trying to convert Republican voters or cajole white working-class voters,” Aimee Allison, president of Democracy in Color, recently told the Washington Post, neatly summarizing the conventional wisdom among progressives. “The job of Democrats this week, in 2018 and in 2020, is to excite the base.”

And yet 2,300 miles away in Phoenix, the woman who is likely to become one of the Democratic Party’s marquee Senate nominees next year seems to have missed the memo entirely.

Meet Kyrsten Sinema: three-term congresswoman, lapsed Mormon, openly bisexual and nontheist trailblazer, Ironman triathlete — and, with $4.1 million on hand, the early frontrunner in the race to replace retiring Republican Sen. Jeff Flake, which is one of the few contests that will decide control of the world’s greatest deliberative body in 2019 and beyond.

Oh, and she is also one of the most moderate, bipartisan, aisle-crossing Democrats in all of D.C.

Sinema finishes the ACLI Capital Challenge 3 Mile Team Race in 2016. (Photo: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call)

Sinema has yet to launch the media offensive that typically marks the start of campaign season; so far, she’s only submitted to a single brief interview with the Arizona Republic. But in that article, Sinema made it clear that she will be campaigning in a manner that seems to clash dramatically with the prevailing view among progressives — namely, that if Democrats want to win back Congress, and eventually the White House, they should disregard America’s dwindling centrist bloc and focus instead on harnessing their own voters’ righteous anger at Trump.

Trump is “not a thing,” Sinema insisted when the Republic asked about her message. “[He’s] not a part of what I think my constituents are worried about or think about.”

Nor, she added, is partisanship. “It’s not about a party,” Sinema said. “It never is about party. It’s about putting people ahead of party. I don’t think party matters much to people.”

This sort of “No Labels” talk has a long history on the campaign trail. But what makes Sinema’s rendition unusual is not just that she’s delivering it at a time when such sentiments have never been less trendy among party regulars.

It’s that her record really does back it up.

As a result, Sinema’s candidacy raises a crucial question for the Democratic Party going forward: Is the only way to fight Trumpian fire with fire? Or, under the right conditions, can a less “resistant” approach still make sense? (Sinema doesn’t have the primary field to herself — rivals include Muslim-American attorney Deedra Abboud and tech entrepreneur Bob Bishop — but she is seen as the prohibitive favorite.)

“Elections aren’t one-size-fits all,” says Sacha Haworth, Sinema’s campaign spokeswoman. “The national narrative doesn’t decide these races. People don’t wake up in Arizona reading Twitter and think that’s the news of the day. So it’s crucial to keep your eye on the goal and continue being the sort of person your constituents elected you to be.”

It’s hard to overstate how resolutely centrist Sinema has remained during her nearly five years in Congress. She was one of just seven House Democrats to vote for a Republican-backed bill that would repeal the estate tax; one of just five House Democrats to vote for a Republican-backed bill that would bar the Federal Communications Commission from regulating broadband Internet rates; one of just six House Democrats to vote for a Republican-backed bill that would punish so-called sanctuary cities by withholding federal funds; and one of just seven House Democrats who voted to create a select committee to investigate the 2012 attack on the United States diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. Sinema has also joined the GOP in voting for bills that would deregulate the banking industry, provide $1.6 billion for a border wall with Mexico, weaken Obamacare’s employer mandate and prevent Syrian and Iraqi refugees from being resettled in the United States until tighter vetting processes could be implemented. She has even voted against Nancy Pelosi for House minority leader — twice.

Sinema joins a group of bipartisan Congressmen during a news conference in 2014. (Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

According to the Lugar Center, all of this makes Sinema is the fourth-most bipartisan member of the House, and the most bipartisan Democrat. Meanwhile, the data-driven website FiveThirtyEight had determined that the Arizona congresswoman has voted with President Trump 50 percent of the time — more often than all but one other House Democrat.

It’s early yet — Sinema is barely campaigning, and the national political class is barely paying attention — but already there are signs that progressives will have some problems with the candidate who’s likely to represent their side in the fight for one of 2018’s two most flippable Senate seats. (Right now, Democrats need two pickups to split the Senate 50-50 — and if Doug Jones defeats Roy Moore in the Alabama special election on Dec. 12, two would be enough to retake the chamber.)

“There are issues, murmurs within grassroots groups and the progressive community, the environmental community and others, including immigration advocates,” Arizona Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva, co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, told the New York Times in October, explaining why he has been withholding his endorsement. “[There is] still a lot of resentment.”

These murmurs will only grow louder once the race ramps up — as will the inevitable arguments that by voting with Republicans and not only downplaying Trump but touting her meetings with him, Sinema could dampen enthusiasm among the base (particularly Arizona’s surging Hispanic population) without picking up the support of diehard Trump Republicans in return.

But it’s worth considering another scenario as well.

Arizona’s Ninth Congressional District was created after the 2010 census. Curving around central Phoenix to the north, east and south, it wound up containing almost the exact same mix of Republicans (34 percent), Democrats (31 percent) and independents (33 percent) as the state itself. Prior to declaring her candidacy in 2012, Sinema had once been a member of the Green Party; fond of designer shoes and glasses, she jokingly described herself as a “Prada socialist.” But Sinema campaigned (and later legislated) as a centrist who was “willing to work with anyone to get things done,” and after securing the new seat by a mere 10,000 votes, she has won reelection by widening margins (13 percentage points in 2014, and 22 percentage points two years later).

Sinema leaves the Capitol after the House passed a fiscal 2018 budget resolution on October 26. (Photo: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via Getty Images)

Sinema has reason to believe a similar strategy could work statewide. On the GOP side, staunch Trumper Kelli Ward will battle a more establishment-friendly Republican — such as Rep. Martha McSally of Tucson, an occasional Trump critic — in a divisive, expensive primary race that will almost certainly yank the party to the right. Meanwhile, Sinema will continue to target the familiar voters who’ve propelled her to victory in the Ninth,, which  despite its even partisan split, voted for Clinton by 16 percentage points: independents and suburban, college-educated Republicans who are turned off by Trump but aren’t particularly turned on by the resistance.

This explains why Sinema recently told the New York Times that — in the Times’ paraphrasing — “a Democrat would have to campaign in a virtually nonpartisan way to win a Senate race” in Arizona, criticizing “national Democrats for moving too far to the left.”

“It’s irresponsible to promise a platform that you can’t deliver on,’’ Sinema added. “You’re not going to get free college.”

This also explains why, in the end, Arizona progressives may be unsatisfied. But amid what may be a national, anti-Trump wave election, would they really refuse to show up and vote in the one contest that could, more than any other, help them achieve their ultimate goal of halting President Trump’s agenda in its tracks?

It’s a question that will determine whether Sinema’s brand of centrism is, in fact, on the way out — or whether the reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated.

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For Democrats in 2018, how many candidates are too many candidates?

Democratic candidates for California’s 48th congressional seat, from top left, Hans Keirstead, Boyd Roberts, Omar Siddiqui, Harley Rouda, Michael Kotick, Laura Oatman and Tony Zakardes. Far right, GOP Rep. Dana Rohrabacher. (Photo illustration: Yahoo News)

LOS ANGELES — For Democrats in Orange County, Calif., it has started to seem, in recent months, as if the question is not so much “Who’s running for Congress in 2018?” as “Who isn’t?”

In February, Democratic real estate broker Boyd Roberts announced that he would be challenging longtime GOP Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (CA-48) in the upcoming midterm elections.

In March, businessman Harley Rouda, another Laguna Beach Democrat, declared that he would be gunning for Rohrabacher’s job as well.

In April, Laura Oatman, an architect and mother of five, entered the race.

Then came pioneering stem cell biologist Hans Keirstead. And American Airlines pilot Tony Zakardes. And lawyer Omar Siddiqui. And Nestlé executive Michael Kotick.

And these California Democrats aren’t unique.

Earlier this month, the party won key victories in Virginia, New Jersey and scores of other local contests across the country. But one of the biggest stories of the night — if not the biggest — was recruitment, particularly in the battle for control of Virginia’s Republican-dominated House of Delegates.

In previous years, Virginia Democrats had failed to field challengers in politically promising districts, conceding dozens of seats to vulnerable but unchallenged GOP incumbents. But 2017 attracted droves of diverse, often rookie candidates electrified by President Trump and itching to “resist,” and by Election Day, Virginia Democrats had standard-bearers on the ballot in 88 of 100 districts — the most anyone could remember. The party wound up winning 16 seats, roughly twice the number even the most optimistic partisans had predicted before the election.

This, in turn, has led to newfound optimism for the party going into 2018. According to Politico, Democratic leaders are now predicting “a fundraising and candidate recruitment surge, powered by grassroots fury at the Trump administration.”

When it comes to recruitment, the conventional wisdom is clear: The more candidates, the merrier.

“Given the failed agenda being pushed by Paul Ryan and Washington Republicans, it’s no wonder that strong candidates are stepping up to the plate in Orange County and across California,” says Drew Godinich, a spokesperson for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “The deep bench of outsider candidates is a testament to the incredible grassroots energy we are seeing on the ground.”

Or as the DCCC chair, Rep. Ben Ray Lujan, D-N.M., has said elsewhere, “No party ever lost an election due to too much energy and momentum.”

But 2018 is shaping up to be such an unusual election cycle that one has to wonder:

Could an unprecedented glut of Democratic hopefuls — and the crowded primaries that are sure to follow — tip the scales the other way?

Could Democrats be in danger of having too much of a good thing?

This, at least, is the line that Republicans in the traditional conservative stronghold of Orange County are peddling.

“All the Republicans are unified behind one candidate in each of these races and the Democrats have divided loyalties to candidates who have no name ID,” county GOP Chairman Fred Whitaker has said, according to the Orange County Register. “I’m pretty happy with it.”

And so, more than anywhere else, the O.C. will be the place to watch to find who’s right.

In November 2015, with roughly a year to go until Election Day 2016, only one Democrat had launched his candidacy across all of Orange County.

Now there are seven Democratic candidates running in Rohrabacher’s district alone — and 23 in the O.C. as a whole, where diversifying demographics, a dwindling Republican registration advantage and Hillary Clinton’s groundbreaking countywide victory in 2016 have Democrats eyeing four GOP incumbents previously considered safe: Reps. Rohrabacher; Ed Royce, CA-39; Mimi Walters, CA-45; and Darrell Issa, CA-49.

For the most part, these challengers are not the gadflies, vanity candidates and sacrificial lambs that have run against Rohrabacher & Co. in prior elections.

Democratic candidates for congress in California, Doug Applegate, Mike Levin, Andy Thorburn and Mai-Khanh Tran. (Photo illustration: Yahoo News)

There’s Mai-Khanh Tran, a Vietnam-War-refugee-turned-pediatrician-turned-two-time-cancer-survivor. There’s Andy Thorburn, a teacher-turned-union-leader-turned-millionaire-businessman. There’s environmental activist Mike Levin, who’s raised nearly a million dollars since announcing his candidacy in March. And there’s retired Marine Col. Doug Applegate, who came within 1,622 votes of unseating Issa in 2016.

Not to mention 19 more like them.

Political scientists say there’s a strong relationship between the number of candidates a party recruits and the party’s win-loss record on Election Day.

“If a party can convince a large number of skilled and experienced candidates to run for office, those candidates tend to do better and the party tends to win more seats,” Seth Masket of the University of Denver wrote in August for the data-focused FiveThirtyEight website. “Democrats had twice the number of challengers that Republicans did in 2006 and then took over the House in that election, while a similar advantage yielded similar payoffs for Republicans in 2010.”

In his analysis, Masket plotted the Democratic share of viable, early House challengers — that is, candidates who raised more than $5,000 by June 30 of the year before the election  — against the number of seats Democrats eventually gained or lost on Election Day.

He found that in every election since 2004 in which Democrats fielded more candidates than Republicans, they also wound up gaining seats — an additional 2.5 House members per each additional percentage-point advantage in early House candidates, on average. The most extreme example was 2006, when nearly 70 percent of the early House candidates were Democrats. That year, the party netted 31 seats on Election Day.

Apply the same formula to the 2018 cycle, Masket noted, and Democrats will be on track to pick up 93 House seats — the third-largest gain in U.S. history.

Which brings us to the problem with the political science on recruitment: The numbers so far this cycle are way off the charts — making it pretty much impossible to predict how things will ultimately shake out.

Case in point: According to a recent analysis by Michael Malbin, executive director of the nonpartisan Campaign Finance Institute, 391 Democratic challengers have already raised $5,000 or more. No other cycle comes close. The next highest tally belongs to the GOP, who in October 2009 boasted fewer than half as many candidates (184) with $5,000 or more. In fact, at every fundraising level — $5,000, $25,000, $50,000, $100,000 — the Democratic class of 2017 is more than twice as large as the Republican class of 2009.

Also unprecedented is the fact that, so far this cycle, 85 percent of the candidates who’ve cleared $5,000 are Democrats. By October of 2009, Republicans could only lay claim to 72 percent of the $5,000 club — and they still managed to pick up 63 seats the following November, thanks to that year’s tea party wave.

So far, so good for the Dems, right? Absolutely. But the flipside of this flood of Democratic challengers is that a lot of them are clustering into a few pivotal races, competing against each other for the opportunity unseat the most vulnerable Republican incumbents. As Malbin points out, “eight Democratic challengers have filed FEC reports in the race against the incumbent, Jeff Denham, in California’s 10th District. Seven are running against Dana Rohrabacher in CA-48, seven against Peter Roskam in Ill.-6, and seven against John Faso in NY-19. The most these 29 challengers can do in the general election is defeat four incumbents.”

In other words, there may be 391 viable Democratic challengers out on the trail right now, but they’re only running against 156 Republican incumbents — which means that, on average, 2.5 Dems are already competing in each primary contest, with roughly a year to go until Election Day. Rewind to this point in the last Democratic wave cycle (2006), and you’ll see that the average number of primary candidates back then was significantly lower: about 1.4 Dems per contest.

None which is bad for the party, per se. The only way to lay the groundwork for a wave election is by fielding solid candidates for as many flippable seats as possible, then waiting for the national mood to turn in your favor. By that measure, this year’s Democrats are miles ahead of where Republicans were in the fall of 2009, when only 97 Democratic incumbents had drawn viable challengers.

Yet it’s not impossible to imagine that squeezing seven or eight Democrats into a competitive House primary could have some unintended consequences.

“The level of enthusiasm that comes with such a crowded field almost always outweighs any downside,” says Dan Schnur, a former spokesman for Republicans Pete Wilson and John McCain who until recently ran the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California. “But there needs to be some type of organization or structure through which to channel all that energy.”

The first thing to note is that unlike 2006, when then DCCC chair Rahm Emanuel “recruited the right candidates, found the money and funded them and provided issues for them,” 2017 is all about fired-up grassroots activists making the leap to electoral politics on their own. This means less grooming, less district-by-district tailoring, less top-down centrism — and more rookies, more idiosyncrasies and likely more progressivism.

From there, it’s a short leap to a more unpredictable primary season. As in the 2016 GOP presidential primary contest — when the popular vote was divided among a dozen candidates — the eventual nominee could wind up being a plurality candidate who represents a passionate faction of the party. But that isn’t always the same thing as a nominee who’s the best fit for the district in a general election.

In fact, some Democrats worry that in such a scenario Republicans could “put their thumbs on the scales,” says Dave Min, one of two University of California, Irvine law professors running against Walters in CA-45 (along with five other Dems).

“With so many candidates, we run the risk that the incumbent will play in our primary,” Min tells Yahoo News. “Republicans could spend money to help pick a weaker candidate — the challenger they want to face in the fall.”

A cramped field can also complicate fundraising. The problem isn’t so much a lack of donations; so far, overall receipts have been impressive. It’s that “we all have to spend down to zero in the primary, while the Republican incumbent saves her cash,” according to Min. “So she’ll have more than a million dollars on hand to define the contest from day one — while our nominee will have to start over from scratch.”

Meanwhile, things could get even wilder in California, where control of Congress may ultimately be decided — and where Democrats compete against Republicans and independents in a nonpartisan primary system. (The top two finishers proceed to the general election regardless of party affiliation.) Here, the risk is that splitting the Democratic vote seven or eight ways in a historically conservative area could allow a non-Democratic challenger to finish second and go head-to-head with the GOP incumbent next November.

This has happened before. In 2012, Republican Rep. Gary Miller was gerrymandered out of his previous district (the 42nd) and forced to run in a new, majority-Hispanic district that leaned to the left. In the primary, Redlands Democrat Pete Aguilar actually won the most Democratic votes — but because three other Democrats were also running, Republican Bob Dutton squeaked past him with 25 percent of the vote and faced off against Miller in the general election.

It could happen again. In CA-48, for instance, one Republican, Stelian Onufrei, is already campaigning against Rohrabacher — he has pledged to spend half a million dollars of his own money — while another, former county GOP Chairman Scott Baugh, is waiting in the wings with more cash on hand than Rohrabacher himself. A Libertarian and an independent candidate are running as well.

(The DCCC has said that, to prevent such outcomes, “We absolutely reserve the right to get involved in these primaries where necessary.”)

In the end, Democrats should be excited about how many candidates they’ve recruited for 2018 — and how many have simply volunteered. The biggest class of challengers in recent memory? That’s a good problem to have.

But it’s also worth remembering that the party is proceeding into uncharted territory — and that 2018’s most congested primaries could shake out in some unusual ways.

_____

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[andrewromanoyahoo]

Democrats used to campaign on class — and win. It's time to do it again.

Illustrations: Ivan Canu/Salzmanart.com for Yahoo News

The reason the Democratic Party lost the last presidential election is simple.

Or so a lot of Democrats seem to think.

In the end, says one school of thought, it was all about race. As the influential journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates asserted in a recent Atlantic magazine cover story, “whiteness brought us Donald Trump.”

Trump, Coates pointed out, won whites of all genders, all ages, all incomes and all levels of educational attainment. “And so,” Coates concluded, “it will not suffice to say that Trump is a white man like all the others who rose to become president. He must be called by his rightful honorific — ‘America’s first white president.’”

Unless, of course, November’s defeat wasn’t about race after all. The real reason Democrats lost the White House was economic, not cultural, according to the most powerful Democrat in the country (and his many allies).

“When you lose to somebody who has 40 percent popularity, you don’t blame other things … you blame yourself,” declared Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer earlier this year. “I think if we come up with this strong, bold economic package, it will change things around. That’s what we were missing.”

Economics or culture? This, in short, is the debate that has consumed the Democratic Party since the disorienting morning of Nov. 9, when Hillary Clinton — who was supposed to have an 85 percent chance of winning — finally called Trump to concede. It is a debate that has produced 11 months of postmortems and polemics, each more assured of its own simple rightness than the last.

If only liberals weren’t so obsessed with identity politics, argues Columbia humanities professor Mark Lilla in the New York Times, then everything would be different.

If only Democrats knew how to talk to blue-collar whites, added University of California law professor Joan C. Williams in the Harvard Business Review, then Trump wouldn’t be president.

Wait a minute, countered Columbia law professor Katherine Franke in the Los Angeles Review of Books. A liberalism that ignores identity — that “regards the protests of people of color and women as a complaint or a feeling, ignoring the facts upon which those protests are based” — is a liberalism of “white supremacy.”

And so on.

But what if the answer isn’t so simple? What if it isn’t “either/or” — but rather “both/and”? As Democrats ponder their defeat and strategize about how to avoid similar disappointments in 2018 and 2020, it might be worth considering not just why they lost but why Trump won.

In a sense, it all came down to class, because class is the space where economics and culture overlap.

More than any Republican presidential candidate in recent memory, Trump erased the boundaries between culture and economics. Again and again, the impulsive, improvisational mogul — a man who launched his campaign by calling Mexicans “rapists” — capitalized on the resentments and rage of certain white Americans: toward elites, toward the “establishment,” toward nonwhites and non-Americans. At the same time, Trump broke with the bipartisan Beltway consensus to gesture, at least, toward an economic attitude — “agenda” is probably too strong a word — that reflected the populist desires and demands of the voters to whom he was also targeting his divisive cultural appeals. Unravel free-trade deals. Revive American manufacturing. Reanimate the coal industry. Halt immigration.

Never mind that as president, Trump has done little, so far, to deliver on any of these promises. In his campaign, culture dictated economics and economics amplified culture. The product was greater than the sum of its parts: the first Republican presidential bid in decades to be animated by the affinities and animosities of a particular class. As a result, Trump lost the popular vote by nearly 2.9 million but peeled off just enough voters in the traditionally blue states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — 77,744 of them, to be exact — to eke out a surprise victory in the Electoral College.

If Democrats want to wound Trump in 2018 and defeat him in 2020, they would be wise to learn from his success. Don’t ignore identity — embrace it. Then embrace the economic implications of that identity.

But which identity could Democrats embrace? And which economic agenda flows from it?

This, at least, should be familiar territory. For decades, every Democrat worth his or her salt knew the answer.

And again, it comes back to class.

In the marquee elections of 2017, not much seems to have changed: the Democratic gubernatorial nominee in Virginia, mild-mannered pediatric neurologist Ralph Northam, twice voted for George W. Bush, and his counterpart in New Jersey, Phil Murphy, is a multimillionaire former Goldman Sachs executive.

But class is a subject that several of the party’s rising stars are circling around — and that at least one veteran senator, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, is trying to get his fellow Democrats to put front and center.

*****

The Democratic Party is the oldest political party in the world. Its coalitions have splintered over the last two centuries; its priorities have shifted. Yet one founding principle has survived since the party’s earliest days: a sense, however self-serving, that Democrats represent “the people.”

In the Jeffersonian era, Democrats — or Democratic-Republicans, as they were called — opposed the federalism of Alexander Hamilton and John Adams, with its strong central government, its ruling elite and its affection for bankers and business.

In the Jacksonian era, Democrats fought to destroy the national bank and expand suffrage to citizens — at least white male citizens — who didn’t own land. “There never has been but two parties, founded in the radical question, whether PEOPLE, or PROPERTY, shall govern?” fumed Democratic Sen. Thomas Hart Benton in 1835. “Democracy implies government by the people. … Aristocracy implies a government of the rich … and in these words are contained the sum of party distinction.”

Fast-forward through the next 135 years — through the Civil War, the Gilded Age, the Great Depression, the Great Society and a tectonic realignment that finally forced the party to shed its slaveholding past and embrace civil rights — and you’ll hear Democrats sounding the same note of economic populism at every turn.

Their identity — the force that bound them together — centered on class. The other party represents the rich, they claimed. We’re for the rest of you.

“There are those we believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below,” said three-time Democratic presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan in 1896, defining what would in more recent times be called “trickle-down economics.” “The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them.”

“The Democratic Party represents the people,” President Harry Truman added in 1948. “It is pledged to work for agriculture. It is pledged to work for labor. It is pledged to work for the small businessman and the white-collar worker.”

In the 1970s, however, something changed. After Vice President Hubert Humphrey lost to Republican Richard Nixon in 1968, Democrats formed the Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection. Its goal was to heal and restructure the party — and restructure the party it did, forging a new coalition under the guidance of strategist Fred Dutton.

“By quietly cutting back the influence of unions,” the Atlantic’s Matt Stoller has written, “Dutton sought to eject [from the Democratic Party] the white working class … which he saw as ‘a major redoubt of traditional Americanism and of the anti-Negro, anti-youth vote.’ The future, he argued, lay in a coalition of African-Americans, feminists and affluent, young, college-educated whites.”

Dutton’s realignment succeeded. At the time, it felt obvious — a natural evolution. The trusts of the Gilded Age had been busted. The social safety net had been built. The unions had grown strong. And the Great Depression was a distant memory. America was prosperous, and its prosperity was widely shared; the economic arguments that had animated earlier generations of Democrats no longer applied. And so, as Dutton wrote in 1971, the “balance of political power” was shifting from the “economic to the psychological … from the stomach and the pocketbook to the psyche.”

The psyche of the Democratic Party shifted along with it. Now “the people” no longer meant “workers.” Instead, the little guy was the student oppressed by the draft; the woman oppressed by sexism; the African-American oppressed by bigotry. In fact, workers, as Dutton put it, were “the principal group arrayed against the forces of change.”

“In the 1930s, the blue-collar group was in the forefront,” he concluded. “Now it is the white-collar sector.”

With the rise of free-market Reagan Republicanism, any mention of class was soon considered off-limits; “Class warfare!” shouted the newly dominant conservatives.

As a result, a Democratic identity that used to center on economics came to center on culture, and a post-New Deal generation of politicians — Gary Hart and Bill Clinton, the neo-liberals and New Democrats — steered the party toward a more moderate, market-friendly agenda designed to appeal to the college-educated, meritocratic, baby-boomer professionals who now comprised the party’s primary class constituency. Free trade. Financial deregulation. Welfare reform. Technocratic innovation. Out went a rhetoric that once revolved around “workers”; in came “the middle class,” a mushy mantra whose main political appeal was the fact that almost all Americans thought it applied to them, actual data be damned.

Which brings us to 2017. The question a lot of Democrats seem to be asking themselves now, in the wake of Trump’s electoral upset, is whether the turn the party took in the 1970s — a turn reflected and reified in the presidencies of both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — still makes sense today, with economic inequality looming, as Obama himself once put it, as “the defining challenge of our time.”

The Dow Jones hits new highs every month. Productivity continues to increase. Yet wages stagnate. Median income hovers well below its 2007 level. As journalist Thomas Frank notes in his 2016 book Listen, Liberal, the lower 90 percent of the population — a group that took home 70 percent of U.S. income growth between the Great Depression and 1980 — hasn’t pocketed a single cent of that growth since 1997. Why? The “upper 10 percent of the population — the country’s financiers, managers and professionals — ate the whole thing.” In 2016, the top 1 percent made 87 times more than the bottom 50 percent of workers, up from a 27-to-1 ratio in 1980, and CEOs made 271 times more, on average, than a typical employee — a 930 percent increase since 1978.

Corporate consolidation, meanwhile, is back. Automation is accelerating. And vast swaths of America have been devastated.

How can Democrats respond? Is the “party of the people” doing enough? Or is the rise of Trump, after years of debilitating losses in statehouses and governor’s races, a red flag: a warning that, in order to revitalize itself, the Democratic Party may have to reoccupy the space where identity and economics overlap?

Trump has yoked the Republican Party to his own narrow, racial notion of class. Those are the battle lines he has drawn; that is the war he has declared.

Has the president paved the way for Democrats return to their roots? Has the time come for class to make a comeback on the left as well? And if so, can the party convey a different, more inclusive version of class than Trump — one that can unite its diverse constituencies rather than dividing them?

*****

To find out, I got in touch with four younger, forward-thinking Democrats, all of whom have been asking versions of these questions themselves: 2016 Missouri Senate candidate Jason Kander; Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy; Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan; and 2016 Virginia gubernatorial candidate Tom Perriello.

Each is considered a rising Democratic star. Though his bid to unseat Republican Sen. Roy Blunt fell short, Kander, 36, outperformed Hillary Clinton in Missouri by 16 percentage points after assembling an AR-15 blindfolded in what’s been called “the best campaign ad of 2016.” Murphy, 44, seized the national spotlight after the Orlando nightclub shooting by filibustering for 15 hours on the Senate floor; he’s often hyped as a future presidential candidate. Last November, Ryan, 44, challenged Nancy Pelosi for the job of House Minority Leader, claiming that his blue-collar constituents consider the San Francisco Democrat more “toxic” than Trump. And Perriello, 43, whose innovative, insurgent (albeit losing) primary campaign was designed as a progressive-populist response to Trump, is one of the party’s smartest voices on what he has called “a genuine shift in the economics of the United States.”

From the outset, Kander, Murphy, Ryan and Perriello agreed on one thing: The Democratic Party can’t downplay its commitment to social justice and civil rights.

“We don’t need to take a back seat to anybody on the issues of equal protection under the law and inclusion,” Ryan insisted. “That is a pillar of the Democratic platform, regardless of who you are or who you love.”

“Trump is waging an assault on civil rights,” Murphy added. “So Democrats have to keep raising alarm bells about the way this administration is treating immigrants, African-Americans, the LGBT community.”

Yet in an era of overwhelming economic inequality and insecurity, it would be mistake, they continued, to let so-called social issues define the party’s identity.

“Over the last few years we’ve spent 50 percent of our time making economic arguments and 50 percent of our time making social and cultural arguments,” Murphy insisted. “We need to be spending 80 percent of our time making economic arguments, 20 percent of our time making non-economic arguments.”

The problem in 2016 — the reason Trump won whole swaths of 2012 Obama counties in Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Ohio — wasn’t just that he “suckered [Clinton] away from an economic contrast on to a debate on social and cultural issues,” as Murphy put it, or that when Clinton did talk about the economy, she “started with programs and plans” — taxing the rich, redistributing wealth and creating various new benefits, like paid family leave — rather than “a vision of the change we’re trying to bring about in people’s lives,” according to Kander.

It was that the former secretary of state had come to embody a Democratic Party that voters in those areas dismiss as a bunch of “out-of-touch coastal wealthy liberals,” in Ryan’s words.

“Democrats did not do enough over the course of the last 20 or 30 years to keep communities like mine plugged into the global economy,” he explained. “You could see that trade in the aggregate works. Globalization in the aggregate works. But it is disproportionate as to the benefits. The corporations have done really well. The wealthiest people have done really well. But communities like Youngstown, Ohio, have been wiped out.”

“It’s absolutely true that we have not been seen as standing up for everyday folks — because very often, we haven’t,” Perriello concurred. “In our policies and our rhetoric over the last generation, too many Democrats too many times have seemed to stand with the rich and powerful over genuine economic opportunity.”

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s surprisingly durable Democratic primary opponent, performed better in this regard, Ryan & Co. agreed, “obviously striking a chord on the economy” (Ryan) by hammering away at “a couple of big, easy-to-understand, popular ideas” (Murphy).

“I think the party needs to learn from Bernie,” Murphy said.

Yet none of these younger Democrats answered yes when asked if the party actually needs to sound more like Sanders — a man who tweeted, shortly after the election, that “I come from the white working class, and I am deeply humiliated that the Democratic Party cannot talk to the people where I came from.”

Perhaps it’s unrealistic to expect ambitious pols to endorse the agenda of a self-described democratic socialist who refuses even to join their party. But if not Clinton or Sanders, then what should Democrats sound like going forward?

“Bold” was a favorite buzzword. “Populist” too.

“We need to have new ideas, bolder ideas, bigger ideas,” Ryan said.

“We’ve got to have some sharp-edged populist messaging,” Murphy said. “We can’t be afraid of telling people who’s screwing them.”

“We’re the party of progress,” Kander said. “So absolutely we should lean into that.”

“The line in politics today isn’t actually right vs. left — it’s boring vs. bold,” Periello concluded. “I do believe that the Democratic Party will benefit by being bolder.”

Specifics, however, were harder to come by.

Periello was the most inventive of the bunch, if also the wonkiest. He predicted that “whichever party figures out how to talk about automation and monopoly will control not just the economic conversation but politics for the next decade or more.” He mentioned “health insurance not tied to employment,” and a “robot tax,” and decentralized energy production, and two free years of community college or vocational training.

  “Neither party has fundamentally changed its economic outlook to adjust to the realities of the 21st-century economy,” he said.

Ryan mentioned automation as well (in addition to his steelworker grandparents and his long record of voting against free-trade deals). Yet his diagnosis of an ailing Democratic Party was more detailed than his prescription to cure it — a prescription that boiled down to tax breaks for companies willing to create jobs in places like Youngstown and a nebulous plan to replace “every blighted home and every empty factory in the United States in the next five years” with things like “urban farms” and “multipurpose housing developments” that “both millennials and baby boomers want to live in.”

Murphy, meanwhile, was more sanguine, calling for “a Democratic message that says we’re going to go after the bloated costs in the health care system and finally take on the drug companies and insurance companies that are making billions off your health care” — but otherwise insisting that “the moment” doesn’t “require us to fundamentally change who we are” as long “we have the discipline to make the contrast every single day.”

And Kander barely engaged at all, preferring to speak more broadly about how, “when we talk about issues, we should talk about the way they affect people in their lives.”

Yet under the surface one could sense each of these Democrats dancing around the deeper, more delicate issue of class. It was there in their vague yearning for “boldness” and “authenticity”— for an organizing principle that could transform “programs and plans” into a “vision.”

But most of all, it was there in the way they referred to the diverse Democratic coalition, and hinted that an identity conceived around economics — a class identity — could both embrace that diversity and transcend it.

“The unifying theme for all of those different groups is economics and wages and pensions and job security and getting investment into these communities that have been isolated over these last 30 years,” Ryan said. “The working-class people — black, white, brown, gay, straight — don’t see Democrats as a party that’s out there fighting for them.”

Still, none of these promising young Democrats framed his politics in terms of class. None really seemed ready to resituate workers — regardless of race, creed or sexuality — at the heart of their party’s identity.

One of their more seasoned colleagues, however, has been quietly doing just that.

*****

When Robert F. Kennedy was shot and killed at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles in 1968, his underdog bid for the Democratic presidential nomination was gathering steam; he had just won primaries in Indiana, Nebraska, South Dakota and California. What we remember today is how Kennedy galvanized antiwar Democrats. What we forget is that he also relied on a “blue-black” or “have-not” coalition for much of his electoral strength.

“I have a chance, just a chance, to organize a new coalition of Negroes and working-class white people against the union and party establishments,” Kennedy told journalist Jack Newfield before he died.

RFK never got that chance. But from time to time his vision of an anti-establishment, have-not coalition — a coalition of working-class whites and working-class minorities united around a progressive, populist agenda — resurfaces in Democratic op-eds, policy papers and even campaign speeches.

If anyone embodies that vision today, it’s probably Ohio’s senior senator, Sherrod Brown.

As a recent BuzzFeed profile put it, Brown, 64, has “combined a fierce populism and unapologetic progressive ideals to repeatedly win local and state elections — even as Ohio has trended increasingly conservative.” He’s won in cities and rural communities; old manufacturing hubs and college towns; diverse districts and mostly-white districts.

First elected to Congress in 1992, Brown secured reelection two years later by picking off Republican-leaning workers who’d previously backed Ross Perot’s anti-NAFTA presidential bid. In 2012, running for a second Senate term, he earned 95 percent of the black vote and outperformed his GOP rival, state Treasurer Josh Mandel, in many white, industrial parts of the state — including Mahoning and Trumbull counties, where Brown took 66 percent and 62 percent of the vote respectively.

Brown didn’t accomplish this by moderating his staunchly liberal views on social and cultural issues. He was one of only two members of Ohio’s congressional delegation to vote against the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996; he’s pro-gay, pro-choice, pro-gun-control, and pro-criminal-justice-reform. (He was the first senator to oppose Jeff Sessions’ nomination as attorney general.)

Instead, Brown keeps winning in Ohio — he’s gearing up for a rematch with Mandel next November — because he personifies Chris Murphy’s 80/20 recipe for the party: He has spent his entire career obsessing, first and foremost, over the economic well-being of workers.

Not just white workers, the way Trump did. All workers.

“I do my very best to fight for working people in this job,” Brown told me last week. “And that means all workers — whether you punch a time sheet or swipe a badge, make a salary or earn tips. Whether you’re on payroll, a contract worker, or a temp — working behind a desk, on factory floor, or behind a restaurant counter. The fact is, all workers across this country are feeling squeezed.”

Other, higher-profile Senate populists — Sanders, Elizabeth Warren — tend to view the world through an anti-Wall Street lens. Brown sees everything from a pro-worker perspective. To the casual listener, Sanders and Warren can sound like they’re bashing billionaires or bankers because they’re billionaires or bankers — a message that might resonate in liberal enclaves like Vermont or Massachusetts but doesn’t play as well in middle America.

In contrast, Brown is always careful to remind voters that the real problem isn’t corporate profits, per se — it’s that “workers,” as he told me, “are no longer sharing in the wealth they help create.”

“Look at what Bank of America did this week — downgrading Chipotle because it pays its workers too much,” he added. “This view that American workers are a cost to be minimized instead of a valuable asset to invest in is everything that’s wrong with Wall Street and our economy.”

For 18 years, Brown refused to enroll in a congressional health plan, saying he would not accept federally subsidized care until the American public could also avail itself of the same option. As a state representative in the mid-1970s, he spent long days as listening to tales of worry and woe at the steelworkers union hall in his hometown of Mansfield, Ohio. He went on to lead the bipartisan opposition to NAFTA, crossing then president Bill Clinton; more than two decades later, he helped torpedo the Trans-Pacific Partnership, defying Barack Obama. In between, Brown wrote a book called Myths of Free Trade. On election night 2016, he surprised his gloomy staffers by immediately offering to help Trump renegotiate NAFTA (a promise he’s kept). And when Brown rescued a shaggy black dog, he named it Franklin — as in Roosevelt, the Democrat who created the New Deal.

According to recent reports, Brown was Hillary Clinton’s initial vice presidential pick; some progressives tout him as a possible 2020 presidential nominee. It remains to be seen whether Brown’s moment on the national stage will ever come. But in March, the senator showed up at Ohio State University in Columbus and, with little fanfare, put forward a vision that could, he thinks, help lead his party out of the political wilderness.

“I can accept that the workforce is changing,” Brown said from behind a dinky podium. “But what we cannot accept is that more and more of our workers are paid less and have little economic security. We need to update our economic policies, our retirement policies and our labor laws to reflect today’s reality.”

The 77-page, footnote-heavy white paper that Brown released that day — Working Too Hard for Too Little: A Plan for Restoring the Value of Work in America — in some ways anticipated the “Better Deal” blueprint that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer would unveil four months later. Both aim to combat the inequality of a system that “favors short-term gains for shareholders instead of long-term benefits for workers,” as Schumer put it.

But the Better Deal — a $15 minimum wage; paid leave; corporate tax credits for retraining; a crackdown on prescription drug prices; $1 trillion for infrastructure — isn’t as bold as it (repeatedly) claims to be; much of it consists of material recycled from Hillary Clinton’s campaign. This is “a strong, bold economic program for the middle class and those working hard to get there,” Schumer insisted when he introduced the proposal. But the phrase “middle class” was a giveaway — the same old so-vague-its-meaningless rhetoric of a party that still fears the “class warfare” label.

Brown’s plan was bolder, his pitch stronger.

“Now, I can already hear the complaints coming from the corporate boardroom: ‘These ideas cost too much’; ‘We’ll have to raise prices,’” Brown said in Columbus. “Funny, you never hear those concerns raised over the cost of shareholder payouts or corporate bonuses.”

If enacted, the senator’s suite of populist policy proposals would strengthen key labor standards to reflect an economy that increasingly relies on alternative work arrangements (temps, subcontractors, freelancers, etc.). He wouldn’t just raise the minimum wage and require paid sick days and paid family leave. He would also expand collective bargaining rights. He would ensure that alternative workers get benefits too. And he would crack down on companies that force people to work off the clock; that refuse to pay the minimum wage; that deny overtime pay; that steal tips; that knowingly misclassify workers to avoid paying fair wages.

And finally — and perhaps most potently — Brown would implement what he calls a “carrot and stick” approach to big companies that slash labor costs to pad their profits.

“Republicans are going to cut taxes on the largest corporations and the wealthiest people in the country,” the senator recently explained on Pod Save America. “I think … those companies that pay a living wage and provide health benefits and retirement benefits and don’t outsource their jobs, they should get a lower tax rate. But the companies that pay $10 or $11 [an hour] so that their employees get food stamps and Medicaid and Section 8 housing vouchers? Those companies should pay a Corporate Freeloader Fee, because taxpayers have to subsidize those corporations’ wages.”

The chances of Brown’s Corporate Freeloader Fee actually becoming law? Nil under the current regime, and not much higher even if the Democrats take over. Both parties are loath to offend the business community. But as a statement of principle for the Age of Income Inequality — as a message to anxious workers that at least one party wants to make it less profitable for big companies to pay so little — it’s bolder than anything in the Better Deal.

Meanwhile, Trump himself may be providing the Democrats with some political cover. At a time when a Republican president and his allies are scoring points by railing against “global elites,” Democrats probably aren’t as susceptible to the whole class warfare attack as they used to be. And it’s highly unlikely that the party’s core class constituency — coastal, college-educated professionals — will defect to Trump’s GOP, which appalls and terrifies them, just because Dems start sticking up for workers instead of the slick “innovators” of Silicon Valley. Antagonism toward Trump will preserve the coalition; class politics could expand it.

When we spoke, Brown insisted that “I don’t pretend to have all the answers, and I don’t see it as my role to tell my colleagues how they should talk to people in their states.” But he has also suggested that if Democrats “don’t change,” the party could “wi[n] the national popular vote by 5 million instead of 3 million [in 2020] and still los[e] the Electoral College … because of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin.”

“We as a party have to fight for workers,” the senator has said elsewhere. “And this is the way to do it. Let some corporate lobbyists call us ‘antibusiness.’ Workers are going to hear this and they’ll say, ‘I’ll do better under the Democrats.’”

Who knows if workers outside of Ohio will ever hear a message like Brown’s. It’s possible, even probable, that Democrats will continue to shy away from so-called class warfare and resist even a progressive concept of class identity — a concept that sees class not as a way to turn white workers against the rest of the electorate, as Trump has done, but rather as a way to unite all working-class Americans, regardless of their other identities, around a set of reforms that might help them withstand a 21st-century economy that has rapidly and ruthlessly turned against them: black or white, gay or straight, blue-collar or white-collar.

It’s possible, even probable, that Democrats will run a couple of fairly conventional, and conventionally successful, anti-incumbent campaigns in the years ahead — that they’ll double down on the anti-Trump, anti-GOP outrage, motivate the base, promote a few Better Deal talking points in some races, ignore them in others, win the midterms and take back the White House in 2020.

But the question Democrats should be asking themselves is: What for? Millions of American workers — not just white workers, but black workers, Hispanic workers, women workers, gay workers, disabled workers — are being left behind. If the “party of the people” won’t represent them, who will?

“People in Washington like to put voters into categories: left, right, Republican, Democrat, etc.,” Brown said near the end of our interview. “But the truth is people don’t think of themselves on some sort of ideological spectrum made up by Washington. They think about ‘Who’s on my side? Who’s fighting for me?’”

“If you want to call yourself a populist, you better be ready to stick up for the little guy,” Brown insisted. “Because populism is for the people — not these people, or those people, but all people.”

Illustrations by Ivan Canu/Salzmanart.com for Yahoo News

_____

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Behind Flake’s decision to bow out of Senate, a disillusioning, disheartening year

On Tuesday afternoon, Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, the most consistent Republican critic of President Donald Trump, stunned the political world by taking the floor of the U.S. Senate to declare that he will not run for reelection in 2018 — in part as a protest against what he called the president’s “reckless, outrageous, and undignified behavior,” and in part because his feud with Trump left him facing a “narrower and narrower path to the nomination.”

Trump “is dangerous to a democracy,” Flake said. “When the next generation asks us, ‘Why didn’t you do something? Why didn’t you speak up?’ — what are we going to say? Mr. President, I rise today to say: Enough.”

The decision was shocking —an act of intraparty mutiny without recent precedent in our painfully polarized political environment.

But it was also a long time coming.

Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., speaks with reporters after a vote in the Capitol in July . (Photo: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via Getty Images)

For more than a year, Flake has repeatedly spoken out against Trump, refusing to vote for him in last November’s election and then, after Trump took office, admonishing his party’s new president on topics ranging from trade policy to the tone of his tweets.

Flake even spent several months secretly writing (and several more very publicly promoting) a book, “Conscience of a Conservative,” which compares Trump’s campaign to a “late-night infomercial” that was “free of significant thought,” then goes on to explain in pained, I-wish-I-didn’t-have-to-do-this detail why almost none of what Trump stands for — banning Muslims, building a border wall — actually qualifies, in Flake’s view, as conservative.

Trump, for his part, took to calling Flake “toxic” and threatening to spend $10 million to bury him in a primary.

But while the Beltway media tends to frame Flake’s feud with Trump as a personality clash, the truth goes deeper.

What were the forces and factors paved the way for Flake’s real-life Bulworth moment? I recently went to Arizona to find out.

***

In August, President Trump flew to Phoenix to rally thousands of his supporters.

The state’s junior senator was not among them.

Early that morning, Flake, 54, left his home in Mesa, a Phoenix suburb, and traveled 120 miles south, to Tucson.

Technically, Flake’s road trip didn’t have anything to do with Trump. But the symbolism was striking. At first Flake’s press secretary told me the senator would not be participating in any public events while the president was in Arizona. The night before Trump arrived, however, she forwarded an invite to a small ceremony at the Pima County sheriff’s department. I wound up being the only national reporter in attendance.

At the event, police officers presented Flake with two awards commending him for the courage he displayed on June 14, when James Hodgkinson, an apparently deranged left-wing radical activist, opened fire on a team of Republicans practicing for the annual congressional baseball game.

Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz. walks toward media gathered at the scene of a shooting at a baseball field in Alexandria, Va. on June 14, 2017, during a Congressional baseball practice where House Majority Whip Steve Scalise of La. was shot. (Photo: Kevin S. Vineys/AP)

“Without regard for his safety, Sen. Flake went to the assistance of wounded colleagues, potentially exposing himself to further danger during a dynamic and still unfolding situation,” said Pima County Sheriff Mark Napier. “His selfless actions and decisiveness likely saved lives.”

An emotional Flake insisted he wasn’t “deserving” of an award “at all, frankly.” But he did want to say a few words.

“I just remember thinking as the shots first rang out, seeing the bullets pitch off the gravel near the dugout: ‘Why? Why here? Why us? Who could look at a field of middle-aged members of Congress playing baseball and see the enemy?’” Flake told the assembled cops. “We have to stop ascribing the worst motives to our political opponents. It’s the language we use, the rhetoric we use. Obviously I’m a fierce partisan at times, when you argue on policy. But it ought to end there. Fellow Americans aren’t our enemies.”

If Flake’s cri de coeur was meant as a message to Trump, it didn’t get through. Before his big speech that night at the Phoenix Convention Center, the president was seen huddling with Arizona state Treasurer Jeff DeWit and former state GOP Chairman Robert Graham, both of whom are considering Senate runs in 2018.

Later, on stage, Trump couldn’t resist lashing out — first at Flake’s Arizona Senate colleague, John McCain, who is battling brain cancer, and then at Flake himself (without mentioning him by name).

“Nobody wants me to talk about your other senator, who’s weak on borders, weak on crime, so I won’t talk about him,” Trump said. “Nobody knows who the hell he is.”

President Donald Trump speaks at a “Make America Great Again” rally in Phoenix, Arizona, on August 22, 2017. (Photo: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images)

***

It’s true (as I’ve noted before) that Flake and Trump are by background and temperament very much opposites. Trump is an Easterner, born and bred in Queens, N.Y., the son of a wealthy real-estate developer; Flake is a fifth-generation Arizonan who grew up on a cattle ranch in a small town founded by his ancestors (Snowflake, Ariz., pop. 5,576). Trump can’t ever recall asking God for forgiveness; Flake, an alumnus of Brigham Young University and a former missionary to South Africa, is as Mormon as they come. Trump is reflexively coarse and bombastic; Flake, with his formal posture, G-rated vocabulary and stern but kindly tone, can seem less like a 21st century Washington pol than a moralizing television dad from 1956.

Yet there’s more at stake here than style.

Over the last six decades, the story of the Republican Party has been the story of movement conservatism. Free-market economists such as Friedrich Hayek inspired William F. Buckley to start National Review; National Review fueled the rise of Flake’s hero and predecessor, Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, who ripped the 1964 GOP presidential nomination away from the Eastern establishment (and wrote the original “Conscience of a Conservative”); Goldwater paved the way for Ronald Reagan, who was twice elected governor of California and president of the United States; Reagan begat generations of conservative Republicans who rallied around his gospel of limited government, muscular internationalism and Christian moralism, transforming the GOP in the process.

Among today’s Republicans, Flake is perhaps the purest distillation of this tradition: a former executive director of Arizona’s free-market, small-government Goldwater Institute who has spent five terms in the House and one term in the Senate fighting for earmark bans, spending cuts, entitlement reform, free-trade deals and the spread of democracy abroad (particularly in Cuba). His lifetime American Conservative Union rating is 93 percent.

Trump, in contrast, won the 2016 election by rejecting each of the three main tenets of movement conservatism. He trashed free-trade agreements and promised to preserve entitlements. He bad-mouthed NATO and vowed to disengage abroad. And he bragged about grabbing married women by the genitals.

“Of all the illusions Trump has dispelled … none is more significant than the illusion of the conservative movement,” wrote political science professor Samuel Goldman last year. “In state after state, voters indicated that they did not care much about conservative orthodoxy on the economy, foreign policy, or what used to be called family values.”

U.S. Republican Congressmen, Jeff Flake (L) and Mike Conaway (C) walk through Old Havana, December 17, 2006. Flake is leading a delegation of 10 Republican and Democratic representatives for a three-day visit to Cuba. (Photo: Reuters)

Flake’s 2018 reelection campaign was set to be the first real test of whether Trumpism could spread beyond Trump and take over the GOP. Flake, who was widely considered one of the two most vulnerable Republican senators in the country, had made it clearer than any other GOP incumbent that he opposed this path. As a result, the senator had already attracted one pro-Trump primary challenger in former state Sen. Kelli Ward, and early polls (all of them from small right-wing firms) showed Ward ahead by double-digit margins.

In Tuesday’s speech on the Senate floor, Flake predicted that the “spell” of Trumpism “will eventually break” and that his brand of movement conservatism will someday triumph.

“For the moment [Republicans] have given in or given up on those core principles in favor of the more viscerally satisfying anger and resentment,” Flake sighed. But “we will return to ourselves once more, and I say the sooner the better.”

But that outcome is far from certain — and Flake’s dramatic decision to step aside is a sign that so far, Trump has the upper hand.

If the president turns out to be a party of one — a celebrity-in-chief with no ideological coattails — then Flake and his fellow movement conservatives could recover. But if Goldman is right — if Trump has shown that rank-and-file Republicans care more about putting “America First” than, say, reforming Medicare — then movement conservatism itself could be a thing of the past.

After the awards ceremony in Tucson, I caught up with Flake in a hallway. He was rushing to his next appointment, but I was able to ask a couple of questions before he disappeared behind a closed door.

Given Trump’s success and support within the GOP, do you worry that the moment for movement conservatism is over? I wondered. Have Republican voters moved on?

Flake grimaced. “That’s my concern,” he said. “My fear is that this kind of populist, nationalist, antitrade movement is not a governing philosophy.” Another grimace. “I’m worried that it could take over.”

***

Spend a few days in Arizona with the GOP base, and you can see why Flake was right to worry.

By the time Arizona Republicans select their Senate nominee next August, Kelli Ward may no longer have the field all to herself. The White House has tried to persuade a more prominent Republican, such as Graham or DeWit, to enter the race, and even former sheriff of Maricopa County Joe Arpaio, the anti-immigrant hardliner who recently received Trump’s first presidential pardon, is claiming that he’s mulling a bid.

“I’m sure getting a lot of people around the state asking me,” Arpaio told the Washington Examiner earlier this year. “All I’m saying is the door is open and we’ll see what happens. I’ve got support. I know what support I have.”

Right-wing Flake challenger Kelli Ward poses with a supporter outside President Donald Trump’s Aug. 22 rally in Phoenix. (Photo: Andrew Romano/Yahoo News)

But for now, Ward, a 48-year-old osteopathic doctor, is the only game in town.

As Flake was leaving the Phoenix area for Tucson, Ward, who lives in Lake Havasu City, made a beeline for the site of Trump’s rally. A dozen volunteers assembled in the lobby of the nearby Renaissance hotel, where an organizer passed out a bunch of T-shirts in Ward’s signature bright yellow. The logo on the front was an Arizona license plate with the words “TRUMP 2016” on one side and “WARD 2018” on the other; the back of the shirt said #MAKEARIZONAGREATAGAIN.

“They’re brand-new,” one volunteer boasted.

Outside, a line of eager Trump fans had already encircled an entire city block, even though the rally was still five hours away and the temperature was 106°F. Ward’s street team set up a folding table at the corner of Second and Washington and went to work. Goal No. 1: gathering the 12,000 or so signatures needed to get Ward on the primary ballot. Goal No. 2: convincing as many Trump voters as possible to wear yellow “Ward 2018” stickers.

“Any Kelli Ward supporters here?” shouted volunteer Susan McAlpine, a 64-year-old retired teacher with dangly earrings and a thick Boston accent. No response.

“Any Jeff Flake fans here?” she added.

“F*** Jeff Flake,” one man immediately snapped.

“Flake the Flake!” another chimed in.

“Might as well be a Democrat,” a third muttered.

McAlpine pulled me aside. “As soon as they hear the name Flake, they’re all like ‘WHAT?!?!’” she said.

By the time Ward herself materialized on the corner and began to shake hands and smile for selfies in (what else?) a bright yellow blazer, McAlpine & Co. had canvassed the entire block. More than half the attendees now seemed to be sporting WARD 2018 decals. Nearby, consultant Brent Lowder smiled approvingly.

Lowder’s presence in Phoenix is one of several early signs of how much has changed since Ward’s last campaign. In 2016, she attempted to unseat McCain and wound up losing the GOP primary by more than 11 percentage points. Ward made several rookie mistakes that year, plagiarizing a Mitt Romney ad, mocking McCain as “old” and “weak” and failing to fully dispel the opposition’s “Chemtrail Kelli” caricature (which gained traction after Ward hosted a town hall meeting in 2015 to discuss the conspiracy theory — a theory she says she doesn’t believe — that the trails of white condensation emanating from airplane engines are actually dangerous chemicals being dispersed by the government).

But the biggest difference between then and now is that back then, Trump seemed likely to lose the election. Now he’s leader of the free world.

The rise of Trumpism has, in turn, boosted Ward. On Aug. 9, the reclusive hedge fund billionaire and top Trump donor Robert Mercer sent $300,000 to Ward’s super-PAC. Two days later, Lowder and his partner, Eric Beach, signed on to run Ward’s campaign; they previously led the largest pro-Trump super-PAC in the country, raising $30 million during the 2016 election cycle. And on Aug. 17, Trump himself tweeted about Ward, stopping just short of formally endorsing her.

“Great to see that Dr. Kelli Ward is running against Flake Jeff Flake, who is WEAK on borders, crime and a non-factor in Senate,” the president wrote. “He’s toxic!”

Great to see that Dr. Kelli Ward is running against Flake Jeff Flake, who is WEAK on borders, crime and a non-factor in Senate. He’s toxic!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 17, 2017

The morning after Trump’s rally in Phoenix, Ward still sounded delighted — and surprised — by all the national attention.

“Our momentum has been YUGE!” Ward told a crowd of 100 local Republicans sipping coffee and nibbling cookies in the Navajo Room of Arizona’s Sun Lakes Country Club. “It’s been ‘big league!’ The media coverage alone — there were 3,000 hits about that tweet!”

Pacing back and forth between two life-size cardboard cutouts of Trump, Ward rattled off all the things she agreed with the president about: building the border wall, halting Muslim immigration, repealing Obamacare, ending sanctuary cities.

“Our race is going to be ground zero for the heart and soul of the Republican Party,” Ward said. “Do we want to be what we’ve had for decade after decade — the same thing that has gotten us into this position where we can’t get anything done? Or do we want to be the party of freedom and hope and opportunity? That’s what Donald Trump has offered us as president — and that’s what we have to continue in 2018. This is the new GOP.”

Suddenly, Ward’s phone rang. She raised her hand and shushed the crowd; the room went silent. It was Sean Hannity’s producer. Unable to resist a last-minute interview request — and the publicity it promised — Ward decided to take the call in the middle of her appearance.

For a few minutes, Ward just listened. Then she smiled. “Thank you!” she said. Ward covered the phone and turned to the crowd. “Sean Hannity just endorsed me!” she whispered. “Yay!”

After the event, I talked to Joyce Sample, a retiree from Chandler, about why she wasn’t supporting Flake.

Ward receives Sean Hannity’s endorsement in the middle of a campaign stop at the Sun Lakes Country Club in Sun Lakes, Ariz. (Photo: Andrew Romano/Yahoo News)

“Trump is now his president,” Sample said. “As a Republican, it’s Flake’s duty to go along with him. He is not doing it. That’s why I don’t like Flake. He’s not being supportive.”

As the room emptied out and Ward posed for a final photo with cardboard Trump, I asked her to explain how “the new GOP” differs from the old GOP.

“Jeff Flake is a globalist,” she said. “He’s not about making sure the United States has as good a deal as everybody else. But the new GOP is about Americanism. That’s what Donald Trump is pushing the Republican Party toward — and that’s what’s at stake in this primary.”

But Flake would say Americanism is not conservatism at all, I suggested. In fact, that’s what his entire book is about.

“You mean his hit piece on the president?” Ward snapped. “It’s all very condescending. He’s basically tapping all of us on the head who are conservative and saying, ‘You don’t really know what conservatism is.’

“Things do change over time,” Ward continued. “Things work or they don’t work. You can’t be stagnant. You have to look at the direction you want to go and see if the path you’re taking is getting you there. And if it isn’t, you have to take a turn.”

***

A few days earlier, before the Trump tornado touched down in Arizona, Flake attended a breakfast hosted by the East Valley Chambers of Commerce, 20 miles southeast of Phoenix. The theme: “Good Government.”

The senator was in his element. Men in suits and women in heels tapped at their smartphones. A large screen hovering overhead listed nine corporate and institutional sponsors. Attendees held crisp copies of “Conscience of a Conservative,” which Flake happily signed as he made his way to the stage.

“Arizona tends to elect senators who stand on principle and are independent in their thinking,” said the executive tasked with introducing Flake. “Certainly, Sen. Flake is that.”

Sen. Jeff Flake signs a copy of his book Conscience of a Conservative at a Chamber of Commerce breakfast in Gilbert, Ariz. (Photo: Andrew Romano/yahoo News)

In his remarks, and in his responses to questions, Flake sounded like the same senator I profiled in 2015. He extolled the virtues of NAFTA, arguing that it “has been good for Arizona.” He described Trump’s “rejection of the Trans-Pacific Partnership” as “a big mistake that will haunt us for a long time.” He called for a grand, bipartisan bargain on the deficit, saying that the only way to produce a “sustainable” budget is to “work across the aisle.” He insisted that “when people talk about one solution on the border, they haven’t traveled the border” — and proudly reminded the audience that he was one of the main architects of the Gang of Eight’s comprehensive immigration reform bill in 2013. On North Korea, he warned that “our allies need to know we are steady and predictable — in my mind, that’s what a conservative is.” As for foreign policy in general, “we need to lead, as we have in the past.”

“This vitriol we have, it’s preventing us from achieving conservative ends,” Flake concluded. “We’ve got to get away from calling our opponents ‘losers’ or ‘clowns.’ It just makes it difficult to work with them on big issues.”

Listening to Flake, it was hard to believe that recent polls have shown him with an approval rating as low as 18 percent. Perhaps that’s what happens when you refuse, in such a polarized era, to pander to your party’s base — and actively antagonize the president they adore.

Flake meets the press after his Chamber of Commerce event in gilbert, Ariz. (Photo: andrew Romano /Yahoo News)

You become a man without a country.

As we got to the end of that hall in the Pima County sheriff’s office, I asked Flake one last question: Has your reelection contest become a referendum on conservatism itself?

Flake chuckled nervously. “Whether it is or not, I am who I am,” he said. “This is what I think traditional conservatism is. And I do think people will rally around it — given the alternative.”

Flake can be very convincing. But this time, it didn’t sound like he was trying to convince me. It sounded like he was trying to convince himself.

On Tuesday, he finally revealed that he had failed.

_____

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Portrait of a mass killer: The details don’t add up

Stephen Paddock. (Photo: Facebook)

As mass shootings have become almost routine in America — at least 1,518 have taken place since 2012’s Sandy Hook massacre, according to the Gun Violence Archive — so too have the details that have typically emerged about the shooters themselves in the hours after these heinous attacks.

He kept to himself, a co-worker will say. (The perpetrator is almost always a “he.”) Didn’t talk much, others will add. Troubled. Angry. Political. Ideological. Bigoted. Even mentally ill. The portrait never matches up in every single one of these respects — but most of the time, it’s fairly close.

The strange and scary thing about Stephen Craig Paddock, the 64-year-old Nevada resident who secretly hauled 10 or more rifles to the 32nd floor of Las Vegas’s Mandalay Bay Resort Sunday before opening fire on concertgoers below, killing at least 58 and injuring more than 515, is that few if any of the details that have surfaced at this point play to type.

A mass killer’s biography usually helps explain his actions, offering hope that the next shooter can somehow be stopped.

But so far, the man behind the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history is too much of an enigma to provide even that coldest of comforts.

“We have no idea how or why this happened,” Paddock’s brother, Eric, told ABC News, adding that there is “exactly no reason for this” and that there are “no secrets in his [brother’s] past.”

“As they drill into his life, there will be nothing to be found,” Paddock concluded. “We don’t understand.”

(ISIS put out a statement claiming Paddock as a late convert to Islam and a member of the terror group, but as of late Monday there was no corroboration of the claim. A quick Google search suggests there is no mosque in Mesquite, a city of around 17,000.)

In this photo provided by the Mesquite, Nev., Police Department, police personnel stand outside the home of Stephen Paddock on Monday, Oct. 2, 2017, in Mesquite. Police identified Paddock as the gunman at a music festival Sunday evening. (Photo: Mesquite Police via AP)

Before Sunday, Stephen Paddock seemed be easing into his senior-citizen years in relatively unremarkable — and un-shooter-like — fashion.

He lived in a new, cookie-cutter house in Mesquite, Nev., 80 miles northeast of Las Vegas.

With the exception of minor citation, now resolved, he had never had a run-in with the law, either in Las Vegas, Mesquite, or in Texas, where he lived before moving to Nevada.

Paddock was active: a licensed hunter and pilot who owned two planes, according to public records.

To earn his private pilot license, which recently lapsed, Paddock would have had to prove that he hadn’t been diagnosed with psychosis, bipolar disorder or any severe personality disorder.

Paddock wasn’t a loner, either: he had a girlfriend, 62-year-old Marilou Danley, and he had been married before, 27 years ago, to a woman now living in Southern California.

And Paddock did well for himself, financially: first as an accountant or auditor (at one point for Lockheed Martin), then buying, selling and managing properties, and finally, in retirement, as a “professional gambler” (his term) who, according to a Washington Post report, would take frequent trips to Las Vegas with Danley to play high-stakes poker.

Broken windows are seen on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino after a lone gunman opened fired on the Route 91 Harvest country music festival on October 2, 2017 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo: David Becker/Getty Images)

Neighbors in Florida, where Paddock owned another home, described to the Post’s reporters a couple that lived on “Vegas time,” staying “up till midnight and sleep[ing] in till noon” — which is unusual, perhaps, for most sixtysomethings, but less so for the tens of thousands of casinogoers who populate the Silver State.

“My brother is not like you and me,” Eric Paddock told the Post. “He sends me a text that says he won $250,000 at the casino.”

Some neighbors in Reno, where Stephen Paddock owned yet another home, told the Post’s reporters that he was “reclusive” or “quiet” or “unfriendly.” But others, in Mesquite or in Florida, where Paddock seemed to spend more time, said that he was “a good neighbor” and that “there was nothing strange about him”

Either way, these conflicting accounts could accurately describe the same person; moods change. Neither, however, suggests a man on the verge of shooting hundreds of people.

By far the most unusual thing about Paddock isn’t really about Paddock at all. Paddock’s father, Benjamin Hoskins Paddock, it turns out, was a notorious criminal himself; he even appeared on the FBI’s Top Ten Most Wanted list from 1969 to 1977. Born in Wisconsin in 1926, the elder Paddock, whose nicknames included “Old Baldy” and “Chromedome,” robbed banks in Arizona, escaped prison in Texas and tried to start a new life in Oregon as “Bingo Bruce,” the manager of a bingo parlor — an effort that ended in 1987 when the state attorney general filed seven bingo-related racketeering charges against him. As an FBI wanted poster once put it, the elder Paddock was a man who had been “diagnosed as psychopathic,” seemed to have “suicidal tendencies” and “should be considered armed and very dangerous.”

Perhaps Stephen Paddock inherited those traits from his father; perhaps they lay dormant until the son hit his mid-sixties and decided, suddenly, to commit mass murder. The rapid spread on social media of stories about “Bingo Bruce” suggests that we want to believe as much.

Or perhaps not. We simply don’t know. So far — and it’s early yet — all we know is what Paddock’s brother Eric has told us.

“There’s absolutely no sense, no reason he did this,” Eric Paddock told the Post. “He’s just a guy who played video poker and took cruises and ate burritos at Taco Bell. There’s no political affiliation that we know of. There’s no religious affiliation that we know of.”

“We know nothing,” Paddock concluded.

Eventually, more information will surface. But right now, in a moment when we’re used to explaining these shooters in familiar terms — religious, political, psychological, whatever — none of the usual explanations apply. Stephen Craig Paddock seems as if he could have been anyone. And that, ultimately, may be the most terrifying thing about him.  

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Confront Trump or try to work with him? California Dems are at the forefront of the debateConfront Trump or try to work with him? California Dems are at the forefront of the debate SEO: California Democrats debate how much to oppose Trump Summary: Deep-blue California boasts of how it’s resisting the Trump agenda, but the Democrats are divided between “protesters” and “pragmatists.” Some of the opposition is more rhetorical than substantive, and the most ambitious item on the anti-Trump agenda, a statewide single-payer health-care plan, went down in flames. Takeaways: - California Democrats introduced more than 35 “#stateofresistance” bills meant to block the president’s policy agenda - “Donald Trump is a threat to everything that we stand for as a great state,” Senate Democratic leader Kevin de Leon recently told the Los Angeles Times. - Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon said in February that he was tired of talking about Trump and fretted publicly last week that, at times, Democrats had “devolved into symbolism.” - The day after Donald Trump was elected president, California’s top two legislators announced in a joint statement that the Golden State would be “lead[ing] the resistance” to Trump’s agenda. “California will defend its people,” declared Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon and Senate President pro Tempore Kevin de Leon, both Democrats. “We are not going to allow one election to reverse generations of progress.” For the next 10 months, much ado was made over California’s pugilistic posture toward the president. Ambitious left-coast politicians seized on every available opportunity to remind voters that they opposed the man in the Oval Office. Again and again, California touted itself the one place powerful enough — and progressive enough, with Democrats leading the entire government — to thwart the commander in chief. But how much of this “resistance” was rhetorical, and how much was substantive? Now’s the time to ask. On Friday, California’s legislative year finally ended. Lawmakers departed Sacramento for their home districts, not to return until January. In their wake they left a trail of legislative successes — and failures — that hold important lessons for national Democrats still figuring out how to move forward under Trump’s rule. The main takeaway? That even in a progressive paradise like California, where Republicans are almost entirely powerless, the Democratic Party is deeply divided over how, exactly, to resist: with protest or with pragmatism. On Sunday, Rendon described 2017 as California’s “most productive and progressive legislative session in memory.” He had a point. Legislators sent hundreds of bills to Gov. Jerry Brown, nearly all of which addressed key liberal priorities: lower drug costs, free community college, more parental leave, increased education funding, more affordable housing. It’s also true that most of Sacramento’s big, headline-grabbing moves wound up being about Trump in one way or another. Over the course of 2017, California Democrats introduced more than 35 “#stateofresistance” bills meant to block the president’s policy agenda; four have since become law or part of the state budget, and eight more await the governor’s signature. After Trump’s refused to release his income tax returns, for instance, Sacramento sent Brown a bill – not yet signed -- that would deny California ballot access to any future presidential candidate who does the same. When Trump yanked America out of the Paris climate agreement, Sacramento extended Brown’s landmark cap-and-trade program. When Trump continued to rail against illegal immigrants, Sacramento set aside $65 million to fund legal assistance for residents facing deportation — and then, after Trump announced that he was ending President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, ponied up another $10 million in loans for college students brought to the country illegally as young children. The list goes on. When Trump’s education secretary Betsy DeVos moved to roll back Obama-era Title IX guidance, Sacramento beefed up state regulations designed to prevent sexual harassment and sexual violence at schools and colleges. And after Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers stepped up their raids under Trump, Sacramento passed a bill that would transform California into a “sanctuary state” of sorts by limiting communication between law enforcement and federal immigration authorities. The legislature’s resolutions, which do not carry the force of law, were even more antagonistic toward Trump. One demanded that Congress censure the president for his equivocal response to last month’s violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville; another seized on his popular-vote loss to call for the end of the Electoral College. All in all, Sacramento passed more than two dozen Trump-bashing resolutions before adjourning for the year. And yet, despite the flurry of anti-Trump activity, serious fissures developed over the course of the session between two types of Democrats. Call them the Protesters and the Pragmatists. The protesters, led by De Leon, tended to be concentrated in the more liberal state Senate. “Donald Trump is a threat to everything that we stand for as a great state,” de Leon recently told the Los Angeles Times. “So, it’s not just as president of the Senate, or as a senator, but more importantly as an ordinary citizen and son of a single immigrant mother do I take these positions.” Meanwhile, Rendon emerged as brake on the Senate’s ambitions, declaring as early as February that he was tired of talking about Trump and publicly fretting last week that, at times, Democrats had “devolved into symbolism.” As a result, many anti-Trump bills were “scaled back from their original sweeping premise,” as the Times put it; others “flamed out entirely.” De Leon’s sanctuary state bill squeaked through at the last minute, but only after the governor and police softened its protections for undocumented immigrants convicted of certain crimes. De León’s proposal to enshrine federal air and water protections into state law — a preemptive response to likely rollbacks from the Trump administration — fizzled without a vote Friday night. And two bills meant to punish any private company willing to aid Trump in his bid to build a wall on the country’s southern border also failed to advance. Sacramento’s most spectacular flameout, however, involved single-payer healthcare (as we previously reported). With Trump’s push to repeal Obamacare dominating the agenda in Washington, D.C. — and California Democrats suddenly enjoying supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature — two state senators earlier this year introduced a bill (SB 562) designed to wipe out California’s private insurance market and create a single-payer system. The old barriers, it seemed, had finally broken down. The stars were aligned. But after SB 562 passed the Senate, Rendon (who insists he supports single-payer) abruptly intervened in late June and shelved the bill for the remainder of the 2017 session. “SB 562 was sent to the Assembly woefully incomplete,” Rendon snapped. “Even senators who voted for SB 562 noted there are potentially fatal flaws in the bill, including the fact it does not address many serious issues, such as financing, delivery of care, cost controls, or the realities of needed action by the Trump Administration and voters to make SB 562 a genuine piece of legislation.” Gov. Brown, meanwhile, piled on. “Where do you get the extra money?” Brown told reporters. “You take a problem and say I’m going to solve it by something that’s even a bigger problem, which makes no sense.” Progressive activists were furious. Rendon and his family received death threats. Outside the speaker’s Capitol office, one protester pretended to stab a bear in the back with a fake knife; the blade had “Rendon” written on it. Sacramento’s single-payer implosion neatly illustrates the larger conflict that will continue to bedevil national Democrats as they struggle to chart a path back to power in the Age of Trump. Is protesting the president with passionate rhetoric and pie-in-the-sky policy proposals the best way to regain control in Washington, D.C.? Or is pragmatism the smarter play? It’s a conflict that’s been on vivid display on Capitol Hill in recent days. Last week, Sen. Bernie Sanders finally introduced his signature “Medicare for all” legislation, and several top 2020 presidential hopefuls — Sen. Kamala Harris of California, Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York — quickly signed on to cosponsor the bill. But Nancy Pelosi — the leader of the House Democrats, and a Californian herself — did not. “I don’t think [single payer] is a litmus test,” Pelosi told the Washington Post, instead calling on Democrats to release a wide range of proposals to fix and improve the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a., Obamacare). “It isn't helpful to tinkle all over the ACA right now," Pelosi added in an interview with MSNBC. "Right now we need to support the Affordable Care Act and defeat what the Republicans are doing." This isn’t the only time Pelosi has angered the protest wing of her party. Earlier this year, Pelosi refused to require that every Democrat support abortion rights, noting that many of her relatives “are not pro-choice.” (“You think I’m kicking them out of the Democratic Party?” she scoffed.) And in recent weeks, Pelosi and her Senate counterpart, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, have struck a pair of deals with President Trump, first on the debt ceiling and then on DACA. In response, angry protestors confronted Pelosi in San Francisco on Monday, chanting “all of us or none of us” and “we are not a bargaining chip.” Pelosi’s strategy is fairly simple: accomplish as much as possible, given the circumstances — then let the electoral chips fall where they may. “You can never satisfy everybody,” she told the Post last week. “We don’t have a responsibility to get nothing done.” Whether that sort of pragmatism will pay off at the ballot box remains to be seen. Meanwhile, the protests will continue — in California and beyond.

Tempore Kevin de Leon, Anthony Rendon, Donald Trump. (Yahoo News photo illustration; photos: Mark J. Terril/AP, Rich Pedroncelli/AP, Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images, AP)

The day after Donald Trump was elected president, California’s top two legislators announced in a joint statement that the Golden State would be “lead[ing] the resistance” to Trump’s agenda.

“California will defend its people,” declared Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon and Senate President pro Tempore Kevin de Leon, both Democrats. “We are not going to allow one election to reverse generations of progress.”

For the next 10 months, much ado was made over California’s pugilistic posture toward the president. Ambitious left-coast politicians seized on every available opportunity to remind voters that they opposed the man in the Oval Office. Again and again, California touted itself the one place powerful enough — and progressive enough, with Democrats leading the entire government — to thwart the commander in chief.

But how much of this “resistance” was rhetorical, and how much was substantive?

Now’s the time to ask. On Friday, California’s legislative year finally ended. Lawmakers departed Sacramento for their home districts, not to return until January. In their wake they left a trail of legislative successes — and failures — that hold important lessons for national Democrats still figuring out how to move forward under Trump’s rule.

The main takeaway? That even in a progressive paradise like California, where Republicans are almost entirely powerless, the Democratic Party is deeply divided over how, exactly, to resist: with protest or with pragmatism.

On Sunday, Rendon described 2017 as California’s “most productive and progressive legislative session in memory.” He had a point. Legislators sent hundreds of bills to Gov. Jerry Brown, nearly all of which addressed key liberal priorities: lower drug costs, free community college, more parental leave, increased education funding, more affordable housing.

It’s also true that most of Sacramento’s big, headline-grabbing moves wound up being about Trump in one way or another. Over the course of 2017, California Democrats introduced more than 35 “#stateofresistance” bills meant to block the president’s policy agenda; four have since become law or part of the state budget, and eight more await the governor’s signature.

After Trump’s refused to release his income tax returns, for instance, Sacramento sent Brown a bill – not yet signed — that would deny California ballot access to any future presidential candidate who does the same. When Trump yanked America out of the Paris climate agreement, Sacramento extended Brown’s landmark cap-and-trade program. When Trump continued to rail against illegal immigrants, Sacramento set aside $65 million to fund legal assistance for residents facing deportation — and then, after Trump announced that he was ending President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, ponied up another $10 million in loans for college students brought to the country illegally as young children.

State Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de Leon, D-Los Angeles, from left, Gov. Jerry Brown and Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, D-Paramount, walk through the Capitol to a news conference to discuss the passage of a pair of climate change bills, Monday, July 17, 2017, in Sacramento, Calif. Brown backed the measures, which will extend the state’s cap-and-trade program and aims to improve local air quality. (Photo: Rich Pedroncelli/AP)

The list goes on. When Trump’s education secretary Betsy DeVos moved to roll back Obama-era Title IX guidance, Sacramento beefed up state regulations designed to prevent sexual harassment and sexual violence at schools and colleges. And after Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers stepped up their raids under Trump, Sacramento passed a bill that would transform California into a “sanctuary state” of sorts by limiting communication between law enforcement and federal immigration authorities.

The legislature’s resolutions, which do not carry the force of law, were even more antagonistic toward Trump. One demanded that Congress censure the president for his equivocal response to last month’s violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville; another seized on his popular-vote loss to call for the end of the Electoral College. All in all, Sacramento passed more than two dozen Trump-bashing resolutions before adjourning for the year.

And yet, despite the flurry of anti-Trump activity, serious fissures developed over the course of the session between two types of Democrats. Call them the Protesters and the Pragmatists.

The protesters, led by De Leon, tended to be concentrated in the more liberal state Senate.

“Donald Trump is a threat to everything that we stand for as a great state,” de Leon recently told the Los Angeles Times. “So, it’s not just as president of the Senate, or as a senator, but more importantly as an ordinary citizen and son of a single immigrant mother do I take these positions.”

Meanwhile, Rendon emerged as brake on the Senate’s ambitions, declaring as early as February that he was tired of talking about Trump and publicly fretting last week that, at times, Democrats had “devolved into symbolism.”

As a result, many anti-Trump bills were “scaled back from their original sweeping premise,” as the Times put it; others “flamed out entirely.” De Leon’s sanctuary state bill squeaked through at the last minute, but only after the governor and police softened its protections for undocumented immigrants convicted of certain crimes. De León’s proposal to enshrine federal air and water protections into state law — a preemptive response to likely rollbacks from the Trump administration — fizzled without a vote Friday night. And two bills meant to punish any private company willing to aid Trump in his bid to build a wall on the country’s southern border also failed to advance.

Members of the California Nurses Association and supporters rally in the rotunda at the Capitol calling for a single-payer health plan, Wednesday, June 28, 2017, in Sacramento, Calif. The demonstrators were demanding that Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, D-Paramount, bring a health care bill, SB562, by state Senators Ricardo Lara, D-Bell Garden, and Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, to a vote in the Assembly. (Photo: Rich Pedroncelli/AP)

Sacramento’s most spectacular flameout, however, involved single-payer healthcare (as we previously reported). With Trump’s push to repeal Obamacare dominating the agenda in Washington, D.C. — and California Democrats suddenly enjoying supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature — two state senators earlier this year introduced a bill (SB 562) designed to wipe out California’s private insurance market and create a single-payer system.

The old barriers, it seemed, had finally broken down. The stars were aligned. But after SB 562 passed the Senate, Rendon (who insists he supports single-payer) abruptly intervened in late June and shelved the bill for the remainder of the 2017 session.

“SB 562 was sent to the Assembly woefully incomplete,” Rendon snapped. “Even senators who voted for SB 562 noted there are potentially fatal flaws in the bill, including the fact it does not address many serious issues, such as financing, delivery of care, cost controls, or the realities of needed action by the Trump Administration and voters to make SB 562 a genuine piece of legislation.”

Gov. Brown, meanwhile, piled on.

“Where do you get the extra money?” Brown told reporters. “You take a problem and say I’m going to solve it by something that’s even a bigger problem, which makes no sense.”

Progressive activists were furious. Rendon and his family received death threats. Outside the speaker’s Capitol office, one protester pretended to stab a bear in the back with a fake knife; the blade had “Rendon” written on it.

Sacramento’s single-payer implosion neatly illustrates the larger conflict that will continue to bedevil national Democrats as they struggle to chart a path back to power in the Age of Trump. Is protesting the president with passionate rhetoric and pie-in-the-sky policy proposals the best way to regain control in Washington, D.C.? Or is pragmatism the smarter play?

It’s a conflict that’s been on vivid display on Capitol Hill in recent days. Last week, Sen. Bernie Sanders finally introduced his signature “Medicare for all” legislation, and several top 2020 presidential hopefuls — Sen. Kamala Harris of California, Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York — quickly signed on to cosponsor the bill.

But Nancy Pelosi — the leader of the House Democrats, and a Californian herself — did not.

“I don’t think [single payer] is a litmus test,” Pelosi told the Washington Post, instead calling on Democrats to release a wide range of proposals to fix and improve the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a., Obamacare).

“It isn’t helpful to tinkle all over the ACA right now,” Pelosi added in an interview with MSNBC. “Right now we need to support the Affordable Care Act and defeat what the Republicans are doing.”

Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the top Democrat in the U.S. House, discusses immigration reform before a group of students, faculty and others at California State University, Sacramento, Monday, Sept. 18, 2017, in Sacramento, Calif. Earlier she was shouted down by young immigrants at an event in San Francisco where she was trying to drum up support for legislation the would grant legal status to young immigrants. (Photo: Rich Pedroncelli/AP)

This isn’t the only time Pelosi has angered the protest wing of her party. Earlier this year, Pelosi refused to require that every Democrat support abortion rights, noting that many of her relatives “are not pro-choice.” (“You think I’m kicking them out of the Democratic Party?” she scoffed.) And in recent weeks, Pelosi and her Senate counterpart, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, have struck a pair of deals with President Trump, first on the debt ceiling and then on DACA. In response, angry protestors confronted Pelosi in San Francisco on Monday, chanting “all of us or none of us” and “we are not a bargaining chip.”

Pelosi’s strategy is fairly simple: accomplish as much as possible, given the circumstances — then let the electoral chips fall where they may. “You can never satisfy everybody,” she told the Post last week. “We don’t have a responsibility to get nothing done.”

Whether that sort of pragmatism will pay off at the ballot box remains to be seen. Meanwhile, the protests will continue — in California and beyond.

_____

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[andrewromanoyahoo]

Arizona’s Jeff Flake fights for conservatism's future, and his own

Republican Sen. Jeff Flake speaks with reporters after a vote in the Capitol in July. (Photo: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via Getty Images)

PHOENIX — Last Tuesday, President Trump flew here from Washington to rally thousands of his supporters.

Sen. Jeff Flake was not among them.

Early that morning, Flake, 54, left his home in Mesa, a Phoenix suburb, and traveled 120 miles south, to Tucson. The decision wasn’t exactly surprising. For more than a year, Flake has been Trump’s most consistent Republican critic, refusing to vote for him in last November’s election and then, after Trump took office, tsk-tsking his party’s new president on topics ranging from trade policy to the tone of his tweets.

Flake even spent several months secretly writing (and several more very publicly promoting) a new book, “Conscience of a Conservative,” which compares Trump’s campaign to a “late-night infomercial” that was “free of significant thought,” then goes on to explain in pained, I-wish-I-didn’t-have-to-do-this detail why almost none of what Trump stands for — banning Muslims, building a border wall — actually qualifies, in Flake’s view, as conservative.

Trump, meanwhile, has taken to calling Flake “toxic” and threatening to spend $10 million to bury him in a primary.

Technically, Flake’s road trip didn’t have anything to do with Trump. But the symbolism was striking. At first Flake’s press secretary told me the senator would not be participating in any public events while the president was in Arizona. The night before Trump arrived, however, she forwarded an invite to a small ceremony at the Pima County sheriff’s department. I wound up being the only national reporter in attendance.

At the event, police officers presented Flake with two awards commending him for the courage he displayed on June 14, when James Hodgkinson, an apparently deranged left-wing radical activist, opened fire on a team of Republicans practicing for the annual congressional baseball game.

“Without regard for his safety, Sen. Flake went to the assistance of wounded colleagues, potentially exposing himself to further danger during a dynamic and still unfolding situation,” said Pima County Sheriff Mark Napier. “His selfless actions and decisiveness likely saved lives.”

Jeff Flake after the baseball field shooting in Alexandria, Va., on June 14. (Photo: Kevin S. Vineys/AP)

An emotional Flake insisted he wasn’t “deserving” of an award “at all, frankly.” But he did want to say a few words.

“I just remember thinking as the shots first rang out, seeing the bullets pitch off the gravel near the dugout: ‘Why? Why here? Why us? Who could look at a field of middle-aged members of Congress playing baseball and see the enemy?’” Flake told the assembled cops. “We have to stop ascribing the worst motives to our political opponents. It’s the language we use, the rhetoric we use. Obviously I’m a fierce partisan at times, when you argue on policy. But it ought to end there. Fellow Americans aren’t our enemies.”

If Flake’s cri de coeur was meant as a message to Trump, it didn’t get through. Before his big speech that night at the Phoenix Convention Center, the president was seen huddling with Arizona state Treasurer Jeff DeWit and former state GOP Chairman Robert Graham, both of whom are thinking of challenging Flake in 2018. Later, on stage, Trump couldn’t resist lashing out — first at Flake’s Arizona Senate colleague, John McCain, who is battling brain cancer, and then at Flake himself (without mentioning him by name).

“Nobody wants me to talk about your other senator, who’s weak on borders, weak on crime, so I won’t talk about him,” Trump said. “Nobody knows who the hell he is.”

***

  When the Beltway media covers Flake, it tends to frame his feud with Trump as a personality clash. “The Arizona Republican is betting his Senate seat on the political appeal of decency,” according to a recent headline in the Atlantic. “But can that pay off in Trump’s America?”

President Trump speaks at his Phoenix rally on Aug. 22. (Photo: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images)

It’s true (as I’ve noted before) that Flake and Trump are by background and temperament very much opposites. Trump is an Easterner, born and bred in Queens, N.Y., the son of a wealthy real-estate developer; Flake is a fifth-generation Arizonan who grew up on a cattle ranch in a small town founded by his ancestors (Snowflake, Ariz., pop. 5,576). Trump can’t ever recall asking God for forgiveness; Flake, an alumnus of Brigham Young University and a former missionary to South Africa, is as Mormon as they come. Trump is reflexively coarse and bombastic; Flake, with his formal posture, G-rated vocabulary and stern but kindly tone, can seem less like a 21st century Washington pol than a moralizing television dad from 1956.

Yet there’s more at stake here than style.

Over the last six decades, the story of the Republican Party has been the story of movement conservatism. Free-market economists such as Friedrich Hayek inspired William F. Buckley to start National Review; National Review fueled the rise of Flake’s hero and predecessor, Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, who ripped the 1964 GOP presidential nomination away from the Eastern establishment (and wrote the original “Conscience of a Conservative”); Goldwater paved the way for Ronald Reagan, who was twice elected governor of California and president of the United States; Reagan begat generations of conservative Republicans who rallied around his gospel of limited government, muscular internationalism and Christian moralism, transforming the GOP in the process.

Among today’s Republicans, Flake is perhaps the purest distillation of this tradition: a former executive director of Arizona’s free-market, small-government Goldwater Institute who has spent five terms in the House and one term in the Senate fighting for earmark bans, spending cuts, entitlement reform, free-trade deals and the spread of democracy abroad (particularly in Cuba). His lifetime American Conservative Union rating is 93 percent.

Trump, in contrast, won the 2016 election by rejecting each of the three main tenets of movement conservatism. He trashed free-trade agreements and promised to preserve entitlements. He bad-mouthed NATO and vowed to disengage abroad. And he bragged about grabbing married women by the genitals.

“Of all the illusions Trump has dispelled … none is more significant than the illusion of the conservative movement,” wrote political science professor Samuel Goldman last year. “In state after state, voters indicated that they did not care much about conservative orthodoxy on the economy, foreign policy, or what used to be called family values.”

Then-Rep. Jeff Flake and fellow Congressman Mike Conaway in Old Havana in 2006. Flake led a bipartisan delegation for a three-day visit to Cuba. (Photo: Reuters)

If Trump turns out to be a party of one — a celebrity-in-chief with no ideological coattails — then Flake and his fellow movement conservatives will probably be fine. But if Goldman is right — if Trump has shown that rank-and-file Republicans care more about putting “America First” than, say, reforming Medicare — then movement conservatism could be a thing of the past.

(It’s worth noting, as Democrats often do, that Flake has voted “with” Trump 93.5 percent of the time; to progressives, this demonstrates the senator is merely grandstanding. But so far, none of Flake’s major points of disagreement with Trumpism — trade, immigration — have come up for a vote in the Senate. Until they do, he seems determined to continue speaking out.)

After the awards ceremony in Tucson, I caught up with Flake in a hallway. He was rushing to his next appointment, but I was able to ask a couple of questions before he disappeared behind a closed door.

Given Trump’s success and support within the GOP, do you worry that the moment for movement conservatism is over? I wondered. Have Republican voters moved on?

Flake grimaced. “That’s my concern,” he said. “My fear is that this kind of populist, nationalist, antitrade movement is not a governing philosophy.” Another grimace. “I’m worried that it could take over.”

Flake’s 2018 reelection campaign is the first real test of that question — of whether Trumpism can spread beyond Trump and “take over” the GOP. Flake, who is widely considered one of the two most vulnerable Republican senators in the country, has made it clearer than any other GOP incumbent that he opposes this path. As a result, the senator has already attracted one pro-Trump primary challenger in former state Sen. Kelli Ward — and he might get at least one more.

Early polls (all of them from small right-wing firms) show Ward ahead by double-digit ratios, and even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has taken notice. Last week, McConnell’s super-PAC released a web ad that painted Ward — and, by implication, the entire Trump movement — as out of touch with reality.

The battle lines, in other words, are drawn.

***

  By the time Arizona Republicans select their Senate nominee next August, Ward may no longer have Flake all to herself. The White House is trying to persuade a more prominent Republican, such as Graham or DeWit, to enter the race, and even former sheriff of Maricopa County Joe Arpaio, the anti-immigrant hardliner who recently received Trump’s first presidential pardon, is claiming that he’s mulling a bid.

“I’m sure getting a lot of people around the state asking me” to challenge Flake, Arpaio told the Washington Examiner on Monday. “All I’m saying is the door is open and we’ll see what happens. I’ve got support. I know what support I have.”

But for now, Ward, a 48-year-old osteopathic doctor, is Flake’s only real primary competition, and her simple message — I support the president; he doesn’t — will continue to define the contest no matter how many Trump loyalists eventually jump in.

As Flake was leaving the Phoenix area for Tucson, Ward, who lives in Lake Havasu City, made a beeline for the site of Trump’s rally. A dozen volunteers assembled in the lobby of the nearby Renaissance hotel, where an organizer passed out a bunch of T-shirts in Ward’s signature bright yellow. The logo on the front was an Arizona license plate with the words “TRUMP 2016” on one side and “WARD 2018” on the other; the back of the shirt said #MAKEARIZONAGREATAGAIN.

“They’re brand-new,” one volunteer boasted.

Outside, a line of eager Trump fans had already encircled an entire city block, even though the rally was still five hours away and the temperature was 106°F. Ward’s street team set up a folding table at the corner of Second and Washington and went to work. Goal No. 1: gathering the 12,000 or so signatures needed to get Ward on the primary ballot. Goal No. 2: convincing as many Trump voters as possible to wear yellow “Ward 2018” stickers.

Right-wing Flake challenger Kelli Ward poses with a supporter outside President Trump’s Aug. 22 rally in Phoenix. (Photo: Andrew Romano/Yahoo News)

“Any Kelli Ward supporters here?” shouted volunteer Susan McAlpine, a 64-year-old retired teacher with dangly earrings and a thick Boston accent. No response.

“Any Jeff Flake fans here?” she added.

“F*** Jeff Flake,” one man immediately snapped.

“Flake the Flake!” another chimed in.

“Might as well be a Democrat,” a third muttered.

McAlpine pulled me aside. “As soon as they hear the name Flake, they’re all like ‘WHAT?!?!’” she said.

By the time Ward herself materialized on the corner and began to shake hands and smile for selfies in (what else?) a bright yellow blazer, McAlpine & Co. had canvassed the entire block. More than half the attendees now seemed to be sporting WARD 2018 decals. Nearby, consultant Brent Lowder smiled approvingly.

Lowder’s presence in Phoenix is one of several early signs of how much has changed since Ward’s last campaign. In 2016, she attempted to unseat McCain and wound up losing the GOP primary by more than 11 percentage points. Ward made several rookie mistakes that year, plagiarizing a Mitt Romney ad, mocking McCain as “old” and “weak” and failing to fully dispel the opposition’s “Chemtrail Kelli” caricature (which gained traction after Ward hosted a town hall meeting in 2015 to discuss the conspiracy theory — a theory she says she doesn’t believe — that the trails of white condensation emanating from airplane engines are actually dangerous chemicals being dispersed by the government).

But the biggest difference between then and now is that back then, Trump seemed likely to lose the election. Now he’s leader of the free world — and he is personally gunning for Flake.

The rise of Trumpism has, in turn, boosted Ward. On Aug. 9, the reclusive hedge fund billionaire and top Trump donor Robert Mercer sent $300,000 to Ward’s super-PAC. Two days later, Lowder and his partner, Eric Beach, signed on to run Ward’s campaign; they previously led the largest pro-Trump super-PAC in the country, raising $30 million during the 2016 election cycle. And on Aug. 17, Trump himself tweeted about Ward, stopping just short of formally endorsing her.

“Great to see that Dr. Kelli Ward is running against Flake Jeff Flake, who is WEAK on borders, crime and a non-factor in Senate,” the president wrote. “He’s toxic!”

Great to see that Dr. Kelli Ward is running against Flake Jeff Flake, who is WEAK on borders, crime and a non-factor in Senate. He’s toxic!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 17, 2017

The morning after Trump’s rally in Phoenix, Ward still sounded delighted — and surprised — by all the national attention.

“Our momentum has been YUGE!” Ward told a crowd of 100 local Republicans sipping coffee and nibbling cookies in the Navajo Room of Arizona’s Sun Lakes Country Club. “It’s been ‘big league!’ The media coverage alone — there were 3,000 hits about that tweet!”

Pacing back and forth between two life-size cardboard cutouts of Trump, Ward rattled off all the things she agreed with the president about: building the border wall, halting Muslim immigration, repealing Obamacare, ending sanctuary cities.

“Our race is going to be ground zero for the heart and soul of the Republican Party,” Ward said. “Do we want to be what we’ve had for decade after decade — the same thing that has gotten us into this position where we can’t get anything done? Or do we want to be the party of freedom and hope and opportunity? That’s what Donald Trump has offered us as president — and that’s what we have to continue in 2018. This is the new GOP.”

Suddenly, Ward’s phone rang. She raised her hand and shushed the crowd; the room went silent. It was Sean Hannity’s producer. Unable to resist a last-minute interview request — and the publicity it promised — Ward decided to take the call in the middle of her appearance.

For a few minutes, Ward just listened. Then she smiled. “Thank you!” she said. Ward covered the phone and turned to the crowd. “Sean Hannity just endorsed me!” she whispered. “Yay!”

Kelli Ward receives Sean Hannity’s endorsement in the middle of a campaign stop in Sun Lakes, Ariz. (Photo: Andrew Romano/Yahoo News)

After the event, I talked to Joyce Sample, a retiree from Chandler, about why she wasn’t supporting Flake.

“Trump is now his president,” Sample said. “As a Republican, it’s Flake’s duty to go along with him. He is not doing it. That’s why I don’t like Flake. He’s not being supportive.”

As the room emptied out and Ward posed for a final photo with cardboard Trump, I asked her to explain how “the new GOP” differs from the old GOP.

“Jeff Flake is a globalist,” she said. “He’s not about making sure the United States has as good a deal as everybody else. But the new GOP is about Americanism. That’s what Donald Trump is pushing the Republican Party toward — and that’s what’s at stake in this primary.”

But Flake would say Americanism is not conservatism at all, I suggested. In fact, that’s what his entire book is about.

“You mean his hit piece on the president?” Ward snapped. “It’s all very condescending. He’s basically tapping all of us on the head who are conservative and saying, ‘You don’t really know what conservatism is.’

“Things do change over time,” Ward continued. “Things work or they don’t work. You can’t be stagnant. You have to look at the direction you want to go and see if the path you’re taking is getting you there. And if it isn’t, you have to take a turn.”

***

  A few days earlier, before the Trump tornado touched down in Arizona, Flake attended a breakfast hosted by the East Valley Chambers of Commerce, 20 miles southeast of Phoenix. The theme: “Good Government.”

The senator was in his element. Men in suits and women in heels tapped at their smartphones. A large screen hovering overhead listed nine corporate and institutional sponsors. Attendees held crisp copies of “Conscience of a Conservative,” which Flake happily signed as he made his way to the stage.

“Arizona tends to elect senators who stand on principle and are independent in their thinking,” said the executive tasked with introducing Flake. “Certainly, Sen. Flake is that.”

Jeff Flake signs a copy of his “Conscience of a Conservative” at a Chamber of Commerce breakfast in Gilbert, Ariz. (Photo: Andrew Romano/Yahoo News)

In his remarks, and in his responses to questions, Flake sounded like the same senator I profiled in 2015 — and, I imagine, like same candidate who will be crisscrossing Arizona for the next 14 months, fighting for his political life. He extolled the virtues of NAFTA, arguing that it “has been good for Arizona.” He described Trump’s “rejection of the Trans-Pacific Partnership” as “a big mistake that will haunt us for a long time.” He called for a grand, bipartisan bargain on the deficit, saying that the only way to produce a “sustainable” budget is to “work across the aisle.” He insisted that “when people talk about one solution on the border, they haven’t traveled the border” — and proudly reminded the audience that he was one of the main architects of the Gang of Eight’s comprehensive immigration reform bill in 2013. On North Korea, he warned that “our allies need to know we are steady and predictable — in my mind, that’s what a conservative is.” As for foreign policy in general, “we need to lead, as we have in the past.”

“This vitriol we have, it’s preventing us from achieving conservative ends,” Flake concluded. “We’ve got to get away from calling our opponents ‘losers’ or ‘clowns.’ It just makes it difficult to work with them on big issues.”

Listening to Flake, it was hard to believe that recent polls have shown him with an approval rating as low as 18 percent. Perhaps that’s what happens when you refuse, in such a polarized era, to pander to your party’s base — and actively antagonize the president they adore. You become a man without a country.

The bet Flake is making is simple — and risky. He is wagering, in effect, that most GOP primary voters would rather elect a senator who obeys his principles than one who obeys their party’s president.

Jeff Flake meets the press after his Chamber of Commerce event in Gilbert, Ariz. (Photo: Andrew Romano/Yahoo News)

But there’s another factor at work here that Flake may not be considering — and might not be able to survive. What if Republican primary voters don’t share his principles anymore? What if they never really did?

As we got to the end of that hall in the Pima County sheriff’s office, I asked Flake one last question: Has your reelection contest become a referendum on conservatism itself?

Flake chuckled nervously. “Whether it is or not, I am who I am,” he said. “This is what I think traditional conservatism is. And I do think people will rally around it — given the alternative.”

Flake can be very convincing. But this time, it didn’t sound like he was trying to convince me. It sounded like he was trying to convince himself.

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In Arizona, Trump defends Charlottesville response, blames media

PHOENIX — Urged by supporters and critics alike to use a speech in Phoenix, Ariz., to help heal the wounds of racial division stemming from the violence that erupted at a white supremacist rally in Charlotesville, Va., a defiant President Trump did nearly the opposite Tuesday.

After defending his much-derided, evolving response to the events in Charlottesville, Trump spent more than 20 minutes attacking the media as “really bad people” who “foment divisions” because they “don’t like our country.” He disparaged both of Arizona’s Republican senators, John McCain and Jeff Flake, though not by name: McCain for casting the “one vote” that killed Obamacare repeal and Flake for being “weak on borders and weak on crime.” And he all but promised to pardon anti-immigrant icon Joe Arpaio, the hard-line former Maricopa County sheriff whose round-’em-up raids have landed him in legal trouble.

“I’ll make a prediction — I think he is going to be just fine,” Trump told the tens of thousands of supporters in red “Make America Great Again” hats who’d crowded into the cavernous Phoenix Convention Center, where they hung on his every word.

“But I won’t do it tonight because I don’t want to cause any controversy,” Trump explained. “But Sheriff Joe can feel good.”

More than a week after pro-Trump white nationalists held a rally in Charlottesville, Va. that ended with one of their own driving a Dodge Challenger into a crowd of counter-protestors, injuring 19 and killing one — and with tensions still running high after a week of equivocal responses that earned Trump widespread criticism from Democrats and Republicans alike — White House staffers clearly wanted to hit the reset button in Phoenix.

The other speakers on the program — Vice President Mike Pence, Dr. Ben Carson, Rev. Franklin Graham, Dr. Alveda King, the niece of Martin Luther King, Jr. — emphasized unity and equality in their remarks, and the speech streaming across Trump’s teleprompter soberly spelled out the “pro-worker” agenda he wants Congress to pursue in the months ahead.

But Trump refused to stick to the script. Over 75 combative minutes, Trump veered wildly from his prepared text as he tore into one enemy after another, real or perceived, and hammered on every hot-button topic he could think of.

President Donald Trump reacts before speaking at a rally at the Phoenix Convention Center, Tuesday, Aug. 22, 2017, in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

It was Charlottesville that seemed to set him off.

After reading a line about how “what happened in Charlottesville strikes at the core of America” and insisting that “this entire arena stands united in condemnation of the thugs who perpetrated violence,” Trump produced a computer printout from his pocket and proceeded to re-litigate — at length — last week’s back-and-forth with the press.

“Here’s what I said on Saturday,” he intoned, reading from the sheet of paper to prove that the “dishonest” media had not reported the whole truth. “We condemn in the strongest possible terms hatred, bigotry and violence.”

Trump then pointedly left out the part where he blamed this “hatred, bigotry and violence” on “many sides” — which is, of course, the part that set off a bipartisan firestorm in the first place.

A few minutes later, in an attempt to show that he had, in fact, called out the specific groups protesting in Charlottesville, Trump glibly told the crowd that, “I hit ’em with neo-Nazi, I hit ’em with everything. KKK? We have KKK. I got ’em all.”

“The only people giving a platform to these hate groups,” the president insisted, “is the media itself.”

From there, Trump only occasionally returned to his prepared remarks — which touched on his plans for border security, infrastructure and tax reform — choosing instead to complain about anti-fascist protesters outside the event (“they show up in black masks, they got clubs and everything”); the elites (“I went to better schools than they did and got better grades than they did, and I live in a bigger, better apartment then them, too”); and even the presidency itself.

“Most people think I’m crazy to have done this,” Trump said. “And I think they’re right.”

Eventually, Trump glanced back at his teleprompter to read a passage that would have sounded presidential in another context — but that now seemed jarring in light of all the improvisational vitriol that had preceded it.

“I came to Washington for you,” he said. “Your dreams are my dreams, your hopes are my hopes, and your future is what I’m fighting for every day.”

If Trump wanted anyone beyond his base to believe those lines, he missed another opportunity Tuesday to show it.

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The lessons Trump's 'Red Team' needs to learn about passing tax reform

White House senior adviser Jared Kushner and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin leave the Rose Garden, July 25, 2017. (Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)

Remember the Republican Party’s crusade to repeal Obamacare? You know, the one that featured prominently in pretty much every GOP campaign ad between 2010 and 2016 — and then consumed the whole of President Trump’s legislative agenda for first seven months of the year before collapsing in chaos right before lawmakers left town for August recess?

Never mind all that. Next month, Republicans plan to move on to tax reform—and they swear that this time, everything will be different.

As Bloomberg Politics reported Wednesday, the White House is now seeking to advance Trump’s signature tax code overhaul and “avoid the missteps that doomed the effort to repeal Obamacare” by toning down president’s “improvisational approach” in favor of a more “tightly orchestrated process.”

The centerpiece of this strategy, according to the four anonymous White House officials who spoke to Bloomberg, is a weekly meeting of aides and advisors who have taken to calling themselves “The Red Team.” The name — an homage to the similar groups that formed during George W. Bush’s big legislative battles — is meant to convey “urgency and close coordination,” officials said.

“There is a concentration of the mind,” said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform. “They in the White House have done much more focused job of messaging this issue than earlier issues.”

But as Trump’s so-called Red Team schemes about messaging, its members would be wise to remember how rarely tax reform has succeeded in the past — and try to learn some lessons from the few times it has.

The last time Congress reformed the federal tax code was more than three decades ago. The story of the Tax Reform Act of 1986 is long and convoluted. But the one thing everyone seems to agree on — the key to the bill’s eventual success — is that it was a bipartisan effort.

Tax reform typically involves two related tweaks designed to simplify and stabilize the tax code: Cutting rates to provide relief to individuals and corporations, and broadening the base — i.e. taxing income that is currently untaxed (which is usually accomplished by eliminating various deductions and shelters). The reason tax reform is rarely enacted is that pretty much everyone — whether you’re an ordinary taxpayer or a powerful special interest — has a deduction they’d rather not lose: mortgage interest, charitable giving, etc. Taking away stuff that people like is generally considered bad politics.

The way Republicans and Democrats typically avoid shouldering the blame for the less popular aspects of tax reform is simple: They hold hands and jump together. In his 1984 State of the Union address, President Ronald Reagan announced that he had directed his treasury secretary to develop a plan “to simplify the entire tax code so all taxpayers, big and small, are treated more fairly.” Democratic Sens. Bill Bradley of New Jersey and Dick Gephardt of Missouri were already touting their own proposal to reduce rates and eliminate preferences. When the Treasury finally unveiled its framework in late November, Democrats didn’t bolt; instead, two pivotal House leaders — Speaker Tip O’Neill and Dan Rostenkowski, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, quickly decided that “they should join [Reagan] and try to win some credit for the Democratic Party,” as the New York Times later put it.

What followed was one of the all-time-great demonstrations of across-the-aisle sausage-making. Rostenkowski declared tax reform his “mission in 1985,” then endorsed the principles of Reagan’s proposal in a primetime speech. Reagan undertook an extraordinary trip to Capitol Hill to personally lobby reluctant Republicans, flipping 35 GOP votes in the process. Sen. Bob Packwood of Oregon, chairman of the Finance Committee, assembled a team of seven senators — four Republicans and three Democrats — to secretly craft an 11th-hour tax package, then convinced them to band together against any changes to the proposal.

The Senate eventually approved Packwood’s bill by a staggering 97-to-3 margin; to hammer out a final version, Packwood and Rostenkowski engaged in five days of nonstop man-to-man negotiations. In the end, Reagan signed the bill into law on the South Lawn of the White House as rows of instrumental Republicans and Democrats beamed behind him.

Lawmakers look on as President Ronald Reagan signs into law a landmark tax overhaul on the South Lawn of the White House, Oct. 22, 1986. (Photo: AP)

But that, of course, was then. In 1986, Republicans controlled only the White House and the Senate; the House was firmly in Democratic hands. Today, the GOP has total control in Washington — and as a result, its leaders don’t seem to think bipartisanship is necessary anymore.

“I don’t think this is going to be 1986, when you had a bipartisan effort to scrub the code,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters earlier this month.

The president appears to be equally unenthusiastic about pulling a Reagan.

“One of the worst ideas in recent history,” Trump wrote about the bipartisan, broadening-the-base aspects of the 1986 reform law.

Instead, the Senate GOP’s current scheme is to use the 51-vote budget reconciliation process to pass a tax bill along partisan lines—just like they tried to do with their Obamacare repeal plan.

The problem with this, as New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait has pointed out, is that reducing the universe of possible votes to the 52 Republican senators gives any three of them the power to kill the bill — which means that “eliminating deductions … is going to be virtually impossible,” because “almost every Republican senator is going to have at least one current preference in the tax code they want to keep.” In this scenario, the likeliest outcome is that Republicans skip the hard stuff and stick to what they can all agree on — and high-minded tax reform morphs into another big, unpaid-for, Bush-style tax cut.

There is, however, another path. Tax reform has occasionally succeeded without a divided government to necessitate bipartisanship — at least on the state level. Utah is probably the best recent example. In 2006, recently elected Republican Gov. John Huntsman Jr., — now Trump’s nominee for ambassador to Russia — took up the mantle of tax reform. (The push started with his predecessor.) By 2008, Utah had eliminated its old income tax structure — six brackets with increasing marginal tax rates — in favor of a single, flat, personal income tax of 5 percent; the state also replaced many deductions with a credit system that phased out as income rose. At the time, roughly three-quarters of Utah’s state legislators were Republicans.

Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. at a governors’ conference in Washington, Feb. 24, 2008. (Photo: Charles Dharapak/AP)

So how did Huntsman & Co. do it?

In a certain sense, it’s impossible to compare Utah and Washington. The former, a stronghold of Western conservatism and Mormon tradition, is relatively homogenous, both ideologically and culturally; the latter isn’t. Also, state tax issues tend to be lower stakes than federal tax issues, so the politics are rarely as perilous.

Even so, the movers and shakers behind Utah’s tax reform effort did manage (in a 2008 journal article) to distill their experience into a few simple lessons. The striking thing is how many of these lessons align with what federal lawmakers learned in 1986, and how few of them seem to have gotten through to today’s Republicans.

The first is that tax reform takes time. From the moment Reagan announced that simplifying the tax code was a top priority to the moment he signed the bill into law was a nearly three-year process. Same for Utah: Huntsman’s predecessor, Olene Walker, may have gotten the ball rolling in 2003, but a final bill didn’t pass for another four years. Trump wants a reform bill on his desk by October; Senate Republicans have said they’ll get the job done by the end of the year. Even that longer timeline is probably too optimistic, at least for real tax reform.

The second lesson from Utah is that principles matter, and that pursuing comprehensive reform may be the best way to preserve them. Walker and Huntsman — as well as Reagan and Rostenkowski — were committed to both cutting rates and broadening the base. That’s how they were able to pass reforms that might not have been popular in isolation but were designed to make the system more streamlined and equitable overall. As the Utah reformers have written, “true tax reform undoubtedly creates winners and losers,” so “attempting reform one proposal at a time” invites “opponents [to] selectively attack individually unappealing changes” and encourages “legislators to do the easy things first.”

It’s true that House Speaker Paul Ryan has been compiling his tax reform wish list for years. But right now there’s no actual legislation on the table and no one can even agree on what such legislation should include. McConnell, for example, has said that reform must be revenue-neutral; Trump, meanwhile, has said that he doesn’t care about raising the deficit. That’s a huge disagreement.

The final lesson from Utah is that tax reform needs a champion — “a political leader,” as the reformers explained in their article, “who understands fiscal issues but also understands the importance of the political process.” In Utah, Huntsman was that champion. He campaigned on tax reform in 2004; he called it his No. 1 priority upon taking office; and he fought through three regular legislative sessions — and called an additional special session — to make it a reality. Reagan acted similarly, introducing his plan in a primetime televised address, stumping for it in Oshkosh, Wis., and elsewhere during the spring of 1985, and personally lobbying for its passage on Capitol Hill.

Can Trump be an active, engaged champion for tax reform? So far, there’s little reason to believe he will try (given that he was largely absent from the recent wrangling over Obamacare) or that he would be effective if he did (given that his approval rating is a historically low 37 percent).

Still, the president’s Red Team, which is headed up by legislative director Marc Short and includes representatives from Jared Kushner’s Office of American Innovation, Steven Mnuchin’s Treasury Department, Gary Cohn’s National Economic Council and Vice President Mike Pence’s office, should probably look to the past as they plot the future of the U.S. tax system.

And they might want to give Trump’s new ambassador to Russia a call as well.

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