Congressional Democrats, divided and struggling for a path from the electoral wilderness, are constructing an agenda to align with many proposals of President-elect Donald J. Trump that put him at odds with his own party.
On infrastructure spending, child tax credits, paid maternity leave and dismantling trade agreements, Democrats are looking for ways they can work with Mr. Trump and force Republican leaders to choose between their new president and their small-government, free-market principles.
.. Mr. Trump campaigned on some issues that Democrats have long championed and Republicans resisted: spending more on roads, bridges and rail, punishing American companies that move jobs overseas, ending a lucrative tax break for hedge fund and private equity titans, and making paid maternity leave mandatory.
.. Some Democrats are even co-opting Mr. Trump’s language from the campaign. “Every single person in our caucus agrees the system is rigged,”
.. “There is an acknowledgment that it is very shortsighted to blame this loss on a letter from the F.B.I.
.. Tim Ryan of Ohio, a former football player from the ailing industrial region around Youngstown, is talking about challenging Ms. Pelosi
.. Democrats need someone “like me, who has constituents and friends who are steelworkers or work in construction,”
.. “We can work with him on things we agree on,” Mr. Brown said. “On Bannon, no.”
Trump voters will not like what happens next – The Washington Post
We are so exhausted from thinking about this election, millions of people will take up leaf-raking and garage cleaning with intense pleasure.
.. Nobody chanted “Stronger Together.” It just doesn’t chant.
.. Alas for the Trump voters, the disasters he will bring on this country will fall more heavily on them than anyone else. The uneducated white males who elected him are the vulnerable ones, and they will not like what happens next.
.. We liberal elitists are now completely in the clear. The government is in Republican hands. Let them deal with him. Democrats can spend four years raising heirloom tomatoes, meditating, reading Jane Austen, traveling around the country, tasting artisan beers, and let the Republicans build the wall and carry on the trade war with China and deport the undocumented and deal with opioids, and we Democrats can go for a long , brisk walk and smell the roses.
.. Mr. Trump was the cruelest candidate since George Wallace. How he won on fear and bile is for political pathologists to study. The country is already tired of his noise, even his own voters. He is likely to become the most intensely disliked president since Herbert Hoover. His children will carry the burden of his name. He will never be happy in his own skin. But the damage he will do to our country — who knows? His supporters voted for change, and boy, are they going to get it.
Why This Election Terrifies Me
Last weekend a man who was getting a head start on Halloween attended a University of Wisconsin football game in a costume that depicted Barack Obama with a noose around his neck.
.. He has modeled contempt for civilized norms and even the rule of law, endorsing violence against protesters, expressing admiration for a Russian autocrat, pledging a clampdown on the press, suggesting that Second Amendment enthusiasts might want to take a shot at Clinton, and promising to throw her in jail.
.. But I can’t identify a single issue like that, domestic or foreign, in 2016, because no campaign in my adult lifetime has turned so little on policy and so much on character.
.. it feels as if we’re coming out of this election with four parties:
- the Paul Ryan Republicans,
- the Freedom Caucus,
- the establishment Democrats and
- the Elizabeth Warren/Bernie Sanders brigade,
which is raring to use the muscle that Sanders flexed during the primaries for legislation more progressive than anything that the House would ever approve.
.. Trump prophesies a “constitutional crisis.” Republicans raise the specters of “impeachment” and “indictment.” And Rudy Giuliani demands an assurance from Obama that he won’t pardon Clinton, who is favored to win even though only 47 percent of the people who are planning to vote for her can muster any considerable enthusiasm about it.
The Great Democratic Inversion
According to the Oct. 20 Reuters-IPSOS tracking survey, Hillary Clinton now leads Donald Trump by 5.6 points among all whites earning $75,000 or more. This is a substantial improvement on the previous Democratic record of support among upscale white voters, set in 2008 when Barack Obama lost to John McCain among such voters by 11 points.
.. According to an Oct. 23 ABC News poll, Clinton also leads among all white college graduates, 52-36. She has an unprecedented gender gap among these voters, leading 62-30 among college-educated white women and tying among college educated white men, 42-42.
.. What these figures suggest is that the 2016 election will represent a complete inversion of the New Deal order among white voters. From the 1930s into the 1980s and early 1990s, majorities of downscale whites voted Democratic and upscale whites voted Republican. Now, looking at combined male and female vote totals, the opposite is true.
.. The data reflects an ongoing evolution in the composition of the two parties.
.. Democrats, including the party’s elite, remain decisively liberal, and have become more cosmopolitan — more readily accepting of globalization, more welcoming of immigrants, less nationalistic — and more optimistic about the future.
.. 81 percent of Clinton supporters expect their family’s finances to improve in the near term, and 72 percent said they expect their children to be better off than they are.
The first group, “the Social Elite. They plan to vote for Clinton over Trump by 74.3 to 14.1 percent.
The second group, termed “the Disinherited”. They plan to vote for Trump by 74.3 to 13.5 percent.
.. 83.5 percent agreed that “in general, Americans lived more moral and ethical lives 50 year ago.”
.. These voters are convinced (72.6 percent) that they can no longer get ahead in America through hard work, and that the government in Washington threatens the freedom of “ordinary Americans” (75.3 percent).
.. These upscale white liberals like government. 52.5 percent have “some” or “a lot” of confidence that public officials will tell the truth, compared with 17.1 percent of the Disinherited.
.. Asked whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement “Most Americans who live in poverty are there because of their own bad habits and choices,” the social elite sharply disagreed, 81-19, while the disinherited were split (47.2 percent agree, 52.8 percent disagree).
.. A majority (56%) of white college-educated Americans say American society is generally better now than it was in the 1950s, while nearly two-thirds (65%) of white working-class Americans say things are now worse.
White evangelical Protestants have the bleakest view of all: “Nearly three-quarters (74%) say American culture has changed for the worse since the 1950s.”
.. The largely white upscale wing of the Democratic Party is far more liberal on economic policy than its self-interest would suggest. In the UVA-IASC survey, the social elite is not only sympathetic to the poor and to pro-government intervention, but, by 3 to 1, believes that the “system is rigged in favor” of the wealthy; by nearly 6 to 1 believes that Wall Street and big business “profit at the expense of ordinary Americans;” and believes, by better than 2 to 1, that the government “should do more to improve the lives of ordinary Americans.”
.. If Clinton wins, she should have less difficulty holding Democratic factions together than previous Democratic presidents, including her husband. She will, however, face a more hostile and obdurate Republican opposition than her predecessors