From Salon: How did we get here? Largely by way of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and the big GOP victories of 1994 and 2010

The author puts the 2016 election in some historical context - going back to 1992 when Democratic presidents started playing to the political middle. He argues the results - including Democratic embrace of free trade, which it had opposed - re positioned the party in a "neo-liberal" direction creating the opportunity for the Republican Party to get the support of the disaffected blue collar whites that seem to be the reason for Trumps victory.

- What is neo-liberalism?

Neoliberalism is a policy model of social studies and economics that transfers control of economic factors to the private sector from the public sector. It takes from the basic principles of neoclassical economics, suggesting that governments must limit subsidies, make reforms to tax law in order to expand the tax base, reduce deficit spending, limit protectionism, and open markets up to trade. It also seeks to abolish fixed exchange rates, back deregulation, permit private property, and privatize businesses run by the state.

Liberalism, in economics, refers to a freeing of the economy by eliminating regulations and barriers that restrict what actors can do. Neoliberal policies aim for a laissez-faire approach to economic development.

- Click here for the article.

Let’s begin by rewinding to 1992. After 12 long years of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton was elected president with Democrats in charge of both houses of Congress. Trifectas like that had once been commonplace. Throughout most of American history, it was more common to have them than to have divided government. But from 1968 up until Clinton’s 1992 election, only Jimmy Carter’s four years in office had seen a unified government. So Clinton’s trifecta was a big deal, and he was ambitious to get things done. Unfortunately, one of those things was NAFTA.

In fairness, Clinton didn’t dream up NAFTA. Ronald Reagan did. He didn’t negotiate or sign it. Bush did. But he did get it passed through Congress, twisting scores of Democrats’ arms as a symbol of his “pragmatism” in moving the Democrats back to the so-called center. (It’s worth recalling that billionaire H. Ross Perot, who ran for president as a pragmatic centrist independent, opposed NAFTA as one of his central campaign planks.)

The irony here was twofold: First, in the real world, Democrats clearly occupied the political center during the Reagan-Bush years, dominating the House as well as a majority of state legislative bodies and retaking the Senate in 1986. What’s more, NAFTA was deeply unpopular with the Democratic base and their representatives. In the House roll call vote, Democrats opposed the treaty, 156 to 102, while Republicans overwhelmingly supported it, 132 to 43.

From Roll Call: Minnesota Blue Dog Isn't Ready to Give Up His District - Collin Peterson’s seat will almost certainly flip when he retires

Not that many Blue Dog Democrats can be found anymore - these were brought in one of my classes recently. This is one of the last of a dying breed of conservative Democrats.

- Click here for the article.

Collin C. Peterson is the last thing keeping Minnesota’s 7th District blue.

Democrats are always worried that the 13-term congressman is going to retire. Because if he does, his heavily agricultural district will almost certainly send a Republican to Congress.

But Peterson, one of the original and last surviving Blue Dog Democrats in the House, is giving no hints of slowing down. In fact, the 72-year-old says he’s enjoying Congress more these days, which likely comes as good news to Democrats already looking to minimize House losses in the 2018 midterms.

“As long as I think I’m making a difference, I’ll probably keep going,” Peterson said in an interview last week at a fish fry for his Democratic-Farmer-Labor colleague, 8th District Rep. Rick Nolan.

Peterson said he’s had a better time in Congress the last couple of years because his attitude has changed slightly.

“I lightened up a little bit,” Peterson said. “I just figured there’s so much stuff I can’t do anything about anyway, so I just pay attention to what I can do something about and don’t worry about the rest of it.”

For more on Blue Dogs:

- A BRIEF HISTORY OF: Blue Dog Democrats.
- What is a Blue Dog Democrat?
- Yellow Dog and Blue Dog Democrats.
- Bye-bye, blue dog “Democrats”: What the end of conservative Dems means for America.

From Slate: The Democratic Party’s Racial Reckoning

The article is harsh on Trump supporters, but it offers analysis supporting the argument that a realignment is occurring that will change the coalitions within each party for the next few elections. We may finally be on the dawn of a new party era.

Or maybe not.

The racial dynamics have shifted since Bill Clinton has been in office.

- Click here for the article.

The Democratic Party of Bill Clinton relied on voters who were unfriendly—even hostile—to racial liberalism. And it moved accordingly. Bolstered by the economy as well as these cultural moves, Clinton would claim the center of American politics, winning an easy re-election and eventually ending his term as one of the most popular presidents in recent memory, despite scandal and an impeachment attempt.

But that was then. Today, those voters—among them millions of working-class white men—are lost to the Democratic Party, in a shift that began under George W. Bush but accelerated under the presidency of Barack Obama. Democrats today win a smaller share of white voters—and the white workers in particular—than ever before. The home for those voters is in the GOP, under Trump, who turned a substantial majority with working-class whites into an overwhelming one, enough to win Ohio and Iowa and possibly other Midwestern states. But there’s been a backlash to this backlash. Trump’s success with working-class whites has come at the expense of the Republican Party’s historic advantage with college-educated and professional whites, who now favor Hillary Clinton. Increasingly, the Democratic electorate is shorn of those voters who are skeptical of racial and cultural liberalism or who vote on that skepticism.

Hillary demonstrated her distance from racists just as her husband used Sister Souljah to demonstrate his independence from black interests.

Bill Clinton distanced himself from anything that smacked of identity politics or traditional liberalism. Hillary Clinton has not. This speaks to a larger reality in American politics. Racism—either virulent or implicit—is the enemy of progressive political coalitions. It’s either an obstacle to building those coalitions in the first place, or it’s a part of the process that unravels them. White departure from the Democratic Party cost it the Oval Office for nearly 20 years, and the effort to win those whites back yielded a disappointing and myopic centrism. But now those whites aren’t as central to Democratic presidential fortunes, and it has given many in the party the space they need to move in a more liberal direction. And looking at the tenor of Democratic policy debates over the past year—debates over how the welfare state should expand, not if it should—they have. Which is to say that the great upside of this shift is for the blacks, Latinos, and young people who form a critical part of the Democratic Party’s national electorate. Their demands for criminal justice reform, immigration reform, and broader economic reform—as channeled through the primary campaign of Bernie Sanders—aren’t a deal-breaker for national Democratic politicians.

Are liberals driving working class whites out of the Democratic Party?

Have elites driven away working class voters from a party they once dominated? Here are two thoughts on the subject: 

- Yes: The smug style in American liberalism.
- No: Is Liberalism Really “Smug”?Vox says smugness has reshaped the Democratic Party. How droll

From the former:

Beginning in the middle of the 20th century, the working class, once the core of the coalition, began abandoning the Democratic Party. In 1948, in the immediate wake of Franklin Roosevelt, 66 percent of manual laborers voted for Democrats, along with 60 percent of farmers. In 1964, it was55 percent of working-class voters. By 1980, it was 35 percent.

The white working class in particular saw evensharper declines. Despite historic advantages with both poor and middle-class white voters, by 2012 Democrats possessed only a 2-point advantage among poor white voters. Among white voters making between $30,000 and $75,000 per year, the GOP has taken a 17-point lead.

The consequence was a shift in liberalism's intellectual center of gravity. A movement once fleshed out in union halls and little magazines shifted into universities and major press, from the center of the country to its cities and elite enclaves. Minority voters remained, but bereft of the material and social capital required to dominate elite decision-making, they were largely excluded from an agenda driven by the new Democratic core: the educated, the coastal, and the professional.

It is not that these forces captured the party so much as it fell to them. When the laborer left, they remained.

From the latter:

That liberal smugness might deter the white working class from the Democratic Party seems reasonable, if unfalsifiable. But to suggest that it is a prime mover in their alienation from the party is to ignore the actual dynamics at work. The driving reason working-class whites abandoned the Democratic Party is race. The New Deal coalition Rensin describes was devoured by its own contradictions, chiefly, the racism needed to secure white allegiance even as the party tried to appeal to blacks.

Pressed by those blacks, Democrats tried to make good on their commitments, and when they did, whites bolted. The Democratic Party’s alliance with nonwhites is what drove those whites away, not the sniffing of comedians on cable television. And, looking at the politics of the last seven years, it’s still keeping them away. (It’s worth noting that, up until left-leaning whites and minorities elected Barack Obama president, Democrats suffered little loss with working-class whites outside of the South.)

Some help figuring out ideological divisions within each party

For GOVT 2305 students, here are a few websites that should help you isolate where each candidate is positioned ideologically. Remember that I want you to look at divisions within either party since that is what's at issue right now. I want you to develop your own specific take on the topic, but think about honing on the divisions that might matter most in determining which candidates receive their party's nomination. Differences between the parties will matter more during the general election, but we are far away from that.

This site might be especially useful to you:

- CrowdPAC: 2016 Presidential Candidates.

Here's more:

- On the Issues.
- NYT: Hillary Clinton and the 2016 Democrats: Mostly Liberal, Together.
- 538: Is Jeb Bush Too Liberal To Win The Republican Nomination In 2016?
- YouGov: On ideology, Democrats clustered but Republicans far apart.
- Pew Research Center: Contrasting Partisan Perspectives on Campaign 2016.
- Washington Post: Who is the most conservative Republican candidate for president?
- Huffington Post: Every 2016 Presidential Candidate From Most Liberal to Most Conservative in 2 Charts.

From Vox: Woodrow Wilson was extremely racist — even by the standards of his time

This is a pretty effective hit job on Wilson, but I add it here mostly to illustrate a point we've gone over in class. That the Democratic Party - as we tend to forget - originated as the party of the South and was protective of first slavery and then segregation. Wilson was the first southerner elected to the White House after the end of the Civil War and re-segregated a number of federal agencies. Things would change when the next Democrat - FDR - was elected to the presidency, but this gives you an idea of how tight the relationship between the South and the Democratic Party was at that time, and how much it revolved around race.

- Click here for the article.

Easily the worst part of Wilson's record as president was his overseeing of the resegregation of multiple agencies of the federal government, which had been surprisingly integrated as a result of Reconstruction decades earlier. At an April 11, 1913, Cabinet meeting, Postmaster General Albert Burleson argued for segregating the Railway Mail Service. He took exception to the fact that workers shared glasses, towels, and washrooms. Wilson offered no objection to Burleson's plan for segregation, saying that he "wished the matter adjusted in a way to make the least friction."

Both Burleson and Treasury Secretary William McAdoo took Wilson's comments as authorization to segregate. The Department of Treasury and Post Office Department both introduced screened-off workspaces, separate lunchrooms, and separate bathrooms. In a1913 open letter to Wilson, W.E.B. DuBois — who had supported Wilson in the 1912 election before being disenchanted by his segregation policies — wrote of "one colored clerk who could not actually be segregated on account of the nature of his work [and who] consequently had a cage built around him to separate him from his white companions of many years." That's right: Black people who couldn't, logistically, be segregated were put in literal cages.

Outright dismissals were also common. Upon taking office, Wilson himself fired 15 out of 17 black supervisors in the federal service and replaced them with white people. After the Treasury and Post Office began segregating, many black workers were let go. The head of the Internal Revenue division in Georgia fired all his black employees, saying, "There are no government positions for Negroes in the South. A Negro's place in the corn field." To enable hiring discrimination going forward, in 1914 the federal government began requiring photographs on job applications.

Is gay marriage longer a wedge issue?

There are arguments that it isn't.

It didn't make the cut of the five issues Ted Cruz was argued to be able use to defeat Hillary Clinton.

Beyond that, it appears that a consensus has developed that, despite that fact that candidates had been able to use it successfully before, this is no longer the case. Republican candidates could once use it to divide Democratic voters. Those who saw gay marriage as dominant, might vote for the Republican on this one issue despite still being supportive of the party on other issues. As Democrats have become more solidly supportive of gay marriage, it has emerged more of a wedge issue for Republicans. The fact is that opposition comes mostly from older voters, this helps explain why it no longer resonates politically. Plus, the federal courts are driving most of the change, which removes it from the political sphere.

It shows how politics changes over time - at least in some areas.

For more:

- Wedge Issue No More: Opposing Marriage Equality Is a Political Loser.

Support for same-sex marriage has been on the upswing since 1996, according to Gallup. When the question was first asked, just 27 percent said “should be” in response to the question, “Do you think marriages between homosexuals should or should not be recognized by the law as valid, with the same rights as traditional marriage?” Sixty-eight percent said they should not be recognized as valid. Today, the “should be’s” are at 60 percent, an all time high, and the “should not be’s” are at an all-time low, at 37 percent. In just 20 years, a third of the country has changed their mind on the question.

Support is increasing even in Republican circles, going from 16 percent to 37 percent in the Gallup poll. A Washington Post poll this year found higher support, 42 percent of Republicans said they supported same-sex marriage.

In news more pertinent to presidential candidates, support for same-sex marriage is a political winner, and, perhaps more importantly, opposition is a political loser. In a memo sent by Democracy Corpstoday, the 55 percent of 2016 potential voters say they are less likely to support a presidential candidate that opposes same-sex marriage.

Also - Tim Cook and the End of Gay Rights as a Wedge Issue.

Here's an argument that gay rights could emerge as a wedge issue, but instead of one that splits Democrats, could split Republicans:

- The Birth of the Left-Wing Wedge Issue.

Well, in 2016, same-sex marriage can be a wedge issue again, but this time, for our team. The numbers are now so decisive that surely in the key swing states with the bushels of electoral votes, the likely Democratic candidate can cast shame upon the head of her opponent. In Florida, support for gay marriage was 57 percenta year ago, and it’s probably a little higher now. In Ohio, support-to-opposition was 52-37 in 2012, and that’s surely higher now. In Virginia in 2013, support registered at 56 percent. The issue isn’t a loser in any important swing state, with the possible exception of North Carolina, which of course is just icing for the Democrats anyway.

From 538: Jim Webb Is Searching For A Bygone Democratic Party

In the section on political parties we discuss the evolution of parties and how they can shift on issues from time to time. The most recent shift - still ongoing - has involved moderate and conservative white southerners slowly distancing themselves from the party. In 2305 we point out this as the shift from the 5th to the 6th party eras.

The most recent evidence of this is the so far lackluster campaign of Jim Webb.

- Click here for the article.

. . . he’s a dying breed in the Democratic Party, where power is increasingly tilted toward liberals and especially nonwhite voters.

Webb, who served as secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration and later as a Democratic senator from Virginia, is one of the last of the moderate Democrats. His public statements and voting record in the Senate were quite centrist, and he even went so far as to defend the Confederate flag after the recent massacre of nine black people at a church in Charleston, South Carolina.

Webb’s record appears to be considerably to the right of either of the two most recent Democratic presidential nominees, John Kerry and Barack Obama, not to mention either of the two top Democrats running for the 2016 nomination, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.

Here's the kicker:

Hillary Clinton is in

The announcement came on Sunday the 12th.

- The NYT describes it here.

Like other candidates she made the annoucement via video.

- Which you can see here on You Tube (of course).

For commentary (so far):

- Vox: What losing in 2008 taught Hillary about how to win in 2016.
- The National Journal: HILLARY CLINTON IS WINNING THE 2016 ELECTION—ON FACEBOOK.
- Vox: Hillary Clinton's uncontested nomination is dangerous for her and her party.
- The National Journal: Hill Progressives Look to Push Clinton to the Left.
- The National Journal: Progressives and Elizabeth Warren Die-Hards Are Preparing for Life With Hillary Clinton.
- New York Magazine: Why Hillary Clinton Is Probably Going to Win the 2016 Election.
- The New Republic: There's Nothing Inevitable About Hillary.
- New York Magazine: Is Hillary Clinton any good at running for president? And how much does it matter, anyway?
- Open Secrets: Will Clinton Win Back Wall Street for Democrats?

From the National Journal: THE EMERGING REPUBLICAN ADVANTAGE The idea of an enduring Democratic majority was a mirage. How the GOP gained an edge in American politics—and why it’s likely to last.

The author argues that Republicans have been able to lure away members of the middle class.

- Click here for the article.

American parties routinely go through periods of ascendancy, decline, and deadlock. From 1896 to 1930, the Republican Party reigned supreme; from 1932 to 1968, the New Deal Democrats dominated; following a period of deadlock, the Reagan Republicans held sway during the 1980s. After the parties exchanged the White House, Democrats appeared to take command of American politics in 2008. In that election, Obama and the Democrats won not only the White House but also large majorities in the Senate and House, plus a decided edge in governor's mansions and state legislatures.

At the time, some commentators, including me, hailed the onset of an enduring Democratic majority. And the arguments in defense of this view did seem to be backed by persuasive evidence. Obama and the Democrats appeared to have captured the youngest generation of voters, whereas Republicans were relying disproportionately on an aging coalition. The electorate's growing ethnic diversity also seemed likely to help the Democrats going forward.

These advantages remain partially in place for Democrats today, but they are being severely undermined by two trends that have emerged in the past few elections—one surprising, the other less so. The less surprising trend is that Democrats have continued to hemorrhage support among white working-class voters—a group that generally works in blue-collar and lower-income service jobs and that is roughly identifiable in exit polls as those whites who have not graduated from a four-year college. These voters, and particularly those well above the poverty line, began to shift toward the GOP decades ago, but in recent years that shift has become progressively more pronounced.

The more surprising trend is that Republicans are gaining dramatically among a group that had tilted toward Democrats in 2006 and 2008: Call them middle-class Americans. These are voters who generally work in what economist Stephen Rose has called "the office economy." In exit polling, they can roughly be identified as those who have college—but not postgraduate—degrees and those whose household incomes are between $50,000 and $100,000. (Obviously, the overlap here is imperfect, but there is a broad congruence between these polling categories.)

The defection of these voters—who, unlike the white working class, are a growing part of the electorate—is genuinely bad news for Democrats, and very good news indeed for Republicans. The question, of course, is whether it is going to continue. It's tough to say for sure, but I think there is a case to be made that it will.

Factions in the current Democratic Party

For some reason there's not as much current usable information on this topic as for the Republican Party - perhaps because there's lots more action among Republicans. I'm still looking for good graphics on the subject, but for now this Wikipedia page will have to do.