PPI President Will Marshall welcomes Congressman Conor Lamb of Pennsylvania’s 17th District to the PPI Podcast, just days after Rep. Lamb’s dramatic floor speech following the insurrection in the Capitol, in which he lambasted Republicans for supporting the Trump lies that inspired the assault, plus his thoughts on impeaching the president again.
Rep. Lamb shares how he and Biden won their elections in the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania, and the critical importance in that state of energy issues — including Biden’s opposition to a ban on natural gas drilling and a balanced approach on energy which helped him flip Pennsylvania back to blue.
The conversation shares the need for a new Democratic approach on energy and climate that recognizes that natural gas is speeding the deployment of renewable energy to the grid; and that our goal should be decarbonizing the economy, not abolishing fossil fuels precipitously, which would cost many Pennsylvania and other energy state workers their jobs and damage their economy.
President Trump’s misbegotten presidency crashed and burned yesterday with a treacherous assault on American democracy. It failed, as most of Trump’s half-baked schemes do. But now the country needs a reckoning with a Republican Party that let it happen.
Senator and soon-to-be Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) got it right last night: For Americans, January 6, 2021 is another day that will live in infamy. Our country was attacked not by a foreign power, but from within. The assailant was a lame-duck president the American people wisely fired last November.
I watched Trump harangue the mob he had summoned to Washington for his last-ditch effort to bully Congress into nullifying the 2020 election results. It was a performance worthy of a dictator: A farrago of big lies about his imagined “landslide” victory, paranoid attacks on his usual stock villains – the media, even Hillary Clinton – and threats to destroy the careers of “weak Republicans” who balked at his blatantly unconstitutional demand that Congress overrule the voters and award him a second term.
It was also an undisguised incitement to mob violence, with Trump promising to lead his supporters in a march up Capitol Hill. Actually, he retired to the White House to watch his handiwork on television. Waving Trump and Confederate flags, Trump supporters stormed America’s citadel of democracy, disrupting the certification vote, sending lawmakers into hiding, trashing the Capitol and raining obscenities and abuse on the police.
Trump lit the match, but he had plenty of accomplices. The shambolic MAGA insurrection would not have happened had not leading Republican politicians played along with Trump’s claims of having been cheated of reelection.
Biden won the popular vote by more than 7 million votes, yet Trump persists in peddling QAnon-is style conspiracy theories about stolen votes, and claims laughably to have won by a landslide. The choice facing U.S. lawmakers today couldn’t be more simple or stark: Fantasy or reality, Trump or democracy?
Incredibly, scores of Republicans appear poised to endorse Trump’s blatant bid to steal what he couldn’t win honestly. The motives animating this squalid band of coup plotters vary.
Some are True Believers — Trump cultists addled by conspiracy theories and conditioned by right-wing propaganda to regard Democrats as mortal enemies rather than worthy political competitors.
Others are spineless hacks who find it expedient to bow to Trump rather than incur his wrath, be hounded by MAGA mobs, and face primary opponents.
Then there is the third and worst category — the opportunists. They know Biden won fair and square, but pander to Trump’s fanatical base by pretending there may be something to his delusional claims. Leading the cynics’ caucus are Sens. Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, who evidently want to run for president, and Sen. Ron Johnson, who seems intent on following in the footsteps of another Republican Senator from Wisconsin, Joe McCarthy.
Whatever their motives, all who side with Trump’s lies will betray the will of U.S. voters and break their oath to defend the Constitution. It’s a kind of sedition that should disqualify those who commit it from public service.
That’s why it’s important for citizens to watch what happens in Congress today, and take careful note of who stood up for American democracy and who didn’t.
President Trump has been caught on tape committing what would be considered a crime if you or I did it: pressuring public officials in Georgia to falsify the results of the 2020 presidential election. He urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” 11,780 votes — the exact number Trump needs to exceed Joe Biden’s winning margin.
I followed Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal and impeachment proceedings intently as a college student. Trump’s push to nullify a democratic election and disenfranchise millions of U.S. voters is far more damaging to our country. Like Nixon, he must be held accountable so that his attempted putsch doesn’t set a precedent for future presidential losers.
The nearly 5600-page omnibus government funding and covid relief bill passed by Congress yesterday was an undeniable win for the American people, providing much-needed relief for those most affected by the pandemic. In addition to preventing a government shutdown, the bill extended and expanded unemployment insurance; provided aid to restaurants, airlines, and other businesses heavily impacted by the pandemic; and provided robust funding for vaccine distribution to help end the pandemic sooner and get people back to work. It also included other important policy developments, such as a long-stalled proposal to limit surprise medical billing and investments to combat climate change. But an arbitrary demand from Republicans that the bill not exceed $1 trillion, combined with their monomaniacal focus on business tax cuts, resulted in some bizarre and unfortunate tradeoffs.
There’s no getting around it: 2020 has been an annus horribilis for America. We’ve had to endure a deadly pandemic, a frozen economy, a corrupt president’s bid to void an election he lost, and deep racial and civil discord.
And yet our national fortunes seem to be changing. Coronavirus vaccines – developed in record time by U.S. drug companies – will soon be widely available. Next month, America gets a real president in Joe Biden, who will restore honesty and decency in the White House, along with a commitment to bring our country together rather than tear it apart.
I’m also happy to report that the Progressive Policy Institute is ending the year on a high note. We have roughly doubled in size, adding new policy analysts and projects that also have brought youth and diversity to our team. We are poised to play a more forceful role in advocating for the kind of radically pragmatic solutions Americans voted for in 2020 and to help the new administration deliver them.
Let me touch on just a few of 2020’s highlights.
Throughout the primaries, PPI worked to illuminate the critical choices before U.S. voters. This included analysis and comparisons of the Democratic presidential candidates’ positions, as well as intensive surveys of public opinion in the key battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Our team also critiqued utopian demands from the sectarian left that repel swing voters in competitive districts and states.
In March, as the coronavirus hit America, we turned swiftly to confront the crisis, which both revealed and exacerbated the nation’s deep racial and social inequities. For example, PPI began work on its ongoing Covid-19 chronology, which offers a definitive, step-by-step record of President Trump’s disastrous handling of the pandemic.
Working remotely, PPI policy analysts have generated a prodigious output of policy reports, articles, op eds and blogs, podcasts and webinars, featuring creative ideas for containing the pandemic and mitigating the economic pain it’s caused. In late August, we published Building American Resilience, a compendium of bold ideas for spurring economic recovery and for making the private sector and government more resilient against future national emergencies. Our Reinventing America’s Schools team also produced a major report on the urgent challenge of keeping our children learning, remotely if necessary, during the pandemic.
Also notable are three new projects PPI launched in 2020:
Center for New Liberalism. The center is an outgrowth of the Neoliberal Project, a virtual network of tens of thousands of young political activists and thinkers. With more than 60 chapters (including 12 overseas), the network provides a political home for young Americans who favor liberal rather than socialist solutions to the nation’s problems.
Innovation Frontier Project. Building on PPI’s traditional strengths in innovation and entrepreneurship, this project aims at keeping America in the vanguard of scientific and technological progress. It’s run by two rising young economists, Alec Stapp and Caleb Watney, as well as PPI chief economic strategist Michael Mandel. The project plans to commission at least 20 research reports on public policies to encourage progress in such emerging fields as biotech, 5G and 6G networks, artificial intelligence, digitally enabled manufacturing and a 21st Century competition policy.
The Mosaic Project. The mission of the Mosaic Project is to raise the profile of women, including women of color, in national debates over economic and technology policy. It recruits classes of highly accomplished women to interaction with seasoned professionals in legislation, communications and dealing with new and old media.
Meanwhile, we are beefing up our communications and outreach capacities to work more closely with our elected friends and allies on Capitol Hill, in local and state government, and in the incoming Biden administration. Over 30-plus years, in fact, PPI has never been in a stronger position to craft innovation ideas and solutions for pragmatic progressives determined to make American democracy work again.
As we celebrate our good fortune after a difficult year of loss and sacrifice, we’re mindful of the crucial part that great friends and supporters like you have played in our success. We thank you and wish you and your families a very happy holiday!
In gas-producing counties in Pennsylvania, Joe Biden gained enough votes over Hillary Clinton alone to wrest the state from Donald Trump. He improved on Clinton’s margin in these counties by three points (Biden -15 / Clinton -18), counties that represent 40% of the state.
In our pre-election polling in these Pennsylvania extraction counties, even as Trump held an eleven-point lead in them, voters wanted Biden’s “middle ground” energy policy.
Our September poll showed that:
These voters take climate change seriously and want to transition to renewable energy, just like Joe Biden.
Most (69%) voters in these gas-producing counties believe that climate change is a very serious or somewhat serious problem.
People see fossil fuels as a bridge to renewable energy, not a permanent solution. Which of these comes closer to your view?
The United States should use some fossil fuels as a bridge to renewable energy sources but work to eliminate it: 55%
The United States should continue to use fossil fuels for the foreseeable future: 29%
The United States should immediately transition to 100 percent renewable energy: 11%
They don’t want to immediately move away from natural gas.
80% support an energy plan that includes a role for both gas and renewable energy,
They strongly oppose “an immediate ban on all natural-gas extraction in the United States” (19% support / 77% oppose) and “an immediate ban on all fracking in the United States” (32% support / 64% oppose).
83% call natural gas a “big jobs provider in Pennsylvania”
These voters mostly didn’t buy Trump’s argument that Biden was “anti-energy”.
Only 48% of voters agreed that “Joe Biden is just like the liberal socialists in his party who want to pass the job-killing Green New Deal, kill the energy industry in our state, and drive up energy costs”.
After hearing Joe Biden’s actual energy policy—that he wants to “continue to use natural gas, he does not support an immediate ban on natural gas or fracking, and that he will pass a law to guarantee that we only use energy sources that do not contribute to climate change by the year 2050”— voters said they support it on balance (50% support / 46% oppose).
Progressive Policy Institute commissioned ALG Research to conduct this poll to assess the electoral landscape in Pennsylvania and understand voters’ attitudes towards energy policy and climate change. The survey consisted of N=500 likely 2020 general election voters in Pennsylvania, and it included an oversample in gas-producing counties which meant we interviewed 317 people in those counties. The overall margin of error is + 4.4% and in gas-producing counties is +5.5%.
It was perhaps the most fitting end for a presidency plagued by crisis and mismanagement: the federal government spent the weekend racing to prevent one final shutdown under the administration of President Donald Trump. Fortunately, it seems unlikely that we will face another government shutdown for the next two years with Democrats retaining control of the House of Representatives and competent dealmaker Joe Biden ascending to the presidency in January. Simply keeping the lights on is the lowest of low bars for our elected leaders to clear, but the transition to an administration that will have no trouble doing so is a welcome one.
Refusing to accept that the election is over, President Trump is moving forward with one of the most desperate gambits from his campaign: raiding Medicare to give 39 million seniors a $200 prescription drug card. Fortunately, Trump’s plan to bypass Congress and act by executive order did not come to fruition before the election. But this week, it cleared a regulatory roadblock and the administration says it will start sending the cards before the end of the month.
The idea is probably illegal, because the Constitution gives Congress alone the power to spend money. It is certainly bad policy, because it cuts into Medicare’s finances to pay for a blatant vote-buying scheme. That makes no sense now that the election is behind us, but then, little that Donald Trump has done or said since he lost decisively on Nov. 3 makes sense.
Before it finishes its work, the lame-duck Congress should act to protect Medicare by killing Trump’s effort to usurp its power of the purse. For Republicans in the Senate, the opportunity to reject this political maneuver will test whether they recognize the election is over, and with it the reckless rule-breaking of the Trump administration.
Trump’s proposal would send 39 million seniors $200 cards, similar in appearance to credit cards, that they could use to buy prescription drugs. Like many things Trump does, this plan may be illegal. The Constitution gives Congress alone the power to spend money, but Congress has not authorized this program or appropriated any money towards it. Congressional Democrats have rightfully asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate whether the program is legal.
Administration officials claim the President can authorize the cards without Congress through an existing “testing” program meant to find more efficient ways to administer Medicare. The program will supposedly “test” whether the cards make seniors more likely to take their medicine on time, but it will not establish a control group or any other practices typical of an experiment. While tests of this kind are normally small in scale and cost-neutral, Trump’s plan would involve tens of millions of seniors and cost billions of dollars.
The much more likely explanation for Trump’s card plan is that it was a political effort to ingratiate himself with seniors. Trump’s own officials say he only added mention of the cards to his speech a few hours before he gave it because he felt the need to cram health care successes in before the election. The general counsel of the Department of Health and Human Services sent an internal memo warning that the plan could draw legal challenges related to election law and advised the administration to get guidance from the Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section, which handles elections-related offenses.
The plan’s political motivations are so glaring that they gummed up Trump’s initial attempts to accomplish it. A week before Trump’s announcement, pharmaceutical executives abandoned a deal between the Trump Administration and the industry that would have included similar cards because the executives believed the cards would make the deal look political.
President Trump has said he intends to get the $7.9 billion he will need for the cards from the Supplemental Medical Insurance Trust Fund, one of the two Medicare trust funds that pay for senior citizens’ health care. But Medicare does not have money to spare. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the net cost of Medicare will grow from 3.5 percent of gross domestic product this year year to 6 percent in just 30 years because the population is growing older and health care is becoming more expensive, drawing money away from other vital spending priorities. Medicare’s other trust fund is projected to run out of money by 2024 thanks to this budget crunch, which would automatically prompt payment cuts. Elected officials need to control Medicare spending growth, not add to it without addressing its driving forces.
Until this week, the program appeared unlikely to materialize before Trump left office. Administrators had to pull the plan together in very little time, and the effort to get guidance from the Department of Justice slowed the process down. More recently, the Special Interest Group for Inventory Information Approval System Standards (SIGIS), an industry organization that helps the Internal Revenue Service set standards for federal benefit cards, has said for weeks that limiting the cards’ use to prescription drugs was inconsistent with the standards it sets for other benefit cards. Health officials told Politico that without the group’s approval, the administration cannot mass produce working cards.
Yet after appeals from the Trump administration, SIGIS dropped its objections on Monday, for unclear reasons. Thanks to this surprising reversal, the administration plans start sending the cards to seniors by the end of this month.
Voters care about drug prices for good reason. Prices are higher in the United States than in other developed countries, and the costs of the most popular prescription drugs are growing by nearly 10 percent per year. But one-time payments from the government cannot solve a systemic problem such as the rising cost of lifesaving and life-improving drugs — they can only paper over it. Congress should keep fighting Trump on this plan so neither he nor any other President thinks they can finance political gifts by raiding Medicare’s coffers.
Watching Joe Biden prepare to take over the Presidency and Donald Trump try to overturn the election, it’s instructive to read two new books about politicians who represent the best of America: Jimmy Carter and John McCain.
They are two great men of great talents and, yes, great flaws. One a former President and one a two-time unsuccessful candidate for President. Both Navy men, graduates of Annapolis. Both veterans of the highs and lows of politics.
Their lives and legacies offer lessons about where we are today in America, how we got here and how we go forward.
“His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life,” by Jonathan Alter, Simon & Schuster.
Alter’s book, like most accounts, praises the good works Jimmy Carter has done and the modest life he has led in the 40 years since he left the Presidency. Alter is far more positive than most writers, though, in assessing Carter’s four years in the White House – and why they’re overlooked:
“Carter’s farsighted domestic and foreign policy achievements would be largely forgotten when he shrank in the job and lost the 1980 election.”
What achievements? Alter’s list: “the nation’s first comprehensive energy policy,” “historic accomplishments on the environment,” consumer protection, ethics laws, civil service reform, two new Cabinet departments (Energy and Education), appointing Blacks and women to key positions, ending inflation, cutting the deficit and the growth of the federal workforce, requiring banks to invest in low-income communities, legalizing craft breweries (!), deregulating airlines and trucking, increasing the defense budget, championing human rights and challenging the Soviet Union on dissidents, aiding Afghan rebels, ratifying the Panama Canal Treaty, establishing full diplomatic relations with China and persuading Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin to sign the Camp David Accords (“The Israelis and Egyptians have not fired a shot in anger in more than forty years.”)
And Carter appointed Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the federal appeals court. She later said he “literally changed the complexion of the federal judiciary.”
Yet Carter is remembered more for his failures and shortcomings. Alter, a journalist himself, says “the aggressive post-Watergate press tended to assume the worst about him.”
Democrats controlled Congress those four years, but Carter often was at odds with them. Ted Kennedy challenged him on health care and for the nomination in 1980, crippling Carter’s reelection. In those days, too, Washington Democrats had a pronounced bias against Southern Democrats; I saw it while working for Governor Jim Hunt.
Carter hurt himself. For all the political skill he and his Georgia Mafia showed in coming from nowhere (literally, 0% in the polls) to win the 1976 election, Carter was far better at deciding what was the right thing to do than at persuading the public and other politicians it was right.
(A sidelight: The first U.S. Senator to endorse Carter in the 1976 primaries was a 33-year-old first-termer named Joe Biden. Forty-four years later, Carter’s Georgia helped put Biden in the White House.)
Alter offers a not-so-positive picture of Carter’s early record on race: “While a quiet progressive since his experience in the integrated Navy in the late 1940s, he failed to oppose racial discrimination in public until sworn in as governor of Georgia in 1971.”
Carter was from one of the most racist parts of rural Georgia. He clearly was uncomfortable with the violent and virulent segregation of that place and time, but he didn’t speak out forcefully against it.
Former Governor and Senator Terry Sanford, who fought racism and segregation in North Carolina in the 1960s, never forgave Carter for his 1970 campaign against Carl Sanders. Carter’s campaign attacked Sanders, an owner of the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks, with a picture of a Black player dousing Sanders with champagne in a post-game locker room celebration.
But Carter changed, and he changed America. He was dragged down by an economic crisis and the Iran hostage crisis. He, like Donald Trump, suffered the ignominy of being a one-term President.
Yet Carter – in his four years as President and in the four decades since – set a standard for decency, integrity and service to his country, a standard that all Presidents, and all Americans, can admire and emulate.
“The Luckiest Man: Life With John McCain,” by Mark Salter, Simon & Schuster.
Carter’s biography was written by a journalist, a trained skeptic and critic. McCain’s was written by a more sympathetic observer; Mark Salter was for 30 years McCain’s aide, advisor and confidante, as well as coauthor of seven books. But Salter has written a book that is both insightful and balanced.
We know the highlights of McCain’s life – POW, congressman, senator, maverick, unsuccessful presidential candidate, cancer victim and, in a role McCain both rued and relished at the end of his life, foil to Donald Trump.
Salter fills in the story – the hard-partying Navy flier, son and grandson of admirals, who finished near the bottom of his class at Annapolis, leading only in demerits.
Shot down on his sixth combat mission over Vietnam, McCain endured more than five years of imprisonment, marked by mistreatment, solitary confinement and torture. He was one of the most resistant and resilient of the POWs.
You can’t read about what he endured without wondering about the character of a man running for Commander-in-Chief who said: “He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”
Maybe there was a higher justice at work when Arizona flipped dramatically this year and, with Georgia, helped elect Biden, one of McCain’s close friends in the Senate. His widow Cindy endorsed Biden.
Where Jimmy Carter was a son of Georgia, McCain had no ties to Arizona. Salter, who has the novelist’s eye for telling detail, writes that on one day – March 27, 1981 – McCain buried his father, retired from the Navy after 22 years and moved to Arizona, where he went to work for his father-in-law’s lucrative beer distributorship and began running for Congress.
During a campaign debate, an opponent called him a carpetbagger. McCain delivered one of the most political devastating counterpunches ever. “Listen, pal,” McCain began. He talked about growing up as a Navy brat, then serving around the world and then: “As a matter of fact, when I think about it now, the place I lived longest in my life was Hanoi.”
McCain won that election. In years to come, friends and foes alike would come to dread his acid tongue.
Throughout his career – he served two terms in the House and was elected to the Senate six times – McCain had an openness and candor that won him good press. But that did him no good in two ill-starred campaigns for President. In 2000, he got run over by the Bush machine. In 2008, he had the bad luck to run against charismatic, historic Barack Obama.
McCain brought no credit to himself with his confused and confounding response to the financial collapse of 2008. Even worse, he gave us Sarah Palin.
He redeemed himself in a gracious concession speech to Obama on Election Night. It’s worth watching on YouTube.
It was as a Senator that McCain made his mark on America. He was a relentless champion of campaign finance reform. He cast the decisive vote to save the Affordable Care Act.
Democrats fond of McCain forget he was a rock-ribbed Ronald Reagan conservative and a searing critic of what he believed to be President Obama’s shaky and uncertain record on defense and foreign policy.
Above all, McCain believed in “regular order,” the traditional operating rules of the Senate that emphasized compromise over confrontation. He bemoaned that the Senate was becoming like the House, a gladiators’ arena of winner-take-all partisan power plays and score-settling.
After Trump’s election in 2016, McCain inevitably became viewed as the anti-Trump. Salter held Trump in contempt, but he writes that “McCain seemed largely indifferent” to Trump’s Twitter attacks. He chastised Salter: “I don’t know why you let him get you so worked up. That’s not how you beat him.”
Salter says McCain “preferred instead to take on Trumpism…opposing Trump’s most noxious views, mainly his nativism and affinity for autocrats, and making the case for the international order founded on the values of free people and free markets.”
McCain once said that he and Trump were “very different people,” with different backgrounds and upbringing: “He was in the business of making money.” McCain added, “I was raised in a military family. I was raised in the concept and belief that duty, honor and country is the lodestar for the behavior that we have to exhibit every single day.”
Our Best
Jimmy Carter and John McCain, both Navy men and politicians, were otherwise very different: from different parts of the country, different backgrounds, different political parties and different philosophies.
But both were men of duty, honor and country. Both represented the best of America. Both gave their best to America.
Their stories remind us how truly great America can be.
Colin Mortimer, the Director of the Center for New Liberalism, is joined by two special guests. First is Adam Hartke, the co-owner of a music venue in Wichita, Kansas, and the co-chair of the advocacy committee at the National Independent Venues Association. We talk about what it has been like to be a music venue owner during this pandemic, suffering the brunt of the economic fallout. Second, PPI’s Chief Economic Strategist Michael Mandel comes on to talk about how an obscure tax cut that expires in December might make the recovery for music venues, bars, restaurants, brewers, and others even more difficult than it was already expected to be.
When the history of Donald Trump’s sordid presidency is written, the Republican Senate’s grotesque dereliction of duty will merit a long chapter.
Even as Trump’s own attorney general admits there’s no evidence to support the president’s wild claims of widespread voter fraud, most Senate Republicans have stood mute as Trump schemes to steal a U.S. election in broad daylight.
Let’s pause to note the honorable exceptions to the general rule of Republican cowardice. Sens. Mitt Romney, Lisa Murkowski. Susan Collins, Ben Sasse and Bill Cassidy have acknowledged Joe Biden’s victory. Most of the rest, including Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, have disingenuously supported Trump’s “right” to challenge the election results, thus lending credence to his lies without specifically endorsing them.
Rather than defend the integrity of America’s electoral system, these freedom-loving patriots have dummied up as Trump attempts to disenfranchise millions of U.S. voters. Yet they did manage to rouse their dormant sense of indignation this week in criticizing one of Biden’s choices for his administration — Neera Tanden — as “too partisan.”
With hospital beds filled and field hospitals scrambling to open, Gov. Gina Raimondo on Monday ordered Rhode Island to begin a two-week pause in an attempt to stop out-of-control coronavirus spread in her state. The governor ordered bars, gyms, movie theaters and the like closed — but she is keeping schools open.
Raimondo should be praised for recognizing what too many state and local leaders ignore: Hard data have proven, and America’s scientists have reached consensus, that students in classrooms are not significant spreaders of COVID-19.
One of the largest studies, led by Brown University economist Emily Oster PhD, analyzed in-school infection data from 47 states for two weeks at the end of September. Out of 200,000 students who returned to the classroom, just 0.13 percent tested positive for COVID-19. Positive tests for 63,000 staff clocked in at 0.24 percent. Cases nationwide have dramatically increased since then, but even in places that had low-positivity rates, schools remained closed while nonessential businesses welcomed customers — and likely contributed to community spread.
With election day looming, my anxiety was spiking. To calm myself, I drove across four state lines to knock doors for Joe Biden.
I had phone and text banked, but I wanted to canvas in one of the three Pennsylvania counties that flipped blue to red in 2016. My goal was to help, but I also wanted to interact with voters who may have helped usher in our recent national nightmare.
When I arrived in the Lehigh Valley, the campaign was in “get out the vote” mode. Headquarters assigned me a list of registered Democrats who hadn’t yet voted. My mission: chase ballots.
Over several days, I knocked hundreds of doors. Some voters needed logistical guidance. I met families waiting for election day to take a young member to the polls for their first presidential vote. The door was slammed in my face a few times. But I quickly observed a pattern with voters “sitting this one out.”
Surprisingly, their beef wasn’t with Biden. It was with what they called the “radical liberalism” and “socialism” of the Democratic Party. One Democrat practically shouted, “You’re not going to like who I’m voting for because of Democrats’ radical liberal B.S.!”
I was unable to catch that particular ballot.
I was more successful with a voter still living with his parents. He probably wouldn’t have spoken to me, but I caught him in the driveway with a freshly lit cigarette. He was trapped. Smiling with my eyes above my mask, I gently disabused him of the idea that Democrats’ platform included “defunding the police.” By the time he crushed out his butt, he caved. “I’ll ride in with my dad and vote,” he promised.
Of course, Trump furiously peddled disinformation about Biden’s record. But overheated “progressive” rhetoric from the primary campaign evidently lingered in voters’ memories, as well. That animus toward Democrats, in part, forced 76 million voters to hold their breath for a less-than-one-percent Pennsylvania win that didn’t come until Saturday.
It also endangered down ballot candidates. For example, demands from Green New Deal advocates for a ban on fracking almost cost Rep. Conor Lamb (D-PA) his seat. Rep. Abigail Spanberger complained of constant questions about “defunding the police” from worried voters in her classic swing district in Central Virginia.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, the democratic socialist firebrand, has another theory: poor spending choices and weak digital operations made vulnerable Democrats “sitting ducks” in close contests. She also criticized candidates for not accepting her help in swing districts.
I can’t evaluate her other charges, but from personal experience I can say AOC’s “help” would not have been helpful with the voters I met. On the contrary, they worry about the direction in which she is trying to lead the Democrats. It was Biden’s refusal to endorse progressives’ dogmatic demands for fracking bans, defunding the police, abolishing private health insurance, open borders and more that made it possible for him to put Pennsylvania back in the blue column.
Pennsylvania isn’t the only place demonstrating this anxiety. Consider Nebraska’s 2nd congressional district. It’s a true swing district that, since its creation in 1883, has only once been held by the same party for more than 25 years. It was blue as recently as 2017.
There, progressive Kara Eastman, who ran on Medicare for All, lost by almost five percent to the incumbent Roll Call named the “most vulnerable of the cycle.” Simultaneously, Biden carried the district by a six point margin − a critical win in a district that comes with its own electoral college vote.
This should be a lesson for House progressives in safe seats who insist on trying to force voters to eat the elephant in one bite. AOC’s seat has been blue, with two exceptions, since 1927. Rep Rashida Tlaib’s (D-Mich.) seat has been blue since 1949. Rep. Ilhan Omar’s (D-Minn.) has been blue since 1963. Those are safe spaces from which to go big and bold, but indications are, voters prefer more incremental change.
As the New York Times’ David Leonhardt observed, a small but crucial segment of Americans chose to vote for both Mr. Biden and Republican congressional candidates. He wrote, “Democrats are almost certainly fooling themselves if they conclude that America has turned into a left-leaning country that’s ready to get rid of private health insurance, defund the police, abolish immigration enforcement and vote out Republicans because they are filling the courts with anti-abortion judges.” Wise words.
This is a fragile moment for the new administration. While Biden notched a solid win, more people voted against the 2020 Democratic ticket than any election in history. When members of the Biden-Sanders criminal justice task force called for defunding the police−something Biden never did−it cost votes in exurban Pennsylvania.
Democrats need those voters, just as we need the urban centers and the Black women who were instrumental to Mr. Biden’s victory. He knows what matters to all of them. He won’t be able to deliver much though, if Democrats lose January’s Senate runoffs in Georgia.
Georgia has voters like the people I met in the Lehigh Valley. It’s time to dial back left-wing daydreams and offer voters pragmatic help in solving their problems. Don’t make an already tough political battle tougher. And please, don’t make me drive to Georgia.
A lot of attention and a bevy of proposals have focused on the rising cost of drugs, among all Americans, including older adults covered by Medicare.
But are these costs really rising as fast as people think? Or is the concern over drug spending due to something I call the prescription escalator?
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in September that the average spending by senior households for prescription and nonprescription drugs dropped in 2019 for the second straight year. In fact, households headed by Americans age 65 and older devoted only 1.5% of their total household outlays to out-of-pocket spending on drugs in 2019, the lowest level in at least 20 years.
Taking a broader look at Americans of all ages, average out-of-pocket drug spending in 2019 came to $486 per household, close to the amount spent in 2014. The long-term trend is that out-of-pocket drug spending is a falling share of household budgets.
If it’s not out-of-pocket spending, perhaps the cost of paying for essential medicines is putting an increasing burden on the economy. List prices are certainly rising. The IQVIA Institute calculates that spending for pharmaceuticals, taking list prices at face value, went up by $194 billion between 2014 and 2019. But after taking rebates and discounts into account, the report showed that net revenues to manufacturers rose by only $56 billion, or 19%, over the same stretch.
North Carolina may never see another Democratic Governor like Roy Cooper. In fact, we may never see another Democratic statewide candidate like him.
By “like him,” I mean Democratic Governors like Jim Hunt who have dominated politics since World War II: farm boys and small-town boys who went off to college, acquired some urban polish and assembled broad centrist-progressive coalitions that propelled them to office.
They were attuned to the innate conservatism and religious faith of small-town and rural North Carolina. They blended that background with the progressive traditions of universities and urban areas. They understood both urban and rural areas.
That model may be outdated now.
The 2020 election pitted deep-red, Republican small towns and rural areas against deep-blue Democratic urban areas. Suburbs and exurbs voted red or blue depending on whether they’re closer to cities or the countryside.
From now on, few, if any, Democratic statewide candidates will come out of rural areas. For one thing, there won’t be many progressive Democrats living there. For another, it will be virtually impossible for such a creature to win a local or legislative election that will boost them onto the statewide stage.
By the same token, we’re not likely to see many statewide Republican candidates who fit the mold of North Carolina’s only three Republican Governors in modern times. They came out of Mecklenburg County (Pat McCrory and Jim Martin) and Watauga County (Jim Holshouser).
Both Mecklenburg and Watauga are now deep-blue Democratic.
Terry Sanford pioneered the Democratic model. He grew up in Laurinburg and went to UNC for undergrad and law school. After fighting in World War II, he moved to Fayetteville. He was elected Governor in 1960 by combining young WWII vets with the “branchhead boys,” farmers and country people who had bucked the establishment and elected Kerr Scott as Governor in 1948.
Jim Hunt perfected the model through five winning campaigns, Lieutenant Governor in 1972 and Governor in 1976, 1980, 1992 and 1996. Hunt grew up on a farm in Wilson County. He earned bachelors and master’s degrees at NC State and a law degree at UNC-Chapel Hill.
Governor Mike Easley (2001-2009) came from Rocky Mount. His father owned a tobacco warehouse. Easley went to UNC and N.C. Central Law School.
Bev Perdue (2009-2013) was a variation on the theme; she grew up in a Virginia coal town, graduated from the University of Kentucky and represented the New Bern area in the legislature.
Cooper is the epitome of the winning formula. He grew up in Nash County. His father was a lawyer and a farmer. Cooper worked on the farm growing up. Like Hunt, his mother was a teacher. Cooper went to UNC undergrad and law school. He moved his family to Raleigh after he was elected Attorney General in 2000.
He beat an incumbent Governor in 2016. This year, again, he won despite Donald Trump carrying the state. Cooper led all Democrats. He got over 2.8 million votes; his margin was 4.5%, a landslide in today’s politics.
(Only one candidate ran stronger: Republican Agriculture Commissioner Steve Troxler. He won over 2.9 million votes and a margin of 7.7%.)
Two questions arise about the future. First, what will the winning model be – for both Democrats and Republicans? Second, who can govern successfully?
North Carolina needs candidates who can speak to both rural and urban residents, as well as to all races, creeds and backgrounds.
We need leaders who can bring us together, not just politicians who drive us farther apart.
We need to find them, and they need to step forward.
