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From Illinois to Pennsylvania: A Moderate Winning Streak

Posted on March 26, 2018September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Is moderate Democrat turnout in recent special elections an indicator of what’s to come?

It was down to the wire, but Rep. Dan Lipinski’s victory over a left-wing challenger in Illinois’ primary election this week keeps alive a moderate Democrat winning streak. Lipinski, who represents Illinois’s 3rd Congressional District, narrowly edged out challenger Marie Newman by 2.4 percent of the vote. Newman enjoyed the backing of Washington pressure groups incensed by Lipinski’s deviations from progressive orthodoxy – he is personally opposed to abortion and voted against the Affordable Care Act. She also was endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, who carried the district by 9 points against Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primary. Nonetheless, Democratic primary voters stuck with Lipinski.

Coming on the heels of wins by Conor Lamb and Doug Jones in a district and a state that Donald Trump won handily in 2016, Lipinski’s success completes a moderate Democratic trifecta. In Pennsylvania’s 18^th District, which Mitt Romney won by 17 points and Trump by 20 points, Lamb had to attract Republican-leaning voters to win. While toeing the party line on health care, entitlement reform and unions, the ex-Marine also took independent stands on guns, immigration and abortion issues and expressed his willingness to work across party lines in Congress. That combination proved attractive to moderate and swing voters who put him over the top. Also impressive was Doug Jones’ U.S. Senate victory in deep-crimson Alabama. Exit polls from the special election to fill Jeff Sessions’ (R) vacant senatorial seat showed that Jones won moderate voters by a stunning 47 points. Of course, Jones had the good fortune to run against accused pedophile Roy Moore, but his tempered positions on gun rights and abortion helped him become the first Democrat elected to the Senate from Alabama since 1992.

The lesson from these elections, of course, isn’t that moderate Democrats always do better than liberals. The main takeaway is that the party’s candidates must be well-matched, politically and culturally, to the districts and states they seek to represent.

Being a good candidate isn’t simply a matter of checking ideological boxes or filling out interest group questionnaires. There can be no “one-size-fits” all electoral strategy for winning in every region of a country as big and diverse as ours. In Illinois, Newman charged that Lipinski is not a “true Democrat” because of his views on abortion and same-sex marriage. Democratic primary voters thought otherwise. And that should give pause to the progressive purity police.

International Women’s Day: #TBT Elect More Women to End Gridlock

Posted on March 8, 2018 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Happy International Women’s Day! Around the world, people are celebrating the power, value, and achievement of women, while bringing attention to many gender based inequalities that continue to pervade society today. In honor of this day, we revisit a 2012 op-ed from PPI Director of Domestic & Social Policy Anne Kim, “Elect More Women to End Gridlock.”

In her piece for The Hill, Kim argues that many female politicians are more likely to approach policy in a bipartisan manner than are their male colleagues from the same state. Kim backs up this point with studies suggesting that women tend more toward personality traits of “agreeableness” and cooperation on average than do men.

In spite of this valuable bipartisanship in public policy discussions, women still face barriers to holding political office. Kim explains that the United States still has a long way to go before reaching a congressional gender balance anywhere near equal, or even on par with many other countries globally. Additionally, many aspects of modern campaigning — including pressure to constantly fundraise, little privacy, and time away from family — tend to be particularly meaningful deterrents for women considering a run for office. Before women are adequately represented in U.S. political representation, Americans must grapple with these factors. In the past few years, a wave of powerful female candidates has become a key part of the American electoral landscape. Last year in Virginia alone, 11 of 15 House of Delegates seats flipped from Republicans to Democrats also flipped from a man to a woman. Hundreds of women are in the running for American congressional seats this year, a number on track to break records once official filings are finalized. In the context of the upcoming 2018 elections, Kim’s 2012 call for hope still rings true: “if enough women make it to Congress this November, they may indeed prove to be the better bridge builders and compromise brokers Washington desperately needs.”

Happy Holidays from PPI

Posted on December 19, 2017September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

It’s been a surreal political year, but PPI has much to celebrate this holiday season. Throughout 2017, we expanded our productive capacity and the scope of our political and media outreach significantly. For example, PPI organized 150 meetings with prominent elected officials; visited 10 state capitals and 10 foreign capitals, published an influential book and more than 40 original research papers, and hosted nearly 30 private salon dinners on a variety of topical issues.

Best of all, we saw PPI’s research, analysis, and innovative ideas breaking through the political static and changing the way people think about some critical issues, including how to revive U.S. economic dynamism, spread innovation and jobs to people and places left behind by economic growth, and modernize the ways we prepare young people for work and citizenship.

Let me give you some highlights:

This fall, David Osborne’s new book, Reinventing America’s Schools, was published on the 25th anniversary of the nation’s first charter school in Minnesota. David, who heads PPI’s Reinventing America’s Schools project, documents the emergence of a new “21^st Century” model for organizing and modernizing our public school system around the principles of school autonomy, accountability, choice, and diversity. David is just winding up a remarkable 20-city book tour that drew wide attention from education, political, and civic leaders, as well as the media. Because David is a great storyteller, as well as analyst, it’s a highly readable book that offers a cogent picture of a K-12 school system geared to the demands of the knowledge economy. It makes a great holiday gift!

Dr. Michael Mandel’s pioneering research on e-commerce and job creation also upended conventional wisdom and caught the attention of top economic commentators. Dr. Mandel, PPI’s chief economic strategist, found that online commerce has actually created more jobs in retail than it destroys, and that these new jobs (many in fulfillment centers in outlying areas) pay considerably better than traditional ones. His research buttresses the main premise of PPI’s progressive pro-growth agenda: that spreading digital innovation to the physical economy will create new jobs and businesses, raise labor productivity, and reduce inequality.

PPI challenged the dubious panacea of “free college” and proposed a progressive alternative – a robust system of post-secondary learning and credentials for the roughly 70 percent of young Americans who don’t get college degrees. PPI Senior Fellow Harry Holzer developed a creative menu of ways to create more “hybrid learning” opportunities combining work-based and classroom instruction. And PPI Senior Fellow Anne Kim highlighted the inequity of current government policies that subsidize college-bound youth (e.g., Pell Grants), but provide no help for people earning credentials certifying skills that employers value.

Building on last year’s opening of a PPI office in Brussels, we expanded our overseas work considerably in 2017. In January, I endeavored to explain the outcome of the U.S. election to shell-shocked audiences in London, Brussels, and Berlin. In April, we led our annual Congressional senior staff delegation to Paris, Brussels, and Berlin to engage European policymakers on the French presidential election and other U.S-E.U. issues, including international taxation, competition policy, and trade. PPI also took its message of data-driven innovation and growth to Australia, Brazil, Japan and a number of other countries.

Other 2017 highlights included a strategy retreat in February with two dozen top elected leaders to explore ideas for a new, radically pragmatic agenda for progressives; a Washington conference with our longtime friend Janet Napolitano (now President of the University of California system) on how to update and preserve NAFTA; public forums in Washington on pricing carbon, infrastructure, tax reform, and other pressing issues; creative policy reports on varied subjects; and a robust output of articles, op-eds, blogs, and social media activity.

I’m also happy to report many terrific additions to PPI in 2017. Rob Keast joined to manage our external relations and new policy development; Paul Bledsoe assumed a new role as Strategic Adviser as well as guiding our work on energy and climate policy; and Emily Langhorne joined as Education Policy Analyst. We will also be adding a fiscal project next year.

All this leaves us poised for a high-impact year in 2018. In this midterm-election year, our top priority will be crafting and building support for a new progressive platform — a radically pragmatic alternative to the political tribalism throttling America’s progress. That starts with new and better ideas for solving peoples’ problems that look forward, not backward, and that speak to their hopes and aspirations, not their anger and mistrust.

It’s a tall order, and we cannot succeed without your help and support. Thanks for all you have done over past years, and we look forward to working with you in 2018.

Happy holidays and New Year!

Marshall for The Daily News, “The embrace of Roy Moore reveals the corrosive, all-consuming corruption of Donald Trump’s Republican Party”

Posted on December 8, 2017 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Last week, Republicans played elves to President Trump’s Santa, cobbling together an atrocious package of tax giveaways that will mostly help wealthy Americans while piling at least $1 trillion on the national debt. So much for GOP claims to be the party of working people and fiscal responsibility.

Now Trump and the Republican National Committee are trying to rally their party behind the odious figure of Roy Moore, who is running in next week’s special U.S. Senate election in Alabama. To put it mildly, this poses difficult ethical questions for the nation’s governing party: Is there any limit to what party solidarity can justify? Is Trump’s addiction to winning at any price now the Republican Party’s animating political principle?

Moore is a religious extremist ousted not once but twice from the Alabama Supreme Court for refusing to abide by one of the U.S. Constitution’s core principles: the separation of church and state. That alone should disqualify him from running for local dog catcher, let alone the Senate. So much for the GOP’s professed reverence for constitutional government.

Continue reading at The New York Daily News.

Marshall for The Daily Beast, “Here’s How Democrats Can Win, Not Just Resist”

Posted on November 17, 2017 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Democrats—who’d had little to celebrate since Donald Trump’s shocking election a year ago—are exulting in last week’s sweeping victories in Virginia and New Jersey, the first signs that the party can spin Trump’s abysmal public approval ratings into electoral gold.

Yet there’s also a danger of over-interpreting these odd-year election results. New Jersey is a deep blue state, and a combination of demographic change and political pragmatism in Virginia has made Democrats ascendant once again in the Old Dominion. More fundamentally, however, the party can’t engineer a political comeback solely on the strength of an anti-Trump message.

That’s because Democrats’ core dilemma – their lack of competitiveness across America’s broad midsection – is structural. It started before Trump burst onto the political scene and reflects deep cultural and economic changes that have left rural and working class voters feeling forgotten and left behind.

Continue reading at The Daily Beast.

Yarrow for the Baltimore Sun, “Early childhood care undervalued in Md.”

Posted on November 12, 2017 by The Progressive Policy Institute

When my son, now in college, started school in Maryland, he went to a private preschool, and only half-day public kindergarten existed. As for most young children in the United States, then and now, public early childhood education was unavailable.

Full-day kindergarten is now the norm, and 35 percent of Maryland’s 4 year olds are enrolled in public preschool, with another 15 percent in private pre-K. But the state still lags behind the national average, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Because low-income children generally have less access, they are less “school ready” by kindergarten, generally perpetuating lifelong disparities. For a state that prides itself on its public education and is also among the nation’s wealthiest in per capita income, it is inexcusable that Maryland lacks free or affordable early childhood care and education.

Continue reading at The Baltimore Sun.

Kim for The American Interest, “One of These Governors Could Save the Democrats in 2020”

Posted on October 24, 2017 by The Progressive Policy Institute

State-level Democratic leaders are showing how populism and pragmatism combined can energize liberal turnout while still winning crucial swing-state support.

Under a clear blue sky in late summer, with the peaks of the Gallatin Mountains as a backdrop, Montana Governor Steve Bullock mingles with guests at a private event on a ranch just outside Bozeman. Holding a plate piled high with barbecue, Bullock is half a head taller than most of the people here. He is genial and relaxed, in jeans and battered brown shoes. His nametag reads, “Governor Steve.”

A young mother brings over two little girls in flowered sundresses, and Bullock immediately drops down to eye level. A few minutes later, the girls leave with their mother, smiles on their faces, their votes no doubt locked up for 15 years hence when the girls will be old enough to cast a ballot. In half the conversations that swirl around Bullock, there are joking references to 2020 and hints about the Governor’s ambitions. It’s an open secret here that the Bullock might be running for President.

Just this past fall, Bullock won re-election over GOP challenger billionaire Greg Gianforte by four percentage points—50 percent to 46 percent—in a state where only 35 percent of voters chose Democrat Hillary Clinton for President and Donald Trump won by 20 points. That victory is Bullock’s calling card into the Democratic presidential sweepstakes, along with the prairie populist credentials he has burnished. As the state’s Attorney General, he endeared himself to sportsmen by authoring a state opinion guaranteeing access to public lands. He also took on the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United, defending the state’s ban on corporate spending (he lost when the Court reaffirmed its decision).

Continue reading at The American Interest.

Iowa’s App Economy: A Summary

Posted on October 12, 2017 by The Progressive Policy Institute

When it comes to tech jobs, global hubs like Silicon Valley, New York, and Austin get all the attention. But, to an increasing degree, our research shows tech-driven employment growth is not restricted to those high-profile areas.

For example, our widely-cited March 2017 report “How the Startup Economy is Spreading Across the Country—and How It Can Be Accelerated” demonstrated that the startup mentality could be found in many regions. And our new report (“The Next Ten Million Jobs”) finds that tech and tech-related jobs grew by 51% in the “Heartland” states from 2007 to 2016, only slightly slower than the nation as a whole. In Iowa, tech and tech-related jobs grew by 83% over the same period (Figure 1), accounting for almost one-quarter of private-sector nonfarm job growth (Table 1).

Rotherham for US News, “American Greatness Is Lost on Trump”

Posted on August 31, 2017 by The Progressive Policy Institute

The president almost never celebrates the U.S., instead griping about perceived ills.

Here’s something curious and hidden in plain sight: For all his talk about “making America great again,” President Donald Trump spends precious little time actually talking about American greatness. From the campaign to his dark nomination acceptance, a dystopian inaugural address, right up to the present, when is the last time you heard the president talking about the strengths and beauty of America with the frequency or fervor he talks about perceived ills or his critics? A city upon a hill this is not.

Trump tosses rhetorical bouquets at soldiers and first responders, and his scripted Warsaw speech underlined the importance of Western values – but then he came home and continued his off-the-cuff attacks on the media. We get “fire and fury,” but a lot less about our ideals and values. When is the last time you heard the president thank America for the opportunities he and his family enjoyed and enjoy here in this great land today? His wife is an immigrant, yet we hear little of the celebration of how immigrants made and continue to make this land great. He rarely celebrates the rich American story of progress and possibility. Instead, despite all the advantages he’s enjoyed, the president is the man from nope.

Continue reading at U.S. News.

Marshall for The Daily Beast, “How Liberals Are Blowing It Worldwide-and How Macron Might Not”

Posted on May 30, 2017 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Nearly everywhere you look, parties of the left are on the skids. That’s a big part of why Macron won in France. If he delivers, it’ll point the new direction.

Europe seems to be containing the fever of resurgent nationalism that propelled last year’s Brexit vote as well as Donald Trump’s improbable election here. Emmanuel Macron’s landslide victory over Marine Le Pen in France’s presidential election is just the latest sign that continental Europe isn’t catching the populist bug.

Not yet, anyway. Nativist and illiberal nationalist movements continue to make headway in many democratic countries. They could break through and take power—as they did in the United States last November—if mainstream parties can’t channel popular grievances toward constructive change.

As populists push political debate to the right, however, center-left parties are floundering on both sides of the Atlantic. Yoked to stale ideas and change-averse constituencies, they are failing to offer restive voters a radically pragmatic alternative to populist panaceas like cutting off immigration, seceding from the global economy and reverting to zero-sum nationalism.

Continue reading at The Daily Beast.

Bledsoe for RCP, “How Democrats Can Hasten Trump’s Departure”

Posted on May 23, 2017 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Washington can hardly keep up with the unprecedented pace at which Donald Trump’s presidency is cascading out of control. Ironically, the appointment last week of Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate Russia’s involvement in the 2016 presidential election may slow White House hemorrhaging, taking pressure off GOP congressional leaders and their weak investigations and temporarily shoring up support for Trump on Capitol Hill.

For Democrats and independents concerned about the safety and well-being of the country, however, the priority must be getting Trump out of the White House as quickly as possible. He is simply too great a threat to America’s security and integrity, and his departure from power should take precedence over all other objectives.

To help accomplish this goal, Democrats must develop and deliver such powerful political and economic messages — and recruit enough strong candidates — that congressional Republicans feel compelled to abandon Trump for fear of losing their majority in 2018. Unlike a normal presidency, there is a genuine possibility that Trump, who is certain to be both perpetually dogged by scandal and tired of the “harder than I thought” stresses of the job, might resign before his term is completed. A strong Democratic Party could have a key role in hastening the process. If Republicans fear going into the 2018 midterms that Trump could cost them their seats, his GOP support will start to erode. If Trump does not leave voluntarily, Democratic capture of the House and perhaps even the Senate in 2018 increases the likelihood of successful impeachment proceedings.

Continue reading at RealClearPolitics.

Yarrow for Washington Monthly: “Emmanuel Macron’s Victory Holds Hope for France, and Lessons for America”

Posted on May 8, 2017 by The Progressive Policy Institute

While America succumbed to right-wing nationalism, France rejected it decisively. Democrats should pay attention.

Nearly 250 years ago, French ideas and French economic support enabled the success of the American Revolution. With the landslide election of Emmanuel Macron as president of France on Sunday, France could again point the way to a much-needed overhaul of U.S. politics.

Emmanuel Macron, a 39-year-old center-left newcomer to politics, decisively defeated Marine Le Pen of the ethnonationalist National Front party, 66 percent to 34 percent. Macron’s victory provides a crucial firewall against the right-wing nationalism that has convulsed the United States and the United Kingdom—at least temporarily protecting the future of the European Union—while reinvigorating the French economy, politics, and spirit.

A former investment banker and Minister of the Economy under outgoing President Francois Hollande, Macron is an outsider who formed his own party, En Marche! (On the Move) barely a year ago and is the first president in decades not affiliated with France’s two major parties: the Socialists and the Republicans. Endorsed by Barack Obama, Macron—like the former American president—could bring a certain hipness to France in a way that spurs pride, hope, and dynamism.

Macron and Le Pen prevailed as the top two vote-getters after the first round of voting two weeks ago, which had more than its share of drama and colorful characters. The four leading candidates included a witty former communist who campaigned using holograms, a Catholic conservative lawmaker who allegedly paid family members more than $1 million for fictional jobs and accepted gifts of two men’s suits worth $13,000, the blond daughter of a Holocaust denier who stoked hatred toward immigrants (Le Pen), and a baby-faced young intellectual who married his high-school teacher (Macron).

Continue Reading at Washington Monthly.

Flashback Friday: PPI in Hindsight

Posted on March 31, 2017September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Just over a year ago, PPI unveiled a big ideas blueprint with a prescient subtitle: Unleashing Innovation and Growth: A Progressive Alternative to Populism. We knew that progressives in the United States and Europe needed better answers to the economic and cultural grievances that have fueled the rise of a retrograde populism and nationalism around the world. We did not foresee that Democrats would fail to offer a forward-looking plan for jobs and shared growth, opening the door to Donald Trump’s improbable victory.

Which makes the themes and ideas in PPI’s sweeping policy blueprint more important than ever. Populism today thrives in the political vacuum left by center-left parties that offer no clear vision for reviving economic dynamism and hope. “Winning the economic argument will be essential to victory in the 2016 elections and it starts by getting the diagnosis right,” the blueprint noted. Instead, Democrats ran a campaign that leaned heavily on identity politics, wealth redistribution and centralized, small-bore solutions.

Unleashing argued that America (and Europe) are stuck in a slow-growth trap that holds down wages and living standards. And it offered bold prescriptions for building on America’s competitive advantage in technology and entrepreneurship to spread innovation – now concentrated in a vibrant digital sector — to the nation’s physical economy, which continues to suffer from low productivity. In addition, the document proposed creative ways to modernize the nation’s economic infrastructure, improve the regulatory environment for innovation, build middle class wealth and empower poor Americans to work, save and chart their own course to social mobility and inclusion.

Crucially, the blueprint also urged progressives to reject anger and victimhood and offer voters a confident account for how America can build a new, inclusive prosperity:

What America needs is a forward-looking plan to unleash innovation, stimulate productive investment, groom the world’s most talented workers, and put our economy back on a high-growth path, It’s time to banish fear and pessimism and trust instead in the liberal and individualist values and enterprising culture that have always made America great.

That was the road not taken in 2016. Now it’s the road to political relevance and success for progressives here and elsewhere.

Lewis for The Daily Beast, “Great Party, Brutal Hangover-Why Democrats Should Reject Their Donor Class”

Posted on February 23, 2017 by The Progressive Policy Institute

As the parties have given up on their core functions, wealthy donors with ideological agendas have filled the void they’ve left.

Democrats suffered losses up and down the ballot on Nov. 8, bolstering Republican dominance of both national and state governments. A presidential campaign launched with high hopes wound up adding to the party’s demoralizing string of defeats in 2010, 2012, and 2014. Outside of a candidate named Barack Obama, Democrats have not had much success on election days since 2008.

The party needs to change, but how? Media attention has focused on the race between competing factions to take over the Democratic National Committee. The press will obsessively cover the “dramatic” picking of a party chair in Atlanta this weekend, where 447 voters will choose the new superhero to return the party to power.

It’s the wrong battle, though, because the DNC cannot be the instrument for the party’s revival. Thanks to the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2001, the national parties have lost power to the growing role of outside money. Formal party structures have become empty vessels overshadowed by external ideological networks of wealthy individuals and organizations on the right and left.

Continue reading at The Daily Beast.

PPI President: Override This Odious Order

Posted on January 30, 2017September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

President Trump evidently believes many things that have no basis in fact. Only a week into his presidency, his make-believe world is colliding with reality – to the detriment and even shame of our country.

There’s no better example than his order temporarily preventing citizens of seven Muslim countries from entering our country. It is an affront to American ideals that has sparked protests here and around the world, embarrassed our friends and handed our Islamist enemies a propaganda windfall.

Trump says the temporary ban is necessary to give the Administration time to set up an “extreme” vetting regime for visitors and immigrants from countries where terrorists operate. But we already have a rigorous system for screening immigrants, and the White House order falls heavily on refugees – many of them fleeing terrorist fanaticism and violence.

Notes Blake Houndshell in Politico, “Since 1990, of the 182 radical Islamic terrorists who plotted attacks in the United States or on inbound airplanes, just two entered the U.S. as refugees. Little wonder-since refugees are among the most carefully vetted immigrant groups, and the bulk of them are women and children.” Oddly, the White House list of proscribed countries includes Iraq, our partner in the fight to destroy the Islamic State’s homicidal “caliphate,” but not Saudi Arabia, where most of the 9/11 attackers came from.

Making life more miserable for refugees won’t make America safer. It’s impossible to listen to the heartrending stories of legal migrants being denied entry, detained and separated from their families without wondering whether the nation’s new political leaders have any idea what they are doing.

The Trump policy – or more likely, the Bannon policy – is unnecessary, cruel and strategically stupid. The word that America is now slamming its doors to Muslims while welcoming Christians is burning up jihadist websites, bolstering their claim to be defending Muslims against U.S. and Western “crusaders.” Our two previous presidents have understood that reinforcing the jihadists’ apocalyptic narrative can only alienate America’s Muslim allies around the world. It’s unsettling that this obvious point eludes Trump’s grasp.

But it’s heartening to see Americans protesting Trump’s order and going to airports to welcome people from Muslim countries. Lawyers have volunteered to help refugees and some judges have issued staying orders.

So is Trump’s policy really America’s policy? That’s for Congress to decide. For Republicans particularly it’s a moment of truth. Will they abet Trump in traducing America’s core values of religious freedom and pluralism? They will if they don’t join Democrats in overriding this odious presidential decree.

Yarrow for the Baltimore Sun, “Americans are losing faith in god, politicians and even science”

issue: Politics