Medicare for Anyone

I think Paul Waldman has this exactly right--Medicare for Anyone is the future for the Democrats. I called the "Medicare for Anyone" idea "Medicare for All (Who Want It)" in a post awhile back but it's the same idea. Instead of replacing the private insurance market wholesale, we simply open up Medicare to anyone who wants it. But if they don't want it, they can keep the health insurance they have.

Of course, the policy details of this get complicated in terms of cost, organization, implementation, etc. They are well worked out in the DeLauro-Schakowdky Medicare for America plan and in CAP's Medicare Extra for All plan. Those details need not detain us here.

The point is that the basic idea is simple, salable, avoids big political potholes and gets us a hell of a long way in the right direction. As Waldman says:

"There are three main reasons [why this is the direction Democrats will go in]. First, this kind of plan satisfies, at least for the most part, the progressive desire to insure everyone and eliminate the pathological features of the current system. Second, it addresses what is probably the greatest vulnerability of single-payer plans: the fear of change. It’s foolish to think that fear can be eliminated through sufficient logical persuasion, and Republicans will absolutely exploit it when they fight against whatever Democrats propose. So the fact that joining Medicare would be voluntary is essential to these proposals.

And finally, it’s easy to explain. I cannot stress enough how important this is. The ACA was an absolute nightmare to explain to people, which left it vulnerable to all the demagoguery and lies Republicans could muster. Like Medicare-for-all, Medicare For Anyone is just three words, and it requires no explanation at all. You know what Medicare is, right? It’s the program your grandmother is on, the one she loves. Now anyone can join. That’s it."

That's it indeed. The press will continue to feast on stories about Democratic disagreements on health care. But in the end I suspect this is where we'll end up. And that'll be a good thing.

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WASHINGTONPOST.COM

Opinion | Democrats have figured out where they’re going on health care

Get ready for "Medicare For Anyone."

Understanding Prospects for a Blue Texas

Nate Cohn presents some new data on the 2018 Texas Senate election based on survey data, actual election results and the voter file for the state. His analysis largely accords with what I and some other analysts have been saying about trends in Texas and prospects for Democrats. Here's the basic story:

"[H]ow did Mr. O’Rourke fare so well? He did it through old-fashioned persuasion, by winning voters who had voted for Republicans and for minor-party candidates....

Mr. O’Rourke’s strong showing had essentially nothing to do with the initial vision of a Blue Texas powered by mobilizing the state’s growing Hispanic population. The Texas electorate was only two points more Hispanic in 2018 than it was in 2012, but President Obama lost the state by 16 points in 2012, compared with Mr. O’Rourke’s 2.6-point loss.

At the same time, Mr. O’Rourke fared worse than Mr. Obama or Hillary Clinton in many of the state’s heavily Hispanic areas, particularly in more conservative South Texas. This could reflect Mr. Cruz’s relative strength among Hispanic voters compared with a typical Republican.

Instead, Mr. O’Rourke’s improvement came almost exclusively from white voters, and particularly college-educated white voters. Whites probably gave him around 33 percent of their votes, up from a mere 22 percent for Mr. Obama in 2012.

There’s clearly additional upside for Democrats if they could pair their recent gains among white voters with improvement among Hispanic voters (through some combination of persuasion, higher turnout among registrants and newly registered voters).....

Put it together, and Texas is on the cusp of being a true (if Republican-tilting) battleground state. It might not be immediately and vigorously contested, as Arizona or North Carolina will most likely be, given the greater expense of campaigning in Texas and the fact that it starts out to the right of those states. But if Democrats chose to contest it seriously in 2020, there wouldn’t be anything crazy about that."

So there you have it. Texas really is becoming a battleground state, through a very interesting combination of persuasion, turnout and demographic change. There's a lesson there for people who are just included to look at one factor!

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NYTIMES.COM

Why Texas Is Nearing Battleground Status (It’s Not Just About Beto)

Hispanics represent the (elusive) upside for Democrats, but it’s a shift in white voters that is making the biggest difference.

Struggling Communities and the 2020 Election

Trump's re-election prospects depend importantly on how he fares in the struggling rural and small town communities where he did so well in 2016. If he can duplicate that performance, he'll have a good shot at a second term.

First of all, are these communities still struggling? If not, that would perhaps help him retain these voters. But it looks like recovery has been slow. From a Brookings report on the geography of employment growth:

"[W]e compared job growth across places since the depths of the recession, grouping places by how economically successful they were prior to 2011. We find that employment is growing faster in thriving places than in struggling places, but it is particularly lagging in struggling rural places."

So, the Democrats logically should have an opportunity here. Will they show up? The 2018 election might be a model. From an interesting article on political behavior by dollar store concentration in Congressional Districts:

"Very few districts moved towards the GOP in 2018. Those that did were almost entirely in (and remained in) Democratic hands. Rather, even in districts with many dollar stores, congressional votes totals moved somewhere between a little and a lot towards the Democratic candidate.In fact, in 2018, Democrats improved their vote share as much in high-dollar-store districts as they did in ones with the fewest stores. The party’s vote share improved most in the mid-to-high dollar store districts in between. They even managed to win in VA-02.

Up through the 2016 elections, the ongoing geographic concentration of prosperity drove a widening political divide. Democrats were positioned as caring about the kinds of people who live in urban areas, and the kinds of poverty and inequality they face. That left Democrats vulnerable to Republican claims that they didn’t care about the kinds of people who live in small town and rural areas or the hardships they face. The social infrastructure through which Democrats once made their case in dollar-store country, like unions and working-class churches, was battered by the same grim trends that favored dollar stores’ arrival.

So how did Democrats make a comeback? In place after place, in the wake of Donald Trump’s election, local progressives decided they could no longer wait for someone else to fix a political system they saw as broken. They stepped forward, found each other, created and used online resources, and took hands-on political action. Where Democrats’ local infrastructure had most atrophied, the new presence was most impactful."

Hope the article's authors are right about the salience of local activism. We'll see.

https://www.brookings.edu/…/has-job-growth-reached-americ…/…

https://washingtonmonthly.com/…/what-dollar-stores-tell-us…/

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WASHINGTONMONTHLY.COM

What Dollar Stores Tell Us About Electoral Politics

Trump overwhelmingly won in small towns and rural areas. Here's why that might be changing.

Turnout and Persuasion in the 2018 Texas Senate Election

With Beto O'Rourke apparently about to enter the Presidential race, it's a good time to consider how he did so well in that 2018 Senate election. Patrick Ruffini of Echelon Insights recently published some detailed data on Twitter which I think are quite interesting. The main takeaways are below. I was particularly struck by the findings on persuasion vs. turnout. The key to O'Rourke's excellent performance was apparently persuading folks to vote for him, rather than simply getting more Democrats our to vote.

✅ Turnout leaned slightly right of ‘16.
✅ Backbone of Dem ‘18 voter surges: Whites in metros and young voters.
✅ Stronger Latino turnout than in CA or FL
✅ Dem gains entirely persuasion- (not turnout-) based

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TWITTER.COM

The Real Turnout Story 2018: Texas

With Beto gearing up for 2020, what can his 2018 race teach us?

Are We Underestimating Trump?

Maybe we are. He is the incumbent President after all and the economy has been pretty good. He's got a strong base. That said, he is pretty darn vulnerable as incumbent Presidents go. Democrats are very motivated and his approval ratings have been consistently bad with extraordinarily high strong disapproval.

But, let's face it, he could win again and therefore you really, really don't want to make too many mistakes in the effort to get rid of him, David Byler, the Post's new political data columnist, makes this case strongly in a new article. After noting Trump's strong points and cautioning against the assumption that Trump's approval rating can only go down, not up, he has the following words of wisdom for Democrats:

"Democrats could underestimate Trump and incorrectly think they have more room to move to the left than they really do. I want to be clear here — this isn’t a “Back To The Center, Democrats” take. I think a Democratic Party that adopts a people-versus-the-powerful ethos, heads left on economics and pushes on issues where Trump has been especially un-populist could work. But not every left-leaning position is as popular as marriage equality. Some 2020 Democrats (most notably Kamala Harris) have signaled that they’re open to some form of reparations for slavery. Whatever you think of the merits of that policy, it polls badly.

Underrating Trump could also lead Democrats to make bad decisions about the map. It would be easy for Democratic politicians to look at Trump’s low approval numbers, the growing number of Asian American and Latino voters, and conclude that they should de-emphasize the Midwest (or take the region for granted) and run hard in long-term targets such as Georgia, Arizona and Texas so they can run up the electoral college score.

Democrats shouldn’t do that. They should try to play on a broad map that includes Midwestern swing states as well as suburban, diversifying America. It’s smart for Democrats to try to get Republicans to spend money and effort on Georgia and Arizona, but Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin are still arguably the lowest hanging fruit and the best route to 270 electoral votes."

Sound right to me. We just can't afford big mistakes this time 'round...We gotta play it smart.

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WASHINGTONPOST.COM

Opinion | Everyone is underestimating Trump. It could hurt Democrats and Republicans alike.

The conventional wisdom is underrating Trump. And that could lead to bad decisions and consequences for both sides.

In Praise of Climate Realism

I detect a distinct lack of realism in the approach of many activists to the global warming problem. I'm for some sort of Green New Deal too but it seems quite unlikely to me that warming, relative to pre-industrial levels, is going to be held under 1.5 degrees C or even 2 degrees C. So how do we adapt and, at the same time, prevent warming that goes even farther? And does the current wave of climate catastrophism (e.g., David Wallace-Wells' The Uninhabitable Earth, but there are countless others) help or hurt such an effort?

I thought this article by Ted Nordhaus and Alex Trembath of the Breakthrough Institute was an excellent attempt to grapple with these questions in a real world, cut-the-bullshit way. YMMV.

THEBREAKTHROUGH.ORG

The Breakthrough Institute

Is climate change more like an asteroid or diabetes? Last month, one of us argued at Slate that climate advocates should resist calls to declare a national climate emergency because climate change was more like “diabetes for the planet” than an asteroid. The diabetes metaphor was surprisingly co...

Democratic Shifts Between 2016 and 2018 Occurred Almost Everywhere

My friend and frequent co-author Bill Frey had an excellent article out on voting shifts between 2016 and 2018, based on county-level data. By comparing Presidential voting in 2016 to House voting in 2018 on a county by county (and also state by state) basis, he finds the following:

"[T]he Democratic wave is all encompassing: 83 percent of the voting population lived in counties where support for Democrats has improved since 2016. This increased Democratic support was not confined to traditional Democratic base counties. It occurred in suburbs, smaller metropolitan and rural counties, and most noticeably, in counties with concentrations of older, native-born and white residents without college degrees. Moreover, at the state level, enough states flipped from Republican majorities in the 2016 presidential election to Democratic majorities in the 2018 House elections to project a 2020 Democratic Electoral College win....

in a vast majority of counties—even in those won by Republicans in 2018—more voters favored Democrats in 2018 than in 2016....In a majority of counties (2,445 of 3,111)—irrespective of whether the final 2018 vote favored Republican or Democratic candidates—there was a positive D-R margin shift between 2016 and 2018 (meaning either a greater Democratic advantage or a smaller Republican advantage)....

Counties with [the biggest shifts in} D-R margins tend to have “Republican leaning” attributes, when compared with all counties: greater shares of non-college whites and persons over age 45, and smaller shares of minorities and persons who are foreign born. This occurs among both Democratic-voting and Republican-voting counties, and suggests that there was a shift toward Democratic support in counties that helped elect Donald Trump in 2016...

Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona...[which went for Trump in 2016] registered Democratic advantages in their 2018 House elections. If those results hold for the 2020 election, the Democratic candidate would receive 293 electoral votes—enough to win the presidency Moreover, in all but two [of the 50} states, 2018 House D-R margins showed more positive or less negative values than those for the 2016 presidential race—both in “red” Republican states and in “blue” Democratic states "

Fascinating stuff, with some interesting political implications. And copiously illustrated with maps, charts and tables! Check it out.

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BROOKINGS.EDU

A vast majority of counties showed increased Democratic support in 2018 House election

Contents: More than four-fifths of 2018 voters reside in counties with rising Democratic support Increased 2018 Democratic support occurred in suburbs, small metros, and rural areas. Counties with …