[...] How can Democrats maximize their chances? First, they need to get the basics right. They should target widely because it’s impossible to know where the floor is for Trump. They don’t want to be in a situation where new terrain opens up and they’re unprepared. They need to start winning back state-level and county-level positions that feed into higher office. They’ll need money and an aggressive recruitment strategy to get good candidates to run. But, ultimately, the 2018 election, like all others, will be determined by who shows up.
The throngs of protesters who attended the Women’s March on Washington, and who continue to demonstrate at airports, town halls, and on city streets around the country, have made clear that opposition to Donald Trump’s radical Republican agenda will be sustained and powerful. But to earn the trust of the majority of Americans who reject Trumpism, Democrats will have to go beyond simple resistance. They’ll have to show that if voters restore them to power, they’ll actually improve the lives of working families. [...]
San Francisco mayor Ed Lee and city supervisor Jane Kim announced on Monday that the city would offer free community college to any of its residents, effective this fall.
[...] So-called “challenge statutes” have long been a subject of controversy. A 2012 Demos study referred to “bullies at the ballot box” measures, arguing that “There is a real danger that voters will face overzealous volunteers who take the law into their own hands to target voters they deem suspect.
The Senate voted Monday to kill an Obama administration rule aimed at curbing labor violations among government contractors. Two years in the making, the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces rule was targeted by Republican lawmakers 10 days after Donald Trump’s inauguration. The House voted to excise it on Feb.
A new report from the public policy think tank Demos and the Institute on Assets and Social Policy (IASP) at Brandeis University found that often, the go-to solutions cited to address economic inequality, do not close the wealth gap between whites and blacks and Latinos.
In a letter sent Tuesday to the New York State Board of Elections and DMV, the groups accused the DMV of flouting a federal law requiring that citizens be able to register to vote whenever they apply for, renew, or change their address on a driver's license or state-issued identification card.[...]
More than 90 percent of voters (including 91 percent of Trump voters) say that it is important for Trump to nominate a Supreme Court justice open to limiting big money in politics.
Published by public policy organization Demos,Court Cash: 2016 Election Money Resulting Directly from Supreme Court Rulingsquantifies for the first time the direct impact of the Supreme Court's four most significant money-in-politics cases, using the highly competitive presidential race, as well as the 22 congressional races won by 5 percentage points or fewer, as the study's focal point. [...]
[...] Judge Gorsuch’s approach “has created a system in which single individuals and corporations can spend tens of millions of dollars to influence elections, and in which candidates and elected officials are significantly more responsive to the priorities of an elite donor class than to Americans on the whole,” the CLC said.76 A recent report from Demos found that the ove
Democratic lawmakers and liberal interest groups are intensifying their pressure on senators to probe Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch’s views on campaign finance law during his confirmation hearings next week. [...]
[...] In short, our analysis indicates that Donald Trump successfully leveraged existing resentment towards African Americans in combination with emerging fears of increased racial diversity in America to reshape the presidential electorate, strongly attracting nativists towards Trump and pushing some more affluent and highly educated people with more cosmopolitan views to support Hillary Clinton. Racial identity and attitudes have further displaced class as the central battleground of American politics. [...]
“There are approximately zero students that would see a net benefit if this budget were enacted into law,” said Mark Huelsman, senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank. [...]
“Consolidating or reforming campus-based aid programs is not a bad idea, but at the end of the day students have to come out ahead,” Huelsman said. “Indiscriminate cuts to work-study absolutely would harm the low income students or middle class students on campuses who absolutely do receive the money.”
The remarkable advance of same-day registration was not an accident. National organizations, including Demos and Common Cause, and numerous state organizations led the fights in legislatures around the country.
Friends and foes of Neil Gorsuch lobbied the Senate Judiciary Committee Thursday both for and against confirmation of the Colorado-based judge to the Supreme Court.
Heather McGhee, president of Demos, a liberal policy think tank, lambasted Gorsuch for not distancing himself from the court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC, which struck down limits on campaign contributions.
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (RI) confronted Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Judge Neil Gorsuch about the vicious cycle facing our democracy: of severe concentration of economic power yielding severe concentration of political power.
Demos Policy Analyst Robert Hiltonsmith testifies before the Congressional Progressive Caucus on wage theft and its effects on the earnings of low-income workers.
The government contracts out hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of business to private entities, who in turn employ a huge share of American workers.
But on Monday, President Trump signed a measure that will make it easier for those same firms to get a slice of that business even if they abuse their employees. [...]
Trumpcare is dead. President Donald Trump is humiliated and so is House Speaker Paul Ryan. The Democrats can hardly believe their luck: The Republicans have hobbled their own agenda, while Obamacare, aka the Affordable Care Act, lives to fight another day. But unlike the law’s previous brushes with death—most notably its bruising encounters with the Supreme Court in 2012 and 2015—this latest example of its resilience represents a turning point, if Democrats choose to seize the opportunity.
