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Kirsten Gillibrand’s new communications director oversaw DCCC’s bizarre war against Texas progressive

One of the most bizarre moments of the 2018 Congressional campaign is when the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), the body designated to elect House Democrats, launched a heavy-handed intervention into the Democratic primary in Texas’s 7th Congressional District.

They posted a research document slamming progressive candidate Laura Moser, an unusually public intervention in a congressional race. They pointed to some writing Moser had done as a private individual that, for instance, mocked the town of Paris, Texas.

The DCCC’s press operation at that time was run by Meredith Kelly, who told the Texas Tribune, “Unfortunately, Laura Moser’s outright disgust for life in Texas disqualifies her as a general election candidate, and would rob voters of their opportunity to flip Texas’ 7th in November.” The intervention was widely seen as designed to benefit Lizzie Pannill Fletcher, a corporate lawyer who worked at an anti-union firm.

The intervention backfired, bolstering Moser’s fundraising and helping her make it to a runoff. But in that runoff, Fletcher was victorious, and then defeated incumbent Republican Senator John Culberson in the general election.

For progressive critics of the DCCC, the episode confirmed their fear that the organization was being used to prevent the Democratic Party from shifting left. For the Democratic establishment, their intervention helped select a more electable candidate.

At the start of the year, New York Democratic Senator and presidential aspirant Kirsten Gillibrand hired Kelly to run communications for her bid.

Gillibrand has developed a reputation of being somewhat of a political chameleon, adjusting her positions for short-term electoral needs. But regardless of where Gillibrand herself publicly stands at any point in time, the adage that “personnel is policy” holds true. In the conflict between the Democratic establishment and progressives, she hired an operative who administered interventions on behalf of the establishment.

South Carolina may be looking sunnier for Bernie Sanders this time

Not too long ago, a friend of mine who is on the state committee of a Democratic Party chapter in the South told me they believed Independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders would be a strong 2020 primary contender in the South because a Clinton isn’t on the ballot this time.

Much of the news media misunderstood why former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did so well with older Southern black voters in 2016, interpreting it as antagonism towards Bernie Sanders. But Sanders’s approval ratings with African American voters have never been low. Yet it was difficult to compete with the name recognition and loyalty the Clintons built over 30 years of campaigning in the South.

But the question is whether things are different for Sanders this time. Although it’s early and we don’t actually have any polling data on South Carolina yet, there are signs that Sanders may be able to get more traction there this time than he did last time. He made a few stops in the state during Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend. and he’s getting positive reviews from Democratic lawmakers in South Carolina, who were almost entirely united behind Clinton last time.

A number of them described Sanders’s posture as improved.

In 2016, state Rep. Gilda Cobb-Hunter, a superdelegate, implied that Sanders was weak in the state not because of what he believed but that he simply had not spent the time necessary to build connections.

“What Sen. Sanders discovered is that you can have a great message and money, but time is not something that waits on anyone,” she said.

But the Senator has now earned her respect.

“He’s learned from his last run and he recognizes if he’s serious about winning the presidency or the nomination, that he needs to do more to get black voters to know who he is and what he stands for,” state Rep. Gilda Cobb-Hunter, the longest serving African American lawmaker in the legislature, said. Sanders also spoke to the Legislative Black Caucus.

"Each member of each caucus was really moved because they felt he stuck to his message," state Rep. Wendell Gilliard of Charleston, who supported Sanders in 2016 said. "He hadn't changed or wavered."

In 2016, Democratic House Minority Leader Todd Rutherford was a Clinton surrogate, and went scorched earth on Sanders.

"He only really started talking about issues concerning African Americans in the last 40 days," Rutherford said at the time. "On the question of social justice for African Americans, the record is thin." (This isn’t true, but this is the sort of thing you say to defeat an opponent in an election.)

But after Sanders’s most recent trip, Rutherford changed his tune. “He was very well received. He talked about the things that I think are important to all of the members,” he said.

None of this is to say that Sanders may score the hegemonic victory that Clinton had in the state in 2016. But in a crowded field, his improved standing with southern lawmakers may be an indicator that he has built the name recognition and respect he needs to be a contender in the region.

#2020 election #bernie sanders

Is the Daily Kos Straw Poll actually representative of Democratic voters? Probably not

Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas is a known critic of Vermont Independent Senator Bernie Sanders. Late last year, he argued that Sanders’s moment has passed during a national TV segment.

“I actually think Elizabeth Warren takes a great number of Bernie supporters,” he argued. “She’s my favorite, I’ll just disclose that, but I also love Kamala Harris, and I love Kirsten Gillibrand...Bernie Sanders will have a role in that conversation I think he wants to be a part of that conversation but I think his moment has passed.”

To reinforce the idea that these Senators are now the banner holders for the progressive movement, Daily Kos has been releasing straw polls of its membership.

In the first straw poll, released January 8, Elizabeth Warren lead the pack, followed by former vice president Joe Biden, California Democratic Senator Kamala Harris, former Texas Democratic congressman Beto O’Rourke, and finally Sanders. In the second straw poll, released January 22, Kamala Harris leads. Sanders is at fourth.

“Big numbers shift from two weeks ago showing an unsettled field. No reason for anyone to really be settled down at this point. Having a favorite is great!” Moulitsas commented. “But with so many amazing candidates to choose from, we get to enjoy the campaign as it plays out. This is no longer a battle for the soul of the Democratic Party. Most of the top contenders are solid on policy.” We can agree to disagree on whether Harris, Biden, Sanders, and Warren share identical politics (they don’t). But in promoting his poll, Moulitsas told The Hill, “In the span of just two weeks, the Democratic presidential primary landscape has already shifted.”

It’s possible that the users of Daily Kos have shifted quite a bit during those two weeks, but is this poll actually representative of Democratic voters? The poll is certainly receiving its fair share of media coverage. The first round was covered by Chris Matthews on MSNBC.

Let’s compare the Kos poll to Morning Consult and Politico’s national Democratic primary poll. The tracking poll conducted between Jan 18 and 22, has the current standing as so:

Biden: 17 percent

Sanders: 12 percent

Harris: 4 percent

O’Rourke: 4 percent

Warren: 3 percent

Kerry: 2 percent

Booker: 2 percent

Gillibrand: 1 percent

This poll isn’t an outlier. Both national and state polls have consistently put Biden and Sanders as the frontrunners in this race. While polling a year out is hardly predictive -- meaning it won’t reflect the final results, especially as the first few states votes and several candidates drop out -- early frontrunners are typically strong candidates in presidential primaries. Barring scandals or simply choosing not to run, they are the ones shaping the conversation, not simply a “part” of it, as Moulitsas relegated Sanders. The Vermont Senator is outperforming Moulitsas’s favored candidates combined.

As for the idea that Warren will be pilfering Sanders’s voters, it is probably too early to say, but there is some evidence that this may not be the case. In early January, Change Research ran a New Hampshire poll that showed Sanders holding a narrow lead over Biden.

As far as I can tell, this is the only poll out there that shows first and second preferences by candidate. What it showed is that if Sanders wasn’t in the race, slightly more of his supporters would go to Biden than to Warren. And if Biden wasn’t in the race, more of his supporters would go to Sanders than Warren. For Warren backers, their second choice is Biden.

Of course this is just one poll. But it shows that Warren and Sanders may not necessarily be fighting over eachother’s voters just yet, but instead over Joe Biden’s. And so far, Sanders is doing a much better job, without even campaigning.

Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Elizabeth Warren helped defeat pro-single payer candidates in 2018

New York Democratic Senator and presidential aspirant Kirsten Gillibrand is calling herself a Medicare for All supporter, but seems to be redefining a single-payer system -- where everyone automatically has Medicare regardless of ability to pay -- with a voluntary public option, which would be far more expensive.

She told a crowd in Iowa that she’s been for Medicare for All since she represented a conservative upstate New York district. But she never sponsored the House single-payer bill and didn’t sponsor one in the Senate until 2017. A public option or Medicare buy-in is a very different policy than a single-payer system. The first is much more expensive for individual Americans, the second is much more expensive for the government.The difference between what is essentially the Canadian system (single-payer), and some Americans having access to a cheaper health insurance plan to buy is massive.

This blurring of the lines is probably how some Democrats will claim to be for Medicare for All while opposing single-payer. Some may even do this after having spent 2018 supporting key lawmakers who were opposed to single-payer health care.

Last year, Gillibrand endorsed incumbent Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo, a single-payer opponent, over his primary challenger Cynthia Nixon, a single-payer advocate. She also endorsed the daughter of a Blue Cross executive who campaigned against single-payer in Michigan, despite the fact her chief primary opponent Abdul El-Sayed was a progressive who proposed one of the most comprehensive state single-payer programs in the country. Independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders endorsed El-Sayed.

Kamala Harris, another recent convert to the Medicare for All cause, chose to endorse Dianne Feinstein, an opponent of Sanders’s bill, during California’s U.S. Senate race. Feinstein defeated single-payer proponent Kevin De Leon. Sanders did not endorse in this race.

In Ohio, Elizabeth Warren, who also failed to endorse single payer until 2017, endorsed Richard Cordray over single-payer proponent Dennis Kucinich in that state’s governor’s race. Sanders did not endorse in this race.

In the cases of all three Senators, it’s unlikely that they chose their endorsements with the intention of stymieing single-payer health care. If I had to guess, Harris endorsed Feinstein because they are Senate colleagues and she wanted her political support in her upcoming presidential bid (Feinstein prefers Biden anyway). Gillibrand endorsed Cuomo because she once worked for him, and probably wanted his support in her bid (he also prefers Biden). Warren endorsing Cordray, a former Consumer Financial Bureau Chief, isn’t super surprising. She was standing with a former ally in her marquee cause of financial regulation.

But these endorsements do demonstrate a big difference with Sanders. He has spent decades arguing for the merits of single-payer, and he spent 2018 campaigning for candidates who believed in it (although he sat out some races). The rest of the potential 2020 field did not, as they only recently endorsed the concept of Medicare for All, which to them may simply end up being a public option you buy into. Sanders clearly prioritized single-payer, while the rest of the field seems to be courting it rhetorically but not making the political moves necessary to enact it.

Did Kirsten Gillibrand really support gun rights to support hunters?

As part of her swing through Iowa, New York Democratic Senator and presidential aspirant Kirsten Gillibrand attempted to explain why she was once an NRA-endorsed backer of gun rights in an upstate New York congressional district but later became an outspoken gun control proponent as the state’s U.S. Senator.

Gillibrand explained her evolution through the lens of hunting.

"So, I had an A-rating as a House member," she said of the NRA’s support, according to a CNN reporter. "I only really looked at guns through the lens of hunting. My mother still shoots the Thanksgiving turkey. But when I became Senator, I recognized I had a lot to learn about my state and all of the 20 million I was going to represent."

Now, I went to high school in a town that literally passed a law requiring the head of every household to own a gun. My friends loved their guns, and they loved to hunt.

Gillibrand’s explanation is understandable enough. Theoretically, anyway.

But is that really what the record shows -- did she really view gun rights entirely through the prism of hunting?

At the time she was appointed to the Senate in 2009, Gillibrand had a “perfect NRA rating,” as Politico noted at the time. While the NRA does occasionally advocate for hunters, most of their activism is based at promoting armed self-defense. Much of then-Congresswoman Gillibrand’s NRA “A” rating was unrelated to hunting.

Presumably someone who grew up in a family of hunters knows that regulating handguns is not related to hunting. The NRA gave Gillibrand a positive rating in 2008 partly because she signed an amicus brief in the Supreme Court’s Heller decision, which struck down the D.C. handgun ban. Surely Gillibrand understood that nobody is hunting wildlife in D.C. with handguns.

In February of 2009, Gillibrand admitted to the press that she and her husband keep two guns under their bed. She said that neither parent hunts, but that "if I want to protect my family, if I want to have a weapon in the home, that should be my right."

That makes sense. You don’t keep a gun under your bed because you might be able to score dinner if a deer jumps through the window for a midnight snack.

As a gun moderate myself -- I’m to the right of Independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders; he has always supported an Assault Weapons Ban, but I think it’s pretty pointless -- I don’t really have any problem with Gillibrand explaining her affinity for gun ownership in either case. But her explanations are in conflict.

There’s a more simple explanation here. Gillibrand supported the NRA’s positions in her upstate district for short-term electoral reasons. She then became a gun control supporter as a Senator for short-term electoral reasons. She then slammed Sanders -- who had a D-minus from the NRA, a far more negative rating than Congresswoman Gillibrand -- over the issue of guns because it benefited her candidate of choice former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (again, short-term electoral behavior).

What she would do as a president would likely also be determined by short-term electoral calculations, which are very different when you’re the President versus when you are campaigning in a competitive primary within your party.

I’ve been writing about the government and elections for more than a decade now. I’m not shocked there’s politics going on in politics. But it’s worth trying to parse out why a politician actually takes the positions they do, because it can help you predict future behavior.

#2020 guns Gillibrand

Kamala Harris rightly campaigns on ending the death penalty, but her vow to severely punish violent crime reinforces mass incarceration

The last major party presidential candidate to campaign on ending the death penalty was Michael Dukakis in 1988. The Massachusetts governor told a national debate audience that he would not favor capital punishment even in the case that his wife was raped and killed.

As NBC News notes in this retrospective, his bloodless answer is considered to have been a major campaign error.

Certainly, that is the lesson that major party politicians took from his response, which is at least part of why Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, despite their many other differences, all agreed that the death penalty should sometimes be used.

In a January 23 interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, California Democratic Senator Kamala Harris sought to break this bipartisan tradition by declaring a steadfast opposition to the death penalty.

“I believe that the death penalty is extremely flawed as a system, I have always been opposed to the death penalty,” she told Maddow.

She went on to explain that she does not believe it to be a deterrent to criminals. “Nobody ever stood there and was about to pull the trigger and then decided, ‘Hm, is this going to be life without possibility of parole or the death penalty before they decide to pull the trigger,’” she said.

It’s worth noting that Harris has long said she is personally opposed to the death penalty, but still helped defend the practice as California Attorney General. The interview on Maddow suggests that Harris will be taking a clear stance against capital punishment during her presidential campaign.

But in explaining her opposition to the death penalty, Harris reinforced the logic of America’s prison system.

“I absolutely believe there should be severe and serious consequence for violent crime which is why I prosecuted those crimes and will always seek the highest sentence consistent with the facts of the case,” she explained.

Harris’s declaration that she wants to severely punish violent crime is not politically controversial. In 2016, Vox and Morning Consult polled Americans about criminal justice reform. They found that just 29 percent of Americans believed in reduced sentences for people who “committed a violent crime and have a low risk of committing another crime.”

Whether you believe in harshly punishing violent crime is largely a matter of personal philosophical preference. If you happen to share neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky’s view of the world (and I mostly do), you might say that most human behavior is genetically, culturally, and environmentally defined, and that crime is largely a public health issue, not an issue of simply good and evil people. Thus we should try to incarcerate people for the least possible time, while focusing on rehabilitation and doing our best to ameliorate the conditions that create crime in the first place.

It’s fair to say that outside of Norway, that’s not how most people think about it. Most people want violent criminals -- people guilty of crimes such as assault, rape, or murder -- to suffer. After all, punishing people makes us feel good, and we’re even willing to sacrifice to do it.

OK, we can agree to disagree on the philosophical argument about punishment.

I’m going to lose that one with at least seventy percent of Americans.

But let’s agree on the math.

America’s prisons are not crowded with mostly nonviolent offenders. That’s a myth, as Vox’s very smart criminal justice correspondent German Lopez has pointed out.

The majority of people sitting in prison today committed violent crimes. Check out this graphic from the Prison Policy Initiative:

Over the past decade, we’ve seen a vigorous and bipartisan criminal justice reform movement that’s done really good work in reducing prison populations with minimal impact on violent crime rates -- and it’s been very popular with the public. Let’s remember that President Trump, who has campaigned obsessively about the threat of violent crime, signed into law the biggest federal prison reform packages in decades. Most Americans of both major parties, and plucky independents like me, want to see reform.

But the politics has been relatively easy because these efforts are aimed at nonviolent offenders.

When politicians promise that they will significantly reduce prison populations, it is fair to ask how they plan to do so without changing the way violent crime is punished.

During the Wisconsin Gubernatorial election, the Democratic candidate Tony Evers said he wanted to reduce the state’s prison population by half. Incumbent Republican Governor Scott Walker countered that the majority of the Wisconsin prison population is composed of violent offenders. Evers countered that he would not be focusing on releasing violent offenders, essentially admitting Walker’s point. That means that no matter what Evers chooses to do in Wisconsin, if he holds by his promise to basically leave the violent offender population as is, he can’t even come close to reducing the population by half.

We can expect this scenario to play out time and time again unless politicians are forced to directly confront the reality of what is really driving mass incarceration in America. We have a considerable amount of violent crime, and Americans by and large are in favor of punishing that crime quite harshly.

Is there any real hope for that changing? There are signs that there are cracks in America’s violent crime consensus.

As whipsmart criminologist John Pfaff notes, the ruby red state of Wyoming is currently moving to make unsupervised parole an option for a number of violent crimes, including manslaughter and aggravated assault. Reformist Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner is testing the waters on lowering murder charges.

While I focused on Harris in this post, it’s worth noting that the entire current crop of presidential candidates has mostly been mum on the issue of changing how we punish violent crime. Likely entrant Bernie Sanders, the most left-wing candidate and an independent democratic socialist who is defeating every Democrat except for former Vice President Joe Biden in current polling, has more or less entirely avoided the issue.

Of all of the contenders, the only one I know of who has ever publicly talked about the need to punish violent offenders less harshly is New Jersey Democratic Senator Cory Booker, who is likely to run. It remains to be seen whether Booker will be willing to raise the issue on the campaign trail when he is likely to be competing for key constituencies against a dedicated tough-on-crime warrior like Biden.

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