After his victory in the Nevada caucuses, Sanders is leading in Colorado and Virginia. Sanders has a 14 point lead over his next closest rival, Elizabeth Warren in Colorado and a 9 point lead over his next closest rival, Biden in Virginia. In both of these states, several candidates are hovering right around the 15 point threshold for delegate allocation with significant effects on overall delegate counts depending on how many candidates hit this threshold.
Read MoreThe Democratic presidential primary debates have each included questions asking candidates to confront the feasibility of passing their respective agendas. If a Democrat wins the Presidential election in November, they are likely to face an adversarial Senate and an adversarial Supreme Court, both equally stuffed with conservative ideologues.
Candidates have come up with a few possible solutions that would allow them to pass new policies in the face of partisan opposition. Some suggest that if Trump loses, the dam will burst and Republicans will come to their senses that wildly popular Democratic policies should pass. Others suggest mobilizing the people against Republicans, to produce a public pressure wave that forces them to come to the table. Still others propose simply reforming existing institutions so that fewer Republican votes, which disproportionately come from small, mostly-white states, are needed at all.
Read MoreIn January, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Energy & Commerce released a draft of the CLEAN Future Act, a bill that would transition the United States to a 100% clean energy economy by 2050. The bill received a mixed response. Green groups like the League of Conservation Voters, the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Natural Resource Defense Council praised its overall goals. Other environmental groups, including Friends of the Earth, criticized the bill for including emissions trading and lax standards that would do little to phase out fossil fuels.
Both critics and supporters, however, largely overlooked the fact that the legislation reflects a significant paradigm shift in climate policy. It is part of a movement away from modest taxes on carbon, often alongside dividends and sometimes even regulatory rollbacks––and towards robust public investment, a commitment to justice and the use of aggressive performance standards in decarbonization.
Read MoreThe Trump era has been marked by increased attention to norms in general and their erosion in particular. Political scientist Brendan Nyhan defines norms as “the unwritten rules and conventions that shape political behavior.” The existence and support for norms, political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt argue, are necessary for the continued survival of “the republic.” Their erosion has become a point of considerable consternation among a variety of political observers.
Read MoreAs the Democratic primary contest heats up between the top few contenders, the seemingly small policy differences that separate them will come into clearer focus. One of these differences is over healthcare policy. In a recent survey, Data for Progress implemented an experiment to randomly assign likely Democratic primary voters and caucusgoers to consider one of three possible healthcare policies. Each of these policies has at some point in the primary been the focus of at least one candidate.
Read MoreA narrow finish in Iowa and the 2020 Democratic primary remains quite crowded. Candidates are scrambling to pick up political endorsements in the early voting states, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina, before Super Tuesday on March 3. News agencies closely track these endorsements, from local to national politicians. Five Thirty Eight’s tracker weighs the endorsements by power of the endorsing office and Slate even published a ranking of candidates’ celebrity endorsements. But critically, it seems nearly all endorsement trackers and articles understate the significance of grassroots endorsements from groups like unions or nationwide coalitions, and the role they serve for campaigns.
Rooted in organizing and mobilization, these groups could make the difference for electoral success - with their own people, networks, and resources functioning as ancillary field staff for a campaign. The youth-led, climate-focused Sunrise Movement, for example, knocked on 14,000 doors last weekend in New Hampshire. And as DfP co-founder Sean McElwee wrote in 2015, individuals in union households are more likely to vote than non-union households. Scholarly evidence suggests ”grassroots contacting activities can effectively motivate electoral participation” - and electoral success. An undecided voter could be compelled by their favorite governor’s endorsement, but they could be equally compelled by the immigrant-rights organization knocking on their door for a candidate.
Read MoreLast year, the BlueGreen Alliance put forward a blueprint to create good-paying, union jobs while tackling the climate crisis. We called this platform Solidarity for Climate Action and it is backed by the power of the millions of members and supporters of our labor and environmental partners.
Read MoreWhat sorts of features were useful for predicting the 2016 Presidential election and what do they tell us about American politics today? To answer these questions, we at Data for Progress built a forecasting model based on 2012 Presidential election data and machine learning methods. While past Democratic Party performance is still a strong predictor of future performance, our analysis demonstrates that the racial composition of the American electorate has become a powerful predictor of Presidential elections. Unlike some recent research, we do not find evidence that features such as education or population density are strongly predictive of the 2016 election. In essence, our predictive models demonstrate that American elections have become racialized and are likely to remain that way in the future.
Read MoreIn the wake of a season of historic fires that caused record levels of property damage and threatened much of California’s ecosystem and economy, some California legislators have decided it is time for the state to take charge of its utilities. Recently, California representative Scott Wiener introduced legislation that would turn Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), one of the largest state-granted monopolies in the world, into a public utility.
PG&E is facing bankruptcy stemming from the estimated $30 billion in financial liabilities it accrued throughout the most recent series of fires. At the same time, the measures it took to avoid incurring future liabilities -- shutting off power whenever there was a fire risk -- were politically unpopular, especially as evidence emerged that power shutoffs tended to avoid wealthier cities and neighborhoods. The state’s own stopgap measures failed to be widely adopted, suggesting the need for new rules around equipment safety as well.
Read MoreIn principle, a survey is a conversation. Like all of those Rust Belt safaris that feature political reporters asking a wildly unrepresentative segment of the voting public what they think about politics, but no longer wildly unrepresentative. However, political surveys are typically limited as they heavily constrain what respondents can say as part of this conversation. Respondents can say yes or no, agree or disagree, and so on, and what researchers lose by restricting everyone to a common vocabulary they gain in being able to systematically analyze the results. However, it’s becoming easier to both collect and analyze the less constrained vocabularies that citizens have when offered the chance to talk about politics, as we have found in the most recent wave of our national Democratic primary panel survey.
Read MoreMuch has been written about candidates’ “electability,” and pundits often wonder how these concerns affect the Democratic presidential primary this year. Are primary voters planning on voting for the person they want to be president, the person they think is most likely to beat Donald Trump, or are these things and the same for voters?
To understand how concerns of “electability” are influencing voting in the primary, Data for Progress asked likely Democratic primary voters two different questions about their vote: first, a traditional “horse race” item that asked who the respondent plans to vote for, and second, a “magic wand” item that asks who the respondent would want to be president in an ideal situation. These survey items were first asked in a survey last June, which collected 2,953 likely voter responses. These respondents were recontacted in a second wave in January, and 1,619 of them completed another survey about the primary. Both surveys were conducted online by YouGov Blue.
Read MoreIn the last few months, there have been mass mobilizations across the globe. In Puerto Rico, Iran, and Hong Kong people have taken to the streets to demand changes. For some, these mobilizations are lessons for what needs to happen to push Republicans to vote to remove Trump from office. Pundits frequently bemoan the lack of mass resistance to Trump and wonder why there hasn’t been a larger mass resistance to his very clear abuses of power. While some speculate that the acquittal-in-all-but-name just decided in the Senate may change the status quo, our data do not provide much optimism.
Although there is no single reason why there have not been larger protests, at least part of the reason is that no one is being asked to join them. And when they are being asked, it happens too often through social media.
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