Tag Archives: priorities

What Should Democrats Say About Jobs?

Mother Jones

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Greg Sargent reports today on work by Priorities USA to figure out why so many people who voted for Obama in 2012 turned around and voted for Trump in 2016:

One finding from the polling stands out: A shockingly large percentage of these Obama-Trump voters said Democrats’ economic policies will favor the wealthy — twice the percentage that said the same about Trump. I was also permitted to view video of some focus group activity, which showed Obama-Trump voters offering sharp criticism of Democrats on the economy.

….The poll found that Obama-Trump voters, many of whom are working-class whites and were pivotal to Trump’s victory, are economically losing ground and are skeptical of Democratic solutions to their problems.

I’m afraid I can’t find this very interesting without answers to a few questions:

How many voters switched from Obama to Trump? Are we talking 5 percent? 1 percent? Less?1
How does this compare to other years? Is it unusually high?
How does this compare to other years after a party has held the White House for eight years?

That said, let’s assume this is a problem. What should Democrats do about it? Here’s my take: above all, these folks want steady, secure jobs. Health care is great. Free college is great. Childcare is great. All that stuff is great, but it’s not fundamentally what drives the votes of these party switchers. What they want to hear about is jobs. They want their old-time good jobs back.

Trump had a good message on jobs: the Chinese stole them from you and I’ll get them back. This is not an especially correct message, but it’s both plausible and galvanizing. It works.

So what should the Democrats’ message be? What policy would plausibly and directly impact the likelihood of these “left behind” folks getting good, steady jobs again? There’s trade, of course, which Bernie Sanders raised in the primaries, but I think Trump has that one covered. It needs to be something else. But what?

If it takes more than a sentence or so to explain, it’s no good. If it’s couched in liberalese, it’s no good. If it’s not viscerally plausible, it’s no good. If it’s about “retraining,” it’s no good. If it’s gobbledegook about the changing world, it’s no good. If it’s not directly focused on getting a good job, it’s no good.

Any ideas?

1Please note my admirable restraint in not mentioning that if it weren’t for James Comey, Hillary Clinton would have won and the number of vote switchers would probably have been minuscule.

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What Should Democrats Say About Jobs?

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A New Ad Strategy Will Mean Many More Pro-Clinton Videos Online

Mother Jones

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With the general election campaign approaching, the top super-PAC backing Hillary Clinton is preparing to release an onslaught of ads attacking Donald Trump and bolstering Clinton. But the group, Priorities USA, is not just repeating its 2012 approach, when its TV ads aimed to tarnish Mitt Romney’s image. This time it is also investing heavily in online ads intended to get out the vote among Clinton’s core groups of supporters in November, particularly Latinos and African Americans.

Partly, the new strategy seeks to keep up with changing patterns of media consumption; TV no longer dominates the way it once did. But the approach also reflects a recognition that in a campaign where Trump has alienated one constituency after another, most Democratic voters won’t need to be persuaded to support Clinton. Instead, the central goal will be nudging reliable supporters to go to the polls, with the hope of boosting turnout among groups that traditionally don’t vote in huge numbers but that overwhelmingly oppose Trump. In a PPP poll from last week, 50 percent of Hispanics said they planned to vote for Clinton, compared with 14 percent for Trump. Among African Americans, Clinton led Trump 84 percent to 5 percent.

Priorities USA has budgeted $130 million in ad spending for the general election. Most of that ad time has already been booked on TV and radio stations and websites, and the total figure is likely to increase, depending on donations. Of that total, $90 million is slotted for traditional TV ad buys, with $35 designated for digital. (In 2012, the super-PAC spent $75 million, almost entirely on TV ads.)

“The way that we communicate with voters is changing rapidly with each election cycle,” says Anne Caprara, the group’s executive director. As voters have gotten more of their information online, “particularly a lot of the core audiences that we want to speak to,” she says, advertising has to move in the same direction.

Priorities’ ads are split into two categories: an initial rollout set to begin on June 8—the day after the California primary, which could effectively seal Clinton’s nomination—and lasting through the convention in July, followed by a ramped-up effort starting in September that will hit its peak shortly before the election. Those ads—both TV and online—will be concentrated in the traditional battleground presidential states: Ohio, Nevada, Colorado, Iowa, Virginia, New Hampshire, and Florida. (With Trump on the ticket, it’s possible that some normally red states such as Arizona or Georgia could come into play and be targeted by Priorities ads as well.)

The TV ads won’t stray much from the traditional formula, but for its digital ads, Priorities is targeting key groups that include Latinos, African American women, and millennials. The super-PAC has been conducting polls, testing ads online, and holding focus groups to figure out exactly what messages and clips resonate with those groups. (Trump offers so much potential fodder for attack ads that the super-PAC will need to determine which of the many negative clips are most effective.) The group points to a host of statistics to explain why TV ads wouldn’t help it target its key groups. One in four millennials don’t watch cable or broadcast TV, for example, and 66 percent of Latinos access media mainly through their mobile devices.

Most of Priorities’ digital purchases are so-called non-skippable pre-roll video ads. Think of the ads you have to sit through before watching the latest Justin Bieber music video on YouTube, the ones that don’t offer you the option of skipping past after just five seconds. “That’s kind of the gold standard in digital advertising, the most valuable piece of it,” says Caprara. She says the group will likely buttress those online video spots with ads on Facebook and website banner ads, but for now, ads preceding web videos are its primary focus.

The group is still figuring out exactly what form those ads will take—likely some combination of positive spots about Clinton’s record and hit pieces on Trump. Caprara says she’s learned not to pull early punches against Trump, noting that his Republican opponents “committed political malpractice” by waiting so long before they started to go negative on Trump. “We don’t take him for granted,” she says. “We don’t think the election’s going to be easy. We think it’s going to be a competitive race. But we’re not scared of him, either. We think that there’s a lot of material out there, obviously.”

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A New Ad Strategy Will Mean Many More Pro-Clinton Videos Online

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Clinton Backers Edit Trump Ad to Make Him the Punch Line

Mother Jones

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A day after Donald Trump posted an ad on his Instagram account featuring Hillary Clinton barking like a dog, a super-PAC backing Clinton for president has responded in kind.

The ad, from Priorities USA, formed in 2011 and now supporting Clinton, repeats the motifs from the Trump video—Vladimir Putin doing martial arts, an ISIS fighter with a gun—but replaces the barking Clinton footage with a garbled response from Trump to a question about whom Trump consults for policy ideas. Instead of a clip of Trump laughing, there’s a clip of Clinton laughing. The closing text is the same: “We don’t need to be a punchline!”

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Clinton Backers Edit Trump Ad to Make Him the Punch Line

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Let the Hillaryland Infighting Begin

Mother Jones

Hillary Clinton’s second presidential campaign was supposed to be one giant kumbaya sing-along for the Democratic coalition. For years, elected officials and party elders had been rushing to endorse her proto-campaign. The warring Obama-Clinton factions from the 2008 Democratic primary had melded into one happy family ready to elect the first female president. A competing host of organizations—Ready for Hillary, Correct the Record, and Priorities USA—agreed to play nice, and, with the tacit approval of official Clintondom, organized themselves to work jointly on preparation work for the apparently inevitable 2016 campaign.

Read more about David Brock’s army of “nerd virgins” defending Hillary.

As longtime Clinton adviser Paul Begala told me last summer when I was profiling Correct the Record and its founder David Brock, “This is a really rare thing…for the first time in my adult life the left has its shit together. It’s never happened before. So now, everybody has their job. And we stay in our lanes but we help each other out.”

Alas, staying in their lanes wasn’t meant to be. Early this week, the pro-Hillary groups crashed into a multicar interstate pileup as private fighting between two key players in Hillaryland became public in dramatic fashion when Brock abruptly resigned as a Priorities USA board member. In a scorching letter obtained by Politico‘s Ken Vogel, Brock accused Priorities USA staff of “an orchestrated political hit job” and said they executed a “specious and malicious attack on” other pro-Clinton groups.

Brock was ticked off about a New York Times story that detailed the murky world of “donor advisers,” and focused on how Brock’s chief fundraiser, Mary Pat Bonner, took a suspiciously large commission for each donation she obtained for his groups, including Correct the Record.

Why this public outbreak of sniping? For part of the explanation, follow the money—or lack thereof. Priorities USA and Brock’s enterprises are each angling for the same donors, and so far the money from Democratic donors isn’t flowing strongly enough to satisfy fully all the organizations. Priorities USA, a super-PAC founded by Obama allies to aid the president’s 2012 reelection campaign, is supposed to take the lead on blitzing TV airwaves in 2016. It had hoped to raise as much as $500 million for the election, but with Clinton delaying the official launch of her campaign until late spring or summer, money has been trickling in at a tepid pace.

Shortly after the initial Politico article, the two sides began to make amends, with Brock saying he might be open to rejoining Priorities USA. Yet an ally of Priorities co-chairman Jim Messina told (anonymously, of course) the New York Times that Brock “is a cancer.” This is a sign that the current tiff might have roots in the old animosity between the Clinton camp and Obama’s one.

Brock is a Hillary fan through and through—albeit reaching that point via a circuitous route. He began his career as a conservative journalist, digging dirt on the Clintons in the early 1990s for the American Spectator. Brock’s about-face into a Democratic true-believer began when he penned a largely friendly tome about Hillary during the 1996 presidential campaign. He fully cemented his apologia with his tell-all Blinded by the Right. Bill Clinton reportedly kept a cabinet stocked with copies of this work at his office, handing them out to friends. The Clintons have embraced Brock as one of their own.

The public confrontation this week can’t sit easy with Hillary Clinton’s champions. Her 2008 presidential campaign ended in the steaming wreckage of leaked emails by staffers bickering like petulant middle schoolers. “The anger and toxic obsessions overwhelmed even the most reserved Beltway wise men,” The Atlantic said in a 2008 post-mortem.

Hillary 2016 has tried to leave all that behind and replicate the No Drama Obama mantra of her one-time foe. Up until this week it had been smooth sailing, at least publicly. But if this sort of bitter infighting is already underway—a year out from the first caucuses and primaries— there’s good reason to fear more public collisions ahead.

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Let the Hillaryland Infighting Begin

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