Making Waves

2018 is here. This is supposed to be the year of what is being called the Democratic wave election. In November, the story goes, voters will show their displeasure with Donald Trump by electing Democrats in large numbers. The Democrats will take over the House, possibly the Senate as well. They will win in statehouses across the land, both governorships and control of state legislatures. Well, I have news for you. It may happen, and it needs to happen, but it won’t happen for all the wishing in the world. Instead, it will take hard work, money, and some intelligence about what we learned in 2016 and 2017.

I hope everyone learned in 2017 what too many did not know in 2016: the two parties are not even remotely the same, and it matters a great deal which one wins. The most flawed Democrat, and Hillary Clinton may own that distinction, would not have conducted an all-out assault on the Affordable Care Act. She would not have tried to ban immigration from Moslem countries. She would not have pushed for, or signed, a tax package drafted in darkness that is so clearly tilted towards the wealthy at the expense of everyone else. And she would not have done everything in her considerable power to load the judicial branch for a generation to come with judges who are openly hostile to the LGBT community in particular, and to individual rights more generally. She would not have implemented an environmental policy that is hostile to science and scientists. Finally, for now at least, she would have fully staffed the government with people who are genuinely qualified to do their jobs.

Having said all of that, it is still important for the Democrats to do a better job of choosing their candidates. In 2017, we saw in Alabama what can happen when it is done correctly. Doug Jones won in the end because he demonstrated a clear and easily understood difference between himself and his opponent. Black voters in Alabama didn’t show up in record numbers just to keep a pedophile out of the Senate; they voted for a man who persuaded them that he would be their champion in Washington. Jones did not try to win in one the reddest states in the nation by trying to be conservative enough to appeal to independents. He won as a progressive, and an answer to the deeply unpopular policies of the national Republican Party.

I am old enough to remember when the nation was split between conservatives and liberals. Nowadays, however, you hardly ever hear anyone proudly claiming to be a liberal when running for office. That’s because the right wing worked very hard over the course of many years to make “liberal” a poisonous brand. 2018 is the best chance we will ever have to start to do the same to the word “conservative”. To do so, we need candidates like Doug Jones in the reddest states and everywhere else. We need to make the differences between our side and theirs starkly obvious everywhere. We need to let Democrats in the House and Senate know that we support their decision to stand united against anything the Republicans try to do without them. And we need to link the word “conservative” to every policy Donald Trump pushes against the will of the American people.

In terms of policy, we must remember that many Trump voters did not care what his policy prescriptions were; they voted for him to get their revenge on a system that they felt had failed them. It doesn’t matter to a Trump supporter that “this is not normal”; it isn’t supposed to be normal, and the abnormality only proves that they got what they voted for. What does matter is that their healthcare is going to be needlessly more expensive. It matters that their sons and daughters will not have the same protections with Social Security and Medicare that they will have. It matters that corporate tax cuts will be used in part for corporate mergers that will threaten their jobs. Voters in states like Alabama will respond to appeals based on these issues, as long as the candidate pointing them out can make them believe he or she will do better. It will not be enough to point out these issues. The candidate must lay out a credible plan to address them. Bernie Sanders could not explain how he would pay for universal healthcare without hurting the people he wanted to help, and that more than anything else may have cost him the nomination. The negative branding of “liberal” is all about “tax and spend”, and Sanders fell into that trap. It follows that the negative branding of “conservative” will require a thorough debunking of the notion that tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy create jobs.

We have our work cut out for us in 2018. We must do what we can to put forth the best candidates everywhere to oppose Trump and the Republicans. But, when the more establishment candidate wins a primary, we must still recognize that we need every Democratic win we can get. Majorities in the House and Senate mean the Democrats get the chairmanships of all committees, and control of investigations. Majorities can also keep noxious bills from going to the floor for votes, and they can keep horrible nominees from being voted on by the full Senate. So even if the Democrat in your state or district wasn’t your first choice, his or her election could empower someone from another part of the country who is more to your liking. For all of these reasons, we can not afford to sit back and watch, and hope for a blue wave. We must make it happen, and we will never have a better chance.

The famous quote that “Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom” seems apt to me, and here is a song that expresses it on a personal level:

We Need to Talk

Mitch McConnell finally confessed to his sins this week in going public with the Senate version of Republican health care. Of course, the bill is a travesty. It does not really have anything to do with healthcare at all, except as an obstacle to its true goal of massive tax cuts for the rich. Amazingly, the bill is not only more dishonest than its House counterpart, but it may actually be worse in the severity of its outcomes. So much for the Senate as the more reasonable body,

But here is truly scary part. In discussing the possibility of this atrocity becoming law, the press talks about a handful of Republican Senators. There is, rightly, no mention of what the Democrats might do. Sure, this partly reflects the fact that no Democrat is expected to vote for the bill. But it also reflects the fact that the Democrats have done nothing to make this bill harder to support. In part, this is because they refuse to acknowledge one truth that Donald Trump has accidentally told: we the people are now worse off with respect to healthcare than we were when the Affordable Care Act first went into effect. This is not for any of the reasons the Republicans or Trump name, but it is true all the same. The Affordable Care Act was not the success that it should have been, but Democrats need to explain that its failure was that it its design was vulnerable both to the trickery of the insurance industry and to outright sabotage by the Republicans. To explain, let me talk about my own situation.

I am the sole breadwinner for a family of four. My job is good enough that I do not qualify for the subsidies provided under the ACA, but I have my company health plan. My family and I have a host of pre-existing conditions, so we are heavy users of healthcare and we need a large menu of medicines each month. Over the past seven years, I have seen a steady increase in the dollar amount that comes out of my check for health care, and my out of pocket expenses have shot up as the insurance companies have gotten better at imposing copays and deductibles. So I am grateful for the fact that I can get insurance at all, given the pre-existing conditions. I am glad that my daughter, who is turning 22, can still be on my plan. And I understand that my health care expenses are still much less than they would be without the ACA. But my family and I are hurting, and Hillary Clinton is not our president in part because she did not sufficiently acknowledge and address this hurt. The situation is worse for my brother-in-law and his family. They do not have jobs that provide them benefits like mine, and they live in a state where a Republican governor and legislature blocked the Medicaid expansion that would have meant so much to them. For the first few years of the ACA, they had to choose whether to use the healthcare they could afford for themselves or their children, and of course they chose their children. Thankfully, they have now reached the point where they no longer have to make that devil’s bargain, but we were really worried about them for quite some time. Again, the provision regarding pre-existing conditions in the ACA meant that they could get healthcare for themselves once their job situations improved enough that they could afford it.

I am sure this country is full of families like mine, and like my brother-in-law’s. The Democrats are simply not talking to us. They are not acknowledging our hurt. Instead, they are reacting to what the Republicans are doing, and thereby letting Donald Trump and his allies control the conversation. Hillary Clinton spoke vaguely on the campaign trail of improving the ACA, but I regard myself is more politically aware than most Americans, and I don’t know what improvements she thought were needed. Only Bernie Sanders offered a solution, but he got bogged down in the question of how to pay for it in a way that suggested he was unable to master the details needed to make universal healthcare the law of the land. His approach also would have failed to persuade most Americans to support him in the face of Republican fearmongering. I have explained before how universal healthcare can be sold to the American people, but I have yet to hear any Democrat make this pitch. Barring that, the Democrats must explain all of the ways the ACA has made lives better, and all the ways it could be made to do so much more. They must help the American people to see how much better the ACA could be if the Republicans were not so intent on its destruction. One way or another, they must take back the conversation, and make the Republicans react to them for a change. The results of the midterm elections next year will depend on whether or not they can get it done.

I believe Americans are ready to hear the truth. Here is Sheryl Crow with the alternative we have now:

The Best Defense

The Washington Post has a slogan on their website that is very apt right now: “Democracy dies in darkness”. From the struggles in the House of Representatives to get the atrocity known as the American Health Care Act (AHCA) passed, Mitch McConnell might have taken the lesson that this was a terrible bill for the American people. Instead, he decided the real lesson was that the Senate version must be kept secret as long as possible in order to get it passed. Even his fellow Republicans in the Senate must not have the time to read the full bill before having to vote on it, and under no circumstances should the public have a chance to react until the bill was law. This is darkness at its finest, and democracy stolen again by the Party of voter suppression. It has meant that, in the face of severely limited news of how the new law was being shaped, press coverage has been overshadowed by other issues and developments. Democrats have decided to hope that it will be enough that the public prefers keeping Obamacare to the public efforts so far by the Republicans to repeal and replace it. It will not be enough, but there is still time to do something about it. If preserving the status quo was the best defense against Republican aggression, I would be writing now about how the presidency of Hillary Clinton looks as we approached the six month mark.

What we need instead is a way to put the subject of health care back in the forefront of public discussion. To begin with, let’s take the wind out of one of the Republicans’ favorite arguments by admitting that Obamacare has not delivered on all of its promises. But Democrats need to reframe that argument. They need to say that the Affordable Care Act was not crafted well enough to withstand Republican sabotage, and certainly not to withstand the onslaught of a united Republican government. They also need to say that prices were not controlled as well as they should have been, because Obamacare still makes the American people pay for items that have no bearing on health care outcomes: marketing costs, obscenely high CEO paychecks, and stock dividends for health insurers and big pharmaceutical companies. Democrats furthermore must coopt one of Donald Trump’s favorite promises, to deliver better healthcare that costs every American less. To make all of this news worthy, the Democrats in the Senate must introduce their own healthcare plan in the Senate, and force a very public debate on it. Let it become the standard that any Republican bill will be measured against. During the Obama presidency, it was common for Democrats to point out that the Republicans never presented an alternative plan. If only for that reason, it is essential that there be a Democratic alternate plan now.

I am talking, of course, about universal healthcare, and I have previously laid out the pitch for it here. Bernie Sanders lost the primaries to Hillary Clinton while advocating universal health care, so why should the Democrats play this risky card? First, Sanders never made the capitalist case for it, as I have done. But Sanders also fell into a trap that Hillary Clinton laid for him during the campaign. He got bogged down in the numbers, and wound up proposing large tax increases for everybody to pay for his plan. In doing so, Sanders failed to make the point that universal healthcare will be paid for in large part with moneys that are now being spent on other health care programs, including Obamacare. So the actual funds needed to get from here to there are lot less than the total price tag for universal health care as a stand alone item. It is also not enough to say that it would be less than the average American spends now on health care. The Democrats and the press must explicitly state where those savings will come from. The public resents having to pay for corporate profits out of public funds, but that resentment needs to be harnessed.

Clearly, there isn’t much time, and the Democrats will not do this on their own. Activists must coalesce around this strategy, and start pushing for it immediately. We need to find a Democratic Senator who can be persuaded to introduce a new Democratic health alternative to the Republican plan. So much the better if this starts with someone other than Bernie Sanders, because that would be more newsworthy. The goal here is to control not only the discussion in the Senate, but also the news cycle. Imagine the reaction in the media if someone like Cory Booker were to introduce this with an impassioned speech on the floor of the Senate. That’s what needs ideally to happen, in order to steal this issue from Mitch McConnell’s darkness, and bring it back into the light where it belongs.

This week’s song has everything to do with the news cycle:

A Morality Play

The takeaways in the media from James Comey’s testimony last week were certainly interesting. For many, the argument to be had was over whether Comey was saying that Trump was guilty of obstruction of justice. Comey was very careful to not say that himself, but he also explained why not. Comey as a private citizen has no standing to bring that charge, and that legal distinction is important to him. Keep in mind that Comey was our nation’s top law enforcement officer until Trump fired him. However, his testimony was an offering to Robert Mueller. If Mueller wants to pursue the charge of obstruction, Comey just let him know what his evidence would be. The media also spent a lot of time on the Republican’s attempts to defend Trump. But if Trump was just inexperienced at governing, or just too immature at age 70 to know better, why did he have everyone leave the room, even waiving off Jared Kushner and Attorney General Jeff Sessions when they tried to stay behind, before discussing the Michael Flynn case with Comey. That was a clear act of intent. You do that only if you want to make sure there are no witnesses later to what you are about to do. If the Republican excuse that Trump was simply handling things the way he did as a businessman was true, that is very interesting information, but it doesn’t mean it wasn’t obstruction. It just means that when he pursued this tactic as a businessman, he grew used to it working so well that we never heard of it until now. Meanwhile, what Comey was willing to come right out and say was that Trump’s lies about the Comey firing constituted defamation of character. Comey knows that that is a legal charge, and that he has the standing as a private citizen to bring it. He is not a man to use the words without being fully aware of the legal implications.

But the larger picture is that the testimony gives the Democrats a huge marketing opportunity for the 2018 elections and beyond. The Republicans, in their responses to the Comey testimony, showed a complete lack of morality. When the Anthony Weiner sexting scandal arose, the Democrats had the decency to be ashamed that one of their own could behave in such a manner. Privately, that stance may well have involved cynical calculations, but the public act is what concerns me here. The Democrats make mistakes, but they have the good grace to be ashamed, and to apologize. The Republicans do not. John McCain surrendered the last claim he may have had to be the conscience of the Republican Party with his line of questioning. Republicans, faced with behavior that was clearly wrong, rush to explain why they are OK with it. And it’s not just the Comey testimony either. Donald Trump sat back and let the Republicans in the House and now in the Senate craft their own versions of a healthcare bill, and the results once again show a complete lack of morality. As long as there are tax cuts for their donors, Republicans simply do not care at all who their legislation hurts. Remember too that it was not the current Republican president who wove an elaborate tapestry of lies to get the nation into a completely unjustified war that may have been nothing more than a personal vendetta. Here again, there was no concern with the innocent Iraqi or even American lives that would be lost. The Republicans do pretend to care what happens to the veterans of that war, but their legislative actions say otherwise

. So the Democrats must put all of this together, and start making the case to the American people that the Republicans are a once respected legislative partner that has lost their way. It is not simply that Donald Trump is immoral, although he certainly is. But he is a Republican for a reason, and the Democrats need to say soon and often what that reason is. Make Republican a bad word, in the same way that the Republicans made being a liberal anathema. There were articles last year about how the Republicans were destroying themselves by making Trump their standard bearer. What we should have learned from his victory is that that destruction will not happen by itself. We need to help it along, and we were just handed an easy way to get started.

Muddy Waters gets the nod for the song this week:

A Plan for the Democrats

The Republicans who now control the White House and both houses of Congress have a problem, and it is the job of progressives in particular, and the Democratic Party as well, if they will only accept the challenge, to make that problem worse for them. The Republican Party as now constituted is dedicated to the proposition that government can only do harm, and never do anything good. The Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, flies in the face of that proposition, which is why from the beginning the Republicans set out to sabotage the ACA once they understood that they could not stop it. It was also necessary to amplify every problem that occurred during the rollout of the ACA, to promote the idea that the ACA overall was bad. One defense the Democrats pursued was to challenge the Republicans by asking what their alternative was. Now we know: it is the monstrosity known as the American Health Care Act, which I prefer to call Ryancare. At this point, it is not Trumpcare, because Trump had no apparent hand in shaping it, but he has said that he will try to sell it.

In trying to “repeal and replace” the ACA, Republicans ran into sharp opposition from their own constituents at emotional town halls. It turns out that people are discovering, when faced with the prospect of losing the ACA, that they really like and need it. Oddly, Ryancare is also opposed by the most extreme members of the Republican Party, who object to the fact that it fails to completely repeal the ACA. So it would seem that progressives would have nothing to worry about, because the Republicans will not be able to find the votes to pass Ryancare. This assumption, however, fails to take into account the extraordinary sales skills of Donald Trump. This is a man who could sell sand in the Sahara Desert. The last time we underestimated him, he became president. The Democratic Party is being too complacent at the moment, and not listening to their own advice. It is not enough to defend the status quo, to insist that the ACA must remain in place. Despite the exaggerations and outright lies of the right wing, there are real problems with the ACA that created the opening for Trump’s victory in the first place. For many, lack of insurance has been replaced by insurance that people can not afford to use. So, in order to make sure that Ryancare fails, The Democrats need to offer up their own plan, just as they insisted the Republicans do. Let me offer my idea of what that plan should be, and how to sell it.

The purpose here is to offer up a plan that highlights the inadequacies of Ryancare and the harm it will do. We also need to undercut Trump’s efforts to get it passed. So we need a plan that really does deliver on a promise that Donald Trump made, that he would deliver a plan that would save money and deliver better care than the ACA. That plan is universal health care. I have talked before about how and why Democrats have failed to sell it to the American people, but I want to go into more detail now about how to win this battle. Hillary Clinton tried to get universal healthcare in 1993, but her instincts are always to find a consensus solution to any problem. There is no consensus solution here, because there is no way around the fact that you are destroying a vital part of the insurance industry, taking them out of the very lucrative health care business entirely. Done properly, universal health care also hurts the pharmaceutical industry, because you should insist that the government has the right to negotiate for the best prices. So you need to stand up to some powerful lobbies to pass universal health care. That is why the best time to do it is during a severe economic crisis. Barack Obama had that opportunity in 2009, but he too was intent on government by consensus, so we got the ACA instead. Last year, Bernie Sanders tried a different approach, insisting that universal health care was a right, a moral imperative. It is, but Hillary Clinton was able to get him bogged down in the details of how to pay for it. She made him lose the same battle she had lost thirteen years earlier, and also managed to make him look unprepared to govern while she was at it. I believe this was a major reason why Sanders lost the primaries. Ironically, the answer to how to sell universal healthcare was at Sanders’ fingertips the whole time, but he never effectively put the whole package together for the voters.

Universal health care would give the American people cash to spend on other things, so it would provide a major boost to consumer spending. Money that now gets deducted from paychecks for premiums, or spent on copays and deductibles, would instead go directly into the economy, leading to a major boost in job creation. It would also make American companies more competitive, by reducing the cost of hiring, and freeing companies from the expense of providing retiree health benefits. To pay for it, we must first recognize that the current cost of the ACA and other government health programs would no longer be needed, so those funds would go here instead. On top of that, companies currently deduct $260 billion for employee health benefits. Add in increased revenue from all of those new jobs I mentioned. And then there is the kicker. Pair universal healthcare with a measure that costs the government nothing, and you suddenly need very little in the way of new taxes to pay for it all. That measure is an immediate increase in the minimum wage to $15, indexed to inflation. Right wingers like to make the disputed claim that increasing the minimum wage is a job killer, but pair it with the job creating aspects of universal healthcare and that problem disappears. Over time, the minimum wage increase promotes consumer spending, which also means more jobs, and more revenue to pay for healthcare. Bernie Sanders erred in failing to realize the powerful synergy between his two proposals. It even gets better. All those new jobs, plus increased pay for existing jobs, means a sharp reduction in the number of the working poor, meaning funds that had been spent on public assistance programs such as food stamps can be used to pay for universal healthcare instead. I am not an economist, but I think it is possible that this proposal could be sold as being revenue neutral. At the worst, it should be possible to claim convincingly that the only new taxes needed would be on the wealthy.

I am a realist. I understand that there is no chance that a Republican-controlled Congress would ever pass this. Even if they did, you can be sure that Donald Trump would veto the measure. But that is not the point. By offering up this proposal and selling it properly, the Democrats would guarantee the failure of Ryancare, and expose the callousness of the Republican Party for all to see. If anything, the fact that this proposal would not pass should help reluctant Democrats to rally around it, knowing that they would have to answer to their constituents in redder states only for an idea, but not a law that would be vilified in the right wing media. The minimum wage increase is a popular idea, and so is universal healthcare if the public can be made to accept that their taxes do not need to rise to pay for it. The Democrats need to show that they are better than the Republicans who could not come up with an alternative to the ACA for eight years, and this is how to do it.

OK, I admit the song this time is a stretch, but I couldn’t resist:

Backward and Forward

Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20. I still feel that Hillary Clinton would have been a good president. In particular, I believe that many progressives would have been pleasantly surprised. No, we would not have gotten universal healthcare or a $15 dollar minimum wage, but we would have gained ground on both fronts where now we stand to lose. In this post, I do not want to brood, but we must understand why we lost if we are to win next time. In Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party insiders chose a candidate and gave her a big head start in fundraising, but she was still the candidate who could not even win the nomination in 2008. That is because she has a great resume, but is a terrible candidate. In this year’s campaign, you can see why in the strategic choices she made in the debates.

After the first debate, Clinton won praise and a bump in the polls for her performance, but it is now clear that she lost that debate and the ones that followed before she even took the stage. She pursued a strategy that suited her personality, and I have to admit that I thought at the time it was a good idea; she tried to present Donald Trump as a man who was not worthy of her respect. By extension, the concerns of his potential followers were not worthy of her respect either. Hillary Clinton would defend the status quo, and you were a “deplorable” if you thought the country had serious problems. It was as if the Bernie Sanders scare in the primaries had never happened. She decided to disrespect her opponent by addressing him by his first name, and she decided to act like his criticisms of her did not deserve a serious response. She admitted, for example, that her Iraq vote and the handling of her emails were mistakes, but she missed the opportunity to tell us what she learned from them. They remained legitimate concerns of voters, where they could have been presented as valuable learning experiences.

In 2020, a Democratic candidate will run against either Donald Trump or Mike Pence. Especially if the Democrats win the Senate in 2018, I believe there is a high chance that Donald Trump will find a reason to be impeached. Still, either Trump or Pence will be the sitting president, and they will deserve to be addressed in the debates as Mr President. It will be all too easy to attack the president on all the ways he has failed the working people who placed their trust in him, but we must do more. We must offer a positive vision of the future. We must do what Hillary Clinton did not, by showing that it was the Republicans in Congress who kept the country down. It was the Republicans who kept the public option out of the Affordable Care Act and loaded it with concessions to the insurance and medical industries. It was the Republicans who loaded the Supreme Court with the Justices who made Citizens United and the gutting of the Voting Rights Act realities, and that is how our system is rigged. It was the Republicans who have stood in the way of minimum wage increases and meaningful gun control measures. And it was the Republicans who shirked their Constitutional duties, and refused to govern for the eight years that President Obama was in office. These are all negatives against the Republicans, but their flipsides are the beginning of a Democratic vision that should have won this year, and must win in 2020. We must acknowledge that the Affordable Care Act gave 20 million Americans health insurance they never had before, but still couldn’t afford to use. We must admit that cost of living increases in Social Security benefits over the years have not kept up with what it costs to be a senior citizen in the United States. We must let the workers and potential workers of this country know that the official employment numbers show an improvement, but we know too many people are still being left behind or exposed. The Republicans now know that blaming immigrants and persons of color for this is a winning strategy, one that can be explicitly stated. We must show that there is a better way, and that means explaining that the money and security that once went people who worked hard now goes instead to the very wealthy. We must show that we are all, white, black, brown, Christian, Moslem, Jew, male, female, straight or queer, in this together.

It truly is the economy, and it should have been a simple matter to defeat Trump’s message of hate and fear with a message of concern and hope. But Hillary Clinton’s defense of the status quo didn’t get it done, and Bernie Sanders’ message of righteous anger was not enough to win the chance to try. In 2020, the Democrats need to open the primaries to all comers, to not clear the decks for anyone. Then, the DNC needs to avoid any hint of favoritism, and let the people choose. Expect to be hacked, so keep both private and public communications clean. In 2020, Hilary Clinton will be the woman who lost the presidency to Donald Trump, and Bernie Sanders will be almost 80 years old. So let’s start with a clean slate and no favorites, and find someone we can all support with enthusiasm. And then, let’s win this thing back.

Be Careful What You Wish For

In this bizarre campaign season, I am seeing a lot of talk about third parties. Nearly half of all registered voters are now registered as independents, and fantasies are being spun that these voters somehow represent a unified bloc that only awaits a hero for them to rally behind. Could it be Jill Stein? Gary Johnson? Bernie Sanders, if only he had been willing to try? Progressives who are dreaming this way have not thought through what a viable progressive third party could mean. In any case, most registered independents will actually vote for one or the other of the major parties, but do not want their registrations to commit them to either party in advance. Having said all that, we may be witnessing the birth of a viable third party this year, but not the one progressives are talking about.

Let’s suppose that a group of people had done the years of hard work it would take, starting from the ground up, and actually built a viable progressive third party in time for this year’s election. Let’s call it the Progressive Party. To be viable, they would have started years ago by running in very local races, and grown organically to the point where they now had members of both the Senate and the House, and they were able to stage primaries and caucuses in all fifty states and hold a national nominating convention. So now, the Progressive Party presents to the country their first candidate for president of the United States, who I will call John Doe. For those who are bitter that Bernie Sanders did not win the Democratic nomination, and who refuse to vote for Hillary Clinton, Doe is their dream candidate. Roughly 13 million people voted in the primaries for Sanders, and that sounds like a lot of people. But it is only about 10% of the total turnout in the last two presidential elections, so it is not enough to elect anyone, even with three candidates on the ballot. Knowing that, many of those 13 million voters would stay with the Democrats and vote for Clinton, especially since the Progressive Party, in the eyes of a majority of the public, is brand new. So, generously now, Doe is going to receive about 5% of the vote. That’s a great start, something to build on to be sure, but nowhere near a win. The vast majority of those votes come from the Democrats, so it becomes more likely that Trump wins. In trying to build a progressive third party, there would be an initial cost of Republican victories that could have been Democratic ones. This year, we face an extraordinary election, and the risk is simply too great. I would like to see someone build a viable third party like this, but we might have to sacrifice a few elections before this model would yield a John Doe who could actually win the presidency.

But, historically, this is not the model for how American third parties have arisen. It may well be that a scenario like the one I just outlined has kept any grass roots party from achieving the critical mass necessary to become a viable third party. That transitional phase where the growing pains of a new party cost an established party a series of elections is just too great a price to pay. Instead, third parties in our history have arisen from schisms within existing parties. In 1824, the Whigs and the Democrats arose from a split in the Democratic-Republican Party. In the 1850s, a split in the Whigs over the issue of slavery yielded the Republican Party. In both cases, a viable third party arose at the expense of one of the two previous parties, one of which soon vanished.

The modern Republican Party has been hijacked by far right wing extremists, and the Trump nomination represents their greatest victory to date. Old school Republicans remember a party that collaborated with Democrats to actually govern the country, but that doesn’t happen now. For some years now, moderate Republicans have been leaving either the Party or the government, as the extreme wing has made it harder for them to hold off far right challenges in their primaries. In the primary season just passed, there was more of a hope than an effort to promote an establishment candidate who could withstand the rise of Donald Trump. The Party no longer had an attractive moderate candidate for old school Republicans to rally around. So now there are important Republicans who fear that Trump is headed for a defeat in November of historic proportions. They fear that his campaign could produce such in bad taste for voters that the Republicans could also lose control of one or both houses of Congress. And so we are seeing every day now a story about another Republican who has announced that he is leaving the party, rather than risk being associated in any way with the Republican candidate for president. Especially if Trump does lose by a landslide in November, we could be seeing a split in the Republican Party, and the birth of a new third party. This would be a center-right party, more like what the Republicans were like in the 1960s. Some moderates who left the Republicans could easily swell the ranks of this new party, as could people like Jim Webb, who previously left the Republican Party to become a conservative Democrat. They would be able to offer a slate of candidates with name recognition who could start winning elections immediately.

If this third party comes to be, it would push the current Republican Party far to the right, as its remaining more rational members would join the new party. Initially, the Democrats could be the big beneficiaries of this, as the conservative vote is split. But I think, as happened in our history, this new party would quickly supplant the old Republicans, who might live on as a fringe party on the far right, but would never again enjoy the power they have now. In this scenario, The Democratic Party, by virtue of losing some of its most conservative members to the new party, would become somewhat more progressive. But , while this altered Democratic Party would be more welcoming for progressive candidates, those who seek an alternative to the current Democrats would keep looking.