Category Archives: National Politics

Warren Tops in Local Club’s Democratic Candidate Poll

Club vote was highly competitive – no candidate achieved 51% for endorsement

Senator Elizabeth Warren was the top vote-getter in a recent poll of Democratic presidential candidates taken by the Progressive Democrats of Benicia (PDB), a local political club. Warren received 36.8% of the votes cast, with Sen. Bernie Sanders placing second at 28.9%. Also receiving votes were Amy Klobuchar with 21.1% and Pete Buttigieg with 13.2%. Candidates Joe Biden, Mike Bloomberg, and Tulsi Gabbard each received no votes.

The poll was the culmination of a panel discussion held on February 12 in Benicia by PDB in which representatives of six Democratic candidates for President had a lively exchange of ideas with an overflow audience at the Benicia Library. Members of PDB were eligible to cast votes through Feb. 19.

Ralph Dennis, chair of PDB, was pleased with voting and said “that’s a pretty strong showing by Warren among our members” but explained that it wasn’t enough to receive the Club’s endorsement which required 50% plus one of all votes cast. “This was the first time we allowed voting through our web site, and a lot of the votes were cast online after the meeting,” Dennis added. He believes the club will use the online voting option in future endorsements or polls conducted.

Well over one-half of the votes cast in the club’s poll were for one of the two progressive candidates in the race – Warren and Sanders. Dennis said that “this shows there is a strong progressive sentiment in this community which wants to see substantive change in Washington.” Dennis also recognized that the combined votes for Klobuchar and Buttigieg were 35.3%, reflecting, he said, “the current quandary among Democratic party analysts between progressive and moderate political positions within the national party and how it should best represent itself to defeat President Trump in November.”

A recent poll released on February 18 by the Public Policy Institute of California shows Sanders leading in California’s Presidential primary with 32% of likely voters. Biden, Buttigieg, Bloomberg, and Warren were in a statistical tie at 14%, with Klobuchar at 5%. California’s primary is March 3 and voting by mail-in ballot is already underway.  Details on the Solano County website, solanocounty.com/depts/rov/.

Indivisible Guide, Version 2.0 – We Can Go On Offense Now!

Repost from The Benicia Independent
By Roger Straw, November 14, 2018

Indivisible on Offense: A Practical Guide to the New, Democratic House

Rachel Maddow hosted an important interview last night with Ezra Levin, co-author of the Indivisible Guide.  Her 5-minute interview and the new Indivisible on Offense: A Practical Guide are exciting introductions to the work ahead in these next two years.

Main premise: Now that Democrats have taken control of the House, we are no longer ONLY playing on defense; we can now set agendas, advocate for new legislation and powerful oversight moves.  The guide is a powerful tool for everyday folks like you and me.

Download the Indivisible Guide 2.0, formatted in PDF or Word.

P.S. – If you’re curious, here’s the original Indivisible: A Practical Guide For Resisting the Trump Agenda last updated in December, 2016.  This guide was developed with the understanding that progressives had NO pull in the House, Senate or executive branch of government.  Remember: it’s a whole new ball game now – see above!

Washington Post: What works with reluctant voters

Repost from The Washington Post

How to mobilize reluctant voters

By Melissa Michelson, July 15, 2014
(AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis)

Americans of different ethnicities vote at very different rates. Whites and blacks tend to vote more frequently than Latinos and Asians.  Older people and wealthier people vote more frequently than the young and the poor. Increasing turnout among groups that tend to vote at lower rates can not only increase their political power, but also change the outcomes of elections. Indeed, this is a major reason that Democrats are concentrating so much on mobilizing voters who don’t vote in midterm elections.

Could this strategy work?  Is it possible to mobilize people who are otherwise uninterested in voting or reluctant to vote?   We now have good answers to these questions.  People who have not participated much before can indeed be moved to go to the polls.

What really mobilizes these voters is repeated personal contacting. In our book Mobilizing Inclusion, Lisa García Bedolla and I describe 268 get-out-the-vote field experiments conducted repeatedly across six electoral cycles from 2006 to 2008. These field experiments were focused on communities with a history of low participation and were conducted in partnership with non-partisan community-based organizations. Because these experiments randomly assign some voters to be contacted in particular ways and others not to be contacted, we can better know what actually gets people to the ballot box.

Our analysis shows that citizens who haven’t voted much in the past can be inspired by either door-to-door visits or live phone calls. Tellingly, our research shows that such contacts, especially if repeated, can produce habitual voters. Phone banks from which callers contact the same potential voters twice are especially effective in creating committed voters. Door-to-door campaigns also showed strong results, with one such effort increasing voter turnout by more than 40 percentage points. (To be sure, most get-out-the-vote campaigns produce smaller gains.)

Personal contacting works to persuade people to vote regularly even though the interactions do not increase voters’ resources and have little or no impact on their underlying attitudes about public issues. It is the social interaction itself that seems to matter. These interactions appear to change reluctant citizens’ entrenched understandings of themselves as disengaged from the polity. For most Americans – and especially for low-income citizens of color – it is very rare to be contacted for the sole purpose of being urged to vote. When such an unexpected interaction occurs, it can be very meaningful.

Personal contact to encourage voting can be enough to cause many low-income minority people to see themselves anew, as the sorts of people who regularly go to the polls on Election Day. In turn, voting even once can become habit forming, reinforcing self-identification as “a voter” long after the initial conversation with a canvasser. What is more, voter contacts have strong spillover effects within households, boosting participation by others as much as 60 percent.

These field experiments also shed light on tactics that do not work.  Perhaps most interestingly, messages designed to appeal to ethnic or racial solidarities aren’t more effective than general appeals to “civic duty” or other broad concerns.

For example, among African-American voters experiments conducted in cooperation with community organizations using “Green Jobs” or other non-racial issue-based appeals have successfully increased turnout, while another experiment that stressed racial solidarity did not. Among Asian-Americans, appeals that stress ethnic community empowerment have proven no more effective than general messages telling people how to go about voting. Among Latinos, dozens of randomized experiments have effectively mobilized Latino voters with a variety of appeals, although recent work I have done with Ali Valenzuela in California and Texas suggests that appeals to ethnic solidarity can be more effective for Latinos who are less incorporated into the broader American culture and who have stronger ties to their Latino identity.

As candidates, political parties, and interest groups gear up for the 2014 and 2016 elections, recent scholarship shows how to bring reluctant voters to the polls. Largely regardless of the message, personal contact with reluctant voters — even once, but especially repeatedly — can shape the electorate dramatically.

Melissa Michelson is a political scientist at Menlo College and a member of the Scholars Strategy Network.