Summary
Priorities USA is in the midst of a research project analyzing “swing voters” and “turnout voters” in the 2016 election in order to glean lessons that can be applied to strengthen Democrats in elections in 2018, 2020 and beyond. The initial analysis, conducted via polling and focus groups, has now continued with an examination of the impact of voter identification laws.
A 2015 report by Demosfound that California had one of the country’s the lowest ratios of DMV voter registration applications to DMV transactions, between 0.01 and 0.1. [...]
Since 2006, states across the country have implemented strict voter ID laws, which require photo identification at polling places. Extensive research has suggested that these laws are motivated by racism and partisanship.
Our analysis shows Trump accelerated a realignment in the electorate around racism, across several different measures of racial animus—and that it helped him win. By contrast, we found little evidence to suggest individual economic distress benefited Trump. [...]
Donald Trump campaigned as the defender of working Americans. In his inaugural address, Trump vowed that every decision he made would be to benefit America’s workers. Yet his proposed federal budget, Cabinet appointments, and other actions since taking office suggest little concern for workers’ wages, safety, and overall well-being.
Investing in a rapid transition to 100% renewable energy and clean transportation, while protecting environmentally vulnerable communities from the worst effects of climate change, comprise what is arguably the most important fiscal choice we have to make as a country over the next decade.
The Congressional Progressive Caucus’ 2017 People’s Budget tackles inequality head-on, rewriting the rules of a rigged economy so that corporations pay their fair share and the infrastructure and programs that serve the people are well resourced.
The Congressional Progressive Caucus has released its People’s Budget, which it aptly subtitles a “roadmap to resistance.” The CPC budget is proactive, pro-public, and progressive. In decided contrast to the dystopian vision of the Trump budget, the CPC budget presents a bold vision rooted in the fundamental value that our nation is a shared project of all its people – the demos – for the benefit of the entire demos.
Donald Trump’s election came at the worst possible time in so many ways. In a spectacular litany of truly awful aims, including mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, repealing Obamacare, retracting federal oversight of abusive local policing, undoing Obama-era banking reforms, and much more, where does one begin to describe the damage he and the Republican Congress could do? But the threat Trump poses to our environment and particularly to our ability to escape the worst impacts of global warming is unparalleled.
As we approach the Peoples Climate March on April 29, Americans are expressing concern about climate change at the highest levels ever reported. A recent Gallup report shows that concern for global warming is at a three-decade high.
The division that threatens to split this country in two is not between red and blue states, or between rural and urban areas – it is between the way we discuss politics and the realities of American lives, none of which fit into tidy categories. Contrary to popular narratives, you can be a progressive populist, a wealthy and college-educated Trump supporter, a rural laborer of color, a provincial urbanite, an open-minded midwesterner.
While Trump and his allies can debate his progress elsewhere, there’s little dispute that the president’s congressional agenda has been a wreck so far. His glaring failure to sign any major legislation or at least make significant progress on a signature bill stands out among modern presidents. [...]