Roy Moore And Evangelical Churches Have A Catholic Priest Problem

Meet Roy Moore: Pedophile and sexual predator, and quite possibly the next Senator from the great state of Alabama.

-by James Newton

Roy Moore is a pedophile.

I am the father of a young girl, and if Roy Moore did to her what the Washington Post’s reporting said he did-- and I believe what the Post has written and what subsequent reports have added in support-- he might well be a dead man, and if not dead, beaten to within a inch of being so.

It turns out that this isn’t all that uncommon in the white male privileged world, probably all through society, but certainly in some sects of the Evangelical church, where the idea of “early courtship,” is still common. Where girls are molded for something called a “helpmeet,” which sounds a lot like an arranged marriage between minor girls and sick, predatory, older men. Where there are:

Adult men selecting and grooming girls who were too young to have life experience. Another word for that is "predation."

As we know, countless and uncountable Catholic priests were sexual predators and abusers with regard to the young, mostly boys, with impunity, for centuries. It appears that adult males in various evangelical sects have had a similar arrangement, have enjoyed a similar position of power with regard to young girls for a long time as well. And it appears that the Right, whatever that means, has brain-washed enough of its followers where this just doesn’t really matter. What the hell is going on in this country? We’re not perfect, I’m not perfect, but how is this not evil?

Roy Moore is a pedophile.

For the record, here’s how I define a pedophile: someone who is sexually attracted to children. By any definition, a 14-year old is a child, right? What am I missing? Oh, right. I’m not missing anything. So I doing it. I’m calling Roy Moore a sexual predator. I’m calling him a pedophile. I’m calling him evil. If he wants to sue me for libel, fine. But remember, Roy, ol’ boy, the truth is a complete defense.

Say it with me. Or don’t, whatever, but I am saying it:

Roy Moore is a pedophile.

In another sick and sort of unbelievable-- and just plain weird-- twist, some of Mr. Moore’s supporters are saying that what he did was ok because the virgin Mary was a teenager, too. Wow. OK. Let’s break that down for a second, shall we. My understanding from my Presbyterian upbringing is that part of the magic of Christianity and Jesus Christ was that Jesus was born of a virgin. Meaning that Joseph was a good and honorable man and didn’t, y’know, sexually assault, rape or otherwise prey upon or commit evil acts upon Mary? Do I need to go any further, or is the point clear?

People are fighting to put a pedophile, a Mr. Roy Moore of Alabama, a man twice fired from that state’s Supreme Court for ethics violations, into the United States Senate. This is a job where he becomes one of the most powerful men in the country, whose vote on a bill may one day determine, for example, if millions can or can’t have health insurance. This is who we are electing?

It’s no longer “Gob Bless America,” but God save America. Because right now we are lost.

Roy Moore is a pedophile.

UPDATE: Today's Developments Is GOP Pedophile World

Another woman is willing to testify in court that Moore locked her in his car and tried raping her when she was 16. Alabama Senate polls are neck and neck. Senator Cory Gardner R-CO), head of the NRSC, said that if Moore is elected he should be immediately expelled from the Senate "because he does not meet the ethical and moral requirements of the U.S. Senate."

The new accuser, Beverly Young Nelson, told a news conference in New York that Mr. Moore attacked her when she was 16 and he was a prosecutor in Etowah County, Ala. Ms. Nelson was represented at the news conference by Gloria Allred, a lawyer who has championed victims of sexual harassment.

“I tried fighting him off, while yelling at him to stop, but instead of stopping, he began squeezing my neck attempting to force my head onto his crotch,” Ms. Nelson said in a statement she issued at the news conference. She said Mr. Moore warned her that “no one will believe you” if she told anyone about the encounter in his car.

McConnell announced today that he believes the women who have come forward and told their stories about Moore's pedophilia. Can't get any worse? This evening, Charles Bethea reported for the New Yorker that the Moore situation is even sleazier than anyone assumed/feared:

This past weekend, I spoke or messaged with more than a dozen people-- including a major political figure in the state-- who told me that they had heard, over the years, that Moore had been banned from the mall because he repeatedly badgered teen-age girls. Some say that they heard this at the time, others in the years since. These people include five members of the local legal community, two cops who worked in the town, several people who hung out at the mall in the early eighties, and a number of former mall employees. (A request for comment from the Moore campaign was not answered.) Several of them asked that I leave their names out of this piece. The stories that they say they’ve heard for years have been swirling online in the days since the Post published its report. “Sources tell me Moore was actually banned from the Gadsden Mall and the YMCA for his inappropriate behavior of soliciting sex from young girls,” the independent Alabama journalist Glynn Wilson wrote on his Web site on Sunday. (Wilson declined to divulge his sources.) Teresa Jones, a deputy district attorney for Etowah County in the early eighties, told CNN last week that “it was common knowledge that Roy dated high-school girls.” Jones told me that she couldn’t confirm the alleged mall banning, but said, “It’s a rumor I’ve heard for years.”

Alabama Evangelical Voters Don't Care How Many Underage Girls Roy Moore Molested-- Here's Why

Roy Moore, Old Testament-style sex predator

Breitbart News was all about their hero, ex-judge Roy Moore, raping children Thursday afternoon. I guess they think they scooped the legitimate story by Stephanie McCrummen, Beth Reinhard and Alice Crites in the Washington Post. To the Mercer family's neo-fascist gossip rag it's all a smear by Jeff Bezos... and they don't seem to mild child molestation at all anyway.

Moore was a 32 year old assistant D.A. in 1979 when he approached a mother with a 14 year old daughter and eventually proceeded to drive "her about 30 minutes to his home in the woods, told her how pretty she was and kissed her. On a second visit, she says, he took off her shirt and pants and removed his clothes. He touched her over her bra and underpants, she says, and guided her hand to touch him over his underwear." 3 other local women-- then girls between the ages of 16 and 18-- reported Moore attempted to pick them up when he was in his 30s. He tried getting one drunk, although, by law, she was under the legal drinking age. Leigh Corfman, the 14 year old, is now a 53 year old Republican employee of a payday loan business who voted for Trump.

Neither Corfman nor any of the other women sought out The Post. While reporting a story in Alabama about supporters of Moore’s Senate campaign, a Post reporter heard that Moore allegedly had sought relationships with teenage girls. Over the ensuing three weeks, two Post reporters contacted and interviewed the four women. All were initially reluctant to speak publicly but chose to do so after multiple interviews, saying they thought it was important for people to know about their interactions with Moore. The women say they don’t know one another.

“I have prayed over this,” Corfman says, explaining why she decided to tell her story now. “All I know is that I can’t sit back and let this continue, let him continue without the mask being removed.”

...The legal age of consent in Alabama, then and now, is 16. Under Alabama law in 1979, and today, a person who is at least 19 years old who has sexual contact with someone between 12 and 16 years old has committed sexual abuse in the second degree. Sexual contact is defined as touching of sexual or intimate parts. The crime is a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in jail.

The law then and now also includes a section on enticing a child younger than 16 to enter a home with the purpose of proposing sexual intercourse or fondling of sexual and genital parts. That is a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

Republicans are having enough problems with the voters without another child sex scandal. McCain was quick to issue a statement: "The allegations against Roy Moore are deeply disturbing and disqualifying. He should immediately step aside and allow the people of Alabama to elect a candidate they can be proud of."

Republican Senate leadership is sure to make Bannon's head explode with their handling of the scandal. NRSC chair Cory Gardner (R-CO) and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (whose home state is awash with scandals of Republican legislators molesting women), both called on Moore to step down from the race. McConnell-- well known for molesting young men in Louisville's Pickle Park-- said, "If these allegations are true, he must step aside." Gardner had a similar perspective: "The allegations against Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore are deeply troubling. If these allegations are found to be true, Roy Moore must drop out of the Alabama special Senate election." Susan Collins (R-ME) jump in as well. The Republican establishment urging Moore to drop out, wants Luther Strange, the swampy lobbyist incumbent who Moore beat in the primary, to run a write-in campaign against Democrat Doug Jones.

Philip Bump asked the big question: Will evangelical voters stick with Roy Moore after sexual assault allegations? "Roy Moore," he reminded his readers, "won the Republican nomination for the Senate seat in Alabama this year on the strength of his long-standing position as an advocate for hard-right conservative and evangelical values.

Recent history, though, suggests that he might not lose substantial evangelical support. That recent history is Donald Trump.

On Oct. 7, 2016, The Post had another scoop: Donald Trump had been recorded casually talking about sexual assault while preparing for a segment on Access Hollywood. When he denied having actually assaulted anyone during a presidential debate, a number of women came forward to say that he'd done to them precisely what he described in those audio recordings.

The result for Trump? He won more support from evangelical voters than any Republican since the question of religious identification began being asked.

Nearly half of Trump's support-- 46 percent-- identified as white evangelical Protestant.

In the wake of the Access Hollywood tape, PRRI released data showing that, for evangelical voters, moral rectitude had faded in importance since 2011. More than any other religious group, evangelicals said that someone who acts immorally in their personal lives can still serve morally in office.

Part of this is certainly a response to what was known about Trump. Evangelical voters supported Trump, so they were willing to say that any indiscretions were irrelevant.

But why did they support him so fervently?

Bump doesn't know the answer. He wants to believe it was all about Hillary, partially true-- but not the real picture. So I turned to someone who does, Frank Schaeffer, the son of Religious Right co-founder Francis Schaeffer. "I grew up in the big time Evangelical subculture," he told me moments ago. "Roy Moore’s penchant for child sex/assault and alleged rape was all too typical. There was always some nasty little sex secret with a pastor going on. In public-- like Moore-- it was all about godly lives. In private it was all about double standards. From rape to who got abortions, to how evangelical churches protected their pedophile molesters, one story emerged: Protect the 'Work' at all costs! The children who a pastor rapes are told to keep silent less they 'Hurt the Lord’s Work.' And the children are blamed: 'Your skirt was too short! You led him astray!' Roy Moore isn’t the abusive anomaly, he’s the patriarchal norm. This goes back to the Bible itself that puts brutal men in charge of churches where women must be silent. Voices raised in protest are exiled. Moore is a poster boy for evangelicals like Ralph Reed, who should be in jail for double dealings with the casino owners. He’s a poster boy for the professional hater Franklin Graham. Moore with his gun-waving, Bible-quoting is no different in hypocrisy than is Sarah Huckabee, as she quotes Jesus with one side of her mouth and lies for Trump daily out of the other. AWAY with these scum! Take back the House in 2018."

Election Day In Georgia's 6th District-- The End Of The Trumpanzee Agenda?

Today’s the day in GA-06. The most recent poll shows Ossoff up but within the margin of error, as most polls have shown. This one has Ossoff winning with 49.7% to Handel’s 48.0%, despite Ryan and Trump pouting tens of millions of dollars into the race. Many see the race as a referendum on Trump. 91% of Ossoff voters have an unfavorable opinion him and 78% of Handel voters have a favorable opinion. About 140,000 people have already voted-- a gargantuan number which favors Ossoff.

Ossoff has a 15-point lead among self-described early voters in the Opinion Savvy poll, a 13-point lead in a poll from The Trafalgar Group, a 14-point lead in a SurveyUSA poll conducted for WXIA-TV in Atlanta and a 9-point lead in a WSB-TV/Landmark Communications poll. Then there is the Atlanta Journal Constitution poll, the only live-caller poll, where Ossoff led by 31 points among early voters.

The key to winning these kinds of races is field-- something the DCCC opposes, since none of their crooked staffers can funnel money into their own pockets-- but, thankfully, Ossoff has poured millions of dollars “into an unprecedented ground game to turn out new voters and those who haven’t voted in non-presidential elections previously.” If that reporting is accurate, he’ll win.

GA-06 voters are divided on Trump-- 50% approve and 50% disapprove. Tom Cole (R-OK), former chair of the NRCC told the NY Times that “first and foremost, this is a referendum on the Trump presidency. The stakes here are not just for the House, the stakes are for the Trump presidency.” But there’s another important factor voters will be using today: TrumpCare, which divides the 2 campaigns and which the voters oppose.

The GOP is in a bad situation. If Handel wins, all she did was win a deep red district that Tom Price won last year by 23 points-- and at a cost of over $40 million. Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin wrote that “Republicans, weighed down by Mr. Trump’s growing unpopularity, must demonstrate they can separate themselves from the president enough to hold suburban districts that only now are becoming battlegrounds.”

The DCCC hacks they spoke with for their piece emphasized that a win by Ossoff will help the DCCC recruit more candidates. That’s something that should scare all progressives, since DCCC recruitment-- led by 2 conservatives, multimillionaire New Dem Denny Heck (WA) and wretched Rahm Emanuel protégée Blue Dog Cheri Bustos (IL)-- means wealthy self-funders, “ex”-Republicans, corrupt careerists and, first and foremost, dull conservatives who will take orders from leadership and not rock the corporate, donor-driven boat.

Republicans, weighed down by Mr. Trump’s growing unpopularity, must demonstrate they can separate themselves from the president enough to hold suburban districts that only now are becoming battlegrounds.

…An outright win in Georgia would serve as validation of the party’s overall strategy. Democrats have been recruiting aggressively in Republican-leaning seats-- including in Michigan, Illinois and New Jersey-- and party officials expect a wave of new challengers to announce their candidacies after the start of the next fund-raising quarter in July.

The stakes are highest for Republicans, who have held the district since the Carter administration without much of a challenge to speak of. Ms. Handel, the well-known former board chairwoman of the state’s most populous county, Fulton, and also a former Georgia secretary of state, is facing Jon Ossoff, a 30-year-old Democrat and former congressional aide who does not even live in the district.

“It’s a race that we have to win,” said Georgia State Senator Brandon Beach, a Republican whose district includes part of the terrain being fought on here.

Republican officials worry that if Mr. Ossoff wins, it would send a resounding statement about the intensity of the backlash to Mr. Trump, prompting incumbents to think twice about running for re-election, slowing fund-raising and, most significantly, further imperiling their already-stalemated legislative agenda.

“It’s not just symbolic-- we really can’t afford to lose any seats at this point,” said Representative Tom Rooney, Republican of Florida, noting that “the factions” among congressional Republicans make their majorities more tenuous in practice than they may seem on paper.

In a district that was once nobody’s idea of “swing,” the parties themselves have elevated the stakes. The two candidates and outside groups have now spent more than $51 million.

Republican Party leaders thought having total control of Washington would end the gridlock of the Obama years. But with lawmakers unable to put a single piece of significant legislation on Mr. Trump’s desk and the president threatening the party with his unceasing Twitter eruptions and intervention in the investigation surrounding his campaign, Republicans fear that losing in Georgia may hasten the sort of every-man-for-himself acts of self-preservation that typically do not come this early in an election cycle.

And if vulnerable lawmakers turn inward, that could make passing controversial legislation, like an overhaul of the health care or tax system, even more difficult.

Such a vicious cycle, retrenchment ensuring inaction, could only further demoralize grass-roots Republicans, deteriorating the party’s standing even more. That malaise has already hobbled Republicans in Georgia, forcing national super PACs to spend heavily to aid Ms. Handel while Mr. Ossoff has raised over $24 million on his own, mainly with support from small donors.

“We actually have to have victories,” Mr. Rooney said.

Notably, Mr. Ossoff has made opposition to the American Health Care Act, the health care bill approved by House Republicans last month, a signature issue of his campaign. And while Mr. Ossoff has run on a centrist message over all, Democrats have run advertisements targeting liberal-leaning voters, especially African-Americans, with appeals to send a message to Mr. Trump: Republicans on Saturday circulated a picture of a truck parked in the district with a sign reading, “Hold Donald Trump Accountable, Vote Tuesday, June 20.”

…On the Democratic side, elected officials and party strategists say that Mr. Ossoff’s campaign has already served as a galvanizing force, spurring small donors into action and focusing the attention of voters and activists on the battle for the House. The notion that Mr. Price’s once-safe seat could be in play, strategists said, has helped encourage Democrats in other conservative-leaning seats.

Should Mr. Ossoff win, it could spur another wave of Democratic candidates to run in challenging districts.

Citing Georgia as a model, Andy Kim, a former national security official in the Obama administration, said he is likely to enter the race against Representative Tom MacArthur of New Jersey, who vaulted into the national spotlight as an architect of the House Republicans’ health care bill.

“We want that same energy,” Mr. Kim said. “We want people around the country to focus in and say: This an opportunity for us to push back and hold MacArthur accountable for his actions.”

In Arizona, Randy Friese, a trauma surgeon turned state representative, said he has watched the Georgia race as he weighs a challenge to Senator Jeff Flake. Mr. Friese, who said he is leaning toward running, noted that Mr. Ossoff’s message-- casting him largely as a nonpartisan candidate-- had resonated with both Democrats and independent voters.

“Voters need people who have the political courage to stand up for their values and not just bend to the will of the party,” said Mr. Friese, who entered politics after treating Representative Gabrielle Giffords for a near-fatal gunshot wound in 2011.

Among the Democrats likely to announce campaigns in conservative-leaning districts, according to party strategists, are Matt Longjohn, a physician who is the Y.M.C.A.’s national health officer, against Representative Fred Upton of Michigan; Brendan Kelly, the St. Clair County, Ill., state’s attorney, against Representative Mike Bost; and Nancy Soderberg, a former ambassador, against Representative Ron DeSantis of Florida. Elissa Slotkin, a former Defense Department official, is moving toward a campaign against Representative Mike Bishop of Michigan.

All would be running in seats that tilt clearly toward the Republicans and where Democrats typically struggle to enlist strong candidates.

And in California, Gil Cisneros, a Navy veteran who won $266 million in the lottery, has been meeting with strategists about a challenge to Representative Ed Royce, according to Democrats familiar with his preparations. Mr. Royce has already drawn a promising Democratic opponent in Mai Khanh Tran, a pediatrician and former refugee.

Democratic officials argue that even a razor-thin defeat for Mr. Ossoff should be taken as an encouraging sign, but the party is under pressure to win. House Democrats only reluctantly, and minimally, competed in special elections earlier in the year in Kansas and Montana. But they poured millions into this race, even as Mr. Ossoff largely ran from the party’s agenda and leadership.

“My concern is that we might raise the bar too much, the expectations,” said Representative Michael E. Capuano, a Massachusetts Democrat. “Look guys, these are seats we shouldn’t even be playing in.”

Republicans are not even bothering to play down the consequences of losing.

“We all know this is a harbinger of national politics,” Mr. Perdue said, “and the world is looking, the nation is looking.”

Wow, enough identity politics in there to make you want to puke your guts up. Early today, I saw some well intentioned woman candidate from Houston babbling on twitter that the solution to the country’s problems was getting more women into Congress. I was happy to point out that though the best voting record in the House belongs to a woman-- Pramila Jayapal (100%)-- the worst Democrat, by far, also belongs to a woman-- Blue Dog nightmare Kyrsten Sinema (10.0%). How about kf we look at the quality of candidates instead of the identity politics bullshit?

Nate Cohn did a fascinating piece for the NY Times yesterday that listed the 15 best educated districts in the country-- best educated in terms of college degrees-- and correlated the list with congressional representation. All but 2 are represented by Democrats and of the two represented by Republicans-- GA-06 and VA-10-- only one was won by Trump last year, GA-06, very narrowly. They’re the only districts where at least half the adults have degrees. “The list,” he wrote, “includes plenty of caricatures of the liberal elite: ‘limousine liberals’; ‘Hollywood liberals’; ‘latte liberals’; ‘San Francisco liberals’; ‘Massachusetts liberals’; and the ‘D.C. establishment.’ It also includes Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District, where a special election on Tuesday has been held up as the first big litmus test of Democratic strength in the Trump era. Education explains why the race is competitive at all.” The list includes some of the most committed and effective progressives in Congress-- Ted Lieu, Ro Khanna, Jerry Nadler, Pramila Jayapal, Jamie Raskin and Katherine Clark. It would be nice seeing a Georgia district on a list like that!

The district has been staunchly Republican for a generation. Mitt Romney won it by 23 percentage points in 2012-- larger than his margin of victory in Alabama or Kansas.

But President Trump won it by just 1.5 points, and Jon Ossoff, a 30-year-old Democrat, won 48.1 percent of the vote in a big field in the first round of voting. Of the 15 best-educated districts in the country, this is the only one Mr. Trump won in November.

…If Mr. Ossoff wins the election, Republicans can argue-- with some credibility-- that Georgia’s Sixth was a particularly ripe opportunity for Democrats at a time when Mr. Trump’s ratings among college-educated voters have sunk into the low 30s.

But even if he loses, Mr. Ossoff’s strong performance has already demonstrated that Republicans in well-educated but traditionally conservative areas now shoulder the burden of Mr. Trump’s weak performance. It suggests that previously safe Republican incumbents in Orange County, Calif., or the suburbs of Dallas and Houston could face serious challenges next November. And most important, a close race in Georgia’s Sixth suggests that control of the House is in play, regardless of which candidate comes out on top.

I couldn’t find much on the group that started running an ugly and divisive negative ad campaign on Sunday-- only on Fox News-- blaming Democrats and Ossoff for Steve Scalise’s shooting. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that the Principled PAC “bills itself as a group that only supports ‘principled conservatives who have the backbone to stand up to the Washington elite’ but is a bit player in the political world and has faced staunch criticism from conservative leaders.” Ossoff called on Handel to ask the group to take down the ad. Her campaign issued a statement saying the group “should be ashamed” but refused to ask them to take down the ad. The PAC appears to be a scam operation and Laura Ingraham once urged people NOT to heed their call to contribute to her own short-lived Senate campaign through them, calling them trolls. The only records I was able to find for the Principled PAC previous to this buy was some small contributions to some fringe candidates no one has ever heard of and a $5,000 contribution to the North Carolina Gun Rights PAC last year. Kind of ironic.

Today will come down to turnout. I’m betting Ossoff’s gamble on investing heavily in field and GOTV will give him the edge. We’ll know in a few hours.

Will Voters Oust Republicans From Power In 2018? Bigly!

My neighbor keeps complaining to me that Trump isn’t been impeached yet. She wants to know when it will happen. She doesn’t want to hear that the most obvious answer is in 2018 when theDemocrats take over the House. So I explain to her that if a time comes when more Republicans in Congress feel their own jobs are in jeopardy from supporting Trump than from abandoning Trump, that’s when they could possibly move. The problem, of course, is that all those national numbers showing Trump’s cascading approval numbers are not spread evenly across districts. In many safe Republican seats Trump’s approval is good enough to not be a threat to Republican incumbents. But even in those areas there are reasons to believe that Trump’s support is finally starting to crack.

That AP poll we mentioned yesterday, has some overwhelmingly troubling-- if you’re Republican-- headlines. For one thing, 65% of American voters said Señor Trumpanzee doesn't have much or even any respect for the country's democratic institutions and traditions. That 65% includes nearly a third of Republicans or Republican-leaning independents. A shockingly low 35% of voters approve of the job he's doing. And a quarter of Republican voters agree he’s doing a bad job. A quarter isn’t enough to shake the resolve of incumbents in deep red districts. But swing district Republicans are in full panic mode. Here’s where it gets problematic for Republicans: about 50% of whites without a college degree-- one of Trump's most loyal demographic groups-- still approve of the job the president is doing but that's down 8 percentage points since AP’s March poll. And every survey indicates that approval for congressional Republicans is being driven down by Trump’s taint-- although a case could be made that it’s their stink that’s ruining it for Trump, especially Paul Ryan’s lifelong dream to destroy the American healthcare system. By embracing his notions and accepting them as “TrumpCare”-- despite how starkly they differ from TRump’s campaign promises-- Trump has destroyed his own credibility and is destroying the hope many of his own supporters had in him.

Look at Jonathan Swan’s report for Axios about the fallout from Trump’s comments about how Ryan’s healthcare package is “mean.” Those “private” comment about TrumpCare being “mean” is “having a lingering, and potentially devastating, effect on his credibility among House Republicans. Members are still talking about Trump's comment, and their frustration that he'd throw them under the bus is likely to damage his ability to negotiate on major items like infrastructure and tax reform.”

In the House Ways & Means Committee markup today, there was discussion among a couple of Dems and Republican members, with a Democrat saying:

“See, we told you your health care bill was mean. Now the president agrees with us.”

A source familiar with the conversation said the Democrat was touching on an issue that remains "hot" among Republicans.

A number of members of Congress have told Axios that Trump and Pence lobbied the bill like nothing they'd ever seen, using superlatives such as calling it a "great bill."

Members who Trump urged to take a risk and pass the bill are now seeing him turn his back on them. One member said Trump was on the phone urging people to support it, and "for him to turn around and do this, it's stunning. I can't believe it.”

One of Vox’s healthcare policy experts, Sarah Kliff, reported on Thursday that the GOP desire to keep the country from knowing what’s in their healthcare bill is becoming more obvious every day “as the Senate plots out a secretive path toward Obamacare repeal— and top White House officials (including the president) consistently lie about what the House bill actually does.”

“The extreme secrecy is a situation without precedent, at least in creating health care law” writes Julie Rovner, who has covered health care politics since 1986 and is arguably the dean of the DC health care press corps.

I don’t have quite as long of a tenure as Rovner, but I have been covering health care politics since Democrats began debating the Affordable Care Act in 2009. It’s become obvious to me, particularly this week, that Republicans plan to move more quickly and less deliberatively than Democrats did in drafting the Affordable Care Act. They intend to do this despite repeatedly and angrily criticizing the Affordable Care Act for being moved too quickly and with too little deliberation.

My biggest concern isn’t the hypocrisy; there is plenty of that in Washington. It’s that the process will lead to devastating results for millions of Americans who won’t know to speak up until the damage is done. So far, the few details that have leaked out paint a picture of a bill sure to cover millions fewer people and raise costs on those with preexisting conditions.

The plan is expected to be far-reaching, potentially bringing lifetime limits back to employer-sponsored coverage, which could mean a death sentence for some chronically ill patients who exhaust their insurance benefits.

Senate Republicans do not appear to be focused on carefully crafting policy that reflects a more conservative, free-market attempt at achieving President Donald Trump’s goals of covering every American at lower cost. They’re focused on passing something, by whatever means necessary. That may come back to haunt them electorally, but not after millions suffer the consequences.

…[T]he Senate is running a remarkably closed process. There are no committee hearings. There are no floor speeches defending the policy provisions of the bill. Senate Majority Mitch McConnell instead has assembled an ad hoc working group to hash out the details of Obamacare repeal in private meetings.

The biggest priority seems to be just passing a bill, regardless of what the bill actually looks like. Tierney Sneed, a reporter for Talking Points Memo, recently asked Sen. Orrin Hatch, who chairs the Senate Finance Committee, whether it was important to get the bill out a few days before the vote, so the public could review its provisions.

His response was telling. “Well, I think we’re not worried so much about that as we are getting it together so we can get a majority to vote for it,” he said.

Vice President Mike Pence visited the Health and Human Services Department on Tuesday and delivered a speech to the agency’s employees.

“Now I know this room is filled with men and women who care deeply about bringing high-quality health care to every American,” Pence said. “Rest assured, Donald Trump wants the exact same thing.”

Trump is not acting that way, though. He held a Rose Garden ceremony last month to laud a bill that would cause 23 million Americans to lose coverage-- a bill he praised as “incredibly well-crafted.”

This is now a consistent pattern from top Trump officials, who have decided that their strategy to hide the Republican health care plan will be to not tell the truth about what it actually does.

Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price has appeared on national television and claimed that Americans will “absolutely not” lose Medicaid coverage under the House-passed bill. Two separate, independent analyses of the AHCA find this isn’t true. Millions of Medicaid enrollees would lose coverage under that bill.

Trump himself gave an interview to CBS in April where he said that people with preexisting conditions would be protected under the AHCA. They won’t be: At the time he gave that interview, the bill had been amended to allow states to opt out of the requirement to charge people with preexisting conditions the same prices as healthy enrollees, a move that will almost certainly price some patients out of coverage.

Trump said that deductibles will go down under the Republican plan. Nonpartisan analysis expects deductibles will go up.

The White House has decided to deal with an unpopular bill by refusing to acknowledge the parts of the bill that the public doesn’t like. When asked in interviews about the expected loss in coverage or cuts to Medicaid, administration officials simply act as if they don’t exist.

At some point, of course, this strategy will catch up with Republicans. Promises that “every American” will receive “high-quality health care” will ring false when millions lose their health insurance. Once a law passes, it’s awfully hard to hide the consequences.

Republicans might lose elections if they pass the American Health Care Act. But that will only happen after people suffer the consequences of a rushed bill considered quickly with little public debate.

These are people like 62-year-old Cliff Hoskins, a retired coal miner who lives in rural Kentucky. He used to be on Medicaid expansion-- he described it as the best insurance he ever had-- and now has coverage through the ACA marketplace.

His out-of-pocket premium would likely triple under key Republican health care provisions.

“It’s going to at least take half, if not all, of my Social Security,” Hoskins says. “If I had to pay the full amount, that would not be good. That would put you back in poverty.”

…Voters can oust Republicans in the 2018 midterm elections if they don’t like the health care plan. But for people like Cliff… the damage will already be done. The election is secondary to [his] ability to get health insurance coverage. This is the most damaging part of the lack of public discourse around the Republican repeal efforts: There are millions of real lives at stake that could be hurt. These people would suffer the consequences that will happen much faster and matter much more than any election.

Did you see that list this morning of 70-odd Republican incumbents who could lose their seats in a 5 point swing away from Trump’s 2016 performance in the 2018 midterms? A 5 point swing looks like a very conservative estimate of what’s likely to happen. Trump is going to drown his party in a lake of raw sewage in a way that it could be a decade before they recover. Why is Karen Handel polling so poorly in a deep red Georgia district, even after Ryan and Trump directed tens of million of dollars into media buys? National Republicans blame her miserable debate performance. People in her campaign whisper about the toxicity of Trump and Ryan, a deadly association in the current political climate.

Friday, Alex Isenstadt reported that “the GOP is bracing for the prospect of a loss in Tuesday’s Georgia’s special election that could have far-reaching implications for President Donald Trump and his party’s fortunes in 2018.”

While no one is willing to publicly write off Handel’s chances just yet-- Republicans stress that she remains competitive and point to robust GOP early voting figures-- several private surveys taken over the last few weeks show Republican nominee Karen Handel trending downward, with one private party poll showing 30-year-old Democrat Jon Ossoff opening up a more than five-point lead in the Republican-oriented, suburban Atlanta seat.

“If we’re losing upper middle class, suburban seats in the South to a 30-year-old progressive liberal, we would be foolish not to be deeply concerned about the possibility that would exist for a tidal wave election for Democrats in 2018,” said Chip Lake, a Georgia-based Republican strategist and former Capitol Hill chief of staff.

…Regardless of the outcome, Republicans appear to be taking a lesson from the contest: the president’s support is diminishing in some of the key districts that will determine the House’s balance of power-- places like Georgia’s 6th District, which is filled with the upper-income and highly-educated suburban voters and was never especially enamored of the president in the first place.

“It defines the kind of district where Trump struggles,” said Whit Ayres, a Handel pollster. “He was never particularly popular, and he hasn’t gotten more so since he was inaugurated.”

Ayres said that Republican voters were more energized now than in April, but argued that Trump's unpopularity in the district was the primary reason why the race was still close.

…With the election still days away, some Republicans are already pointing fingers at Handel— a tried-and-true Washington tactic. In the White House, some officials have privately derided her as a frequent candidate for public office who isn’t the kind of fresh face necessary to win. Others are second-guessing her campaign team. During a Sunday appearance on “The Georgia Gang,” a public affairs TV show, longtime party hand and conservative commentator Phil Kent criticized the campaign’s decision to hold a fundraiser instead of a public rally with Pence.

Oklahoma Rep. Tom Cole, a former NRCC chairman, said he was nervous about the Georgia race but felt confident the party had done all it could. The special election, he said, was a reflection of a challenging national environment the GOP was coming to terms with.

“No one here is whistling past the political graveyard and we understand this cycle will be intense, and that it will test our hold on the majority," he said. "We may or may not hold the majority, but it won't be for lack of effort.”

GA-06 Homestretch... Ossoff Takes The Lead As Trump And Ryan Pour In More Dark Money

Thursday one of the Trumpist dark money front groups, America First Policies, dumped another $1,339,990 into GA-06 to smear Ossoff and bolster the failing Republican candidate, Karen Handel, after her stunningly bad debate performance. Republican dark and dirty money groups, like Paul Ryan's shady SuperPAC and America First Policies, have rushed something like $30,000,000 to GA-06 so far-- they will spend much more by Tuesday-- and they have no choice. Democrat Jonathan Ossoff has raised a shocking $23,600,861.14 while the generally disliked Handel has only come up with $519,726.40.

Without daily financial transfusions from Republican leadership she wouldn't have a competitive campaign. They even sent Trump to Atlanta to raise money for her, as well as Ryan, Pence and Price. Ryan's SuperPAC had spent $2,948,888.85 smearing Ossoff by Thursday and the NRCC kicked in a similar amount-- $2,556,761.24-- strictly for negative-- entirely dishonest-- ads. There's so little positive stuff to say about Handel that the NRCC only spent $295,378.55 on positive ads. Ryan's SuperPAC, the #1 source of spending in the race, put up just $110,933.19 for positive ads backing Handel. She's a dreadful candidate and they know it and her positions-- "I do not favor a livable wage"-- are unpopular. So it's all smear, smear, smear.

As Georgia's Secretary of State, Handel was once pretending to be a proponent of "transparency in government." Kira Lerner of Think Progress explained it like this yesterday: "Fast forward eight and a half years, through failed campaigns for governor and for the Senate, Handel is now the Republican candidate taking on fundraising-juggernaut Jon Ossoff in the special election for Georgia’s sixth congressional seat. As individual donors pour money in, trying to flip the historically solid conservative district to Ossoff, Handel is relying heavily on the same kind of spending she so recently fought against." Handel's campaign is almost entirely fueled by Dark Money. One anti-dark money group's executive director pointed out that "the hypocrisy is striking. Karen Handel was for a ban on secret political spending, but now that it’s clear she can’t compete with Jon Ossoff and his small-dollar, grassroots donors, her campaign is almost completely reliant on special interest money from groups that refuse to disclose their donors."

Friday the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published the results of a brand new poll that confirm what every other poll is saying-- a very tight race with Ossoff leading slightly. Except in this new poll it's actually a little better than slightly, probably because Handel did so horribly in the debate and because Trump and Ryan are so toxic (and so associated with her campaign). The poll, which has a margin of error of 4, shows Ossoff leading her 51-44%. Her downward momentum is palpable after a series of polls in the last 2 months showing a much closer contest.

The findings show Ossoff has an enormous lead over Handel among women, leading 60-34. The Republican is beating Ossoff among male voters by a 52-41 margin. He has a solid advantage over Handel among younger voters, while she has a slim majority of voters who are over 65.

The conservative-leaning district has long been held by Republicans, and Ossoff has tried to appeal to both liberals infuriated with President Donald Trump and moderates and independents who typically vote for the GOP. Of those polled, 46 percent identified themselves as Republican or Republican leaning and 44 percent identified as Democrats or Democratic leaning.

He’s capturing about 13 percent of Republican voters and 50 percent of independents-- a crucial voting bloc that typically leans right in the state. It shows almost no cross-over on the flip side; only 3 percent of Democrats say they’re backing Handel. He gets support from 44 percent of white voters, a big number for a Democratic in Georgia.

The race is likely to come down to get out the vote efforts on the ground. If Ossoff was swayed by the DCCC he won't have a robust GOTV effort and he'll lose, the way all their candidates do. If his team is running their own campaign they'll do what Jimmy Gomez just did in CA-34 and turn out the vote on Tuesday the same way Gomez just did against his rich conservative opponent. Early voting has been amazing so far, which makes me think Ossoff isn't letting the DCCC push him around.

Almost 63,000 people had already voted in the contest by Wednesday morning, easily surpassing the first round of early voting in April when about 55,000 people cast ballots. For the runoff, early voting ends June 16 and the total may stretch to 100,000.

...More than $36 million has already been spent on the race so far, according to a recent Atlanta Journal-Constitution analysis, making the contest the most expensive in the history of the U.S. House. Voters in the 6th District-- and beyond-- have been inundated with TV ads, and signs promoting the candidates have dotted much of the metro area.

As a result, GOP strategist Chip Lake predicted a more than 200,000-voter turnout this time around, while others have said it will go higher. If so, that would be incredible for a district that boasts almost 530,000 registered voters and includes parts of three of metro Atlanta’s most populous counties-- Cobb, DeKalb and Fulton.

“That’s a big, big turnout in a special election in the hot, hot summer anywhere,” Lake said. “But I don’t know that it necessarily favors one candidate over another. We just have to spend some time and figure out who these people are.”

Adding to the suspense, nearly 8,000 voters have been added to the district’s voting rolls since the April special election. Experts say those are likely to be “high propensity” voters-- meaning they are more likely to turn out to vote than skip the race.

“The federal judge’s ruling to reopen voter registration was a game changer for the Ossoff campaign because it allowed him to hopefully expand the electorate,” Democratic strategist Tharon Johnson said.

As part of an ongoing lawsuit over how Georgia handles voter registration ahead of federal runoff elections, a judge in early May extended registration in the district through May 21.

Johnson said the early voting numbers should favor Ossoff because Democrats traditionally do a better job of getting their voters to the early voting sites.

“Both campaigns have put a lot of resources into turning out their voters early before they go away for the summer vacation,” Johnson said. “I truly believe a majority of voters in the 6th Congressional District have made up their mind who to vote for.”

Wayne and Maureen Darling are among them. Wayne is 68. Maureen is 69. Both are retired. Both voted for Ossoff.

“A counter to Donald Trump is probably the biggest one,” said Wayne Darling, when asked what issues motivated him. Ossoff, he added, could bring political change “more so than Karen, who’s just been part of election after election.”

If you want to help counter Trump-- and Ryan-- you can still help Ossoff's Get Out the Vote efforts by contributing. All you have to do is tap on the Blue America ActBlue thermometer just above on the right and find Jonathan Ossoff on the page it takes you to. And remember, there's no such thing as a contribution that's too small, at least not from Democrats.

Why Jimmy Gomez's Victory In CA-34 Was A BFD

Tuesday night Jimmy Gomez became the first Democrat to win a House seat since Trump was elected president. He won pretty overwhelmingly-- 60-40%-- in a deep blue Los Angeles district. Generally Republicans don't even try in districts like CA-34. The jungle primary, in fact, resulted in 2 candidates with "D" next to their names facing off this week in the general election. One was Gomez-- a nose-to-the-grindstone progressive Assemblyman and proven, recognized champion of working families. The other was a wealthy, conservative "ex"-Republican, Robert Lee Ahn, who was backed by prominent Republicans and flagrantly campaigned for GOP votes.

It didn't work out for Ahn. He spent $498,400 of his own money ($1,372,545 in total) on the race and appealed strictly along ethnic lines to fellow Koreans, the second biggest ethnic group in the district. Korean-American turnout was very high, but not high enough, especially when Republicans wound up not turning out, just staying home-- a warning to other Democrats around the country who think this is a viable strategy for career advancement.

When Gomez declared for the seat, he was not favored to win. The establishment was already getting behind a far better known and more senior political leader, former Assembly Speaker John Pérez... and Gomez was viewed as the "too far left" interloper. "Too far left" is a weird idea in the only congressional district in Los Angeles where Bernie beat Hillary-- a a district that Democrats regularly win with over 80% of the vote. Blue America was the first group to urge Gomez to run and the first group that endorsed him when he decided to. And the reason we did is the same reason, essentially, he was able to win the primary (among two dozen candidates!) and then win the general on Tuesday. The magic formula? To be honest, there are two pieces of this: his record and his campaign.

Forget about the Republican stooge and his incoherent conservativism. In the primary, several candidates tried running to Gomez's left based on two things: basically meaningless utopian promises and the fact that each had licked envelopes in Bernie's campaign. What Gomez had to offer instead-- aside from a robust record on constituent services-- was an admirable and inspiring list of actual progressive accomplishments. So not just a good voting record but actual accomplishments. He co-wrote the state's Medicare-for-All bill. He wrote and passed a Paid Family Leave bill that fixed flawed legislation that saw virtually all the benefits going to women making over $80,000 and none going to the women who most needed it. His approach is now the national model. He conceptualized, wrote and passed-- in a bipartisan manner-- a green energy bill that didn't just subsidize wealthy Tesla buyers and people putting expensive solar panel arrays on their roofs, but also working class communities. Talk is cheap. A record of accomplishment like Gomez's goes way beyond talk.

As for the campaign... Monday a contact at the DCCC was trying to sell me on their new DCCC University-- "better," he told me, "than Trump University." Ha, ha. DCCC U is supposed to train campaign operatives. "There are less than 30 competent campaign managers in the whole country," he told me. That's true, although I didn't mention that the DCCC has been turning out scores of incompetent ones for at least a decade. But the point is that Gomez was lucky enough to snare one of the 30: David Keith.

Keith had just finished a successful Assembly campaign for Eloise Reyes, beating a corrupt conservative Democratic incumbent, Chevron Cheryl-- no one even remembered her name after Keith tarred her with that monicker. He knows how to win races, not by following the flawed one-corrupt-size-fits-all DCCC playbook but by eschewing expensive and ineffective TV ads that do nothing but make consultants very very wealthy, instead putting together the kinds of field operations and GOTV efforts that crooked organizations like the DCCC and EMILY's List hate (since they can't use them to rake off any dough for themselves through commissions). Today top Washington Democratic Party officials are begging him to fly to Washington to "debrief" them on how to win races. He laughed. Rumors are running wild that he was packing his bags to fly to Racine, Wisconsin... where some say he plans to spend the next 17 months helping Randy Bryce beat Paul Ryan.

"I've been asked to work on a couple of Senate races and some interesting House campaigns here in beautiful sunny California," he told me this morning. "But repealing and replacing Paul Ryan with @IronStache... is something any red blooded, patriotic American would have to give real consideration to. You know how much I love my mother and this great country... Any idea what the weather is like in Racine," he asked earnestly.

What Is Today's Democratic Party Offering The Working Class?

The GA-06 special election is June 20th-- three weeks from yesterday. And yesterday was the first day of early voting there. The ad up top was just put up on local TV to the tune of $500,000 by Pelosi's SuperPAC. Or more important, who is it speaking to? Who is it not saying a word to? Patrick Ruffini had an interesting post up yesterday at FiveThirtyEight: Black Voters Aren’t Turning Out For The Post-Obama Democratic Party. Before we get into his post, which has a lot to offer, let me over a simplistic short version: concerted, unconstitutional Republican efforts at voter suppression aimed at African-Americans has been working well. Ryan's SuperPAC and other shady GOP entities are outspending the Democrats massively, as they did in Montana. But with this kind of race, Democrats don't have to go toe-to-toe on spending, not if they have a superior ground game or field operation and can get out the vote.

And this:

Ruffini's post starts off with the reminder that GA-06 is "nearly 10 percentage points more Republican than the nation as a whole" but that Democrats have something else to worry about June 20-- turnout trends.

In 2016, turnout among whites was up across the country, and in highly educated areas like the 6th District in the suburbs of Atlanta. This redounded to Democrats’ advantage. At the same time, black turnout was down precipitously, from 66 percent in 2012 to 59 percent in 2016. This black-white turnout gap continued in the first round of Georgia’s special election, where the Democrats got impressive turnout levels from all races and ethnicities-- except African-Americans.

Lower black turnout in 2016 might be explained as a reversion to the mean after that group’s historic turnout for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. It’s possible that Clinton could never inspire black turnout the way the first African-American president could. But even if this shift is more of a return to the old status quo, Democrats will still have to grapple with these turnout levels going forward, and there are powerful lessons we can learn from the party’s failure to raise or maintain previous black turnout levels in 2016. Painting Trump as a bigot did not motivate more African-Americans to vote, in 2016 or in the Georgia 6th. Hope and shared identity seem to be much more effective turnout motivators than fear.

Elections are decided by two chief factors: Who turns out and which candidate they vote for. It’s been pointed out that turnout alone did not decide the 2016 election-- and that the key factor in Trump’s success with groups like the white working class was not that he got way more of them to the polls than Mitt Romney did, but simply that he won a much higher share of their votes.

But if there was one area where Democratic turnout was undeniably weaker in 2016 than 2012, it was among African-Americans-- and this is borne out in my own analysis of the 2016 voter files, which consisted of comparing actual 2016 turnout to pre-election modeled turnout expectations. While most of the conversation around electoral demographics has focused on the growing Latino population, African-Americans are still the most electorally influential nonwhite group because they make up a larger share of the voting population both in the U.S. overall and in swing states in particular. And for Democrats, the influence of black voters is further amplified because, as a group, they vote for Democratic candidates by such large margins. Clinton won about 66 percent of Latino voters, compared to Trump’s 28 percent; she won African-American voters 89 percent to 8 percent. Turnout among Latino voters is rising, and this is good news for Democrats, especially as African-American turnout has fallen. But the difference in the margins by which these two groups lean Democratic means Democrats need to work twice as hard to net the same number of votes from the Latino community as they could from the African-American community.

We saw last year how lower engagement among African-American voters is a serious problem for the Democrats, as black turnout declined nearly uniformly across all the swing states in 2016:

Turnout did not decline equally among all parts of the African-American electorate. The dropoff was particularly steep among men, and especially young men. Across the swing states for which we have voter files, turnout among black men aged 18-29 was 22 percent lower than 2012 levels, while it rose 7 percent among white men in the same age group. Age aside, we also see steeper differences in turnout rates along gender lines among African-Americans than any other racial group.

The post-Obama Democratic Party may be less able to count on black voters turning out at Obama-era levels, forcing it to become more reliant on whites with a college degree, Hispanics and Asians.

Indeed, on April 18th in Georgia, black voters did not necessarily join their white counterparts in a surge of Democratic enthusiasm against Trump. Compared to turnout levels in the 2014 midterms-- which, like this special election, was an off-year election where Democratic enthusiasm was low and Obama was not on the ballot-- black Democratic turnout in Georgia’s 6th lagged around 10 points behind that of white Democrats, though black voters still turned out at a higher rate than Republicans as a whole did.

As in 2016, the Democratic coalition in the Georgia special election relied somewhat less on African-American votes, gaining numbers instead through higher-than-expected turnout from the district’s fast-growing Hispanic and Asian populations. Nonwhite voters make up a smaller share of the 6th District’s electorate than Georgia’s as a whole, but the trends shown below are consistent with ones we saw in many states in a post-2016 review of voter turnout.

Democrats may partially solve their midterm turnout problem before they repair the cracks in their Electoral College strategy. In 2018, Democrats may be able to win over and turn out the kinds of white voters who showed up for them in Georgia’s 6th-- educated, left-leaning, but usually unlikely to vote in midterms-- even as “the resistance” fails to appeal to the African-American community that has been a major element of Democrats’ traditional base. But that strategy is more limited in 2020, when marginal voters are concentrated in African-American and other nonwhite communities, and no candidate has shown an Obama-like ability to reach them.

You can't see the video of Grayson, just above, too often. He addressed a very basic problem of the Democratic Party brand and how careerists thinking more about their own career trajectories instead of the people they're supposed to be serving have strayed very far from the values and ideals of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Rahm Emanuel and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Pelosi, Hoyer, Crowley and the rest of the losers can take their asinine identity politics with them when they exit. Jeff Stein had an important post at Vox Monday morning, Tired of losing the Rust Belt, new Democratic group has strategy to un-Pelosi the party. We'll see what Krystal Ball's new PAC-- the People's House Project-- turns into, but she says the aim is "to give progressive candidates in the Midwest and Appalachia a new form of support that isn’t dependent on the Democratic Party's coastal financial elite." OK, sounds good; they went public yesterday. Stein points out that the GOP has been successfully running attack ads tying Democratic candidates to the party’s coastal and culturally elites.

Ball and the House Democrats behind the People’s House Project say they’re determined to shake that image. They’ll try to fundraise for the PAC’s candidates, recruit candidates that fit the bill, and give them a slogan to use to try to distinguish themselves from the national party. “It will allow them to say, ‘I’m a different kind of Democrat,’” said Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH), one of the House Democrats backing the project, in an interview. “It’s hard to convince people around here sometimes how toxic our brand is. But, clearly the brand is damaged, and we need to see if something else can work.”

So far, three House Democrats from the two regions targeted by the PAC-- Ryan, Michigan’s Dan Kildee, and Kentucky’s John Yarmuth-- are supporting the People’s House Project.

The two House Democrats interviewed for this story emphasized that they view the project as complementary, rather than in conflict with, the existing Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Similarly, they stressed that they don’t intend for the new organization to serve as a rebuke to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. (Ryan ran against Pelosi for minority leader in December 2016 and lost.) “This has to be a movement with a lot of hands rolling in the same direction,” Kildee said in an interview.

But Ball was more willing to directly attack the Democratic Party’s leadership in the House-- and cast the new effort as an attempt to break with it. Some political analysts say Democratic candidates are weighed down by what the Cook Political Report calls the “Pelosi Factor.” In the home stretch of several House elections, including Thursday’s Montana race, Republicans have deployed images of Pelosi in attack ads to go after their Democratic opponents.

“She’s an impediment to every House Democrat in the country except for a few coastal enclaves,” Ball said in an interview. Candidates running under the People’s House Project will be able to say they’re of a different cast than Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Ball said.

“This gives us a chance to go straight into the heartland with an economic message,” said Kildee, who like Ryan stressed that he doesn’t view the effort as contradictory to Pelosi. “We have really not led with an economic message that transcends the whole spectrum of voters who would benefit from Democratic policies.”

Obviously Ball, Ryan, Kildee, Yarmuth and the rest working on this project aren't the first to understand the problems. Who knows, maybe it's time to stop obsessing about "the white working class" and just talked about "the working class."