Working Class Hero

Alan Grayson's grassroots PAC, The Resistance, did a final appeal for Randy Bryce Sunday evening. At this point, forget about the contribution part, just try to remember if you know anyone who lives in Racine, Kenosha, Janesville, the suburbs south of Milwaukee... and call them and tell them why they should vote for @IronStache. Meanwhile, though Grayson's PAC made some good points.

When no one else was willing to take on the Speaker of the House, Randy Bryce took on the Speaker of the House.  He put his hand right next to the woodchipper, filing to run against Paul Ryan in Ryan's Wisconsin Congressional district.

Ryan couldn't take the heat.  He quit the race, and he's stepping down as Speaker of the House two months from now.

Randy Bryce beat the second most powerful person in Washington, DC, a current Speaker and former Vice Presidential nominee. Bryce chased Paul Ryan out of politics.

But that is not the end of the story.

"You come at the king, you best not miss."
- Omar, The Wire (2006)

Paul Ryan's Super PAC, the "Congressional Leadership Fund," has spent $2.7 million in the last two months, relentlessly smearing Randy Bryce in order to hand Ryan's seat to Ryan's hand-picked successor.

We can't let Ryan beat Bryce from beyond the political grave.  Ryan wouldn't stand and fight for his seat; instead, he hides behind his Super PAC to fling mud at Bryce. Let's show our support for the candidate who stepped up to face Paul Ryan, and beat him.

Randy Bryce: Ironworker, veteran and cancer-survivor. A true Man of the People.

But now that Paul Ryan's Super PAC is spending $2.7 million to smear him, no one has come to Randy's defense.

Here is a list of Super PAC expenditures in Bryce's campaign. The blue ones are for Bryce, and the red ones against him:

Paul Ryan's Super PAC has outspent all the pro-Bryce Super PACs by nine to one-- combined!

(And by the way, there's no shortage of blue money available to help Bryce, The Democratic counterpart to Ryan's Super PAC has spent $72 million so far this year. None of that has gone to defend Randy Bryce.)

We can't let Republican sewer money defeat our Working Class Champion.

Yep, not a dime from the DCCC, not a dime from Pelosi's House Majority PAC-- both of which have been spending millions of Blue Dogs and New Dems from coast to coast. Fine, if Randy wins today, he won't owe them a nod.

Odd There Are So Few Members Of The Working Class In Congress? Remember, The System Is Rigged

In the last few weeks, I've been complaining that the elites who control both parties recruit elites like themselves to recruit and to support. When someone from the working class self-selects and manages to win a primary, those elites are more likely to turn up their nose at them than to support them. After Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won her primary about a member of the House elite club in New York, I sensed that the House Democrats were more vicious in their reaction than even the House Republicans were. I remember thinking to myself, self, I sure hope she has a thick skin! Ultimately though, I know what will happen. Pelosi and her cronies will try to coop her.

It was a similar story with Randy Bryce in Wisconsin. Bryce built his own @IronStache working class brand. The DCCC chuckled. Then he raised more money and got more press than any DCCC knucklehead they recruited from anywhere in the country. No one cared about any of their shit candidates-- most of whom seemed to be rolling off some kind of white collar assembly-line in the basement of DCCC headquarters in DC. Instead they cared about Bryce. The DCCC sniffed around to see if they could bottle what he was doing. Once they realized they couldn't-- and saw that he didn't "even" graduate from college and that he wore work boots to their soirees and wanted to talk about labor unions "too much," they dropped him like a hot potato. Ryan's corporately-sponsored SuperPAC saw a chance to keep the seat red. So far, they've poured $1.8 million into the district-- and announced today that they plan on spending another $1.2 million-- on behalf of their corporate lawyer Ryan clone, Bryan Steil (a complete nothing), almost all of it to smear Bryce. Neither the DCCC nor Pelosi's PAC has responded. They've decided to let him die on the vine, another damn member of the working class trying to crash their club. They want him to learn his place-- and fuck WI-01.


Nor, obviously, are Alexandria and Randy the only working class candidates being ignored by the DCCC. Nate McMurray has a good shot to win his western New York race. He's an excellent candidate and his Republican opponent was just indicted on dozens of serious fraud charges. But the DCCC isn't interested. Nate isn't their kind of guy. His dad died when he was young and his mom at age 35 was suddenly raising seven kids. They certainly struggled. Today, Nate, whose own struggle included working his way through college scrubbing bathrooms, told us he still cuts his own grass. "I know what it's like to work dead end jobs and worry about your family, about the finances of your family. My first priority is to help working families like mine growing up. I'm running against a man that inherited millions and exploited his public position to make money. I don't think he can relate to the people of this region. And that's why I want to go to Congress to fight for families like mine."

The guy in the video up top, Nick Carnes, wrote a book about why Congress has virtually no one who made a living with his or her hands, The Cash Ceiling: Why Only the Rich Run for Office-- and What We Can Do About It and yesterday The Guardian published a piece by him Why are so few US politicians from the working class? "Contrary to the ideal of a government of and by the people," he wrote, "new research shows Americans are almost always governed by the very privileged." He understands the significance of Bryce and Ocasio-Cortez. "This year," he continued, "at least two races for seats in the US House of Representatives will feature high-profile candidates with significant experience in working-class jobs – the manual labor, service industry and clerical jobs that make up over half of the American labor force. In Wisconsin’s first congressional district, the Democratic nominee is a delivery-driver-turned-ironworker named Randy Bryce, nicknamed “Ironstache”, who takes credit for “scaring off” Paul Ryan. In New York’s 14th congressional district, a former bartender and waitress named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently made headlines for her stunning primary-election upset over incumbent Democrat Joe Crowley. Candidates like Bryce and Ocasio-Cortez-- politicians with significant experience in the kinds of jobs most Americans punch in for every day-- are genuine anomalies in 2018, and in US politics more generally."

The president is the billionaire head of a global business empire. His cabinet is mostly millionaires. Most members of Congress are millionaires. Most supreme court justices are millionaires. Millionaires make up less than 3% of the general public, but have unified majority control of all three branches of the federal government. Working-class Americans, on the other hand, make up about half of the country. But they have never held more than 2% of the seats in any Congress since the nation was founded.

The root cause-- and one of the reasons that candidates such as Bryce and Ocasio-Cortez raise eyebrows-- is that workers almost never run, even at the state and local levels. In nationwide surveys of people campaigning for state legislatures in 2012 and 2014, candidates from working-class jobs made up just 4% of both Republican and Democratic candidates. In California-- the one state that offers detailed data on the occupational backgrounds of candidates at the local level-- between 1995 and 2011, workers made up just 4% of candidates for county and local office.

So why are so few workers running? In a democracy like ours where almost any citizen can stand for elected office, why are the vast majority of candidates drawn from the ranks of white-collar professionals, and usually affluent or wealthy ones at that?... Just as working-class people in the general public tend to be more pro-worker (and business owners tend to be more pro-business, farmers tend to be more pro-farm, etc), politicians from different social classes tend to bring different perspectives with them to public office, especially when it comes to economic issues. In confidential surveys of state legislators, leaders from the working class in both parties are 20 to 50 percentage points more likely to support policies such as social welfare programs, regulation of the private sector, government-backed healthcare and efforts to reduce economic inequality. In scorecards that rank how members of Congress vote on economic legislation, those from the working class consistently earn significantly higher marks from pro-worker groups like the AFL-CIO and lower marks from business groups like the Chamber of Commerce.

Bryce: "There’s no question: if we want people in Congress who will legislate on our behalf they need to understand what working people go through. The problem is that we have auctions, not elections. Until we have meaningful campaign election reform we probably won’t see many working people drop their lives and try to run. It’s not easy, but it needs to be done."

These differences, coupled with the virtual absence of working-class people in our political institutions, ultimately have enormous consequences for public policy. States with fewer legislators from the working class spend billions less on social welfare each year, offer less generous unemployment benefits and tax corporations at lower rates. Towns with fewer working-class people on their city councils devote smaller shares of their budgets to social safety net programs; an analysis I conducted in 2013 suggested that cities nationwide would spend approximately $22.5bn more on social assistance programs each year if their councils were made up of the same mix of classes as the people they represent. Unfortunately, we can’t write off white-collar government as politically inconsequential. As the old saying goes, when the working class isn’t at the table, it’s often on the menu.

We also can’t dismiss government by the privileged as an inevitable byproduct of some deficiency on the part of working-class people themselves. It sounds odd to have to state this, but to the contrary, workers and professionals alike tend to have the qualities voters want – traits like honesty, compassion and a strong work ethic – at about the same rates. And when working-class Americans hold office, they tend to do about as well as professionals on objective measures of government performance. Between 1996 and 2001, for instance, towns governed by majority-working-class city councils were indistinguishable from other cities in terms of their rates of population growth, revenue growth, school spending, and debt. The idea that workers don’t hold office because they lack the necessary skills simply doesn’t add up. If just 1% of working-class Americans had what it takes to govern, that would be more than enough potential politicians to staff every office in the United States.

Last, we also can’t blame government by the privileged on some preference for affluent leaders on the part of American voters. When working-class candidates run, voters tend to like them just fine. Between 1945 and 2008, members of Congress from the working class earned about as many votes as those from white-collar careers. In surveys embedded with randomized control trials, voters are just as likely to say that they would vote for a working-class candidate as they are to pick an otherwise-identical white-collar candidate. When voters are asked directly why they think so few working-class people hold office, “workers are less qualified” is the least popular answer; around 75% of people surveyed in 2014 said that working-class candidates tended to be at least as qualified as white-collar professionals. When workers run, they don’t face a class-biased electorate.

Nonetheless, they seldom run. But researchers and reformers are starting to understand why-- and to identify interventions that might give working-class Americans more of a seat at the table in government.

...First, workers seldom run for public office in the US because of the fundamental personal burdens associated with campaigning – doing so always takes a great deal of time and energy, and working-class Americans are far less likely to have the time and energy to spare. When I surveyed seemingly qualified working-class and white-collar citizens, the biggest gap in their reported concerns about running wasn’t a fear about being able to raise enough money, or a difference in raw political ambition, it was a more fundamental concern about losing out on income and work in order to campaign. As one worker (who herself had run for city council and won) put it, “When you are working 40 hours a week and working 40 hours on the campaign, it’s too much.”

Second, and partly as a result, the party and interest group leaders who help people launch political careers often pass over workers in favor of more familiar white-collar candidates. In a 2013 survey of the leaders of county-level political parties, most were quite open about their preference for white-collar candidates. More than 30% said workers are worse at campaigning, more than half said that workers were harder to recruit and two-thirds of local party leaders worried that workers would make bad fundraisers. One survey item even asked party leaders to compare two hypothetical candidates; when evaluating equally qualified workers and professionals, party leaders were consistently more likely to back the white-collar candidate. Qualified working-class Americans almost never appear on your ballot in part because powerful people are less likely to encourage or support them.

White-collar government isn’t caused by voters, or some deficiency on the part of workers or even the soaring costs associated with political campaigns. It is caused by the simple reality that campaigning requires taking time off work and getting help from political elites, and working-class Americans often can’t do either.

From a reform standpoint, that is actually good news. Making public office more accessible to a broad cross-section of the economy won’t require significantly changing our laws or electoral institutions. People who work in and around government just need to devote more attention and resources to qualified working-class candidates.

Political parties and activist organizations already know how to do exactly that. Just a generation ago, women made up around 2% of Congress-- today that number is closer to 20%. What changed? Party leaders and interest groups began devoting time and resources to female candidates, working to identify talented women, and helping them overcome the obstacles that prevented them from running.

When pro-worker organizations have attempted similar interventions targeting working-class candidates, the results have been extremely promising. In New Jersey, for instance, the state affiliate of the AFL-CIO runs a well-established “labor candidates school” that has trained working-class candidates for more than 700 state and local elections. Graduates of this pioneering program have won 75% of the elections in which they have run and have gone on to have long and effective careers in public office. Organizations that understand the challenges facing workers and that invest in overcoming them seem to have found the key to helping the working class break through America’s cash ceiling.

A half century ago, women were anomalies in congressional elections, and in American political institutions more generally. Today they aren’t. Ironworkers and restaurant servers don’t have to be either.

Alan Grayson, who devoted much of his political life protecting and trying to improve Social Security and Medicare, grew up in the Bronx, a stone's throw from Alexandria Ocasio's district. Years ago he told me how he had put himself through Harvard by cleaning the toilets at night his classmates used. This morning I asked him if he thought this whole thing is a genuine problem. Oh, he does. This is what he told me.

First, working-class leaders can be great leaders. Think of Lech Walesa, an electrician, who almost brought down the entire Communist system.

Second, the absence of the working class from elected office has a huge impact on public policy. That’s why mortgage interest is deductible and rent is not, for instance.

Third, the great majority of candidates in both parties are people who don’t have to show up for work each day, whether they are lawyers, businessmen, retired, or simply rich. It’s very difficult to campaign for a major office and work full-time at the same time. In some cases, it’s also difficult for an elected official to live on the official salary. For instance, when Bill Clinton was elected governor, his salary was $35,000 a year [insert inevitable Hillary-futures-trading snark here].

Finally, both parties do discriminate against working-class candidates, not so much on the basis of elitism, but primarily because working-class candidates can’t self-fund, which is a fundamental consideration on both sides. (Another unspoken consideration is that workers have much lower turnout in elections.)  Despite the fact that both parties raise more than a quarter of a billion dollars for House candidates alone each cycle, they still have the mindset of being money-takers, not money-givers. There is no infrastructure whatsoever to raise money for working-class candidates, the way that there is for women, minority and LGBT candidates. It doesn’t have to be that way; if the unions were to decide, for instance, that they would back only working-class candidates (the way that some women donors give only to women candidates), then that alone would make a huge difference.

Nice song, huh? Ready for another version?



Great, huh? Now are you ready for a Senate candidate with a working class background? When's the last time any of us saw that? It's been a while. As on the June 30 FEC reporting deadline, Kevin de León had raised $1,310,851. His opponent, Dianne Feinstein, wrote herself a check for $5 million-- and then raised another ten million, only $886,109 from the kind of small donors who have given to Kevin's campaign.

If there a too few men and women with working class backgrounds in the House, you can imagine the scarcity in the Senate. It's what drew Blue America so strongly to Jeff Merkley of Oregon. Today our working class hero is even closer to home, like I said, Kevin de León here in California. Earlier today, Kevin told us that "for a very long time, wealth and privilege were prerequisites for any U.S. Senate hopeful. And while I don't begrudge my opponent her background, I take a different perspective as the youngest child of a single immigrant mother with a third-grade education, a woman who worked her fingers to the bone in very wealthy enclaves near San Diego. I learned the value of hard work by watching my mother’s ethic. She didn’t have access to venture capital for a startup that would potentially change the world as we know it. But she changed the world in the sense that I was born from her, and I became the only person of color in 133 years to lead the California State Senate. And ever since, I have passed laws that lift up working people like my mother. At the end of the day, my politics are about opportunity. That’s what people want, and right now we have a system that’s rigged against the majority of Americans."

You're getting an idea why we're so enthusiastic about Kevin's campaign, why we endorsed him and why we're urging DWT readers to contribute to that campaign by clicking on the 2018 Senate thermometer just above. Before you watch the stunning video below, just read one more quick paragraph, from Kevin:

"I shouldn’t be critiqued for my situation, and no one should besmirch the senior senator from California for being one of the wealthiest members of the Senate, or for being a billionaire. It is what it is. But, just as my background has informed my priorities, California's senior senator's background has influenced hers. For a very long time, the incumbent senior senator from California has had an anti-immigrant record and used anti-immigrant rhetoric. And that has helped feed this anti-immigrant hysteria at a national level for a very long time-- voting for a wall back in 2006, before Donald Trump entered the scene. And that is something I can't help but criticize."

Working Class Heroes In The Midterms?

Fake President by Richard Serra

I'm not trying to cast a kenahora for November but, let's be real... the House Democrats, despite the DCCC, are going to be the beneficiaries of a big wave. Probably in the Senate races too... but there just aren't enough plausible seats available there for a political earthquake. Tennessee and Texas, though, would make for earthquakes. Combined with Arizona and Nevada, that would be big news-- not enough to oust Trump impeachment-wise, but... enough to send McConnell to the bench. The wave is despite the Democrats' election committees not because of them. They're making the same incompetent moves that have lost them both chambers and made the GOP the ruling party for years. But one thing is on their side this time: sheer voter disgust with Trump.

Even with polls showing that 57% of Americans satisfied with how things are going in general, just 41% approve of Trump. (The last time a blue wave swept over an American midterm-- in 2006 when the Democrats picked up 31 seats-- only 46% of voters thought the country was doing well.) Trump is special. Yesterday, though, Ron Brownstein asserted that whether or not the Democrats sweep the midterms will depend on whether or not they can link "voters' perceptions of the Republican tax bill with the GOP's persistent efforts, in that bill and elsewhere, to roll back the federal role in guaranteeing access to health care." I don't agree, but he's a smart guy with a lot of experience and his abstractions and overthinking the matter are worth looking at.

That Trump is disgusting and needs a Congress to balance him his why the GOP will lose Congress but Brownstein's straw man is "Trump's legal and ethical troubles,"which are just a fraction of what's wrong with Trump. "[I]n the district-by-district battle to retake the House, many Democrats are focusing less on condemning Trump's character than on discrediting the Republican agenda," he explains, correctly. Trump's repulsion is already baked into the cake. No one even has to hammer it home. Democrats are winning special elections without talking about Trump. No one needs to anymore. "Central to that mission," explains Brownstein, "is arguing that the GOP has benefited the wealthy, and burdened the middle class, with its twin legislative priorities of the past 17 months: passing a large tax cut and attempting to repeal the Affordable Care Act." Fine; that's good for Democratic candidates to talk about.

Most political professionals and journalists talk about "the health care repeal and the Trump tax plan as two different issues," says Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic consultant working with outside groups supporting the ACA. "The voters see them as ways Washington isn't looking out for them. ... On both of them, it's basically the same: they [Congressional Republicans] have been giving tax breaks to health insurance companies, to pharmaceutical companies and those come at the expense of people who work for a living. It means higher health care costs, eventually higher taxes, more debt for your kids, and cuts to Social Security and Medicare as you get older."

...Republican Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma, a longtime party electoral strategist, is dubious that Democrats can connect the tax cut and health care vote in a manner that erodes support for each, largely because the full ACA repeal didn't become law. What Republicans did accomplish in the tax bill was to zero out the penalty associated with not obtaining health insurance, which is likely to have the effect of tilting the insurance pool more heavily toward those with greater health needs, ultimately raising premiums. Elsewhere, Trump has made clear he intends to starve the ACA through administrative actions where he can. But Cole said he believes the two issues won't cross over.

"I don't see it as nearly as salient an issue," Cole says. "It's hard to beat you on a vote you didn't succeed on. The ACA wasn't repealed, and the only part of it that was was the least popular part: the individual mandate."

But Democrats see reason for optimism in polls from the Kaiser Family Foundation showing that more Americans now view the ACA favorably than unfavorably and significantly more trust Democrats than Republicans to handle health care issues. A wide array of other surveys have found rising health care costs spiking to the top of the public's list of priorities for Washington.

"This is the first real election that the defense of the ACA has turned into an asset," says Chris Jennings, a veteran Democratic health care expert.

The solidifying Democratic decision to focus their local messaging more on health care and taxes than the ethical and legal storms constantly battering Trump represents an attempt to learn distinct lessons from the experience of both Bill and Hillary Clinton.

The Hillary Clinton lesson is a negative one. In 2016, Clinton and the principal super PAC supporting her, Priorities USA, bet most of their chips on disqualifying Trump personally for voters.

Poor Hillary. The message has finally sunk in. It took longer than it should have-- although she did win the popular vote for nearly 3 million, 65,853,514 (48.2%) to 62,984,828 (46.1%)-- but now the Democrats, with Hillary herself out of the equation, will benefit from it without having to talk much about it. (The Republicans will try to substitute Pelosi for Hillary; but that won't work-- hasn't worked-- because no one is being asked to vote for her, except in San Francisco, where they actually like her... a lot.)

Initially, both the campaign and the super PAC signaled that they would place a heavy emphasis on undermining Trump's claim that as president he would champion the interests of average families. But after some initial salvos (notably a Hillary Clinton speech in Atlantic City that accused Trump of bilking small business contractors at his hotel), the party largely dropped that argument. Instead it focused mostly on painting Trump as unfit to serve as president, by morals, temperament and judgment.

That case clearly found an audience: In the exit poll on Election Day in 2016, 61% of voters said they did not believe Trump was qualified to serve as president and 63% said they did not believe he was temperamentally suited for the job. But in the end, those concerns were not disqualifying for enough people: Nearly one-fifth of the voters who expressed such negative opinions about Trump personally still supported him over Hillary Clinton.

The hard lesson many Democrats took from that experience is that if voters believe Trump is fighting for them, even some of those uneasy about his volatile personal behavior will excuse or at least accept it. Recent polling offers evidence that dynamic is holding. The nonpartisan Pew Research Center found last week that the share of Americans who say they "don't like" Trump's conduct as President remains very high, at 54%. But the same national survey found that the share of Americans who say they mostly agree with Trump on issues has significantly increased, from only 33% last August-- just after the ACA debate had peaked in the Senate-- to 41% now.

In new polling from CNN and SSRS released Monday, Trump's overall approval rating was similarly 41%, but he has seen improvement on key issues like the economy, where 52% approve of his performance.

Not surprisingly, the Pew poll found that over three-fourths of those who said they didn't like Trump's behavior said they planned to vote Democratic for Congress, while over four-fifths of the smaller group that liked his behavior (about 1-in-5 adults overall) said they intended to vote Republican. Most telling perhaps was that a commanding majority of the roughly one-fourth of adults who said they had mixed feelings about Trump's personal behavior also said they intended to vote Republican in November. That suggested that even amid the unrelenting national media focus on Trump's ethical and moral controversies, Democrats were still struggling to reach beyond the universe of voters-- admittedly a big pool-- personally alienated from the President.

If Hillary Clinton's excessive focus on Trump's character in 2016 offers a negative model on how to reach those voters, Bill Clinton's experience provides a more successful political precedent. After Clinton's chaotic first two years in office, he suffered a resounding repudiation when voters in 1994 swept Republicans to control of both the House and Senate. Led by then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, the new GOP majorities moved quickly to press their advantage by passing a budget plan that cut taxes and slashed federal spending. But Clinton revived his presidency by arguing that Republicans had paid for their tax cut through simultaneous spending reductions in Medicare and Medicaid (as well as education and the environment). After two epic confrontations that shut down the government, Clinton forced the GOP to back down, pushed his job approval rating back past 50% and set himself on a path for an unexpectedly easy re-election in 1996.

Democrats today are increasingly paralleling Bill Clinton's arguments from that era. Last month, the House Majority PAC, a leading Democratic super political action committee, ran digital ads against three Republican House incumbents-- Andy Barr in Kentucky, Kevin Yoder in Kansas and Bruce Poliquin in Maine-- that echoed Clinton's case during his showdown with Gingrich. Tellingly, the ads connected the GOP agenda not to Trump but to House Speaker Paul Ryan as the embodiment of the congressional Republican majority.

"Paul Ryan gave his wealthy friends a massive tax cut while cheating hardworking American families out of health care coverage," the ad declared. "And to pay for the tax giveaway, Ryan has a plan to cut Medicare for seniors before he's through." (That last segment refers to Ryan's long-standing hope of converting Medicare into a "premium support" system that provides seniors a fixed sum of money, or voucher, to buy private insurance.)

Democratic strategists such as Ferguson, and Charlie Kelly, the House Majority PAC's executive director, see these messages not as competing but complementary to the national debate over whether the Republican-led Congress is providing Trump a blank check.

"That conversation is happening," Kelly says. "The thing that really impacts individuals day to day are these kitchen table issues that are front and center and very personal. Health care is very personal, and it is something that is going to be a large focus for us."

Democrats talk about the twin arguments operating almost in a form of political stereo. They believe the controversies around Trump dominating the national media are energizing turnout from the party's base (and inhibiting the GOP's ability to advance any message selling its agenda) while the focus on taxes and health care functions as a persuasion tool for reaching swing voters. Particularly with working-class white women, whose votes were essential to Trump's 2016 victory, "health care is the tip of the spear" for winning them back, Ferguson says. Indeed, when the Democratic group Democracy Corps on Monday released a memo on focus groups it recently conducted in blue-collar Macomb County, Michigan, it reported, "In every focus group we hear more and more about the crippling cost of health care, especially among the women."

It's virtually certain that the repeal of the ACA's individual mandate and other changes Trump has imposed on the law will lead to significant increases in health insurance premiums later this year-- a process that began, ironically, on the one-year anniversary of the repeal vote last Friday when two large insurers in Virginia proposed substantial hikes. That could benefit Democratic efforts to maintain focus on the Republican efforts to repeal the law; so will the promises from Republican candidates, such as Nevada Sen. Dean Heller and Pennsylvania Rep. Lou Barletta-- who is seeking to unseat Democratic Sen. Bob Casey-- that they will mount a renewed repeal effort if they maintain congressional control after November.

...Hillary Clinton's failure to effectively dislodge Trump from his claim to champion working families proved to be perhaps the crucial messaging failure of her campaign. Now Democrats are making a second attempt at defining the Trump-era GOP as phony populists more committed to benefiting the wealthy and big business. That won't be easy while the economy is growing, and Trump is daily playing so many chords-- from economic nationalism on trade to racially tinged populism on immigration and crime-- that resonate with white working-class voters.

Succeed or fail, the Democratic efforts against Republicans in Congress this fall will offer a revealing trial run for the much larger test looming for 2020: challenging the billionaire President's identity as a working-class hero.

Many Democratic candidates are using a two pronged attack-- anti-Trump plus a positive vision. Alan Grayson's campaign in Orlando, where he first has to win a primary against a bump-on-a-log worthless Democratic incumbent, conservative Darren Soto, is a perfect example. Monday his campaign sent out an e-mail extolling the virtue of standing up to Trump, and getting good things done for people. Grayson wants to work towards impeachment but that's just part of his message.

Citing his previous record in Congress and the title of “most effective member of Congress” from Slate, Grayson explains he made progress before and wants to go back to get more done for the people on issues including Medicare, Social Security, healthcare, paid sick leave and gun safety to name a few.

“Seniors deserve a raise. Seniors need someone is going to fight to increase Social Security, and this has been a longtime issue for me,” Grayson said. He has worked on Social Security issues his whole adult life, from academic studies to Congress, where he was known as a fierce defender of Social Security. Grayson cited West Orlando News’ 2016 candidate questionnaire from Rep. Soto as an issue where he thinks he can draw a distinction.

Overall on healthcare, Grayson doubled down on his prior criticism of the Republicans’ plan as “don’t get sick, or die quickly,” saying it’s still true today. He added if he was in Washington, he would be holding them accountable for it, in contrast to the current silence from Democratic Party officials. Bringing up paid sick leave, he laughed about the fact Italy passed a paid sick leave law if your dog gets sick. One can only imagine Grayson unleashing about healthcare and paid sick time on the floor of the House, again.

On Medicare, Grayson already has a plan in mind to fix current flaws and gaps in medical coverage for seniors. And he believes he can win Republican support for his plans, saying GOP members were open on the matter when he was last in Congress. “Currently, Medicare leaves out teeth, eyes and ears,” he said. “We need coverage for dental, glasses, hearing aids and more for seniors. We can’t accept the current situation.”

He cited his previous work with Republican John Mica and Rep. Corrine Brown to secure funding and support for the new VA hospital, as well as his work with Mica on SunRail funding as examples of reaching across the aisle and delivering for communities who could have been left out. In fact, Grayson says his mix of exposing Republican hypocrisy, holding other officials accountable including the President, and his ability to pass, amend and influence legislation is the winning formula that’s been missing in Washington.

From issue to issue, Grayson is quick to question “why is no one working to change that?” or he asks “why is no one working to bring money into the district for that?” Grayson is proud of his previous track record in D.C. of bringing money back for Central Florida.

“District 9 consists of people with human needs, with low wages and few benefits if any for the most part,” Grayson said. “Our district is being neglected.”

Grayson believes he delivered more for his constituents than Soto, even in the Hispanic communities. Grayson referenced specific accomplishments including foreclosure remediation and bilingual housing program for Osceola County. Grayson’s efforts resulted in foreclosures being cut in half, and the policy was later adopted statewide. However, Republicans wanted to cut funding for a bilingual housing program and Grayson said he was proud to save funding that directly benefited Central Florida. On gun safety, Grayson referenced a 40 hour sit-in to force the House to debate. He also shut down the House with a mini-filibuster of his own to honor Pulse after the mass shooting.

He is not short on accomplishments, but he is quick to add he doesn’t feel done.

“People don’t need more members of Congress who enjoy the perks and benefits, or who take corporate money,” Grayson said. “We need people who will get good things done. That’s what I’ve done before and I want to go back and get more good things done.”