Author Archives: SarahMarquardt

Irony Alert: Latinos May Determine Donald Trump’s Fate

by SarahMarquardt Posted on May 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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Call it justicia divina.

After serving for months as punching bags for Republican candidates, Latinos may ultimately decide the outcome of the race. An upcoming report from two GOP consulting firms argues that Latino votes in California could prove decisive in 11 of the state’s 53 congressional districts—a swath that confers more delegates than 20 other states combined. “If Trump is going to be held under 1,237″—the number of delegates needed to avoid a contested convention—”it will largely be the result of Latino Republicans voting against his candidacy,” says Mike Madrid, whose firm, Grassroots Lab, co-authored the report with the GOP analytics firm Murphy Nasica.

Latino Republicans have far more clout than their numbers would suggest. Fewer than 1-in-5 California GOPers is Latino, but Madrid calculates that their primary votes, on average, will be worth a staggering 6.5 times more than those of the average white voter.

This situation stems from the state GOP’s quirky rules. Each congressional district confers three delegates in a winner-take-all election, regardless of how many Republicans live there. So a majority-white district in Orange County with 166,000 Republicans is worth the same as a majority-Latino one in East Lost Angeles with just 30,000 Republicans. In other words, those Republicans living in Democratic districts have the most powerful votes, and a disproportionate number of those Republicans, Madrid calculates, are Latinos.

“Finding Latino Republicans in these districts is like finding the Holy Grail,” he says. “The irony is that those votes have become the most effective and valuable for amassing delegates, but they are extremely hard to find because the party has not been there in these areas for 25 years.”

The Cruz campaign has invested heavily in targeting Latino-heavy districts in the Central Valley, Los Angeles County, and east of San Diego with phone banking and precinct walking. “We are the only campaign that has the organization to do it,” says Mike Schroeder, the campaign’s California co-chair. “It’s not complicated; it’s simple, basic, nuts-and-bolts politics.”

But it’s also an uphill climb for an ultraconservative candidate like Cruz, who has staked out positions on immigration nearly identical to Trump’s. Cruz’s lead among Latino Republicans in California stands at a mere 4 percent and is unlikely to widen much before the June 7 primary, Madrid speculates. “Cruz has built his entire operation in appealing to Southern, white evangelicals,” he says. “It’s too late to pivot.”

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Irony Alert: Latinos May Determine Donald Trump’s Fate

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Here’s Why I Never Warmed Up to Bernie Sanders

by SarahMarquardt Posted on April 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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With the Democratic primary basically over, I want to step back a bit and explain the big-picture reason that I never warmed up to Bernie Sanders. It’s not so much that he’s all that far to my left, nor that he’s been pretty skimpy on details about all the programs he proposes. That’s hardly uncommon in presidential campaigns. Rather, it’s the fact that I think he’s basically running a con, and one with the potential to cause distinct damage to the progressive cause.

I mean this as a provocation—but I also mean it. So if you’re provoked, mission accomplished! Here’s my argument.

Bernie’s explanation for everything he wants to do—his theory of change, or theory of governing, take your pick—is that we need a revolution in this country. The rich own everything. Income inequality is skyrocketing. The middle class is stagnating. The finance industry is out of control. Washington DC is paralyzed.

But as Bill Scher points out, the revolution that Bernie called for didn’t show up. In fact, it’s worse than that: we were never going to get a revolution, and Bernie knew it all along. Think about it: has there ever been an economic revolution in the United States? Stretching things a bit, I can think of two:

The destruction of the Southern slave economy following the Civil War.
The New Deal.

The first of these was 50+ years in the making and, in the end, required a bloody, four-year war to bring to a conclusion. The second happened only after an utter collapse of the economy, with banks closing, businesses failing, wages plummeting, and unemployment at 25 percent. That’s what it takes to bring about a revolution, or even something close to it.

We’re light years away from that right now. Unemployment? Yes, two or three percent of the working-age population has dropped out of the labor force, but the headline unemployment rate is 5 percent. Wages? They’ve been stagnant since the turn of the century, but the average family still makes close to $70,000, more than nearly any other country in the world. Health care? Our system is a mess, but 90 percent of the country has insurance coverage. Dissatisfaction with the system? According to Gallup, even among those with incomes under $30,000, only 27 percent are dissatisfied with their personal lives.

Like it or not, you don’t build a revolution on top of an economy like this. Period. If you want to get anything done, you’re going to have to do it the old-fashioned way: through the slow boring of hard wood.

Why do I care about this? Because if you want to make a difference in this country, you need to be prepared for a very long, very frustrating slog. You have to buy off interest groups, compromise your ideals, and settle for half loaves—all the things that Bernie disdains as part of the corrupt mainstream establishment. In place of this he promises his followers we can get everything we want via a revolution that’s never going to happen. And when that revolution inevitably fails, where do all his impressionable young followers go? Do they join up with the corrupt establishment and commit themselves to the slow boring of hard wood? Or do they give up?

I don’t know, but my fear is that some of them will do the latter. And that’s a damn shame. They’ve been conned by a guy who should know better, the same way dieters get conned by late-night miracle diets. When it doesn’t work, they throw in the towel.

Most likely Bernie will have no lasting effect, and his followers will scatter in the usual way, with some doubling down on practical politics and others leaving for different callings. But there’s a decent chance that Bernie’s failure will result in a net increase of cynicism about politics, and that’s the last thing we need. I hate the idea that we might lose even a few talented future leaders because they fell for Bernie’s spiel and then got discouraged when it didn’t pan out.

I’ll grant that my pitch—and Hillary’s and Barack Obama’s—isn’t very inspiring. Work your fingers to the bone for 30 years and you might get one or two significant pieces of legislation passed. Obviously you need inspiration too. But if you don’t want your followers to give up in disgust, your inspiration needs to be in the service of goals that are at least attainable. By offering a chimera instead, Bernie has done the progressive movement no favors.

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Here’s Why I Never Warmed Up to Bernie Sanders

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