BLM: Biggest Protest Ever

Larry Buchanan, Quoctrung Bui and Jugal K. Patel at NYT:

The recent Black Lives Matter protests peaked on June 6, when half a million people turned out in nearly 550 places across the United States. That was a single day in more than a month of protests that still continue to today.

Four recent polls — including one released this week by Civis Analytics, a data science firm that works with businesses and Democratic campaigns — suggest that about 15 million to 26 million people in the United States have participated in demonstrations over the death of George Floyd and others in recent weeks.

These figures would make the recent protests the largest movement in the country’s history, according to interviews with scholars and crowd-counting experts.

Number of people in U.S. who said they protested, according to polls

POLL PCT. WHO PROTESTED IMPLIED POPULATION POLLING PERIOD

•  Kaiser Family Foundation (n = 1296) 10% 26 million June 8-14
• Civis Analytics (4446) 9% 23 million June 12-22
• N.O.R.C. (1310) 7% 18 million June 11-15
• Pew (9654) 6% 15 million June 4-10

Lara Putnam, Jeremy Pressman and Erica Chenoweth at WP:

The demonstrations after the killing of George Floyd have seen millions of Americans take to the streets on bicycles, horses, surfboards and boats, skateboards, in cars or on foot. It is the largest sustained mobilization in the United States in our lifetimes.

Data from the Crowd Counting Consortium gives a sense of the scale of these protests. So far, we’ve counted 5,000 individual anti-racism/anti-police-brutality protests nationwide since the end of May, involving millions of participants. In fact, data from Pennsylvania (which we have studied most intensively) suggest that our national count still underestimates the number of protests in small cities and towns. The real national total may be as high as 8,000.

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Nearly half of the 10 percent of American adults who report attending a protest in support of Black Lives Matter last month identify as independents. That’s important because, in general, independents are less likely to be politically engaged or optimistic about politics or to vote. Yet the message that voting is necessary — if not sufficient — has rung out at protests. From Kansas City to Sacramento, protesters registered voters.

Everything we know about political engagement suggests that protest involvement builds new personal networks that make people more knowledgeable and engaged with politics — and more likely to vote.

Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System

 Mark Wickham-Jones at WP:

A little-known report — written in 1950 for the American Political Science Association, or APSA — keeps popping up in commentary on the state of American politics. Yascha Mounk, a Harvard University political scientist, mentioned the report in the New Yorker recently. Lee Drutman referred to it in Vox this past spring.

Why is an old report still garnering such interest? It’s because the report called for political parties that are more cohesive and nationalized. That has finally come true — but many people don’t like what they see.

Why a report on political parties?

It was 1946 when APSA established its Committee on Political Parties. After the Franklin Delano Roosevelt presidency, many people — political scientists among them — had the feeling that U.S. political parties were not as effective as they might be. As the federal government became larger and more complex, the two major parties were not adjusting to changing economic, social and political times. They remained localized and disorganized, lacking either enough centralized staff or a clear identity.

Both Roosevelt and his successor, Harry Truman, struggled to get their domestic programs through Congress, partly because of opposition from within their own party. One concern was the manner in which Democrats in the House helped to water down the Full Employment Bill of 1945. They finally passed it, much amended, as the Employment Act of 1946. Many drew a sharp contrast with the United Kingdom. In July 1945, the British Labour Party won a crushing electoral victory with a mandate to implement a radical program — something it subsequently did.

In 1950, the committee published its 99-page report, “Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System,” packed with sweeping recommendations. The report urged political parties to become much more tightly organized, nationally oriented and disciplined — which is what we see today.

Donald Trump and Executive Orders

Michael C. Bender writes at Bloomberg:

Donald Trump may be one of Barack Obama's toughest critics, but when it comes to the president's use of executive orders to circumvent Congress, the Republican sees him as a role model.

Trump has already promised to be as aggressive as Obama on executive orders on a wide range of issues. Early in his campaign, for instance, he vowed to use the power of the pen to give all cop killers the death penalty. More recently, in his response to the shooting death of 49 people inside an Orlando gay club this month, he pledged to use executive power to implement one of his signature proposals: A temporary ban on Muslim immigration (even though the shooter was born in New York).

,,, 

In addition to the Muslim ban, here are other policies Trump has proposed that he could accomplish without help from Congress:

...
• Tighten regulations on money-transfer companies: The cornerstone of Trump's candidacy has been a promise to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. While Congress approves spending for construction projects, Trump says he can force Mexico to pay for it by taking control of an estimated $26 billion that is wired to Mexico from the U.S. every year.

Trump has said he would halt these remittances “on day one” by rewriting banking rules to expand the federal regulations on companies like Western Union and PayPal. He'd then add a new rule to block undocumented immigrants from wiring money outside the borders.

Trump’s administration would have the authority to write these rules, said Peter Wallison, former White House counsel in the Reagan administration. But Wallison and others—including Republicans and Democrats—questioned the practicality of implementing such a plan. “The notion that we’re going to track every Western Union bit of money that’s being sent to Mexico, you know, good luck with that,” Obama said after Trump unveiled his proposal in April.

Gilded Silicon

At The Daily Beast, Joel Kotkin writes of the Gang of Four -- Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft:

Ironically, the very entrepreneurial form that defeated Japan’s bid for global technological dominance is morphing into an American version of the famed keiretsu that have long dominated the Japanese economy. The keiretsu,epitomized by such sprawling groups as Mitsubishi, Sumitomo and even Toyota,spread across a vast field of activities, leveraging their access to finance as a means to expand into an ever-increasing number of fields. The can best be understood, notes veteran Japan-based journalist Karel van Wolferen, as a series of “intertwined hierarchies.”

Increasingly, American technology is dominated by a handful of companies allied to a small but powerful group of investors and serial entrepreneurs. These firms and individuals certainly compete but largely only with other members of their elite club. And while top executives and investors move from one firm to another, the big companies have constrained competition for those below the executive tier with gentleman’s agreements not to recruit each other’s top employees.

At the top of the American keiretsu system stands a remarkably small group whose fortunes depend in part on monetizing invasions of privacy to use the Internet as a vehicle for advertising. These are not warm and cuddly competitors. Both Google and Microsoft have been accused of using anti-competitive practices to keep out rivals, in part by refusing to license technology acquiring of potential competitors.

Open Secrets reports:

Facebook just turned 10. The little social media site that could, started by Harvard undergrads as a platform for college classmates to connect, has now expanded into a publicly traded global empire with new features and app updates debuting all the time, giving founder Mark Zuckerberg a net worth of over $3.7 billion.

Though it only recently jumped into the Washington game, Facebook has made a huge splash in the past few years - and it shows no sign of stopping. In 2012, political contributions from Facebook to candidates increased more than eightfold over their 2008 level, fueled in part by the political action committee the company established in 2011 (prior to that, its giving came only from employees). Moreover, while overall spending on lobbying has been steadily declining for years now, Facebook has gone in the opposite direction, ramping up its lobbying expenditures every year since it entered the Beltway in 2009.

Graphs on Employment

Our chapters on social welfare policy and economic policy present data on the impact of the Great Recession and government policies to ease its impact. The February unemployment rate dropped to 7.7 percent.  But two graphs from the Calculated Risk blog show that the overall employment situation remains far from good.

POTUS in Afghanistan

Our chapter on the presidency discusses executive agreements.  An example came yesterday in Afghanistan, as a White House fact sheet explains:

In May 2010, in Washington, DC, President Obama and President Karzai committed our two countries to negotiate and conclude a strategic partnership that would provide a framework for our future relationship. On May 1, 2012, President Obama and President Karzai signed the Enduring Strategic Partnership Agreement between the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and the United States of America.

The Strategic Partnership Agreement (SPA) is a legally binding executive agreement, undertaken between two sovereign nations. The President’s goal in negotiating such an agreement has been to define with the Afghan Government what's on the other side of Transition and the completed drawdown of U.S. forces. The agreement the President signed today will detail how the partnership between the United States and Afghanistan will be normalized as we look beyond a responsible end to the war. Through this Agreement, we seek to cement an enduring partnership with Afghanistan that strengthens Afghan sovereignty, stability and prosperity, and that contributes to our shared goal of defeating Al Qaeda and its extremist affiliates.

At The Washington Post, Dan Balz provides some political background:

Rarely has a president blended the role of commander in chief with that of campaigner in chief quite as vividly as President Obama has done in the days surrounding the first anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s death.

Five days ago, his reelection campaign triggered a partisan debate over whether he had unduly politicized bin Laden’s killing by releasing an advertisement that not only trumpeted that achievement but also pointedly questioned whether presumed Republican nominee Mitt Romne ould have had the courage to make the same decision.

As that debate raged, the president, acting as commander in chief, landed in Afghanistan on Tuesday afternoon for an unannounced visit to the war zone. There, he signed a new security agreement with President Hamid Karzai that outlines a partnership between the two countries that will continue after U.S. combat forces end their mission in 2014.

Young Voters and Obama

Previous posts have looked at the youth vote.  At National Journal, Charlie Cook writes that the president cannot necessarily count on the kind of youth passion he generated in 2008:

Visit any college campus today, and you are likely to sense a lack of passion and energy for Obama. It’s far from clear that he can reproduce the unusually strong turnout among younger voters that he sparked in 2008 or match the 66 percent performance level he achieved then. The data back up the doubts. Gallup tracking surveys in January and February recorded Obama’s job-approval rating at 52 percent and 54 percent, respectively, among 18-to-29-year-olds. The polling suggests he would win the majority of the youth vote, but not anything close to 66 percent. As with other key voter groups, Obama’s numbers with young Americans are better than they were last fall, when his approval ratings among that sector were typically in the mid-to-high 40s. The pattern is a common theme across so many voter groups: Obama is doing better, but his gains aren’t enough to put him close to 2008 levels.
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Over the years I’ve found the Democracy Corps, a group started by Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg and the indescribable James Carville, to be a source of enormously valuable survey research and focus-group findings. ... Republicans have now formed their own version of the Democracy Corps with Resurgent Republic, headed by veteran Republican strategist Ed Gillespie and longtime pollster Whit Ayres. Resurgent Republic frequently has other pollsters conduct research projects as well. This week it released a polling memo from Gillespie and Ed Goeas, the lead partner in the Tarrance Group, one of the GOP’s top polling firms. The memo was based on focus groups with Generation Y voters (ages 23-30) in Raleigh, N.C., and Columbus, Ohio. Only independent voters in that age cohort who were undecided on the generic presidential ballot test were included in the focus groups. This limited participation in the group to the true fence-sitters, as opposed to those whose votes in the fall are pretty predictable.

According to the memo from Goeas and Gillespie, “If these groups are representative of this demographic at large, it will be a tall task to counter the disillusionment many feel due to a pattern of overpromising and underdelivering.” They continued, “It is important to note that young voters’ ongoing frustration does not mean they will outright abandon Obama, as was evident in the Ohio groups, but it should call into question their reliability to turn out for him this November, barring any changes.”

What Americans Think About Energy

Previous posts have examined opinions on energy. Gallup reports:

Americans are about as likely to say production of energy supplies (47%) should be prioritized as to say environmental protection (44%) should be, a closer division than last year, when energy led by 50% to 41%. These views mark a shift compared with the early 2000s, when Americans consistently assigned a higher priority to environmental protection

The greater preference for energy production over environmental protection in recent years likely results from the economic downturn, given that Americans have made economic matters their highest priority. There was a brief exception in the spring of 2010, however, after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill brought environmental issues back to the forefront.

Although Americans still view the economy as their No. 1 concern, they perceive the economy to be improving. In this context, the public is now about evenly divided on whether energy development or the environment should be given priority.

Gallup also reports:

As gas prices continue to rise in the United States, 42% of Americans describe the energy situation as "very serious," slightly above the historical average of 38%, but lower than at several other points since Gallup first asked the question in 1977.

The high point in energy concern, 58%, came in May 2001, another time of rising gas prices, which were contemporaneous with rolling blackouts in California due to energy shortages.

Usually, at least 40% of Americans have said the energy situation was very serious during times of higher gas prices, such as in 1979, 2008, and this year. However, the current percentage of 42% is slightly lower than what Gallup measured last year (45%), in 2008 (46%), and in 1979 (47%).
The low point in perceptions of the energy situation as very serious, 22%, came in 2002.

The gasoline  issue illustrates how slight differences in question wording can affect results.  CBS/NY Times asked: "Is the price of gasoline something a president can do a lot about, or is that beyond any president's control?" By a 54-36 margin, respondents said that a president can do a lot about the prices. ABC/Washington Post asked: "Do you think there's anything the Obama administration reasonably can do to reduce gasoline prices, or do you think gas prices have risen because of factors beyond the administration's control?"  This time, the margin was closer with a 50-45 split saying that the administration could do something.  The latter question referred specifically to the "Obama administration" and asking whether it could "reasonably do" something.