America Ascendant

by Stanley B Greenberg

  16. Survey of 800 adults by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner and Public Opinion Strategies for Building America’s Future, June 30–July 2, 2009. A majority of Americans said the most used infrastructure items (bridges, sidewalks/bike paths, roads, and highways) were in good condition, but there was little intensity driving this sentiment.

  17. Survey of 800 adults by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner and Public Opinion Strategies for Building America’s Future, June 30–July 2, 2009.

  18. “Recovery Act Fourth Quarterly Report—the Public Provisions of the Recovery Act,” White House Council of Economic Advisers, 2010; survey of 1,001 adults nationwide by GfK Roper Public Affairs & Media for the Associated Press, February 12–17, 2009; 34 percent said infrastructure spending will help the economy a great deal and 34 percent said it will help some.

  19. President Barack Obama, address by the president to a joint session of Congress, September 8, 2011; survey of 1,000 likely voters in 60 battleground districts by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for Democracy Corps, September 14–19, 2011; 45 percent favored the American Jobs Act (without information) and 41 percent opposed it.

  20. Survey of 800 adults by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner and Public Opinion Strategies for Building America’s Future, June 30–July 2, 2009; 58 percent supported public-private partnerships and 57 percent supported a national infrastructure bank as acceptable ways to fund new infrastructure projects.

  21. Web survey of 1,000 likely voters by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for Democracy Corps, September 8–12, 2012; 68 percent agreed, including 38 percent who strongly agreed with the statement.

  22. Survey of 1,000 2008 voters (866 likely voters and 134 drop-off voters) by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for Democracy Corps and Campaign for America’s Future, July 26–29, 2010. Nearly three-quarters (74 percent) said that they felt more positive about a leader who said this about government investment, the economy, and deficits; 54 percent said the statement made them feel much or somewhat more positive.

  23. Thomas B. Edsall, “How Democrats Can Compete for the White Working Class,” The New York Times, March 11, 2014; national survey of 950 likely 2016 voters by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for Democracy Corps, Women’s Voice Women Vote Action Fund and the Voter Participation Center, January 7–11, 2015.

  24. Rebecca Shabad, “Obama Proposes $4T Budget with Tax Hikes on the Wealthy,” The Hill, February 2, 2015.

  25. Lori Montgomery and Paul Kane, “Democrats, in a Stark Shift in Messaging, to Make Big Tax-Break Pitch for Middle Class,” The Washington Post, January 11, 2015.

  26. Carville and Greenberg, It’s the Middle Class, Stupid!, Kindle location 2185.

  27. Bill Clinton, acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, New York, July 16, 1992; Bill Clinton, “A Partnership for Opportunity,” remarks by Governor Clinton at Montgomery College, Rockville, Md., September 2, 1992.

  28. “Ad Watch: Campaign ’92,” The Los Angeles Times, September 19, 1992, and May 23, 1992.

  29. Survey of 1,000 likely 2008 voters by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for Democracy Corps, October 21–23, 2008.

  30. An important academic study by Kate Kenski, Bruce W. Hardy, and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, “The Obama Victory: How Media, Money, and Message Shaped the 2008 Election,” unfortunately gets this piece of their groundbreaking work wrong. They label the period after McCain joined the issue in the debates as “the McCain Surge” (October 15–28). Just to be clear, there was no McCain surge. Obama’s vote did not drop after the third debate, in fact it went up over the coming days. Confidence in Obama to handle the economy remained unaffected, dropping not even a point. Indeed, Obama’s small advantage on handling “taxes”—the subject of the debate—surged to 10 points with Joe the Plumber and the debate and locked in, Obama’s lead on taxes growing further on election day, 13 points.

  31. Kenski, Hardy, and Jamieson in “The Obama Victory” asked instead whether Obama would raise your taxes—but that wording accepts the conservative terms of the debate. That could shift perceptions of what he would do, but not necessarily shift voters to the Republicans on their approach to taxes. A more neutral wording—“better job on taxes”—allows the respondent to champion their overall posture on taxes, including the prospect of increased taxes. Sure, McCain’s distortion of Obama’s tax plans produced more people saying Obama would raise their taxes, but not more people saying McCain would do a better job on taxes. There was no surge on this more neutral wording.

  32. House battleground survey of 1,105 likely 2014 voters in the 66 most competitive House districts (280 interviews in the 17 most competitive Republican districts and 200 interviews in the next 16 most competitive Republican districts and 625 interviews in the 33 most competitive Democratic-held districts) by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for Democracy Corps, October 4–9, 2014.

  33. Paul Krugman, “In Defense of Obama,” Rolling Stone, October 8, 2014.

  34. Web survey of 2,671 adults nationwide by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for Citizen Opinion and the Center for American Progress, April 18–19, 2010.

  35. National election night survey of 1,429 likely 2016 voters, including 1,030 2014 voters, by Democracy Corps for Every Voice, November 3–5, 2014.

  36. National survey of 1,004 adults nationwide for ABC News/The Washington Post, February 4–8, 2010.

  37. National election night survey of 1,000 2012 voters by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for Democracy Corps and Public Campaign Action Fund, November 6–7, 2012—the night of and night after the election.

  38. National election night survey of 1,429 likely 2016 voters, including 1,030 2014 voters, by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for Democracy Corps for Every Voice, November 3–5, 2014.

  39. Outside Spending, Total by Type of Spender, 2014, Open Secrets, accessed February 12, 2015, http://www.opensecrets.org/outsidespending/fes_summ.php.

  40. National election night survey of 1,000 2012 voters conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for Democracy Corps and Public Campaign Action Fund, November 6–7, 2012; survey of 1,000 likely 2014 voters across the 12 most competitive Senate battleground states by Greenberg Quinlan Roser for Democracy Corps and Every Voice, July 12–16, 2014.

  41. National election night survey of 1,429 likely 2016 voters including 1,030 2014 voters, by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for Democracy Corps and Every Voice, November 3–5, 2014.

  42. Survey of 1,000 likely 2014 voters across the 12 most competitive Senate battleground states by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for Democracy Corps and Every Voice, July 12–16, 2014.

  43. Ibid.; among the half sample who heard the constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and the proposal to publicly fund campaigns, the net change in the vote was 5 points among all voters, 8 points among independents, 8 points among moderate Republicans, and 6 points among the white non-college-educated.

  44. National survey of 950 likely 2016 voters by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for Democracy Corps and Women’s Voice Women Vote Action Fund and the Voter Participation Center, January 7–11, 2015.

  45. Statewide survey of 456 white persuadable likely voters in Louisiana by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for Democracy Corps; survey of 1,000 likely voters in the 12 most competitive Senate races across the country by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for Democracy Corps and Women’s Voice Women Vote Action Function, September 20–24, 2014, including an oversample of 1,200 voters across Georgia, Iowa, North Carolina, and Colorado conducted September 12–October 1, 2014.

  46. Thomas B. Edsall, “Can the Government Actually Do Anything About Inequality?,” The New York Times, September 10, 2013.

  47. Based on surveys with a total of 13,197 adults by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for Democracy Corps throughout 2012, overall margin of error of ± 3 percent. The actual 2012 election results were within the margin of error. Working class is defined by education as those without a four-year-college degree.

  48. Based on time series from national surveys conducted by Democracy Corps.

  49. State of the Union address by President Barack Obama to a join
t session of Congress, the Capitol, Washington, D.C., January 20, 2015.

  11 THE PROGRESSIVE ERA: “TO CLEANSE, TO RECONSIDER, TO RESTORE, TO CORRECT THE EVIL”

  1. Thomas Piketty, “Table S2.4; world output growth rate 0-2100,” technical appendix of Capital in the Twenty-first Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014).

  2. Ian Morris, Why the West Rules—for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014), Kindle locations 7825–7831.

  3. Ibid., Kindle location 8053; Michael Wolraich, Unreasonable Men: Theodore Roosevelt and the Republican Rebels Who Created Progressive Politics (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), p. 32.

  4. Morris, Why the West Rules, Kindle locations 8034–8039.

  5. Thomas Piketty, Directory of Figure and Tables for Capital in the Twenty-first Century, “Table S1.1a. The distribution of world output, 0-2012,” Paris School of Economics, March 2014.

  6. Morris, Why the West Rules, Kindle location 8013.

  7. Ibid., Kindle location 8023; Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-first Century, pp. 59, 91.

  8. Wolraich, Unreasonable Men, p. 14; Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), pp. 166–69, 222.

  9. Morris, Why the West Rules, Kindle locations 7926–7949.

  10. Ibid., Kindle locations 8022–8027.

  11. Ibid., Kindle locations 439–445.

  12. Ibid., Kindle locations 410–447.

  13. Lears, Rebirth of a Nation, pp. 75, 84–85.

  14. Ibid., pp. 79–80; Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and The Golden Age of Journalism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), p. 158; “It Is Estimated That 132,000 Men Will Go Out at Noon,” The New York Times, April 20, 1894.

  15. Wolraich, Unreasonable Men, pp. 22–23.

  16. Lears, Rebirth of a Nation, pp. 59–60.

  17. Ibid., p. 61.

  18. Ida M. Tarbell, The History of The Standard Oil Company (Houston: Halcyon Press, 2009), Kindle locations 27–32, 823, 1017.

  19. Ibid., Kindle locations 12–34.

  20. Lears, Rebirth of a Nation, pp. 177, 179–80.

  21. Wolraich, Unreasonable Men, p. 4.

  22. Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-first Century, p. 349.

  23. Lears, Rebirth of a Nation, p. 188; Paul Krugman, “The Deflation Caucus,” The New York Times, September 4, 2014.

  24. Lears, Rebirth of a Nation, pp. 290–92.

  25. Wolraich, Unreasonable Men, Kindle location 60.

  26. Ibid., Kindle location 125; Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit, pp. 168–70, 178.

  27. Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit, pp. 195, 375–76, 747; Wolraich, Unreasonable Men, pp. 11–12.

  28. Franklin Foer, “The Story of How The New Republic Invented Modern Liberalism,” The New Republic, November 9, 2014.

  29. Wolraich, Unreasonable Men, Kindle locations 53, 326, 5138.

  30. Lears, Rebirth of a Nation, pp. 199, 309.

  31. Wolraich, Unreasonable Men, pp. 46–48.

  32. Ibid., p. 28; Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit, p. 696.

  33. Lears, Rebirth of a Nation, p. 160; Digital History, “Overview of the 1920s,” Digital History ID 2920.

  34. Lears, Rebirth of a Nation, pp. 313–14.

  35. Wolraich, Unreasonable Men, p. 210.

  36. Ibid., p. 200.

  37. Ibid., p. 201.

  38. The first inaugural address of President Woodrow Wilson at the U.S. Capitol, Washington, D.C., March 4, 1913.

  39. Ibid.

  40. Wolraich, Unreasonable Men, pp. 255–56.

  12 MOMENTUM FOR REFORM

  1. National survey of 2,943 Americans age 18 or older with oversamples of African Americans, Hispanics, and Asian Americans, conducted by Latino Decisions for the Center for American Progress and PolicyLink, June 11–July 10, 2013, cited in “Building an All-in Nation,” Center for American Progress, October 2013, p. 11; Robert P. Jones, Daniel Cox, William A. Galston, and E. J. Dionne, “What It Means to Be American: Attitudes in an Increasingly Diverse America Ten Years After 9/11,” Public Religion Research Institute and the Governance Studies Program at The Brookings Institution, September 2011, p. 2.

  2. Martin Wolf, The Shifts and Shocks: What We’ve Learned—and Have Still to Learn—from the Financial Crisis (New York: Penguin Press, 2014), pp. 193–95, 430, 493.

  3. “Inequality for All (2013),” IMDB.com.

  4. Articles in The New York Times by Paul Krugman: “Return of the Bums on Welfare,” September 20, 2014; “Those Lazy Jobless,” September 21, 2014; “The Deflation Caucus,” September 4, 2014; “The Fiscal Fizzle: An Imaginary Budget and Debt Crisis,” July 20, 2014; “Addicted to Inflation,” July 17, 2014; and “Obamacare Fails to Fail,” July 13, 2014.

  5. Danielle Kurtzleben, “Corporations Used to Pay Almost One-Third of Federal Taxes. Now It’s One-Tenth,” Vox, July 25, 2014; Libby Nelson, “Boosting School Funding 20 Percent Erased the Graduation Gap Between Rich and Poor Students,” Vox, May 18, 2014; Patricia Cohen, “Among the Poor, Women Feel Inequality More Deeply,” The New York Times, August 18, 2014; Anna Bernasek, “The Typical Household, Now Worth a Third Less,” The New York Times, July 26, 2014; David Leonhardt and Kevin Quealy, “The American Middle Class Is No Longer the World’s Richest,” The New York Times, April 22, 2014; Kevin Drum, “Chart: The Minimum Wage in America Is Pretty Damn Low,” Mother Jones, December 2, 2013; Erika Eichelberger, “The Head of the IMF Says Inequality Threatens Democracy. Here Are Seven Charts Proving She’s Right,” Mother Jones, May 28, 2014; Michael Massing, “Digital Journalism: The Next Generation,” New York Review of Books, June 25, 2015.

  6. Merrill Knox, “May 2014 Ratings: Fox News #1 for 149 Straight Months,” TVNewser, May 28, 2014.

  7. Survey of 1,000 adults by YouGov for The Huffington Post, July 18–19, 2013; 53 percent view Planned Parenthood favorably.

  8. Human Rights Campaign, “Marriage Center,” accessed February 11, 2015, http://www.hrc.org/campaigns/marriage-center; Jen McGregor, “Wal-Mart CEO Speaks Out Against ‘Religious Freedom’ Bill in Arkansas,” The Washington Post, April 1, 2015.

  9. Pope Francis, Apostolic Exhortation, p. 45.

  10. Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Patrick Kline, and Emmanuel Saez, “Where Is the Land of Opportunity? The Geography of Inequality,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 19843, June 2014.

  11. “The Effects of a Minimum Wage Increase on Employment and Family Income,” Congressional Budget Office, February 18, 2014, pp. 1–2; David Cooper and Doug Hall, “Raising the Federal Minimum Wage to $10.10 Would Give Working Families, and the Overall Economy, a Much-Needed Boost,” Economic Policy Institute, March 13, 2013; Paul Krugman, “Better Pay Now,” The New York Times, December 1, 2013; Ron Unz, “Raise the Minimum Wage to $12 an Hour,” The New York Times, December 4, 2013; Arindrajit Dube, “The Minimum We Can Do,” The New York Times, November 30, 2013.

  12. Pamela Prah, “Next Wave of State Minimum Wage Proposals Would ‘Index’ to Inflation,” Pew Stateline, March 15, 2013; GOP conservative heartland: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

  13. “2014 Minimum Wage Ballot Measures,” National Conference of State Legislatures, November 16, 2014. Four states passed initiatives to raise the minimum wage (Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota), and one state, Illinois, passed an advisory question on raising the minimum wage.

  14. Harold Meyerson, “Labor’s New Groove: Taking the Struggle from Streets to Legislatures,” The American Prospect, September 1, 2014; David Zahniser and Emily Alpert Reyes, “L.A. Lawmakers Lay Out Path to $15.25 Minimum Wage by 2019,” The Los Angeles Times, October 7, 2014.

  15. Mayor’s Press Office, “Mayor Emanuel Signs Executive Order Requiring City Contractors to Pay a
Minimum Wage of $13,” City of Chicago, September 3, 2014; Hal Dardick and Alejandro Cancino, “Emanuel Task Force: Raise Chicago Minimum Wage to $13 an Hour by 2018,” Chicago Tribune, July 7, 2014.

  16. Steven Greenhouse, “Fighting Back Against Wretched Wages,” The New York Times, July 27, 2013; Meyerson, “Labor’s New Groove”; Brian Mahoney, “Corporate America Strikes a Liberal Note on Wages,” Politico, April 2, 2015.

  17. Brian Mahoney, “Corporate America Strikes a Liberal Note on Wages.”

  18. Patricia Cohen, “One Company’s New Minimum Wage,” The New York Times, April 13, 2015.

  19. Noam Scheiber, “Democrats Are Rallying Around $12 Minimum Wage,” The New York Times, April 22, 2015; “Progressive Caucus Supports Low-Wage Workers Striking for Higher Wages,” press release from the Congressional Progressive Caucus, April 15, 2015.

  20. Stephen Singer, “Connecticut 1st State to Require Paid Sick Time,” The Washington Post, July 5, 2011; Mark Pazniokas, “Connecticut Becomes First State to Pass $10.10 Minimum Wage,” The CT Mirror, March 26, 2014; “Connecticut’s Statewide Uninsured Rate Cut in Half: Nearly 140,000 Enrollees Were Previously Uninsured,” press release from the Office of Governor Dannel P. Malloy, State of Connecticut, August 6, 2014; Michelle Andrews, “California Passes Law to Require Paid Sick Leave as Legislation Lingers in D.C.,” PBS, October 3, 2014.