Heaven Knows Dems Can’t Win Without Atheists

serveimageIn an editorial in the Sunday Miami Herald, Robyn Blumner of the Center for Inquiry laid out a good case for why the Democratic Party needs to stop dissing its atheist supporters:

Atheists make up 3.1 percent of Americans and agnostics another 4 percent, according to Pew Research Center’s 2014 Religious Landscape Study and those are people willing to ’fess up to pollsters. Jews are only 1.9 percent of the population; Mormons 1.6 percent.

In other words, there are a lot of us. We are a growing and essential segment of the Democratic Party. About 69 percent identify as Democrats or lean that way, according to Pew. Atheists and agnostics give Democrats the margin of victory in election after election. Include the entirety of the “nones” — the one-in-five Americans who tell pollsters they have no religious affiliation — and we are the Democratic Party’s largest faith demographic.

About 28 percent of Democrats say they have no religious affiliation, compared with 21 percent who say they are Catholic, 16 percent who are evangelicals and 13 percent mainline Protestant.

Read more here.

Poll: Clinton Leads Trump by 31 Percentage Points in California

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In this most unpredictable of all presidential campaign seasons, there is at least one thing that can be counted on to hold true.

California remains a reliable stronghold for the Democratic Party, in general — and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, specifically.

That assumption is based on recent polling in the Golden State, including a well-respected USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll released today.

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Clinton Has Little Traction with Youth Vote

It is fair to wonder about Clinton’s ability to put the party back together if she does become the nominee. Getting youth turnout is always tricky for Democrats, and Clinton is getting absolutely annihilated with young voters: She lost the youngest group of voters (17-29 in Iowa and 18-29 in New Hampshire) 84%-14% and 83%-16%, respectively. Now, we know that Barack Obama put the party back together fairly easily in 2008, and that if Clinton is the nominee she will be able to use her Republican opponent as a motivational tool. But these are staggeringly lousy numbers for Clinton nonetheless.

Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball

Republican Lawmaker Says Trump Could Be a ‘Phantom Candidate’ for Democrats

I think there’s a small possibility that this gentleman is a phantom candidate. Mr. Trump has a close friendship with Bill and Hillary Clinton. They were at his last wedding. He has contributed to the Clintons’ foundation. He has contributed to Mrs. Clinton’s Senate campaigns. All of this is very suspicious.

— Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-FL), “whose district saw two phony candidates run in a pair of elections before he took office, has taken to Spanish-language media to suggest that Donald Trump’s campaign could be a Democratic scheme to hurt the Republican Party,” the Miami Herald reports.

Is a Third Party Emerging?

Listen to the early sounds of the 2016 presidential campaign, in which candidates of the left and the right sound almost identical populist, anti-Wall Street, antiestablishment themes, and the idea doesn’t seem so crazy. When you have Republican presidential contenders opposing free-trade agreements, and at least one backing an increase in the minimum wage; when Democratic firebrand Bernie Sanders (technically an independent to begin with) is speaking to overflow crowds; and when left and right come together to halt a prominent national-security program backed by the foreign-policy establishment—well, something is going on.

— Gerald Seib, in the Wall Street Journal (login required).

Who’s the Democrats’ Plan B?

Stipulate that the former secretary of state is on a different plane from most other Democrats when it comes to experience, endurance and popularity. And yet, as one damaging report after another emerges, it’s got to be asked: How dumb is it for Democrats to count so completely on this one person? What is their Plan B?

— Jill Lawrence, writing in U.S. News & World Report, noting that as Hillary Clinton becomes encumbered by questions of propriety and transparency, who else does the Democratic Party have to offer.

Kerrey: Webb Would Have an ‘Uphill Fight’ Against Clinton for Dem Nomination

It would be an uphill fight, almost like climbing a wall. He would be running against someone who simultaneously has two television shows based on her. She is a political figure with such remarkable strength ahead of the campaign, unlike anything I’ve seen in my lifetime.

— Former Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-NE), quoted by the Washington Post, on the possibility of former Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) challenging Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Lauren Bacall, Actress and Liberal Icon, 1924-2014

March on Washington: Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart lead a contingent of actors, writers and directors from Hollywood to a hearing of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947

Lauren Bacall, who died yesterday just a month shy of her 90th birthday, will rightly be remembered for her A-list acting career and her marriage to movie legend Humphrey Bogart. But Bacall also had a record as a stalwart liberal. As she put it, “I’m a total Democrat. I’m anti-Republican.”

“Being a liberal is the best thing on earth you can be. You are welcoming to everyone when you’re a liberal. You do not have a small mind.”
– Lauren Bacall

Her performance with Bogart in “To Have and Have Not” catapulted her to stardom overnight in 1944. A few months after the film came out, she made her political debut at an event for World War II service members in Washington, D.C., when she was boosted atop an upright piano and photographed lounging there as then-Vice Pres. Harry Truman played for the crowd.

After the war, Bacall, Bogart, director John Huston and others formed the Committee for the First Amendment in opposition to the Republican Party’s anti-communist witch hunts, which were championed by Hollywood figures like Ronald Reagan, Walt Disney and Hollywood Reporter publisher Billy Wilkerson. In 1947, Bacall and Bogart led a contingent of the organization’s members to Washington in protest of the right-wing pogrom and in support of Hollywood witnesses called by the committee who had refused to testify.

That was just the beginning of Lauren Bacall’s decades-long political activity and support for the Democratic Party. Michael Tomasky pays tribute to Bacall as “deeply liberal and deeply anti-communist” in a eulogy at the Daily Beast:

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