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Senior Democratic officials reportedly say that they will adhere to the call from their liberal base and take an all-out-war stance against President Trump.

The New York Times reported Thursday that there was a time when Democrats were divided on their Trump approach. Trump did win former blue states in his November victory and Democrats in those states witnessed a new vulnerability.

The report, however, said that protests and angry emails have prompted Democrats to "cast aside any notion of conciliation with the White House.

My belief is, we have to resist every way and everywhere, every time we can, Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington told the paper. Inslee said there was a tornado of support for a wall-to-wall resistance.

TRUMP GETS READY TO TAKE CENTER STAGE AT CPAC

Douglas E. Schoen, a former pollster for President Clinton and Fox News contributor, wrote in an opinion piece that Trump's ascendance is rooted in Americas preference for center-right policy."

"As the Democratic Party shifted ever leftwards under Obama, it suffered net losses of 11 Senate seats, 62 House seats, and 10 governorships since 2010, as well as nearly 1000 state legislative seats.

He went on to say, The groups driving the Democratic Party to the left believe their only path to victory is mobilization. These forces are pushing the party away from the American public, which fundamentally is center-right, and channeling the concerns and priorities of the core Democratic coastal base.

Sen. Thomas R. Carper, D-Del., is considered a middle-of-the-road. He told The Times that loathing Trump is not a governing strategy.

There is this vitriol and dislike for our new president, he said. The challenge for us is to harness it in a productive way and a constructive way, and I think we will.

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Democrats reportedly plan total war on Trump | Fox News

ATLANTA Unable to get closure on the partys stunning losses in November, nearly 20 Democratic interest groups, operatives, and state committees have commissioned their own private 2016 election autopsy reports.

The projects, which aim to diagnose the partys ills and pave a path forward, are designed in part to fill the void left by Hillary Clinton's campaign, which has yet to offer any formal explanation for its defeat. Instead, leaders of her campaign effort have let the candidate's complaints to donors about Russia and FBI Director Jim Comey's intervention stand alone, leaving a public silence about the details of her defeat that has spawned tangible frustration among party operatives.

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While Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook and members of his team have been privately presenting their own findings to Clinton and other influential party figures, the absence of a full, public accounting of the factors and forces underlying her shocking loss has generated a cottage industry of projects dedicated to explaining and understanding how things went so wrong for the party in November.

Some of the investigations would have happened anyway: There are two parallel probes of what happened in the U.S. House alone one from New Mexico Rep. Ben Ray Lujn, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman, and another led by New York Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney.

By far the largest effort to take stock of the last election cycle is a project thats unlikely to produce any public-facing set of conclusions. AFL-CIO Political Director Mike Podhorzer in January quietly convened leading political, data, and polling professionals from Clintons campaign, outside groups, and progressive organizations for four sessions in Washington where the group shared their own findings.

The Democratic data firm Catalist has also stepped in to provide analyses for a wide range of groups with which it works, pulling together sophisticated, exhaustive looks at turnout and party support based on precinct data, voter files and the group's own models and figures within the states one presentation describing the situation in a non-battleground state, obtained by POLITICO, stretched to over 50 pages.

I certainly did mine for the DNC Executive Committee, but hell, every conference call theres someone with an opinion of what went wrong and why, said Cornell Belcher, a leading party pollster who presented his initial findings to that group in Denver at the end of last year.

The projects are taking place under the aegis of both national and local-level groups from super PACs to state parties to organized labor officials and they often disagree in both their focus and their conclusions.

A number of state parties are conducting deeper-than-usual audits of the election, from the Florida Democratic Partys analysis of its performance at the state legislative and presidential level to efforts led by party committees in states including Iowa, Minnesota, and Georgia.

The Womens Voices Womens Votes Action Fund has analyzed the groups own November 7-9 polling, exit polls, and its mail-based registration campaign the largest in the country to look for response rates in their target demographic groups: unmarried women, millennials, and people of color, explained Page Gardner, president of that group and the Voter Participation Center.

All of it represents tens of millions of dollars worth of investment in research, and hundreds of hours of under-the-radar meetings and panels, according to interviews with a wide range of their drafters and a review of six comprehensive or partial reports obtained by POLITICO.

Spanning from informal pollster presentations to secret hundred-page documents some of which are finished, and others of which are still being assembled the constellation of reports is circulating at a time when the Democratic Party nationwide is at one of its lowest depths in a century, and when a persistent chorus of party donors and candidates are demanding answers on the failures of 2016 as they wait for the Democratic National Committee to elect a new chairman.

There is a widespread assumption that the partys new chairman will also eventually put together a formal party-wide assessment.

The lingering question for party leaders and consultants is how much of the intel and assessment will eventually be made public to ameliorate the fears and concerns of a furious base demanding a clear path forward.

Its a good thing for everybody to be involved in rebuilding the Democratic Party, so as many people want to throw their opinions into the mix, eventually the truth will come out of that. My post-mortem is not the complete picture, and I dont think anyones is. The more the merrier, and its really important that Democrats look in the mirror and dont just lean on Russia or fake news, said veteran party strategist Donnie Fowler, who drafted his own assessment at the request of interim party chairwoman Donna Brazile, referring to two explanations for Clintons loss that are frequently proffered by Democrats.

The donors are really looking of clarity and direction, absolutely, he said. But if you want to be Maoist about it, this is a time for a thousand flowers to bloom.

Crafting an election autopsy before the official party committee builds its own is no easy feat. Its a politically delicate endeavor in any year, and at the moment operatives still dont have access to a completely updated voter file with comprehensive nationwide data from 2016. That means that most of the conclusions offered thus far are tentative.

Most of these analyses are based on exit polls, and the one thing we know about exit polls is that they were wrong, explained Tom Bonier, CEO of Democratic data firm TargetSmart.

Yet Democrats who are actively engaged in fundraising say the lack of an official party-wide autopsy is a constant topic of conversation for donors considering contributions especially the big whales who sat on Clintons national finance council only to receive a thank you note, but no accounting of the loss from the candidates team after November.

Not all of the circulating analyses are meant to be comprehensive. Instead, some are designed to zero in on a demographic or issue most important to the organization in question. But that has led to results that often appear to coexist uncomfortably at a time when party leaders are wrestling with how to fit moderates and increasingly empowered progressives under the same big tent.

When Bernie Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver presented his own findings to the Senate Democratic caucus this month, for example, he told senators they need to face up to the reality that more and more primary voters consider themselves liberal, according to a Democrat familiar with the report. The liberal Center for American Progress think tanks 12-page The Path Forward report similarly makes the case that a majority of Americans, including Trump backers, support progressive policies, from safeguarding Social Security and Medicare to combating money in politics.

America did not sign off on a radical-right agenda with Donald Trumps election, and progressive leaders should remember that, reads the report, which was published in December.

But the centrist think tank Third Ways $20 million New Blue initiative is looking at the circumstances under which recently Democratic Rust Belt states voted for Trump -- and one of its initial findings, published Wednesday, was that, Despite the large change in the demographic composition of the electorate, most voters still do not self-identify as liberals. In fact, liberals remain bronze medalists in the ideological breakdown of the electorate ever since the question was first asked decades ago."

Other projects have led to disagreements over which slices of the electorate are worth focusing on in particular an elaboration of the broader fight over whether it makes sense to invest more in winning back working class white men or the young, minority voters of the so-called Obama coalition.

Priorities USA Action, which grew to become the largest Democratic super PAC ever in its support of Clinton last cycle, is using polling and focus groups in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Florida to study both Obama voters who sat 2016 out and Obama voters who backed Trump. Guy Cecil, the group's chairman, presented some of the findings to the DNC's executive committee on Friday morning. Brazile said she asked Mook to present too, but he was unavailable.

The groups initial report noted that the party has a clear opportunity to win back the Obama-Trump voters. Its a popular group to study: more than 200 counties swung from Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016, and 10 sitting Democratic senators are up for re-election in 2018 in states that Trump won.

In a reflection of the partys inability to come to a consensus on the causes of Clintons defeat, Belcher contends that focusing on such a group is missing the forest for the trees.

Are there people who voted for Obama and voted for Trump? Yeah, there are some. Are there millions and millions of people who did that? No, its fucking absurd, he said. Its not like Trump blew through the Mitt Romney number in any of these states. You know what Trump got in Florida? 49 percent. You know what Romney got in Florida? 49 percent."

The story is different in Ohio, however, where Obama won by three points in 2012 and Trump won by eight in 2016.

There, state party chairman David Pepper is spearheading one of the most comprehensive state-level projects, which includes a series of "kitchen table conversations" beginning last month, wherein party officials listen to groups of 20-30 locals both Democrats and Republicans to ensure they arent in a bubble when it comes to issues that matter to those communities, in Peppers words.

Part of a presentation of the 2016 Strategic Ohio Post-Mortem obtained by POLITICO includes county-level maps comparing Democrats disappointing 2016 results to 2012, and charts comparing turnout between the two cycles. It also presents the finding that smaller urban counties saw Democratic performance plummet, while counties that voted for Obama saw a drop-off of roughly 182,000 votes for Clinton in 2016. Among the states 50 smallest counties, it also notes, Democrats lost by 20 percent in 2012, and 46 percent in 2016.

You cant lose those red counties that badly, you cant make up that difference. So understanding what happened in those scattered counties is important, because if you dont do better there, there just arent enough Democrats in urban areas to make up for it, said Pepper.

Treading on more sensitive territory, the presentation also includes a slide titled, No Persuasion Canvass, which includes images of three Clinton ads and criticizes the campaign for mandating that organizers not try to persuade voters through conversations a decision that has been roundly criticized since November.

Its one of the more explicit critiques of Clintons Brooklyn-based operation among the existing autopsies, which tend to shy away from direct criticism but often note the imperative of finding an affirmative message rather than the anti-Trump one pushed by Clinton in the campaigns closing stretch.

In fact, thats an argument made in A Way Forward, an early January analysis from former Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear and party consultant David Eichenbaum.

The candidate and party with a simple, compelling and consistent economic message that empowers people is the side that usually wins. No matter what polling may say about the efficacy of a positive message at any given time, we need to give voters a reason to be FOR us. A positive vision is not something we can start talking about in the last two weeks of an election, or not at all, the report concludes.

After all, as Beshear told DNC members at a recent candidate forum in Houston, The Democratic Party has lost its way. Lets face it: Weve been getting our butts kicked in elections. Weve been losing elections around the country that we should win."

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Democrats pile up election post-mortems - POLITICO

ATLANTA U.S. Democrats elected former Labor Secretary Tom Perez as chairman on Saturday, choosing a veteran of the Obama administration to lead the daunting task of rebuilding the party and heading the opposition to Republican President Donald Trump.

Members of the Democratic National Committee, the administrative and fundraising arm of the party, picked Perez on the second round of voting over U.S. Representative Keith Ellison, a liberal from Minnesota.

Following one of the most crowded and competitive party leadership elections in decades, Perez faces a challenge in unifying and rejuvenating a party still reeling from the Nov. 8 loss of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. He immediately made Ellison his deputy.

After losing the presidency and failing to recapture majorities in Congress, party leaders are anxious to channel the growing grassroots resistance to Trump into political support for Democrats at all levels of government across the country.

"We are suffering from a crisis of confidence, a crisis of relevance," Perez, a favorite of former Obama administration officials, told DNC members. He promised to lead the fight against Trump and change the DNC's culture to make it a more grassroots operation.

Perez, the son of Dominican immigrants who was considered a potential running mate for Clinton, overcame a strong challenge from Ellison and prevailed on a 235-200 second-round vote. Ellison, who is the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Congress, was backed by liberal leader U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

The showdown between candidates backed by the establishment and progressive wings of the party echoed the bitter 2016 primary between Clinton and Sanders, a rift Democrats will try to put behind them as they turn their focus to fighting Trump.

Those divisions persisted through the months-long race for chair, as many in the party's liberal wing were suspicious of Perez's ties to the establishment and some Democrats raised questions about possible anti-Semitism in Ellison's past.

Some Ellison supporters chanted "Not big money, party for the people" after the result was announced.

But both Perez and Ellison moved quickly to bring the rival factions together. At Perez's urging, the DNC suspended the rules after the vote and appointed Ellison the deputy chairman of the party.

"I am asking you to give everything you've got to support Chairman Perez," Ellison told DNC members after the vote. "We don't have the luxury, folks, to walk out of this room divided."

'TRUMP'S NIGHTMARE'

Perez said the party would come together.

"We are one family, and I know we will leave here united today," Perez said. "A united Democratic Party is not only our best hope, it is Donald Trump's nightmare."

Trump took a dig at Perez and Democrats in a tweet offering his congratulations on the election.

"I could not be happier for him, or for the Republican Party!" Trump said.

Perez and Ellison wore each other's campaign buttons and stood shoulder-to-shoulder at a news conference after the vote. Perez said the two had talked "for some time" about teaming up, and Ellison said they had "good synergy."

"We need to do more to collaborate with our partners in the progressive movement," Perez said, adding he and Ellison would look for ways to "channel this incredible momentum" in the protests against Trump and against Republican efforts to repeal President Barack Obama's healthcare plan.

Sanders issued a statement congratulating Perez and urging changes at the DNC.

"It is imperative that Tom understands that the same-old, same-old is not working," Sanders said. "We must open the doors of the party to working people and young people in a way that has never been done before."

The election offered the DNC a fresh start after last year's forced resignation of chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who stepped aside when the release of hacked emails appeared to show DNC officials trying to help Clinton defeat Sanders in the primaries.

Both Perez and Ellison have pledged to focus on a bottom-up reconstruction of the party, which has lost hundreds of statehouse seats under Obama and faces an uphill task in trying to reclaim majorities in Congress in next year's midterm elections.

Perez said he would redefine the role of the DNC to make it work not just to elect Democrats to the White House but in races ranging from local school boards to the U.S. Senate, pledging to "organize, organize, organize."

"I recognize I have a lot of work to do," he said. "I will be out there listening and learning in the weeks ahead."

Perez fell one vote short of the simple majority of 214.5 votes needed for election in the first round of voting, getting 213.5 votes to Ellison's 200. Also on the first ballot were four other candidates -- Idaho Democratic Party Executive Director Sally Boynton Brown, election lawyer Peter Peckarsky, and activists Jehmu Greene and Sam Ronan.

Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, withdrew just before the voting, while Brown, Greene and Ronan dropped out after the first round.

(Writing by John Whitesides; Editing by Diane Craft and Mary Milliken)

WASHINGTON After a turbulent start to his presidency, Donald Trump goes before the U.S. Congress on Tuesday night to give a speech that will be closely watched for details of his plans for the economy and whether he can strike a more conciliatory tone.

WASHINGTON President Donald Trump's nominee to be the director of national intelligence pledged on Tuesday to support thorough investigation of any Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election, seeking to reassure lawmakers worried that partisan politics might interfere with a probe.

WASHINGTON The National Security Agency risks a brain-drain of hackers and cyber spies due to a tumultuous reorganization and worries about the acrimonious relationship between the intelligence community and President Donald Trump, according to current and former NSA officials and cybersecurity industry sources.

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Democrats pick Perez to lead party against Trump | Reuters

Instead, Perez was welcomed into his new job on Saturday by jeering progressive activists, who for the second time in a year, saw their preferred pick to lead the party defeated after a protracted and unexpectedly feisty campaign. Supporters of Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison, the choice of Sen. Bernie Sanders, painted Perez's election as another victory for an establishment they blame for ceding the White House to Donald Trump by alienating young and working class voters. Minutes after the results were announced -- Perez prevailed on a second ballot after falling one vote short on the first -- the co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, Adam Green, a vocal Ellison backer, leaned back and ruminated on the contentious scene.

"This was not an ideological battle between a corporate Democrat and a progressive," he said, noting that Perez too would have been his choice for attorney general in a Clinton administration. "We agree with him on policy and thought he would challenge big corporations like he did as (President Barack Obama's) labor secretary."

The problem, Green suggested, was that Perez did not -- at least not yet -- have "his finger on the pulse of progressive resistance" to the new administration. Across the ballroom, one young and frustrated Ellison supporter, Alexa Vaca, put it simply: "This shows that the Democratic Party didn't learn their lesson."

While Democrats clawed at each other in Atlanta, the festivities at the Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland, were beginning to wind down. Over the previous 48 hours, the annual conservative gathering had welcomed its first sitting Republican president in his first year in office since Ronald Reagan.

A year before, Trump skipped the conference, backing out the day before his scheduled appearance. The American Conservative Union, which organizes the gathering, bit back in response, saying Trump's decision "comes at a critical time in our movement's history. His decision sends a clear message to grassroots conservatives."

"I think that Trump is a different type of conservative than, perhaps, the mainstream conservative, and I think that's why he got so far in the primaries," said Wesley Dalton, a student at Brigham Young University in Utah.

Matt Batzel, the national executive director of American Majority, a conservative organization that trains grassroots activists, described Trump as a "Patriotic Conservative" before grinning and confessing, "I just made up that term."

Even what remained of the GOP's dedicated libertarian wing, which had been transformed by the rise of Trumpism from an ascendant force to a CPAC afterthought, sought to parlay the presidential moment by passing out caps that read, "Make Taxation Theft Again."

"People don't notice it as much here, because if we wear it around they just assume it's the (Make America Great Again) hat," said Zach Garretson, donor relations officer for the libertarian Stonegait Institute, "but when we're not at an event like this and you wear that hat, people will look at it and be like, 'Oh! What does that say?'"

Conservatives' willingness to look beyond their unlikely standard-bearer's ideological inconsistencies have been rewarded in the early running. They routinely made glowing reference to the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to be a Supreme Court justice -- proof, many insisted, that Trump, whatever he actually believed, was firmly on track to govern like they hoped.

"I want to thank you for finally inviting me to CPAC," Bannon said at the outset. The former Breitbart boss had previously hosted "The Uninvited," a parallel gathering for fellow out-of-favor right-wingers. "I know there are many alumni out here in the audience."

Schlapp nodded to the awkward moment, then declared: "Here's what we decided to do at CPAC with the uninvited. We decided to say that everybody's a part of our conservative family."

And with that, they were off. Bannon railed against the media -- "the opposition party" -- and drew cheers as he outlined plans for the "deconstruction of the administrative state."

More applause interrupted his description of Trump's decision to withdraw the US from Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations, calling it "one of the most pivotal moments in modern American history."

For observers of a party and movement that has traditionally embraced free trade, the scene was instructive. Not a year ago, the idea of a Republican administration's scuttling of a massive free trade pact (and promise to take apart or narrow other existing deals) being met with rapturous ovations might have seemed absurd.

But the presidency has a certain affect on people and political parties.

With Barack Obama in the White House and Hilary Clinton, it seemed, poised to follow him, Democrats enjoyed nearly a decade of relative peace. On the eve of the election, as progressives put the finishing touches on strategies for nudging the new administration to the left, many confided that, for all the tumult of the primary, they fully expected the Clinton administration to offer them a seat at the table.

At CPAC on Saturday, the results of its annual survey ran in stark contrast to the scenes in Atlanta.

Eight in 10 of those polled agreed that Trump was "realigning the conservative movement" -- and 86% approved of the job he has done since taking office in January.

"I love this place," Trump said at the top of his speech a day before. "Love you people."

And they loved the President right back. For Democrats, down in Atlanta, that kind of affection seemed a long way off.

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Trump unites GOP as Democrats bicker - CNNPolitics.com

Sarker Haque, a Muslim originally from Bangladesh who has lived in Queens for 30 years, was attacked in his store by a man who allegedly said he wanted to "kill Muslims." Haque will be a guest of Rep. Joseph Crowley, D-N.Y., at President Trump's speech to Congress. Seth Wenig/AP hide caption

Sarker Haque, a Muslim originally from Bangladesh who has lived in Queens for 30 years, was attacked in his store by a man who allegedly said he wanted to "kill Muslims." Haque will be a guest of Rep. Joseph Crowley, D-N.Y., at President Trump's speech to Congress.

When is a guest list more than a guest list? When politicians bring a plus-one to a presidential address before a joint session of Congress.

Each member of Congress can invite a guest to tonight's speech, and many members will use the occasion to send a pointed political message to President Trump and the public about the issues that matter to them.

For a number of Democrats, their guests of honor are immigrants, a rebuke to Trump's executive orders to halt refugee entry, expand the pool of unauthrozied immigrants who are likely to be deported and ban travel by people from seven majority-Muslim countries.

Rep. Nydia Velazquez of New York will bring Hameed Darweesh, who was detained at JFK International Airport for 18 hours when Trump's travel ban was enacted. Darweesh is an Iraqi who worked as an interpreter for the U.S. Army and an engineer for the State Department and Army Corps of Engineers.

Rep. Joseph Crowley of New York is chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, and his guest is Sarker Haque, the victim of an alleged anti-Muslim hate crime. Crowley told reporters that he didn't anticipate any disruptive protests from House Democrats during the speech.

"I think as much as we have nothing in common with the present president, we do respect the office of the presidency," said Crowley. "Keeping that in mind, we'll be polite. We'll show very little, if any enthusiasm at all, for what I anticipate his speech will be about."

Other congressional Democrats are bringing guests who they hope underscore the importance of the Affordable Care Act, which Trump and congressional Republicans say they plan to repeal and replace. Rep. Brad Schneider of Illinois, for example, has invited Tracy Trovato, whose husband has leukemia. Trovato says that if not for the ACA, "our family could have been bankrupted by the cost of the care he needed."

Many Democratic congresswomen said they'll wear white to tonight's address. Rep. Lois Frankel of Florida tweeted, "Tonight, Democratic Members will wear suffragette white to oppose Republican attempts to roll back women's progress."

A number of outlets are reporting that Rep. Maxine Waters of California won't attend the address, reportedly telling the House Democratic Caucus that "anyone who can't sit still shouldn't go."

And to the ever-growing list of traditions that are being upended by Trump's presidency, add this one: New York Rep. Eliot Engel, for the first time in his 29 years in Congress, says he won't get an aisle seat and shake the president's hand.

For its part, the White House released the names of special guests that President Trump and first lady Melania Trump have invited to the address. Like those invited by the Democrats, the White House guests were also carefully chosen to illustrate political points with their biographies. Among those who will sit with Melania Trump are Jessica Davis, Susan Oliver, and Jamiel Shaw Sr. each of whom had a family member killed by an immigrant in the country illegally, according to the White House. Maureen McCarthy Scalia, the widow of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, will also be a guest in the Trumps' box. Trump recently nominated federal Judge Neil Gorsuch to replace Scalia, who died just over a year ago. Republicans blocked former President Obama's nominee to replace Scalia, Merrick Garland.

Democrats have tapped Astrid Silva to give the party's Spanish-language rebuttal following Trump's address. Silva is an activist and DREAMer, an immigrant who was brought to the U.S. illegally as a child a life story with relevance that will be lost on no one.

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Some Democrats Will Bring Muslim Guests To Trump's Speech - NPR