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Aug. 3, 2017 at 1:21 PM

Sen. Bernie Sanders speaking at a rally for Heath Mello, a pro-life Democrat who lost the Omaha Democratic mayoral race in the spring.

For Democrats with eyes fixed on the midterms, the months since the 2016 election have been filled with soul-searching about the most promising paths to victory in 2018. This week, Rep. Ben Ray Lujn, head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, made some news when he said in an interview with The Hill that the organization wouldnt take a candidates stance on abortion into account when allocating campaign funds. The move has angered some on the left and renewed questions about what ideological deviations from Democratic orthodoxy the party should tolerate as it tries to win back voters who swung for President Trump in last years election.

Activists and some prominent Democrats took umbrage with the DCCCs stance when news of it surfaced this week. Cecile Richards, head of Planned Parenthood, wrote in a tweet, Women deserve access to safe, legal abortion no matter if their state is red or blue its a constitutional right that cant be traded away; and ThinkProgress talked to abortion rights activists who felt undermined by the move. Former Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean, who headed the organization during its 2006 50 state strategy push to be competitive, even in conservative states, tweeted out the Hill article and said, Im afraid Ill be with holding support for the DCCC if this is true.

But the DCCC signal on abortion is in keeping with some of what Sen. Bernie Sanders has been pushing for that the party emphasize its economic message over its cultural one. Its this philosophy that led Sanders to campaign this past spring for a Democratic mayoral candidate in Omaha, Nebraska, who voted for abortion restriction measures during his time in the state Senate.

The debate isnt just lip service about how to attract Trump voters its indicative of a split that already exists within the party. A look at the numbers shows Democrats dont all feel the same about abortion rights. In 2017, polarization doesnt just happen across party lines, but within parties themselves.

In 1995, about 66 percent of the overall Democratic electorate believed that abortion should be legal in most or all cases. Since then, Democrats overall have shifted towards greater comfort with abortion. In 2017, 75 percent said they think it should be legal in most or all cases, according to a Pew Research Center poll.

But that shift hasnt occurred across the board within the party. The last couple of years have seen approval for abortion shoot up dramatically among white Democrats and those who identify as ideologically liberal. But black Democrats and ideologically moderate or conservative Democrats have moved more slowly in their approval rates.

Angry reaction to Lujn and the DCCCs decision against an abortion litmus test for campaign funds comes in part because ideological liberals now make up more of the Democratic Party. Those liberals approval rates for abortion have increased dramatically since 2015, indicating perhaps a renewed interest in the abortion rights cause since the rise of Trump.

According to Gallup, liberal affiliation within the Democratic Party has increased by around one percentage point every year since 2001, when it was 30 percent, through 2016, when it was 44 percent. And in just the past two years (the most recent presidential election cycle), self-described liberal Democrats have become dramatically more supportive of abortion rights: In 2015, 78 percent of liberal Democrats thought abortion should be legal in all or most cases, and by 2017, that number was at 88 percent, a dramatic jump.

White Democrats made similar movements in those two years: In 2015, 74 percent of them favored abortion, and in 2017, that number was at 83 percent. Black Democratic voters have also increased their support for abortion rights over the last decade, but continue to lag behind the percentage of white Democrats who favor abortion rights. Views on abortion among black Democrats (who are less likely than white Democrats to identify as liberal) havent substantially changed over the last two years. In 2015, 64 percent of black Democrats thought abortion should be legal, and in 2017 that number had only moved to 66 percent. Thats a 2-percentage point swing compared to white voters almost 9-point swing during the same two years.

In a party that is growing increasingly liberal, the argument to play to an emerging base of voters activated by Trump is compelling. Dean told FiveThirtyEight that he sees cultivating the strength of youth movements as key. The big trick with this age group is to organize them, stop them from being ad hoc, he said. We need to focus on our principles and then sell our principles to people who are inclined to work with them. For Dean, being in favor of abortion rights is one of those principles.

But if the focus for Democrats is the short-term need for 2018 wins, the DCCC and Sanders also have a strong case. Even setting aside whether or not candidates with more moderate views on abortion will win back areas Democrats lost to Trump, abortion doesnt seem to particularly animate a key group that Democrats need to see turn out in 2018: black voters. Although the latest Pew Research Center poll showed that most black Democrats are pro-abortion rights, only 7 percent said the party should limit its support to pro-abortion rights candidates in a recent YouGov poll. White Democrats, on the other hand, prioritized the issue of abortion rights more strongly, with 35 percent of them saying that the party should limit its support to only these types of candidates.

What does seem clear is that as the road to 2018 unspools, the Democrats might need to brace for their own culture war over the culture wars.

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Democrats Aren't In Lockstep Over Abortion That's Why They're Fighting - FiveThirtyEight

Democrats begin to see Pelosi as a 2018 problem McClatchy Washington Bureau In a survey of 20 Democratic House candidates, only one a former Senate staffer from Orange County, California would state support for the congresswoman staying on as leader of the House Democratic Caucus. Of the rest, 18 declined to say if Pelosi ... and more »

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Democrats begin to see Pelosi as a 2018 problem - McClatchy Washington Bureau

Senior Democrats on Wednesdayendorsed an irrational, socially destructive line of policy that would not be out of place in the Trump White House. No, they did not join Attorney General Jeff Sessions in his intensifying campaign against reverse racism. And they did not announce support for Presidents Trumps absurd border wall. They released a get-tough-on-trade program designed to out-demagogue Trump on one of his signature messages.

This is classic Democrats. Self-conscious that they lost the middle of the country, they recast themselves as the ones who really care about their opponents trademark issue. But Republicans are better at emotional appeals and have already exploited the nations fear and anger. This is John Kerry in 2004, who ran an ineffective national security campaign against George W. Bush. The Democrats latest move on trade is pathetic, and it is bad for the country.

Bill Clinton dragged Democrats toward an optimistic, pro-globalization stance in the 1990s. Since then, the economic case for this position has become more nuanced but has not fundamentally changed. Society at large benefits from increased international trade, in the form of cheaper goods, higher exports and increased specialization. Though there are some losers, most everyone benefits. The rational response is not to forgo trade-related wealth creation but to use some of the gains from trade to compensate the losers.

Many Americans, spurred by irresponsible or ignorant leaders, nevertheless blame trade for creating far more losers than it has. The mainstream of both parties resisted this sentiment until 2016, when Trump executed his hostile takeover of the Republican Party and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) came surprisingly close to winning the Democratic presidential nomination.

Now Democrats have fully evacuated the intellectual high ground. Senate Democratic leaders announced Wednesday that, just like Trump, they favor renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement, which has bound North America together with little net impact on U.S. employment. Democrats would also create a new agency that would scrutinize foreign investment in the United States, offer new tax incentives for reshoring jobs and hire a new trade prosecutor to crack down on unfair trade practices.

Democrats unveiled an economic platform on July 24 that included plans to address unfair market competition, rising pharmaceuticals costs and stagnant wages. (Reuters)

These are mostly gimmicks. Two existing agencies already have powers to combat unfair trade practices. Politicians have promised to renegotiate NAFTA before without meaning it. Even so, the policy rollout signaled a more intemperate tone from Democrats. Theyre rapacious, the Chinese, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) exclaimed Wednesday.

Experts are not impressed. Im both saddened and furious that the Senate Dems have jumped on the protectionist bandwagon so fully, with all the rhetorical flourish, New York University Professor Robert Howse told the New York Times. As a matter of policy, none of these measures, on any plausible economic theory, would result in improving the circumstances of U.S. workers, addressing inequality, or the socioeconomic challenges specific to the U.S. heartland.

A common retort is that the nation should seek fair trade, not the harmful trade pacts of past decades, with deals that promote worker and environmental protections. Yet President Barack Obama negotiated just such an agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Turned out that a real-world trade deal did not satisfy anti-trade zealots and the politicians who attack the poverty-destroying, wealth-creating project of global integration. Instead, they became only more resistant. Rather than making the case that the TPP is what trade critics had demanded, that freer trade helps nearly everyone and hurts a relative few, or that automation is responsible for many of the lost manufacturing jobs that offshoring is blamed for, Hillary Clinton unconvincingly flipped against the TPP during her 2016 primary race against Sanders.

Now the Democratic Party the one to which the country must look for responsible governance in the age of Trump has formally surrendered to anti-trade nonsense. With ever-fewer leaders making the case for globalization, it will be easier for Americans to assume that freer trade has devastated the nation. The country should focus on building trade relationships while investing in education, infrastructure and other things that will make the country less stratified and more internationally competitive. Instead, it will continue to shrink from global leadership and waste resources trying to save a manufacturing economy that was never going to last.

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Democrats on Trump: If you can't beat him, join him - Washington Post

Democrats and Republicans on Thursday said they were worried about the leak of dozens of pages to the Washington Post detailing a phone call President Trump had with two foreign leaders.

"I am alarmed at leaks of conversations between two heads of state. It doesn't matter what I think of this president, this is terrible," said Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii.

The Washington Post published full conversations that Trump had over the phone with Mexican President Enrique Pea Nieto on Jan. 27 and with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on Jan. 28.

"I would've lost my mind if transcripts of Obama's calls to foreign leaders leaked. He wouldn't have sounded so dumb, but it's still absurd," said Tommy Vietor, former U.S. National Security Council spokesman for President Barack Obama.

"Transcripts seem carefully selected to do maximum harm to Trump, minimum to his foreign interlocutors. Somebody thought about this," said David Frum, former speechwriter to President George W. Bush and a senior editor at The Atlantic.

"Fully associate myself with @davidfrum. Regardless of one's politics or of reasons behind the leak, it is dangerous to our foreign policy," said John Kirby, former spokesman for the United States Department of State for Obama.

"Leaking transcripts of presidential calls to foreign leaders is bad," New York Times conservative columnist Ross Douthat said.

"Most recent leak of Trump's foreign leader calls sets a dangerous precedent, as does an ever-lying president destroying our sense of truth," said Mindy Finn, 2016 Vice-presidential running mate of independent candidate Evan McMullin.

"Yes, I know, Trump is awful etc etc. But how does that make it acceptable to leak something like this to public? Never happened under Obama," Attorney Jeffrey Blehar said.

"Foreign leaders need to know they can talk confidentially and not have their opinions on the democracy dies in darkness' front page," New York Post Columnist John Podhoretz said. "Someone should leak Jeff Bezos's confidential conversations with, say, Apple and see how that goes."

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Democrats, Republicans worry about 'alarming' leaks of Trump phone calls - Washington Examiner

Tom Tarantino has a certain quality Democrats these days are craving in a candidate, particularly in the suburban Contra Costa-Alameda County district where Tarantino will file paperwork Thursday to run for the Assembly.

Hes a military veteran.

Im looking for my next mission, Tarantino, 39, told me this week in San Francisco, where he works as a policy manager for Twitter.

Democrats find the vet part of his bio particularly alluring in the Donald Trump era because veterans connote images like stability and service to country desirable characteristics in a hyper-partisan time when 6 in 10 voters find the administration to be running chaotically, according to this weeks Morning Consult/Politico poll.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is actively recruiting veterans to run for Congress next year, and their national security backgrounds can be attractive to independent voters. Among the first-time vet candidates running in California is retired Navy SEAL Josh Butner, who is challenging incumbent Rep. Duncan Hunter in a very Republican Southern California district.

The leading example for Democrats is retired Marine Lt. Col. Amy McGrath, who just launched her campaign in a deeply red Kentucky congressional district that Trump carried by 15 points. In her race against incumbent GOP Rep. Andy Barr, who won last year with 61 percent of the vote, she cites the 89 combat missions she flew.

But dont write McGrath off as political cannon fodder until you check out the campaign video she dropped this week featuring her in a flight jacket standing on the tarmac. Some Democrats a party still in search of a unified message consider the videos closing line a template for 2018.

This is my new mission: to take on a Congress full of career politicians who treat the people of Kentucky like theyre disposable, McGrath says in the ad. Some are telling me a Democrat cant win that battle in Kentucky, that we cant take back our country for my kids and yours. Well see about that.

Key phrase there: my new mission.

Tarantino used the mission message several times in describing why hes running. He grew up in San Anselmo, a working-class kid in a wealthy town his mom cleaned houses and his dad worked blue-collar jobs before signing up for the Army Reserves during his first year at the College of Marin.

He served 10 years, including time in Bosnia and Iraq. But when he left the Army, he had the same experience as many other vets: I couldnt find a job.

Tarantino eventually connected with the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, one of the more powerful veterans advocates in Washington, rising to become a top aide to the organizations co-founder, Paul Rieckhoff. Tarantino testified before Congress more than a dozen times and was influential in getting benefits for veterans.

Rieckoff described Tarantino as a star, and said he is part of a wave of about 100 post-9/11 veterans running for office and split roughly equally between Democrats and Republicans.

Part of it is Trump, and people are upset at some of the things hes said and done, Rieckoff said of why the veterans are putting themselves forward. And part of it is that they see all the dysfunction in politics and they want to help. Theyre problem-solvers. Theyre trained to get (stuff) done.

Tarantino will have challenges taking on incumbent Assemblywoman Catharine Baker, R-Dublin, who won with 56 percent of the vote last fall and enjoys a reputation as one of the more bipartisan members of the Legislature. (She has held joint town hall meetings with Democratic state Sen. Steve Glazer, D-Orinda, for example.) Plus, Tarantino just moved to the district in November. He will marry a Walnut Creek physician this month.

But with Democrats holding a 12-point advantage in voter registration in Bakers district, its a huge target, Bill Wong, political director for Assembly Democrats told me. Its the only Bay Area district held by a Republican.

We were way off message in previous attempts to win the seat, he said. Perhaps a veteran on a mission can help.

Every time theres a new development related to the investigations of the Trump campaign colluding with Russia during last years campaign, people ask: When is Trump going to be impeached?

So I asked a few people who have seen the evidence that we havent: Californians who serve on the Senate and House intelligence committees investigating the matter. Heres what they said:

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, member of the Senate Intelligence Committee: Not close. Recent press reports concerning the president are very worrisome, including stories that he may fire the attorney general and even pardon himself. Those are the kinds of actions that could lead Congress to take a serious look at impeachment. But remember, the House and Senate are controlled by Republicans, and both chambers require the majoritys willingness to advance impeachment proceedings. Right now, very few Republicans are willing to stand up to the president.

Sen. Kamala Harris, member of the Senate Intelligence Committee: I will not at this point ask for or call on the impeachment of the president of the United States without having more facts and evidence that would be the grounds for that.

Rep. Jackie Speier, D-San Mateo, member of the House Intelligence Committee: Until at least 24 Republican House members become disgusted by the presidents incompetence and bullying, or at least feel that he is threatening their re-election, impeachment will not occur. The House needs a simple majority vote to impeach the president, and then the Senate needs a two-thirds vote to remove the president from office. I think it is more likely that President Trump will resign. Its clear that the job is too much for him.

Joe Garofoli is The San Francisco Chronicles senior political writer. Email: jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @joegarofoli

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Democrats searching for vets to lead them out of the wilderness - San Francisco Chronicle