March Then Act - Building Political Infrastructure To Win

Those who participate in protest marches must take the next steps to define actual demands and priorities for candidates to take to voters in 2018-20. They must work every day to help those candidates win their elections. It can be done. If you don't think it can, just remember the tea party did it during the last President's first mid-term in office.

But without a path from protest to power, the Women's March will end up like Occupy. It is exciting when a protest meme leaps from social networks to the streets, capturing the imagination of millions. But it is all too easy to succumb to the false hope that a big splashy protest march is a transformative tsunami that leads to ballot box victory on election day. A big splashy protest march is only the first step on the long and often difficult road to winning elections.

• The Guardian: Without A Path From Protest To Power
• The Women's Marches may have been the largest demonstration in US history

Democrats have about 90 weeks until early voting starts for the Nov 2018 election. Activists at the county and neighborhood levels must work every week to identify every Dem leaning voting age citizen, documenting their contact and demographic info. As Democratic leaning people are identified, county level organizations must plan and execute programs that build relationships with those people to make them an active part of the Democratic base.

Those programs must be designed to invite that disconnected part of the electorate to participate in regular conversations at house and town hall meetings, and on social media. Democrats must do old fashioned base building work, and learn how to combine Internet and mobile communication with those traditional community organizing activities to accomplish that mission.

In the realm of political plays, it does seem that the most important number for Democrats in the near term is Democrats need gain only 24 U.S. House seats to be the majority in that chamber.

As the majority party, Democrats can block legislation, conduct investigations, and more to limit the GOP agenda, and perhaps set the stage for bigger gains in 2020. It's do-able in a wave year - maybe a pro-women wave election year.

• Running For Elected Office In 2018

DNC Chair Candidate Forum Live Stream

When they meet on February 23–26, 2017, the 447 members of the Democratic National Committee will elect a new chair. They will signal whether or not the party will boldly begin to transform itself back into the party of New Deals and Great Societies sought by the new generation of Democrats. Those 400-plus voting members of the DNC must take stock of the need to strike a bold new direction to reverse the party's losses.

This group of DNC voting members is dominated by state party chairs and political appointees, and overlaps substantially with the super-delegates from the 2016 Democratic primary. Party insiders estimate that roughly two-thirds of the DNC members supported former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) during that race.

Democrats lost another net 43 seats in legislatures across the country in 2016, after previously losing 910 seats during Obama's administration. Republicans added to their historic 2014 gains in the nation’s state legislatures with the addition of five state House chambers and two state Senate chambers in 2016.

Republicans are now in control of a record 67 (68 percent) of the 98 partisan state legislative chambers in the nation, more than twice the number (31) in which Democrats have a majority, according to the bipartisan National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL). Republicans hold more total state legislative seats in the nation, well over 4,100 of the 7,383, than they have since 1920. Democrats now have total control of just 13 state legislatures.

Republicans gained 2 more states' governor-ships in 2016, after already gaining 12 over the last 8 years, increasing its total to 33, a record high last seen in 1922. Democrats had also lost 69 US House seats and 13 US Senate seats since 2009 and barely managed to stem further losses in 2016.

And Democrats face a more challenging election map in 2018 than they faced in 2016. Survival of the Democratic Party is literally on the line.

There are now seven declared candidates for the 2017 Democratic National Committee chairmanship election:

• Sally Boynton Brown, Executive Director of the Idaho Democratic Party
• Ray Buckley, Chair of the New Hampshire Democratic Party
• Pete Buttigieg, Mayor of South Bend, Indiana
• Keith Ellison, U.S. House of Representatives, Minnesota 5th District|
• Jehmu Greene, Political Analyst
• Jaime Harrison, Chair of the South Carolina Democratic Party
• Tom Perez, 26th United States Secretary of Labor

All seven DNC Chair candidates will participate in a panel discussion forum on the future of the Democratic Party on Monday, January 23 at 7 p.m. in Washington, DC at George Washington University, hosted by Democracy in Color. You can view the forum via live stream. (View Recorded Live Stream Video.)

Watch FB live stream video of the five candidates already running for DNC Chair address committee persons at the Texas State Democratic Executive Committee (SDEC) meeting on Saturday, December 17, 2016.

Click Here to watch Huffington Post's January 18th DNC candidate forum live stream video.

Guide to the Candidates (Information from candidates’ campaign websites.)

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BlogTalkUSA: Eyes Wide Open DemBlogTalk Inauguration Special

Join BlogTalkUSA.com "Eyes Wide Open DemBlogTalk" talk radio program cohosts, Rheana Nevitt Piegols and Michael Handley for an inauguration special program Friday evening at 9:00 PM CST. Together with Texas Young Democrats Kristi Lara and Kevin Numerick, Rheana and Michael will talk about Obama and Trump, Democrats going forward, and the GOP agenda to repeal Affordable Healthcare, gut Social Security, gut Medicare, gut Medicaid, scrap the Paris climate agreement, privatize public education, outlaw contraceptives, privatize our national parks and more...  We invite our listeners to call in and share their thoughts as we say goodbye to President Obama and look ahead to the GOP agenda.

Listen to BlogTalkUSA's special "Eyes Wide Open DemBlogTalk" program with Michael Handley and Rheana Nevitt Piegols at 9:00 PM CST, Friday, January 20th, by phone at (515) 605-9375. Press 1 to ask your question, make a comment, and share your thoughts!

Click this link to listen:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/blogtalkusa/2017/01/21/eyes-wide-open-demblogtalk-inauguration-special

Download/subscribe to podcasts of our weekly "Eyes Wide Open - DemBlogTalk" program at iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/blogtalkusa/id968994409

Listen to BlogTalkUSA "Eyes Wide Open DemBlogTalk" with Michael Handley and Rheana Nevitt Piegols every Tuesday evening at 8:30 PM CST by phone at (515) 605-9375. Press 1 to ask your question, make a comment, and share your thoughts! Use this link to listen online: BlogTalkUSA.com.

Economics of the Affordable Care Act

Any effort to replace the Affordable Care Act will be confronted by the same structural imbalances in the health care economy that the legislation’s authors faced.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA), which President-elect Donald Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress have vowed to repeal, was crafted to overcome two basic problems in the provision of health care in the United States. First, the costs are incredibly skewed, with just 10 percent of patients accounting for almost two thirds of the nation’s healthcare spending. The other problem is asymmetric information: Patients have far more knowledge about the state of their own health than insurers do. This means that the people with the largest costs are the ones most likely to sign up for insurance. These two problems make it impossible to get to universal coverage under a purely market-based system.

The problem with the skewing of health care costs is that while most people’s health spending is relatively limited, it remains very expensive to provide care for the costliest 10 percent. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services projects that per capita spending on health care in the US will average $10,800 in 2017. But the cost for the most expensive 10 percent of patients will average $54,000 per person, compared to an average of just $6,000 for everyone else. The cost for the healthiest 50 percent of patients averages under $700 per person.

Covering the least costly 90 percent of patients is manageable, but the cost of covering the least healthy 10 percent is exorbitant. Very few people could afford to pay $54,000 a year for an individual insurance policy. Furthermore, if insurers were to set their premiums in accordance with overall averages, they could anticipate a skewed patient pool. The more healthy half of the population, with average costs of less than $700 a year, would either limit their insurance to catastrophic plans that only cover very expensive medical care, or go without insurance altogether.

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