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MAIN TOPICS: Voting Info, Supreme Court Won’t Hear Case On Ban Against Homeless Sleeping In Public Spaces, [Texas Land Commissioner] George P. Bush failed to disclose financial interests in nearly a dozen companies, Democrats could gain control of the Texas House for the first time since 2001. Here are the seats in play in 2020, The little-known US-Canada border war, Astronomers present a concept for the next NASA flagship mission, Want Trump to Go? Take to the Streets, and More

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Make sure you are registered to vote! (Show information begins after Item 4, after voting and election information.)

1. HarrisVotes.com (Election Information Line (713) 755-6965) Dr. Diane Trautman, Harris County Clerk
2. Voting results for Dec. 14, 2019
3. If anyone wishes to call in and talk about impeachment, that’s fine, but I’m not going to focus on it.
4. Supreme Court Won’t Hear Case On Ban Against Homeless Sleeping In Public Spaces, by Vanessa Romo and Kirk Siegler | NPR |  December 16, 20191:10 PM ET
   1. The Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear an appeal in a case originating from Boise, Idaho, that would have made it a crime to camp and sleep in public spaces.
   2. The decision to let a ruling from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals stand is a setback for states and local governments in much of the West that are grappling with widespread homelessness by designing laws to regulate makeshift encampments on sidewalks and parks.
   3. The case stems from a lawsuit filed nearly a decade ago. A handful of people sued the city of Boise for repeatedly ticketing them for violating an ordinance against sleeping outside. While Boise officials later amended it to prohibit citations when shelters are full, the 9th Circuit eventually determined the local law was unconstitutional. …
5. A year before Fort Worth ISD fired a teacher over her tweets about immigrants, students say she threatened to call the FBI on them – Fort Worth ISD fired Georgia Clark after she asked President Trump on Twitter in May to “remove the illegals from Fort Worth.” The Texas Education Agency reversed their decision late last month mostly on procedural grounds, but the school district plans to appeal. by Chase Karacostas |ORG | Dec. 16, 201913 hours ago
   1. A year before Fort Worth Independent School District fired Georgia Clark over her tweets asking President Donald Trump to “remove the illegals” from her school, former students recall her threatening to report them to the FBI and Secret Service after they criticized the president.
   2. “One day she did threaten us, ‘I’m calling the FBI or Secret Service’ or whatever. We were talking about the president,” said Rigoyosmar Ramirez, 19, who graduated from Amon Carter-Riverside High in May and said he was in Clark’s English class during the 2017-2018 school year. “She said, ‘If you even threaten our president, I can have the Secret Service investigate all of this and have you guys in custody and have y’all tried as adults.’”
   3. He said she directed her comments toward the entire class, which was composed of mostly Hispanic students.
   4. Clark, who was a teacher with Fort Worth ISD since 1989, denied threatening to call the authorities on her students through her lawyer, Brandon Brim. …
   5. [In her May tweet, she said] “@realDonaldTrump, Mr. President, Fort Worth Independent School District is loaded with illegal students from Mexico,” Clark wrote in since-deleted tweet to Trump. “Carter-Riverside High School has been taken over by them. Drug dealers are on our campus and nothing was done to them when the drug dog (had) the evidence.”
   6. (According to STREAM.ORG), “@realDonaldTrump Could you please remind the Democrats that a majority of the people elected you on the promise that a wall would be built to protect our borders? Just how many of us voted for you? Shouldn’t we, the people, county for something?” she wrote in another tweet later that month
6.  Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee endorses MJ Hegar in crowded U.S. Senate primary – Hegar, the Air Force helicopter pilot and 2018 congressional candidate, is among 12 Democrats competing to take on Texas’ senior senator, Republican John Cornyn. by Patrick Svitek | TEXASTRIBUNE.ORG | Dec. 16, 20193 hours ago
   1. The move by the DSCC, the political arm of Senate Democrats, is one of the biggest developments yet in the nominating contest, which has drawn a dozen candidates — some more serious than others but no decisive frontrunners. The endorsement drew pushback from three of Hegar’s competitors, two of whom accused national Democrats of snubbing more diverse candidates for Hegar, who is white.
   2. Hegar, the former Air Force helicopter pilot and 2018 congressional candidate, entered the primary in April and has emerged as the top fundraiser. But polls show the race remains wide open as Democrats look to pick up where they left off from Beto O’Rourke’s near-miss 2018 loss to the state’s junior senator, Ted Cruz.
   3. “Texas has emerged as a battleground opportunity for Democrats up and down the ballot, and MJ Hegar is the strongest candidate to flip the U.S. Senate seat,” the DSCC’s chairwoman, Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, said in an announcement first shared with The Texas Tribune.
   4. MIKE: It is highly unusual for the Dems to pick a candidate to endorse in a primary; not unique, but rare. It says something about the stakes the Dems are playing for.
7. [Texas Land Commissioner] George P. Bush failed to disclose financial interests in nearly a dozen companies – After the Texas Ethics Commission received a sworn complaint about the omissions, Bush told The Texas Tribune last week that he took immediate steps to correct his disclosure forms. by Jay Root | ORG | Dec. 16, 2019, 13 hours ago
8. Democrats could gain control of the Texas House for the first time since 2001. Here are the seats in play in 2020 – Republicans and Democrats are ready for the 2020 battle over the Texas House, with roughly 30 of the 150 seats seen as competitive for both parties. by Cassandra Pollock and Patrick Svitek | ORG | Dec. 13, 201911 AM
   1. For the first time in years, Republicans and Democrats are acknowledging that the GOP could lose its grip on the Texas House — a turning point that would mark the state’s biggest political shakeup since the chamber last flipped nearly two decades ago.
   2. With the 2020 ballot all but set, both parties are readying their candidates for the 150 state House races, with roughly 30 seats seen as competitive.
   3. As recently as 2017, House Republicans relished in a 95-member majority. But now, Democrats, bolstered by their 12-seat pick-up last year, are effectively only nine away from gaining control of the chamber — and having a larger say in the 2021 redistricting process.
   4. Such a prospect has prompted newfound attention — and, in some cases, alarm — in a state that’s long been considered far out of reach for Democrats. And it’s created an awareness among Republicans, who have comfortably controlled virtually every lever of state government in Texas, that an updated — if not entirely new — playbook is needed.
   5. Democrats still have their work cut out for them. The last time they controlled the House was 2001. In addition to holding onto the 12 seats the party flipped last year, Democrats would need to pick up the additional nine — and this cycle, the GOP says it’s more prepared for the threat than it was in 2018. …
   6. … The battlefield for the House is large. In addition to the 12 seats that Republicans are trying to reclaim from the 2018 midterm election, Democrats are targeting 22 Republican-held seats where Beto O’Rourke, the 2018 Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, won or lost by single digits. In 17 of those seats, the Republican incumbents won by fewer than 10 percentage points. Of those 17 seats, there are nine where both O’Rourke won and the incumbent won by single digits — those could be considered Democrats’ highest priorities.
   7. Both parties are again calling North Texas ground zero for several of the House races considered to be in play by both parties, with the Austin and Houston areas also featuring clusters of competitive seats.
   8. Even before the 2020 elections, Democrats have a chance to pick up a seat in the late January special election runoff to fill the seat of former Rep. John Zerwas, R-Richmond. Democrats were already targeting him before he resigned this fall to take a job with the University of Texas System.
   9. Democrat targets have even grown to include once-unthinkable places like House District 32, where state Rep. Todd Hunter, R-Corpus Christi, is facing his first challenger from either party since O’Rourke came within 5 points of winning the district.
   10. The Democrat now running against Hunter, Eric Holguin, said the district has become more young and more diverse since the lines were drawn in 2011 — and last year brought into focus Democrats’ path to victory.
   11. “In 2018, we were seeing such a seismic shift in our political landscape due to [President Donald] Trump already having been in office a couple years,” said Holguin, who ran for Congress last cycle in the area. “Now that we saw the results of what happened in 2018, we could build off from there. We know where the new bar is set at more locally, and we could take it from there instead of not knowing what would happen post-Trump being elected.” …
9. The little-known US-Canada border war, By Diane Selkirk | COM/TRAVEL | 16 December 2019
   1. For the past 116 years, a disputed passageway off the Alaskan coast has spurred a war between the two neighbouring countries.
   2. Located between the Haida Gwaii archipelago on the north coast of British Columbia and the southern tip of Alaska’s Panhandle, Dixon Entrance’s nutrient-rich waters, which attract orcas, albatross and five species of salmon …. At some point … we left Canadian waters and entered the US. But really, the only way we knew we’d travelled from one country to the next is that our electronics jumped back an hour to Alaska Standard Time after we passed a Canadian Fisheries patrol boat on the lookout for border violators.
   3. In fact, the actual line where we crossed from one country to the next has long been under dispute. Even before European contact with the nearby indigenous peoples, the Haida, Tlingit and Tsimshian occasionally warred over the land and sea boundaries in this abundant territory. These days, this boundary disagreement continues between new adversaries and the treasure at the heart of this dispute has evolved from furs and gold to salmon.Though the US and Canada have the longest undefended border in the world, Dixon Entrance is one of four long-running border disputes between the friendly neighbours. The roots of the quarrel date back to the 18th Century; a time when the colonising stakeholders in the Alaskan Panhandle region (the narrow strip of mountains, fjords and channel islands bordering modern British Columbia) were England and Russia, followed by the US. …
   4. … Dixon Entrance is one of four long-running border disputes between the friendly neighbours
   5. This set the stage for a territorial dispute. The local indigenous population was soon overpowered by illness and wars, and throughout the period of Russian colonisation, the southern and eastern borders of the Alaskan Panhandle were never firmly established. The 1825 Treaty of Saint Petersburg between England and Russia set the southern coastal border of the Panhandle near modern Prince Rupert, British Columbia – but the region was so mountainous that much of it remained unsurveyed. In 1867, the United States bought Alaska from Russia. A few years later, British Columbia joined Canada. Ottawa suggested to Washington, DC, that it was time for an official survey of the Panhandle so the two countries could agree on the border, but the US considered the effort too costly for such a remote piece of land. …
   6. … An international tribunal was formed in 1903 to solve the Alaska Boundary Dispute. Made up of six impartial jurists from the US, Canada and England, the group ended up setting Alaska’s eastern boundary 56km east of where the ocean touched the mainland coast. …
   7. … Canada was outraged by aspects of the decision, but another issue soon arose. As far as Canada was concerned, the A-B line [decided upon] was the dividing line between the nations; on land and at sea. But the US had a different opinion; they declared that the decision only pertained to the land border, and that according to maritime law, the sea boundary was actually 20km south of the line, halfway across Dixon Entrance. This disagreement continues today. …
   8. … It may seem odd that two close allies still can’t compromise over the ownership of this narrow, 80km-wide and 50km-long passageway for the sake of easier international relations. But there’s a good reason: the Pacific salmon run.
   9. The salmon’s abundant numbers and annual journey have made fishing a key industry in the Pacific Northwest’s economy. From the 1880s to 1950s more than 100 canneries and fishing villages sprang up throughout British Columbia, and in recent years, wild salmon from the province has been exported to 53 different countries. …
   10. … the Pacific Salmon Treaty, whose goal was to ensure that fishermen from both countries had access to a fair share of spawning salmon in designated rivers along the Pacific Coast, was finally signed in 1985. Yet, when portions of the treaty expired in 1992, a six-year-long international incident began with both Canada and the US occasionally arresting each others’ commercial fishing boats. Tensions escalated when a few hundred Canadian fishermen eventually blockaded an Alaska State ferry in Prince Rupert for three days in 1997 and effectively took its passengers hostage.
   11. The annual migration through Dixon Entrance that sends salmon into rivers flowing through much of British Columbia has earned the salmon a central place in the minds of the First Nations’ people, and in the psyche of many British Columbians. Making a roundtrip journey of up to 4,000km from rivers and headwaters, out the sea and then back, the salmon feeds not just the economy, but orcas, bears and eagles that rely on the rivers. And they, in turn, feed the forest. … “Without salmon we would not be,” [Tanner Francois, of Secwepemc Nation]
   12. MIKE: This is not the only area along our northern border that is in dispute. There are other small pockets here and there. Some are friendlier than others. It probably depends on how much money is to be made in each disputed are
   13. You may also be interested in:
       A US town only reached through Canada
       • Canada’s tiny disputed island
       • The US land lost in Canada
10. Astronomers present a concept for the next NASA flagship mission, by Laura Arenschield, The Ohio State University |org | December 16, 2019
    1. The mission, nicknamed “HabEx” for “The Habitable Exoplanet Observatory,” would use a telescope with a mirror larger than Hubble’s, and would employ origami techniques to utilize an external “starshade,” which would block the light from the parent star and enable the search for and characterization of dim planets orbiting that star, according to a presentation today at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
    2. “Our goal is to see if we can find a planet that is similar to Earth—one that can support life,” said Scott Gaudi, one of the project’s co-chairs. “While we’ve identified a number of planets outside our solar system, so far, none have conclusively been shown to have the elements necessary for habitability.” …
11. Want Trump to Go? Take to the Streets – Another moment for public protest has arrived. By David Leonhardt, Opinion Columnist | COM | Oct. 20, 2019
    1. On Nov. 9, 2016, the day after Donald Trump’s election, Obamacare looked to be doomed. Millions of Americans, it seemed, were going to lose their health insurance. …
    2. … Fortunately, some progressives understood that politics isn’t only an inside game. The outside game — of public protest and grass-roots lobbying — matters, too.
    3. Even before Trump took office, activists began planning a strategy to make repeal as politically painful as possible. On the day after Trump’s inauguration, some four million Americans took to the streets for Women’s Marches (which obviously were about much more than repeal). In the months that followed, groups like Indivisible organized people to attend town halls, visit Capitol Hill and inundate members of Congress with phone calls.
    4. The efforts transformed the debate. Obamacare repeal was no longer a bloodless legislative matter, in which public opinion was measured merely with poll results and pundit analysis. The story became rawer, more human and much harder for politicians and ordinary citizens to ignore. …
    5. … Consider what happened last week alone. Trump created a foreign-policy disaster in Turkey and Syria, for no apparent reason, while multiple administration officials testified that he views diplomacy largely as a way to advance his personal interests. His attitude, evidently, is: America, c’est moi. Even more so than a month ago, Trump is a national emergency, flagrantly violating his oath of office and daring the country to stop him.
    6. Yet the chances of removing him appear as dim as Obamacare’s chances of survival did on Nov. 9, 2016. Trump even has plausible paths to re-election, some of which involve again losing the popular vote.
    7. A. Kauffman, a historian of protest movements, has said that effective ones often throw “a monkey wrench into a process that was otherwise going to just unfold smoothly.” That’s the role that an outside game can now play in the impeachment saga.
    8. It can wake up more Americans to the gravity of the situation. It can mobilize progressives to work as hard as they did during the 2018 midterms. It can confront congressional Republicans with their cowardice.
    9. “Protests work,” as Kauffman has said — not always, of course, but often “when groups are willing to be bold in their tactics and persistent in their approach within the broad discipline of non-violent action.” As Vox’s Matthew Yglesias wrote last week, public protest “serves as a powerful signal to the rest of society that something extraordinary is happening.” If anything, protest may be more important than in the past, because the elite institutions that helped bring down Richard Nixon, like political parties and the national media, are weaker today.
    10. So it’s time for a sequel to that first Women’s March — an Americans’ March, in which millions of people peacefully take to the streets to say that President Trump must go. And it’s time for a more intense grass-roots campaign directed at his congressional enablers, one that conjures the respectful intensity of the save-Obamacare campaign. Even if the Senate still acquits Trump, a new protest movement can help galvanize people to defeat him, and his enablers, next year.
    11. The country is in crisis. Right now, that crisis feels all too normal.
12. Air Force spaceplane returns to Earth after 780-day mission, By William Harwood | CBS News | October 27, 2019 / 8:33 AM /
    1. An unpiloted Air Force X-37B spaceplane, one of two winged orbiters used to carry out classified research, made a surprise landing at the Kennedy Space Center early Sunday to close out a record 780-day mission. It was the fifth flight in the secretive Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV) program, pushing total time aloft to 2,865 days.
    2. “This program continues to push the envelope as the (Air Force’s) only reusable space vehicle,” Randy Walden, director of the Air Force’s Rapid Capabilities Office, said in a statement. “With a successful landing today, the X-37B completed its longest flight to date and successfully completed all mission objectives.”
13. Rising Seas Will Erase More Cities by 2050, New Research Shows, By Denise Lu and Christopher Flavelle | COM |Oct. 29, 2019
    1. Rising seas could affect three times more people by 2050 than previously thought, according to new research, threatening to all but erase some of the world’s great coastal cities.
    2. The authors of a paper published Tuesday developed a more accurate way of calculating land elevation based on satellite readings, a standard way of estimating the effects of sea level rise over large areas, and found that the previous numbers were far too optimistic. The new research shows that some 150 million people are now living on land that will be below the high-tide line by midcentury. …
    3. Southern Vietnam could all but disappear. … More than 20 million people in Vietnam, almost one-quarter of the population, live on land that will be inundated. …
    4. In Shanghai, one of Asia’s most important economic engines, water threatens to consume the heart of the city and many other cities around it. The findings don’t have to spell the end of those areas. The new data shows that 110 million people already live in places that are below the high tide line …
    5. The new projections suggest that much of Mumbai, India’s financial capital and one of the largest cities in the world, is at risk of being wiped out. Built on what was once a series of islands, the city’s historic downtown core is particularly vulnerable.
    6. Over all, the research shows that countries should start preparing now for more citizens to relocate internally, according to Dina Ionesco of the International Organization for Migration, an intergovernmental group that coordinates action on migrants and development.
14. The Federalist Society Says It’s Not an Advocacy Organization. These Documents Show Otherwise. By AMANDA HOLLIS-BRUSKY and CALVIN TERBEEK | com | August 31, 2019 (Amanda Hollis-Brusky is an associate professor of politics at Pomona College and author of Ideas With Consequences: The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counterrevolution. Calvin TerBeek is a Ph.D. candidate in political science)
    1. MIKE NOTE: The Federalist Society  – The Federalist Society is a tax–exempt 501(c)(3) charitable organization. Our federal tax identification number is 36-3235550.
    2. This past March, when the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies held its 37th annual national gathering for conservative law students, the lineup of speakers and panelists included an impressive number of Republican Party and conservative movement stars. …
    3. Despite what appears to be an obvious political valence, the Federalist Society and its high-profile members have long insisted the nonprofit organization does not endorse any political party “or engage in other forms of political advocacy,” as its website says. The society does not deny an ideology—it calls itself a “group of conservatives and libertarians”—but it maintains that it is simply “about ideas,” not legislation, politicians or policy positions.
    4. Federalist Society documents that one of us recently unearthed, however, make this position untenable going forward. The documents, made public here for the first time, show that the society not only has held explicit ideological goals since its infancy in the early 1980s, but sought to apply those ideological goals to legal policy and political issues through the group’s roundtables, symposia and conferences.
    5. The question of whether the Federalist Society is properly characterized as a “society of ideas” or a political organization has significant ramifications. The Code of Conduct for United States Judges, a set of guidelines administered by the federal judiciary’s Judicial Conference, was revised earlier this year to bar sitting federal judges from participating in conferences and seminars sponsored by groups “generally viewed by the public as having adopted a consistent political or ideological point of view equivalent to the type of partisanship often found in political organizations.” (The Code does not “explicitly” apply to Supreme Court justices, though they have looked to it in the past.) One former federal judge argued that under the new ethics opinion, the Federalist Society is now a “no-go zone for federal judges.” The Society’s president, Eugene Meyer, responded, calling the former jurist’s argument an “absurd and ludicrous” interpretation of the rule, adding that the Federalist Society has said “time and again” that it is nonpartisan and does not take official policy positions.
    6. But the newly unearthed documents—a 1984 grant proposal and cover letter, written by Meyer on the Federalist Society’s behalf and now housed in the late Judge Robert Bork’s papers at the Library of Congress—provide evidence that the Federalist Society, in contravention of what the new Code states, in fact “advocates for specific outcomes on legal or political issues.” This suggests that federal judges, by attending Federalist Society events, are transgressing the Code’s new guidelines. Given the importance of active federal judges to the Federalist Society’s long-term goal of reshaping the law, barring them from the society’s events could hamper its continued ability to exert the political influence it has impressively built over decades. …
    7. …The Federalist Society’s founders and conservative patrons understood early on that the battle for control of the law would not be won on campuses alone. In the January 1984 grant proposal, Meyer, then the Federalist Society’s executive director, asked the conservative-leaning Smith Richardson Foundation for “seed money” to fund a new entity, a “Lawyers Division.” The central goal, Meyer wrote, was “to build an effective national conservative lawyers organization.” Meyer began the proposal by asserting that an alternative to “an increasingly radicalized bar,” exemplified by the American Bar Association, was now necessary because “lawyers continue to fill key positions in the modern instrumentalities of the welfare state.”
    8. SHORTER VERSION OF ARTICLE ABOVE- REVEALED: New documents show the Federalist Society has lied about its mission — and could blow up on sitting judges, By Matthew Chapman | COM | Published on August 31, 2019
       1. On Saturday, political science academics Amanda Hollis-Brusky and Calvin TerBeek wrote an exposé in Politico revealing that the Federalist Society, an association of conservative and libertarian lawyers infamous for forming a semi-official pipeline of right-wing academics into the federal court system, have deliberately misled the public about the purpose of their organization’s existence for years.
       2. “Despite what appears to be an obvious political valence, the Federalist Society and its high-profile members have long insisted the nonprofit organization does not endorse any political party ‘or engage in other forms of political advocacy,’ as its website says,” they wrote. “The society does not deny an ideology — it calls itself a ‘group of conservatives and libertarians’ — but it maintains that it is simply ‘about ideas,’ not legislation, politicians or policy positions.”
15. The hidden hunger affecting billions, By Michael Marshall | BBC.COM | 7-JULY-2019
    1. Two billion people do not get enough micronutrients in their diets, which can lead to severe health conditions.
    2. New kinds of crops could help to create better, more nutritious foods to beat these deficiencies.
    3. When children do not get enough iron in their food, the results are heartbreaking. They are slower to acquire language, struggle with short-term memory, have poor attention spans and ultimately do less well at school.
    4. “They can never live up to their full physical and mental potential,” says Wolfgang Pfeiffer, director of research and development at HarvestPlus, an organisation that develops nutritionally improved crops in Washington DC. “If they are deficient in their childhood, they learn 20% less as adults.”
    5. In the poorest parts of India and China, millions of children have their lives stunted through lack of iron. In South Asia, an estimated50% of pregnant women have iron deficiency, and it is also prevalent in South America and sub-Saharan Africa.
    6. But iron is only one small part of the story. There are several dozen other “micronutrients” – substances that we need to consume, in small quantities but regularly, to remain healthy. They include zinc, copper, vitamins and folates such as folic acid and vitamin B9.
    7. The traditional solution to micronutrient deficiencies has been to add more micronutrients to common foods, or to supply pills … But these strategies have limits. If people can’t afford pills or don’t have access to a pharmacy, they may still not get enough micronutrients. What’s more, adding micronutrients to food is a constant process: every batch of breakfast cereal has to be artificially dosed with iron and vitamins.
    8. A much simpler approach would be to go back to the crop plant from which the cereal is made, and ensure that it packs itself full of the micronutrient in the first place.
    9. This is the thinking behind “biofortification”, the process of creating crops that have unusually high levels of micronutrients like iron. HarvestPlus was founded in 2003 by economist Howarth Bouis, after a decade of lobbying and raising moneyto create biofortified crops and make them available where they are needed. Today HarvestPlus has members in more than 20 countries and has biofortified over a dozen crops, from rice to sweet potatoes.
16. India’s blowout election is a lesson for US Democrats, By Annalisa Merelli | COM/ | May 24, 2019
    1. Narendra Modi, India’s Hindu nationalist prime minister, defied expectations when he won his second election in an even bigger landslide than the first one. He did so at the expense of India’s Congress party, which campaigned on a secular and pluralist platform.
    2. Turns out the nationalist message of Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is hugely popular with voters. It was a massive defeat—the second in a row—for India’s more liberal Congress party. It’s a bitter loss that came with many lessons, ones that Democrats in the United States would be wise to heed. …
    3. … Politics in India have traditionally been about the economy. This time, however, Modi and the BJP’s support of Hindu nationalism took a more prominent position than it had in past campaigns, exploiting tension with Pakistan to redirect the debate toward national security and anti-Muslim sectarianism. As Modi’s message grew stronger, [the once-dominant Congress Party] failed to really fight for India’s long-established secular ideals. …
    4. … The Congress isn’t known for its ability to learn lessons, but there are some more to note. And given that a left-leaning party promoting pluralism just lost to a right-leaning party promoting nationalism, the Democratic Party in the United States should probably read a long as it prepares for its own election season.
    5. Don’t make it about the candidate: Modi’s leadership of the BJP is strong, and there is no separating his party or government’s success and work from his own. His party capitalized on this, turning the election into a referendum on him—rather than his government’s record. Polarizing figures like Modi tend to benefit from these kinds of politics. His party understood this. His adversaries did not.
    6. Turning the campaign into a vote for or against Modi prevented the opposition from asserting its own ideas. Even when the Congress proposed policies that could have appealed to a broad electorate — for instance, guaranteed minimum income … — they received little attention. As George Lakoff explained in his 2004 book, Don’t Think of an Elephant, obsessing over a candidate’s flaws only makes him or her more popular.
    7. Democrats in the United States made this mistake in the 2016 election, running a campaign against Donald Trump instead of for their own policies.
    8. Dare to be different: … For many voters, the Congress party is associated with old-school elitist politics, corruption, and a perceived inability to bring change to India. Gandhi’s candidacy didn’t do much to change anyone’s minds.
    9. Make friends: Congress also failed to make strong alliances with other, smaller political parties…. Progressives seem to make this mistake a lot. While conservatives often stick together (the Republican Party’s support of Trump during the campaign is a textbook example), liberals often fail to find common ground. In the last presidential campaign, the Democratic primaries went on long after Trump was the presumed nominee. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton spent more time tearing each other apart than focusing on the bigger fight. The extremely crowded field of potential democratic candidates suggests the same thing could happen again.
    10. Focus the narrative: Modi’s narrative of a new, strong, corruption-free India—one with international power, credibility and gravitas—appealed to many voters. It delivered a clear vision of what he was promising, and one that Indians were fast to embrace. Congress never presented a clear vision of its own.
    11. [The Congress Party] decried the threat to secular values [Modi’s Party] posed, and held itself up as its defender. But rather than communicating how those values could help India succeed, the party focused more on what would happen if protections further deteriorated.
    12. This is not unlike what happened during the 2016 election in the United States. Just look at the campaign slogans: Trump’s “Make America Great Again” had a clear if suspect mission. Clinton’s “Stronger Together” described a status, not an intention. Democrats could face the same problem they did in 2016—and the same problem India’s Congress party faced this week—unless they forget about the opposition, stop playing defense, and promote their own, clear vision.