washington, dc

The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: June 2006

Can Dems Win the State Legs in ’06?

Oceans of ink (and mountains of bytes) have been devoted to the Democrats’ prospects for winning control of the U.S. Congress in November. But not so much has been written about another critical priority for Dems in ’06 — winning control of state legislatures. This is an important goal, not only because state legislatures pass laws that have an impact on our communities, but also because they are the key to redistricting for the U.S. House of Representatives and the “farm clubs” for future congressional candidates.
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, Republicans have a less than one percent lead (62 seats) over Democrats in holding the nation’s 7382 state legislative seats. The GOP has the majority of both houses in 21 states, compared to 17 for the Democrats. Eleven states have divided control and the unicameral Nebraska legislature has nonpartisan elections. Less than two dozen state legislators in the nation are independents or third party members. And if you take a peak at this map, the southeast doesn’t look so red — Louisiana, Arkansas, Alabama, North Carolina and Mississippi are solid blue in terms of control of state legislatures.
Not all state legislative seats are up in November. Some are term limited (268 seats in ’06) and a few states are not holding elections for their state house or senate or both this year. Other states stagger the seats up for election every two years. But voters in the 50 states will elect 6181 state legislators.
That’s a lot more races than the Congress’s 435 House and 33 Senate elections, and so in a sense the vote for state legislators may be a better barometer for political trends leading up to 2008.
Democrats could win control of a majority of state legislatures, but it will require a broad rout of the GOP. Their best chances for pick-ups, numerically speaking, are AK (-4 Senate); IN (-4 House); IA (-2 House and tie Senate); MN (-2 House); MT (tie house); NV (-3 Senate); and TN (-1 Senate). However Dems have similarly small majority margins to defend in CO (both houses); Maine (both houses); MS (House); MT (Senate); NJ (Senate); NM (Senate); OK (Senate) and WA (Senate).
The races in the state legs may not be as flashy as those in the Congress. But the state legislatures will be passing laws about immigration, same-sex marriage, funding for education, taxes and many other issues that affect our lives. And do watch the vote for state legislators for clues to the Democrats’ chances in 2008.


Navel-Gazing And the Values Debate

You might not expect to find strategy-relevant information in a paper by a Dutch sociologist that has the title, “The ‘Second Demographic Transition’ in the U.S.: Spatial Patterns and Correlates” (pdf). But as it turns out, Ron Lesthaeghe and his co-author Lisa Neidert have uncovered some fascinating evidence that clarifies what the “culture wars” in national politics are all about.
L&N start with 19 demographic indicators. They then examine the correlations across U.S. states between these indicators and identify two underlying dimensions that the indicators tap into. The first of these – call it lifestyle modernism – has to do with delay in marriage and childbearing, cohabitation (opposite- or same-sex), fertility, and abortion rates. The second is related to teen and nonmarital fertility and might be thought of as childbearing conventionality. Divorce rates play into both dimensions.
Still with me? If you thought that was the interesting part, just wait…
What emerges starkly from their results is that blue states tend to have modern lifestyles (delayed marriage and childbearing, relatively high abortion and low fertility, high levels of cohabitation) while red states tend to have traditional ones. How strong is this relationship? Social scientists use a measure of association called the correlation coefficient, which can range from -1 (perfect negative association) to 1 (perfect positive association), with 0 indicating no linear relationship. This economist found that the correlation between the share of a state’s vote that went to Bush in 2004 and the share of the state’s voters “regularly” attending church was 0.20 – quite low. Compare this to the correlation between modernist lifestyle (a combination of the above demographic indicators) and the 2004 vote for Bush: -0.87.
In English, this means that differences in lifestyles – in terms of when people get married and have children, how many children they have, how common cohabitation and same-sex households are, and how high abortion rates are – are far more strongly related to presidential voting patterns than church attendance is. Indeed, when L&N controlled for the share of a state’s population that was Evangelical and the share that was Catholic, the correlation between lifestyle and the vote only declined to -0.76.
Ready to be even more impressed? The association is strong even at the county level. Take a look at these maps showing the Bush vote by county and cohabitation (same- or opposite-sex) by county (from page 25 of L&N’s paper).
valuesmap.JPG
What to make of these results? One conclusion might be that the cultural/values divide between blue and red states is bigger than religion. It is fundamentally about modernism versus traditionalism, about deference to authority. L&N write that lifestyle modernism is associated with secularism, anti-authoritarianism, egalitarianism, moral libertarianism, high valuation of self-actualization, tolerance for moral ambiguity and unconventionality, and a preference for friendships over civic involvement. The quest for fulfillment has led modernists to be more picky about taking a spouse and to think twice before commiting to children in young adulthood. Does this sound like anyone you know?
Ron Inglehart has noted that as more and more Americans became economically secure in the post-WWII years, the growing middle class could worry less about the materialist concerns of the New Deal era (how can I afford to feed my family?) and could focus more on “post-materialist” issues (how can I feel fulfilled in my job?). This argument implies that with opportunity and economic security come blue-state values. Absent that, many red state voters will not have the luxury of such navel-gazing, and they will seek meaning and refuge in traditional institutions, ways of life, and attitudes toward authority. And they will vote Republican.
If Democrats can successfully implement a progressive economic agenda, we may see the values debate become marginalized. But in the meantime, modernists need to respect – or at least address – the traditionalists and their deference to family, religious, and state authority. There are undoubtedly things we can do in this regard that do not require us to abandon core Democratic values. But that’s a post for another day.


Mid-Term Challenge: Getting Focused on the Big Question

Josh Marshall adds to the buzz about the “embarrassingly lame” Democratic slogans “A New Direction for America” and “Together, America Can Do Better.” Says Marshall in today’s TPM post:

…Newt Gingrich was so on the mark, ironically, when he suggested the Democrats’ slogan should be “Had Enough?” (As a way of understanding Gingrich’s particular genius, consider that “Had Enough?” and “A New Direction for America” are actually two ways of saying the exact same thing — with the first forceful and infectious and the second limp and denatured.) Everything else the election is allegedly about is chatter. The details are so many fine points about making the sale, framing the question. And, yes, those are important. But that is the question. And nothing the geniuses on either side do will change that from being the question.

All polls point to “yes” being the answer to the question. But Marshall makes another point worth noting:

Political insiders consistently overstate the importance of slogans and programs. Political tides aren’t unleashed or weathered because of message discipline or thematic fine-tuning. They come about because of failures or victories abroad, big motions in the economy, or judgments coalescing in the public mind in ways that are as inscrutable in their origins as they can be transparent in their effects.

The thing to do with a weak theme, Marshall argues quite convincingly, is to ignore it and focus on what’s important:

So, yes, the new theme is dopey and flaccid. But the only thing worse than that would be getting too upset about it. On the Democratic side, the punch of this election is going to come from individual candidates willing to be fiercely candid with voters and fight Republicans tooth and nail.
Let’s be honest. What is this election about?
It’s not about the Democrats. 2008 may be about the Democrats. Maybe 2010. Not 2006. 2006 is about George W. Bush and the Republican party. And, specifically, how many people are fed up with what’s happened over the last six years and want to make a change? The constitution gives the people only one way to do that in 2006 — put a hard brake on the president’s power by turning one or both houses of Congress over to the opposition party.

Marshall is right that it’s time for Dems to get past the hand-wringing about message and anxiety about image. We just don’t have the time left for more navel-gazing. With less than five months to go, it’s time to get voters focused on answering the big question, “Had enough?” — and mobilizing a record mid-term turnout to answer “Hell, Yes!”.


Left Behind?

I’d like to start the week off with what I’ll call…Data Day! (Cue the Monty Python illustrated montage, with majestic trumpets, ending in flatulence.)
Last week I mentioned that my read of the evidence is that Americans are right-leaning. This is an incredibly important question in strategy debates among Democrats. What drives many of us to heretofore unseen levels of profanity and exasperation with professional Democrats is the discrepancy between our poor electoral fortunes and the idea that we live in a Fifty-Fifty Nation. If the parties are at parity, why can’t the Democrats (frame/motivate our base/stay as united/enforce discipline/defend our principles) as well as Republicans? And the answers that lend themselves are that we have inept candidates, incompetent consultants, unprincipled elites, or ineffective framing.
It’s certainly true that we live in a Fifty-Fifty Nation when it comes to partisanship, even though that is an indicator of erosion in Democratic support since the post-Watergate ’70s. The following chart shows the Democrats’ share of party identification among adults who identify as either Democrats or Republicans (based on Gallup data I tabulated):
partistrend.bmp
But the fact that the country is evenly divided in terms of partisanship doesn’t mean that it must be evenly divided in ideological identification. For that to be the case, liberalism would have to be as common among Democrats as conservatism is among Republicans. But it is not.
According to the 2004 American National Election Study, liberals were a majority among Democrats (56% versus 33% conservative). But conservatives dominate the Republican Party to a much greater extent, accounting for over 80 percent of their party members compared with just a 5% share for liberal Republicans. Nationally, there are 40 percent more conservatives than liberals. This was also true in 1972, the first year the NES asked respondents this question. In the Gallup data, where it’s impossible to allocate “leaning” moderates to the liberal and conservative groups, liberals look much scarcer.
The following chart is analogous to the previous one, except this time I show liberals as a share of those calling themselves either liberal or conservative. This chart is a bit disjointed because Gallup did not construct the ideology questions consistently from year to year. All of the data points listed were from questions providing at least three categories (liberal, moderate, or conservative), and most of them provide five. Question and category wording varied however, so I show each consistent series in the same color. Finally, I tried to be as consistent as possible in choosing the month in each year the survey was conducted.
ideoltrend.bmp
I’ll stop here and let you all comment on the questions all these data raise. How meaningful are the labels “liberal” and “conservative”? How can we account for the timing of the changes in the data? If self-identified ideology is meaningful, what are the implications for various electoral strategies prescribed for Democrats?


Pleased to meet you

Welcome to The Daily Strategist, the blog of our new magazine. I’m Scott Winship, managing editor of The Democratic Strategist and blogger-in-chief. I will typically be posting once a day in the late evening. Why only once a day you ask? Well, in addition to running the magazine, I am (in theory) writing a dissertation in social policy. I’m also involved in a couple of other outside projects which you can easily find if you google me and have too much time on your hands. Which you don’t because you haven’t read the whole premiere issue yet, have you?
In The Daily Strategist — I lobbied to call it The Strat-o-caster but wiser heads prevailed — I hope to augment the monthly publication cycle of the magazine with information relevant to Democratic national political strategy. Some days that will mean highlighting news from other outlets. Other days it will mean provoking other bloggers or responding to their provocations. Still other days I will summarize academic and think tank research. And Fridays I will likely make unconvincing attempts to pass off reviews of VH1’s evening schedule as relevant to political strategy.
In a very real way, you (dear reader) can help make this a better blog by passing along links to articles or studies that I can deconstruct. I know that sounds like I’m pushing my work off on you, but hey, Josh Marshall does it so why can’t I? (Incidentally, if anyone out there knows Stata, I’d love to push my dissertation work off onto you too. And if you live in D.C., let me know if you’re interested in doing my laundry.)
Before I sign off, you deserve to know a bit about my own ideological predispositions. First and foremost, I am an empiricist, so I try to the extent possible to rely on evidence, data. My read of 20th-century American political history and the analysis I’ve done of electoral data lead me to believe that, unfortunately, there are not enough voters out there who are as secular or fiscally progressive as I am. And there are not enough who are as anti-nationalist as many of you are. As such, I am of the view that Democrats must make (modest) efforts to accomodate those who are to the right of progressives.
At the same time, I part ways with most progressives in a number of policy and political debates. I am essentially a chastened Peter Beinart hawk. I believe in a social policy that both promotes opportunity but demands responsibility. I’m sympathetic toward market-based policies. The point is, in some regards I have a real affinity for moderate Democrats rather than simply being pragmatic.
Can I win you back if I say that in my perfect world we’d have universal health care, a higher minimum wage, gay marriage, more progressive taxes, no creationism in schools, more generous family leave, more legal immigration, preschool for all, tougher fair housing laws, and – uh – polar ice caps?
Stripped of blind ideology, policy — and political strategy — is complicated. The trick is to always treat one’s views as provisional, grapple with evidence, and let the chips fall where they may. We all have to be prepared to say we were wrong, myself included. I’d like to think that’s the spirit that will guide The Democratic Strategist as we collectively search for the keys to building an enduring Democratic majority.
Talk to you Monday!


Wolfe on Conservatism and Incompetence

As conservatives try to disassociate themselves from the ongoing disaster of the Bush administration and the Republican Congress, and progressives argue whether incompetence and corruption or ideology is the right target for their critique of the GOP, Alan Wolfe offers a typically brilliant analysis of the situation in the latest Washington Monthly. Today’s Republicans are authentically conservative, he says, and their ideology virtually guarantees incompetence and corruption. You really, really should read the entire essay, but here’s a sample:

Contemporary conservatism is a walking contradiction. Unable to shrink government but unwilling to improve it, conservatives attempt to split the difference, expanding government for political gain, but always in ways that validate their disregard for the very thing they are expanding. The end result is not just bigger government, but more incompetent government.

I’ve agreed with Wolfe’s point of view for a long time, having watched conservatives from the Reagan administration on, in Washington and in many states, turn government agencies they don’t have the guts to abolish into pork machines and jobs programs, precisely because it’s the only useful thing they can imagine using them for. When combined with tax-cutting mania and the opportunity to serve up vast corporate subsidies–another way to bribe voters and campaign contributors, while offering the illusion that government will someday have to shrink–it offers conservative politicians the equivalent of a bottomless crack pipe. But eventually, the chickens come home to roost with the consequences of misgovernment, and that’s what is happening right now.


WSJ Poll: Support for Dem-Controlled Congress Grows

The latest Wall St. Journal/NBC News poll brings more good news for Democratic congressional candidates. The survey, conducted 6/9-12 by the bipartisan Hart/McInturff polling team, finds that 49 percent of registered voters prefer a Democratic-controlled congress after the November elections, compared to 38 percent favoring Republican control. The figures show a 4 percent increase for Dems and a 1 percent decrease for the GOP since the last (April) poll. Poll respondents also said they were more concerned about continuing Republican control with “not enough” change than Democratic control with the “wrong kind of change” by a margin of 51 percent to 36 percent. Further, as John Harwood notes in his WSJ report on the poll, voters

…prefer Democrats by a wide margin on issues such as health care, gasoline prices and the economy, while traditional Republican advantages on values and terrorism have shrunk.
Five months before Election Day, Democrats also enjoy an edge on voter intensity. Some 60% of self-described Democrats expressed a very high level of interest in fall elections, compared with 52% of self-described Republicans.

The poll results suggest that Democratic candidates may have some challenges ahead in honing their policies on Iraq and immigration. But, with less than five months until the election, it’s clear the GOP has a lot more to worry about.


Baptists, Bloggers and John Calvin

I was a bit startled yesterday to read a Nathan Newman post at TPMCafe suggesting that bloggers had pulled off a coup in helping elect one Frank Page as president of the Southern Baptist Convention. I did a little research, and found that indeed there was a grassroots effort, spread in part by bloggers, to promote Page against the conservative establishment candidate Ronnie Floyd of Arkansas.But it would be a bit too much to assume that Page’s election represents some sort of sea-change in Baptist political theology. He’s a supporter of “biblical inerrancy,” and by his own account has supported the conservative theocratic takeover of the SBC. The big argument for his candidacy has mainly revolved around the need for congregational support for Baptist mission work, which has been lagging of late. And if you actually google around and read some of the blogs about the contest for the SBC presidency, there’s an underlying tension among Baptists that Page exploited: a neo-Calvinist movement in the Baptist seminaries that threatened the denomination’s commitment to evangelizing the world.This is a very old conflict among Baptists; in the nineteenth century, it produced two denominational spinoffs: the Primitive Baptists (two of my great-grandfathers were ministers for this group) who rejected missionary activity as a waste of time given the doctrine of predestination of souls; and the Free Will Baptists who rejected predestination altogether.The neo-Calvinists, who often overlap with the politicized right-wing leadership of the SBC, have exposed a lot of underlying Baptist angst about the drift of the denomination away from its roots. Page’s outspoken resistence to neo-Calvinism, and his advocacy of a more open and inclusive Baptist attitude towards unbelievers, may have been crucial to the success of his candidacy.So there’s more going on here than some grassroots rejection of “fundamentalism.” But Page’s election does in fact indicate that internet-based organizing is particularly relevant to a denomination with a strong tradition of local, congregational autonomy (vitiated so much by the conservative takeover of the SBC). Moreover, the upset probably indicates an understanding among Baptist clergy that the denomination’s massive growth in recent decades has slowed, and that Southern Baptists have lost the initiative to pentecostal churches, and to the nondenominational megachurches where right-wing politics are not the central message from the pulpit.I was raised as a Southern Baptist, and know a lot about the denomination and its membership. And althought rank-and-file Baptists have not vocally dissented from their Christian Right leadership, there’s a lot of snickering going on behind those Broadman Hymnals every Sunday on which the preacher suggests that divorce, feminism, extramarital sex, or homosexuality are unknown among the Godly. Maybe Page’s election will ultimately help energize the sensible if silent majority of Baptists. I certainly hope so.


“Take Back America” Conference Lights Path to Victory

The Campaign for America’s Future “Take Back America” Conference concludes today with an impressive array of presenters, including Sens. Russ Feingold and Barack Obama, Reps. Bernie Sanders, Jan Schakowsky, Sherrod Brown and Lynn Woolsey, luminaries like Eric Boehlert, Kevin Phillips and Gar Alperovitz and a host of leading activists. The conference features sessions on topics of interest to Democratic campaigners, including: “Media Reform: A Critical Issue of Our Times,” “The Cost of Corruption Campaign: the Defining Issue in 2006” and “Eruptions: The Public Moves Against the War,” among others. The Campaign For America’s Future website offers access to selected multimedia content of conference proceedings at the end of each day. Also available at the CAF website is “Straight Talk” by Robert Borosage and Stan Greenberg, described as “a manual for candidates and activists that outlines how to argue the progressive case for this fall’s elections.” Synopsis and download available here.


Revisionist History in the Making

Given all the attention currently being paid to the conservative revolt against George W. Bush, I strongly recommend you read Jonathan Chait’s new piece for The New Republic questioning the “apostate” label the Right is plastering on W, and its (and the news media’s) assumption that Bush’s lagging approval ratings are attributable to same. To summarize Chait’s argument:1) All of Bush’s supposed “moderate” heresies are either imaginary, or were present back when the conservative commentariat was idolizing W. as a Churchillian figure standing astride the world like a colossus.2) Had Bush taken the Right’s advice, he’d be in even more trouble than he is today.3) Contra the conservative chatter, Bush’s support levels from rank-and-file conservatives, while down a bit, are still crazily out of synch with the rest of the public.4) We’ve been here before: conservative movement types always seem to support Republican politicians when they’re successful, and accuse them of wimping out when they’re not.Chait doesn’t generalize his argument into a broader meditation on the nature of ideological thinking, but there is a bit of an analog on the Left, where elite opinion about Bill Clinton’s fidelity to Democratic principle has long diverged from rank-and-file progressive appreciation for the Man from Hope, and has also merged with a strange revisionist argument that Clinton’s alleged heresies from The True Path were responsible for every Democratic electoral setback since 1994.While Democrats can and should rightly enjoy and exploit the implosion within the GOP, what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. A lot of progressives these days seem to think the rise of the conservative movement should serve as a template for Our Side, and if so, we should look at the self-deception going on in conservative circles with an occasional glance in the mirror.