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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: January 2007

Is Population Growth Red or Blue?

Chris Cillizza gets some grief in the comments section following his argument in WaPo that new census figures showing that 2004 red states are leading in population growth is good news for the GOP. Cillizza’s analysis of population trends fails to acknowledge that much of the population growth will come from disproportionate increases in the percentage of African American, Latino and out-state migrants, none of whom are likely to favor the GOP. Some of those commenting on Cillizza’s article put it this way:

When looking at the shift in population, it might be wise to consider who is shifting and to where they are shifting. My guess would be that you would find a lot of Democrats shifting from the Northeast to Florida, Georgia, N.C., etc. This will make the 2008 Election much less predictable than usual. (Gail Mountain)
Agree with Gail–this is an extremely specious and vacuous way of looking at these results. As usual, Chris, your republican slip is showing. Always looking for a ‘bright spot’ for your party. I have a feeling that just the opposite of your analysis is true — that those who are moving will simply be making red states bluer. (drindl)
Some radically presumptious analysis here!
Who says that the people who are moving to these states will vote republican? In fact recent gains for democrats appear to be from new voters in states that have traditionally been republican. Indeed, this may be REALLY bad news for the republican party! (dONHAH)
Chris,
Please consider a follow-up that factors in ethnic and religion changes.It seems to me that Hispanics and immigrants may be as important as raw population numbers in determining the fate of the GOP.Thanks.(Paul Silver)

It goes on like this for more than 100 comments, providing an instructive lesson in what happens when one uses a static analysis to assess a dynamic situation. What is needed instead, is a more thoughtful analysis — Where is the growth coming from? Are Republicans reproducing like rabbits on viagra? How much of the Hispanic influx is permanent or transitory? Is the African American “reverse migration” to the south still strong?
Anyone who has spent any significant amount of time in southern cities knows that they are thick with northeastern and midwestern expats. Are these folks Republican refugees or a broader cross-section of sun-seekers and those longing for a slower pace of life? Let’s discuss.


Rudy Can Fail

One of the odd phenomena in the 2008 presidential runup is the disconnect between Rudy Giuliani’s strong GOP poll ratings and the CW that he can’t get the Republican nomination because of his socially liberal policy stands. Until recently, Rudy has floated above this disconnect, but now a leaked strategy document is giving his opponents an opening to bash him. According to the New York Daily News account of this document, Rudy’s self-identified problems are: “his private sector business; disgraced former aide Bernard Kerik; his third wife, Judith Nathan Giuliani; ‘social issues,’ on which is he is more liberal than most Republicans, and his former wife Donna Hanover.”The leaked strategy document goes on to dwell at great length on a fifth problem, fundraising, and barely gets into the ideological issues he faces. You have to conclude from this document that this ideologically handicapped GOP presidential candidate has a host of preliminary handicaps, personal and ethical, that even his own braintrust considers potentially debilitating. I don’t know how Rudy intends to deal with these handicaps. But I do know how his conservative opponents will exploit them in the early ’08 caucus and primary states, and I suspect “America’s Mayor” will be reduced to “America’s Dogcatcher” before the deal goes down in 2008.


Dems’ Future on Line As New Congress Convenes

The Democratic majority takes control of Congress this week for the first time in 12 years, and Lyndsey Layton and Juliet Eilperin have an insightful preview in their WaPo article “Democrats To Start Without GOP Input.” Those who favor a strong “take charge” strategy for Dems over a more bipartisan approach will be encouraged. As Eilperin and Layton note:

Democrats are planning to largely sideline Republicans from the first burst of lawmaking…instead of allowing Republicans to fully participate in deliberations, as promised after the Democratic victory in the Nov. 7 midterm elections, Democrats now say they will use House rules to prevent the opposition from offering alternative measures, assuring speedy passage of the bills and allowing their party to trumpet early victories.

But Speaker Pelosi’s spokesman Brendan Daly indicated that the take charge strategy applies primarily to the much publicized “plan for first 100 hours” when the House convenes on Thursday:

Daly said Democrats are still committed to sharing power with the minority down the line. “The test is not the first 100 hours,” he said. “The test is the first six months or the first year. We will do what we promised to do….We’ve talked about these things for more than a year,” he said. “The members and the public know what we’re voting on. So in the first 100 hours, we’re going to pass these bills”

The authors point out that Senate Democrats will implement a more conciliatory strategy, owing to their slender majority.
WaPo has another article of interest regarding the Dems’ congressional strategy, E. J. Dionne’s “The New Crowd’s First Test,” in which he makes the case that Dems must pass strong ethics legislation. Noting that the November election was the first time since 1954 that Dems have taken back both houses of Congress, Dionne warns:

This allows the new Democratic majority, in principle at least, to come in with no commitments to doing business as it was done in the immediate past…If Democrats don’t seize this rare opportunity, their party will pay for a long time. Not only will they disillusion their own supporters, but, more important, the angry centrists of the Ross Perot stripe who voted the Republicans out last year will either go back to the GOP or seek other options.

More specifically and with respect to ethics reform, Dionne notes:

…any Democrats who think this anti-corruption talk is just a fad should consult a memo written two weeks after November’s elections by Rep. Rahm Emanuel, the incoming chairman of the Democratic caucus and the House’s shrewdest electoral tactician.
Emanuel counted eight districts the Democrats won largely because of corruption issues. The Democrats, he said, need to be the reformers they said they’d be. “Failing to deliver on this promise,” he added, “would be devastating to our standing with the public, and certainly jeopardize some of our marginal seats.”

Dems have an unprecedented opportunity to solidify public support, and ethics reform is clearly Job 1.


Progressives and Liberals

Over at MyDD, Chris Bowers gets the new year rolling with a post about the gradual displacement of “liberal” by “progressive” as the key self-identifier of Americans on the left and center-left of our political system. Chris’ history lesson on the subject is basically sound if a bit incomplete. He’s correct in saying that late-nineteenth century Democrats (at least up until the fusion with Populists in 1896) were “liberal” in the European sense of favoring laissez-faire economic policies; there’s a good reason that ur-libertarian Ayn Rand regarded Grover Cleveland as the beau ideal of American political history. But they did not always think of themselves as such, given their espousal of states-rights and constitutional strict-construction doctrines; regular southern Democrats in particular called their party “conservative” through most of the nineteenth century.Likewise, “progressive” was not universally used as the self-identifier of the center-left prior to the New Deal. The term was often used by business interests who thought of advanced capitalism as a historically determined trend. And many Populists, who often argued they were restoring a pre-capitalist Jeffersonian political order, certainly didn’t embrace the label of “progressive,” either. Chris is spot-on in noting that “progressive” became tainted by its association with the pro-communist (or at least anti-anti-communist) Left, especially in 1948. And he’s also right in acknowledging that the revival of the “progressive” self-identification occurred almost simultaneously in two very different parts of the Democratic Party in the 1990s: the anti-war, anti-corporate, anti-establishment Left, and the New Democrat movement in the center-left. I have one quibble with Chris’ suggestion that New Democrats started using the term “progressive” (most notably with the establishment of the Progressive Policy Institute in 1989) “as a means to avoid being labeled as ‘liberal.'” That suggests the terminology was purely cosmetic and non-ideological. In fact, the early New Democrats argued that “liberalism” had become temperamentally reactionary, consumed with defending the dead letter of every single New Deal/Great Society program and policy, while sacrificing the spirit of innovation that made “progressives” progressive. The whole international “Third Way” phenomenon was not designed to produce a moderate middle-point between Left and Right, but instead a reformulation of the progressive mission of the center-left at a time when the Right was successfully battening on popular discontent with outworn social democratic programs. That’s why many of us from the New Dem tradition heartily dislike the “centrist” or “moderate” labels, even though they are hard to escape as a short-hand for intra-party politics. (I could, but won’t, go off into a digression about the unusual nature of the American left, which never even flirted with Marxism, and never really embraced European-style democratic socialism, despite some social-democratic features of the Populist program and the New Deal).As for Chris’ ultimate question about the advisability of “progressive” as a unifying, if not always clarifying, self-identifier for the American left and center-left, I’m certainly comfortable with the P-word as opposed to the L-word. Outside the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom (and perhaps to a very limited extent, Germany), the term “liberal” is invariably associated with the political right, while “progressive” has begun to replace “social democratic” as the preferred general term for the left and center-left (the latter process being hastened by the collapse of communism). A particular irritant in any transnational discussion of political terminology has been the variable meaning of the term “neo-liberal,” which outside the US denotes the Thatcher-Reagan revival of the political right based on dogmatic market capitalism, while here it lingers as the chosen self-identifier for those proto-New Democrats of the 1980s associated with the germinal thinking of the Washington Monthly in those days, which reached its brief zenith in Gary Hart’s 1984 presidential campaign. Even if “progressives” often disagree on a host of issues, the term reminds us of our common moorings in a tradition that is hostile to inherited or state-backed privilege, committed to equal opportunity, cognizant of the ultimate solidarity of all human beings, and determined to both accept and shape the forces of change through collective action. That’s why I’m a progressive, anyway.


Dems’ Future on Line As New Congress Convenes

The Democratic majority takes control of Congress this week for the first time in 12 years, and Lyndsey Layton and Juliet Eilperin have an insightful preview in their WaPo article “Democrats To Start Without GOP Input.” Those who favor a strong “take charge” strategy for Dems over a more bipartisan approach will be encouraged. As Eilperin and Layton note:

Democrats are planning to largely sideline Republicans from the first burst of lawmaking…instead of allowing Republicans to fully participate in deliberations, as promised after the Democratic victory in the Nov. 7 midterm elections, Democrats now say they will use House rules to prevent the opposition from offering alternative measures, assuring speedy passage of the bills and allowing their party to trumpet early victories.

But Speaker Pelosi’s spokesman Brendan Daly indicated that the take charge strategy applies primarily to the much publicized “plan for first 100 hours” when the House convenes on Thursday:

Daly said Democrats are still committed to sharing power with the minority down the line. “The test is not the first 100 hours,” he said. “The test is the first six months or the first year. We will do what we promised to do….We’ve talked about these things for more than a year,” he said. “The members and the public know what we’re voting on. So in the first 100 hours, we’re going to pass these bills”

The authors point out that Senate Democrats will implement a more conciliatory strategy, owing to their slender majority.
WaPo has another article of interest regarding the Dems’ congressional strategy, E. J. Dionne’s “The New Crowd’s First Test,” in which he makes the case that Dems must pass strong ethics legislation. Noting that the November election was the first time since 1954 that Dems have taken back both houses of Congress, Dionne warns:

This allows the new Democratic majority, in principle at least, to come in with no commitments to doing business as it was done in the immediate past…If Democrats don’t seize this rare opportunity, their party will pay for a long time. Not only will they disillusion their own supporters, but, more important, the angry centrists of the Ross Perot stripe who voted the Republicans out last year will either go back to the GOP or seek other options.

More specifically and with respect to ethics reform, Dionne notes:

…any Democrats who think this anti-corruption talk is just a fad should consult a memo written two weeks after November’s elections by Rep. Rahm Emanuel, the incoming chairman of the Democratic caucus and the House’s shrewdest electoral tactician.
Emanuel counted eight districts the Democrats won largely because of corruption issues. The Democrats, he said, need to be the reformers they said they’d be. “Failing to deliver on this promise,” he added, “would be devastating to our standing with the public, and certainly jeopardize some of our marginal seats.”

Dems have an unprecedented opportunity to solidify public support, and ethics reform is clearly Job 1.


Focus: Swing States and Electoral Votes

In long range terms, true blue Dems should be all about the 50 State Strategy, though we may differ on shorter range strategy options. With this in mind, we kick off the New Year — and campaign ’08 — with a look at margins of victory in key swing states in ’04. Swing State Project’s, DavidNYC has a post listing states that voted for Kerry or Bush in ’04 by a margin of less than 10 percentage points. The list includes 21 swing states, here broken down into subcategories (- denotes voting margins for Bush):
Squeekers (0 to 1% margin): WI (0.38); IA (-0.67); and NM (-0.79)
Nail-biters (1 to 3% margin): NH (1.37); OH (-2.10); PA (2.50); and NV (-2.59)
Swingers (3 to 5% margin): MI (3.42); MN (3.48); OR (4.16); and CO (4.67)
Winnables (5 to 8% margin): FL (-5.01); NJ (6.68); WA (7.8); MO (-7.2); DE (7.6)
Do-ables (8 to 10% margin): VA (-8.20); HI (8.75); ME (8.99); AR (-9.76;) and CA (9.95);
Any of these 21 states could provide the pivot in a close election. Nail-biters OH and PA merit heightened concern because they rank 6th and tied for 5th, respectively in electoral votes among all states. Winnables FL and NJ also rank among the top ten of all states in electoral votes. The good news is Dems did extremely-well in ’06 state-wide races in top ten electoral vote states, and demographic trends generally favor Dems in all of them.
Democratic candidates and campaigners will have to navigate the complex demographics, political geography, polls and candidate profiles of the swing states, with an eye focused on building support among swing constituencies and independent voters. Meanwhile, Dem strategists should read the Swing State article and comment thread, which contains some interesting tips for different states.


Focus: Swing States and Electoral Votes

In long range terms, true blue Dems should be all about the 50 State Strategy, though we may differ on shorter range strategy options. With this in mind, we kick off the New Year — and campaign ’08 — with a look at margins of victory in key swing states in ’04. Swing State Project’s, DavidNYC has a post listing states that voted for Kerry or Bush in ’04 by a margin of less than 10 percentage points. The list includes 21 swing states, here broken down into subcategories (- denotes voting margins for Bush):
Squeekers (0 to 1% margin): WI (0.38); IA (-0.67); and NM (-0.79)
Nail-biters (1 to 3% margin): NH (1.37); OH (-2.10); PA (2.50); and NV (-2.59)
Swingers (3 to 5% margin): MI (3.42); MN (3.48); OR (4.16); and CO (4.67)
Winnables (5 to 8% margin): FL (-5.01); NJ (6.68); WA (7.8); MO (-7.2); DE (7.6)
Do-ables (8 to 10% margin): VA (-8.20); HI (8.75); ME (8.99); AR (-9.76;) and CA (9.95);
Any of these 21 states could provide the pivot in a close election. Nail-biters OH and PA merit heightened concern because they rank 6th and tied for 5th, respectively in electoral votes among all states. Winnables FL and NJ also rank among the top ten of all states in electoral votes. The good news is Dems did extremely-well in ’06 state-wide races in top ten electoral vote states, and demographic trends generally favor Dems in all of them.
Democratic candidates and campaigners will have to navigate the complex demographics, political geography, polls and candidate profiles of the swing states, with an eye focused on building support among swing constituencies and independent voters. Meanwhile, Dem strategists should read the Swing State article and comment thread, which contains some interesting tips for different states.