Editor’s Note: We are very pleased to publish this constructive critique of field strategies for the unsuccessful effort to defeat the anti-gay-marriage Proposition 8 initiative in California. Its author is Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, a student at Harvard Divinity School and the director of The Progressive Project (TPP). During the 2008 election season, TPP worked in six cities across the nation to engage communities in actions to elect Barack Obama and to defeat Proposition 8 on the California ballot. This article is based upon her work on the No on 8 campaign, and on other campaigns to defeat similar ballot measures.
On November 4, Proposition 8 passed in California, enshrining in the state constitution a ban on same sex marriage. Similar amendments also passed in Florida and Arizona. We have now lost campaigns like this in 29 states; we have won only once – in Arizona in 2006. On a human level, these defeats are a blow to people across the nation who care about civil rights and equality. On a strategic level, they are explicable; after all, we continue to rely on the same strategies despite mounting evidence that they do not work.
What is required as the LGBT movement goes forward is a commitment to permanent political engagement and a national grassroots strategy and infrastructure that complement our national legal strategy. We must also finally do what our opponents have long been doing: treating each statewide ballot measure as a national campaign.
The loss in California is a particularly apt case study because it took place in our nation’s largest state and because the opposition made it a national campaign from the start. A full analysis of this loss falls into three overlapping categories:
–An aerial view of the infrastructure, strategies and mindset of the national LGBT movement;
–A “zoom-in” view of the specific field, messaging, and funding strategies used by the No on 8 campaign; and
–a similar “zoom-in” view of the strategies used by two concurrent, successful national campaigns: “Yes on 8” and the Obama campaign.
In this article, I will focus on an analysis of the field strategies used by the “No on 8” campaign
Proposition 8 passed by 510,591 votes. We don’t know if that gap could have been closed. But we do know that the “No on 8” campaign could have run a more visionary, nimble and aggressive field strategy. Ultimately the field strategy came up short in two critical, related areas:
First, the “No on 8” campaign did not become national until October, limiting both the volunteers and donors it could engage.
Second, the campaign’s field strategy failed to effectively reach enough swing voters enough times to turn them out as “no” voters.

Read more…

Over at the Century Foundation’s blog, TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira has some interesting observations on the November 4 exit polls, particularly with respect to the White Working Class vote:

They lost these voters by 18 points, a significant improvement over 2004 when they lost them by 23 points, but somewhat worse than I thought they’d do based on preelection polls. In my paper with Alan Abramowitz, The Decline of the White Working Class and the Rise of a Mass Upper Middle Class, we allowed as how Democrats needed to get the WWC deficit into the 10-12 point range to be assured of a solid victory. As it turned out, they were able to achieve a solid victory even with a higher deficit than 10-12 points. This is because the simulations we were working with made pretty conservate assumptions about white college graduate support for Democrats and about minority turnout and support for Democrats. As it turned out, minority turnout and support were through the roof and white college graduates also exceeded our conservative assumptions. So an 18 point WWC deficit was in the end adequate for a solid victory, rather than a squeaker as I thought. And a 10-12 point deficit would have translated into a true landslide….
The stubbornly high deficit for Dems among WWC is mitigated by the fact that there are now far fewer of them in the voting pool. According to the exits, the proportion of WWC voters is down 15 points since 1988, while the proportion of white college graduate voters is up 4 points and the proportion of minority voters is up 11 points.
The Dems did manage a fairly solid 7 point improvement in their deficit among whites with some college, the more affluent, upwardly mobile and aspirational part of the WWC. But they only managed a 3 point improvement among the less educarted segment, those with only a high school diploma or less. So that held down their overall performance among the WWC.
On the state level, Obama did stunningly well among WWC voters in four of the five highly competitive states they won in 2000 and 2004 (MI, MN, OR and WI). The average WWC deficit for Kerry in these states in 2004 was 8 points. In 2008, Obama had an average advantage in these states of 6 points, a pro-Democratic swing of 14 points. In PA, however, the other highly competitive state the Democrats won in 2000 and 2004, Obama did worse than Kerry, losing the WWC by 15 points as opposed to Kerry’s 10 point deficit. But college educated whites in PA swung Obama’s way by 17 points, turning a 12 point ’04 deficit into a 5 point ’08 advantage.

Among other things, Ruy’s post provides yet another data point for the proposition that Obama really changed the demographic map in states where his presence, his ads, and his field organization, focused their attentions.

Senate Democrats wil soon decide whether Joe Lieberman should be allowed to retain his Senate seniority, including a major committee chairmanship, after not only endorsing the other party’s presidential candidate, but campaigning for him, joining in attacks on Barack Obama, and speaking at the Republican National Convention.
I said my piece back in April, in a post at TPMCafe. An excerpt:

This argument [for tolerating Lieberman’s apostasy out of “bipartisanship”] conflates “bipartisanship” with abandonment of party. It’s one thing to cross party lines to support this or that policy initiative or legislation. It’s another thing altogether to oppose your supposed party in the contest that more than anything else, defines “party” to begin with. And it has ever been thus.
Back when Lieberman first endorsed McCain, Ken Rudin of NPR did a useful analysis of precedents. The last example he could find of a Member of Congress endorsing the opposing party’s presidential candidate without retribution was in 1956, when Adam Clayton Powell, at that point the only African-American Member of Congress, endorsed Eisenhower. You can understand why Democrats might have refrained from punishing him. But since then, three congressional Democrats endorsed other candidates (John Bell Williams of Mississippi and Albert Watson of SC in 1964, and John Rarick in 1968), and all were stripped of their seniority in the House. Unlike Lieberman, all three were, if nothing else, faithfully reflecting the views of their constituents.
Since 1968, there have been, quite literally, hundreds if not thousands of Democratic and Republican officeholders who in one election or the other, privately preferred the other party’s presidential candidate. A huge number of Republicans didn’t endorse or campaign for Barry Goldwater in 1964, but nor did they endorse or campaign for Lyndon Johnson. And despite the incredible weakness of the national Democratic Party in the South and West during the 1984 and 1988 presidential cycles, you didn’t see any public defections from the then-robust ranks of elected Democrats, either.
This is, in sum, the Line You May Not Cross if you choose to identify yourself as a Republican or as a Democrat. John McCain surely understands that; had he followed the entreaties of some of his own staff in 2004 by endorsing–much less joining the ticket of–John Kerry, he would have been stripped of his party prerogatives instantly and eternally.

President-elect Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have suggested that Lieberman shouldn’t be automatically booted from the Democratic Caucus. Reid has reportedly offered Lieberman a different, less influential committee chairmanship. But Lieberman has made it clear it’s “my way or the highway”: he retains his seniority and his Homeland Security and Government Reform Committee chairmanship, or walks across the aisle.
This isn’t about “bipartisanship” or “putting the election behind us.” Barack Obama has promised to reach out across party lines to work with Republicans when possible; he could still reach out to Joe Lieberman if he chooses to join the GOP Caucus. It’s also not about the famous “collegiality” of the Senate. The decision on Lieberman will affect the rights and prerogatives of the 23 current Democratic senators with less seniority, who somehow managed to support their own party’s presidential candidate.
Make no mistake: if Lieberman is allowed to retain his seniority and current committee chairmanship, Senate Democrats will be setting an entirely new and incredibly low standard for party loyalty. This would set a precedent that is offensive not only to “activists” or “the base,” but to those with heterodox views who felt enough moral obligation to the Donkey Party to at least keep their mouths shut and stay away from Republican campaign rallies and the Republican convention. Lieberman made his own choices, and that’s fine; it’s a free country and all. But the idea that it’s Democrats who are offending him by insisting that his choices have consequences, particularly when they are bending over backwards to keep him in the Caucus when they no longer need his vote to control the Senate, is simply bizarre.

For those Democrats who were settling down with a bag of popcorn to watch an orgy of ideological strife among Republicans, it’s beginning to become apparent that the war may be over before it began. Sure, there’s plenty of finger-pointing and personal recriminations over tactics and strategy, some of it focused on the McCain-Palin campaign, and some looking back to the errors of the Bush administration. There’s clearly no consensus on who might lead Republicans in 2010 or 2012. But on the ideological front, for all the talk about “movement conservatives” or “traditionalists” at odds with “reformers,” it’s a pretty one-sided fight. And one prominent “reformer,” the columnist David Brooks, pretty much declared defeat yesterday:

The debate between the camps is heating up. Only one thing is for sure: In the near term, the Traditionalists are going to win the fight for supremacy in the G.O.P.
They are going to win, first, because Congressional Republicans are predominantly Traditionalists. Republicans from the coasts and the upper Midwest are largely gone. Among the remaining members, the popular view is that Republicans have been losing because they haven’t been conservative enough.
Second, Traditionalists have the institutions. Over the past 40 years, the Conservative Old Guard has built up a movement of activist groups, donor networks, think tanks and publicity arms. The reformists, on the other hand, have no institutions…..
Finally, Traditionalists own the conservative mythology. Members of the conservative Old Guard see themselves as members of a small, heroic movement marching bravely from the Heartland into belly of the liberal elite. In this narrative, anybody who deviates toward the center, who departs from established doctrine, is a coward, and a sellout.

Now there’s nothing particularly new about this dynamic. It’s exactly the way conservatives reacted to the 2006 debacle, and in fact, to virtually every Republican defeat since about 1940 (with the exception, of course, of 1964). They’ve never been shy about saying that “moderate” or “liberal” Republicans are not only wrong, immoral and gutless, but are in fact losers. And there’s nothing new as well about their take on George W. Bush; it’s pretty similar to their ex post facto take on Richard M. Nixon: a potentially great leader surrounded by venal hacks who sacrificed principle in an illusory search for short-term political gain and personal riches and power.
There are, however, two aspects of contemporary conservative self-justification that strike me as somewhat new.

Read more…

If you own one of those Bush Countdown Calendars that have sold so briskly over the last few years, you know that the presidency of George W. Bush will end in 70 days. Anticipating this event, Paul Waldman of Media Matters has penned for The American Prospect a vast compendium of things to which we will soon say “goodbye and good riddance.” Here’s a brief sample:

Goodbye to stocking government agencies with people who are opposed to the very missions those agencies are charged with carrying out. Goodbye to putting industry lobbyists in charge of the agencies that are supposed to regulate those very industries. Goodbye to madly giving away public lands to private interests. Goodbye to a Food and Drug Administration that acts like a wholly owned subsidiary of the pharmaceutical industry, except when it acts like a wholly owned subsidiary of the fundamentalist puritans who believe that sex is dirty and birth control will turn girls into sluts. Goodbye to the “global gag rule,” which prohibits any entity receiving American funds from even telling women where they can get an abortion if they need it.

There’s a whole lot more, but you get the idea.
But happy as progressives will be to see Bush and his buddies turn in their keys and turn out the lights on their benighted administration, it’s going to be a bit tough adjusting to a post-Bush era, particularly in the blogosphere. W. has represented the still point in a turning world, the Great Galvinizer, the lightning rod, the stimulus to political action, the daily shock to the system, for so very long that many of us will soon struggle for perspective, and even for words. Without a doubt, traffic at progressive political web sites will soon go down, perhaps precipitously, and many bloggers will find themselves trying to decide whether to become policy wonks or cheerleaders or critics of the Obama administration, or simply go dark.
Here at TDS, we are fortunate to have a primary subject matter that is evergreen: the long-term prospects of the Democratic Party, along with the strategic decisions necessary to promote them. But there will be many days when we fire up our computers, stare at the news, and if only for a moment, miss the rich targets served up so regularly by this president and his nightmare of an administration.

It happens every time I pop off about “the new south.” Within days, a southern politician will say something so astoundingly lame that the ‘Tobacco Road’ image of the south will be re-confirmed in the minds of millions. The latest comes from Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA10), or “R-Crazy” as Jay Bookman’s blog on Broun in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution puts it.
Here’s what Senator Obama said in a speech he delivered in Colorado on July 2nd:

We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.

The problem is that Senator Obama didn’t flesh out the proposal in the speech, and the paranoid wingnuts got the audio clip and are now circulating it far and wide as indicative of the President-Elect’s “Marxist” agenda, highlighting the scary phrase “civilian national security force.” As Broun said, according to the Associated Press

…That’s exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it’s exactly what the Soviet Union did…When he’s proposing to have a national security force that’s answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he’s showing me signs of being Marxist.

So what did Obama really mean? According to the AP report:

…Spokesman Tommy Vietor said Obama was referring in the speech to a proposal for a civilian reserve corps that could handle postwar reconstruction efforts such as rebuilding infrastructure — an idea endorsed by the Bush administration.

I’m satisfied. But I did get a call from a highly-intelligent friend who was genuinely concerned about what the statement meant. The Obama-team should explain the proposal a little better, perhaps in an article or written statement. I doubt it will just go away without corrective action. The wingnut buzz is threatening to go viral, even with less extreme conservatives. This is the kind of thing that James Vega warned about in his November 5 TDS post.
Oh well, at least the southeast isn’t the only region to elect scare-mongering knuckleheads to congress, as suggested by another Republican, Michelle Bachman’s win in MN-6.

Jonathan Cohn has a fascinating article up on the New Republic site about the plans underway in the Senate for early action next year on legislation implementing some version of Barack Obama’s health care proposals. Its main thrust is to reject the beltway conventional wisdom holding that fiscal and political conditions guarantee a go-slow approach on health care for both the Obama administration and congressional Democrats. But nestled in his report is this very important detail:

Of course, drafting a proposal is relatively easy. Passing one–well, that’s another story. But [Senate Finance Committee Chairman] Baucus himself confirms what staffers have been saying for months: Assuming Senate Democrats can find some common ground on reform, they would consider using the budget reconciliation process to enact it.
This is a crucial development. The rules of reconciliation limit debate, restrict amendments, and prohibit filibusters. It’s the one time a simple majority of 50-plus-one votes–rather than the 60 it takes to break a filibuster–can definitively pass legislation. It’s a brass-knuckles way to move legislation and, as such, nobody’s first choice. But, if the Republicans won’t negotiate, Baucus has told me, the Democrats might have to use it.

“Reconciliation” is an arcane but very important congressional budget procedure providing special rules for packaging and voting on legislation necessary to implement congressional budget resolutions. Originally a last-ditch means for forcing rebellious authorizing and appropriations committees to stay within budget, reconciliation was transformed at the beginning of Ronald Reagan’s presidency into a vehicle for enacting vast changes in domestic policy on an up-or-down, majority vote. (Indeed, much of Reagan’s domestic agenda was accomplished through a gigantic reconciliation floor substitute in the House–dubbed Gramm-Latta II–that virtually no one had read). It was at the very heart of the Reagan Revolution.
Since Reagan, the use of reconciliation has significantly declined, and has devolved towards its original, stop-gap purpose. But it remains available to a party that controls both Houses of Congress and the White House, and is determined to get big things done quickly.
Republicans will complain, of course, that reconciliation was intended to serve as a way to reduce spending and impose fiscal discipline, not to expand federal benefits for health care or anything else. But the precedent of St. Ronald’s use of reconciliation, which would have shocked the drafters of the Congressional Budget Act, will make such objections seem pretty hypocritical. I’d expect congressional Democrats to emulate their GOP predecessors in another way, by finding a Republican to embrace the “bipartisan” package (for those with short memories, the “Gramm” in “Gramm-Latta,” Phil Gramm of Texas, was at the time a Democrat). But the most important thing is the ability to put together a large and audacious package that can be marketed to the public as what they voted for, and then enacted expeditiously over the objections of the minority party.

Just to add a couple thoughts to Ed’s interesting post yesterday on “The Limits of Demographic Determinism:”
You take away the economic meltdown and Sarah Palin, and it’s not entirely implausible that we lose a few percentage points in key states and get President-Elect McCain. In other words, two anomalous events may have clinched Obama’s win.
Chris Bowers makes a pretty good case for demographic determinism. In my view, however, a demographic and/or an event-driven outcome get a little wobbly when you imagine a less impressive Democratic nominee than Obama. Let’s not pick on Dukakis. Substitute any of the poorly-performing Democratic presidential nominees of the post-war period for Obama, and the victory scenario turns to jello. High or low candidate quality has to be worth at least a few points, which can swing a close election.
On the other hand, a data-driven study of all 36 presidential elections (8 presidents died in office and were replaced by their veeps) might conclude that demography is indeed destiny — in a plurality/majority of the cases. As with polls, it’s hard to look at any single election and make an informed call that applies broadly. The electoral college makes an educated guess even harder, with 50 mini-elections, each with its own demographic mix. To evaluate the role of demographics as the dominant factor, you almost need direct popular election which, by the way, is something Dems should get serious about in the upcoming cycle.
I think Bowers is quite right, however, that certain reforms can help maximize untapped demographic advantages, including universal same day voter registration. felon enfranchisement and weekend voting to name just a few. More Black, Hispanic and women candidates would also help Dems leverage their demographic potential.
Instead of just one pivotal factor, it may be possible to devise and test a formula (more complex than the title of this post) weighing the major factors that determine election victories and assigning them numerical values. Bowers’ ‘internet rising’ factor might even be quantifiable in the percentage of voters who get most of their information from the net or the number of “high information voters.” And things went so amazingly well this cycle — consider the odds against getting all the breaks — you could make a case for divine intervention, although it might be a little hard to quantify. Hey, where’s Nate Silver?

A fundamental issue behind the “realignment or reaction” debate over the meaning of the Obama victory is the relative importance of demographic trends as opposed to the persuasion and mobilization activities of parties and candidates (along with real-life events like recessions and wars).
Positions on this issue do tend to become somewhat polarized. Some “demography as destiny” apostles are almost certainly reacting to the tendency of the chattering classes to treat electoral campaigns as sui generis events in which the entire electorate is up for grabs, and the ebb and flow of campaign dynamics and external events control everything. And on the other side of the divide, those who resist “demography as destiny” explanations rightly object that eight years of the Bush administration, culminating in a financial panic and a deepening recession, not to mention the widely varying strategies and resources of the two parties and the two presidential candidates, must have had some significant effect on the results.
The ever-resourceful Chris Bowers of OpenLeft offers a useful demonstration today of both the strengths and weaknesses of the “demography as destiny” approach. Staring at the exit polls and the changing composition of the electorate over time, Chris provocatively suggests that Barack Obama was probably no better a candidate than the much-derided Mike Dukakis. What really changed between 1988 and 2008, he argues, was the relative size of pro-Democratic and pro-Republican elements of the voting-age population. By looking at Obama’s and McCain’s performance in various groups this year, and reconfiguring them to represent their size in 1988, Chris concludes that a candidate as “good” as Obama would have lost decisively that year, while a candidate as “bad” as Dukakis might have swept to victory this year.
Reflecting Chris’s longstanding views on the decline of White Christian America, the optic he chose for this analysis was religious categories of white voters, and unsurprisingly, he concludes that “The Rise of Non-Christian America” and “The Rise of a Non-White America” were two of the three most important moving parts in the slow change from defeat in 1988 to victory in 2008. The third, “Internet Rising,” isn’t directly about demographics, but plausibly represents a “cultural trend” that crucially affected media, fundraising, and organizational opportunities that Obama exploited but did not create:

Internet Rising: Over the past twenty years, the rise of the network neutral Internet has been, by a long way, the biggest change to the national media landscape. Fully 55% Americans are not just online, but have high-speed connections, and the Internet is now the #2 source of news in the country, trailing only television. Twenty years ago, virtually no one was online, and the world wide web wasn’t even created.
The Rise of Non-Christian America. The number of self-identified non-Christians has slightly more than doubled since 1990 and now totals 21.6% of the population.
The Rise of a Non-White America: While the Census does not measure ethnic / racial statistics the same way every ten years, thus making long-term trends somewhat difficult to pin down, twenty years ago non-whites formed 15% of the electorate, much lower than the 26% in the 2008 election. That is an increase of about one-half percent every year for the past twenty years.

Now the immediate problem with Chris’ analysis is that the Democratic-Republican numbers on racial and religious categories bounced around a fair amount prior to and after 1988. Perhaps both the Dukakis and Obama performances can somehow be stipulated as normative, but there’s nothing obvious about that conclusion. The bigger problem emerges when Chris turns to the question of what, exactly, Obama or Democrats can do to build on the demographic trends he views as crucial:

[N]ow that Democrats are the governing party in D.C., we need to actually go one step further and pass legislation that will itself help continue these trends. While there isn’t much we can, or should, do on the religion front (not the sort of business the government should be involved with), this does mean comprehensive, progressive immigration and media reform.

Since the “internet rising” development isn’t really a demographic trend, and since it’s not a slam dunk that nontraditional media will continue to provide a progressive or Democratic advantage, it’s unclear to me that why “media reform” should be a higher priority than, say, a new foreign policy or universal health care. Immigration reform is a good thing in itself, and will in the long run probably contribute to progressive politics, but the short-term costs in terms of a backlash are tangible as well, which is one reason it didn’t happen in the last couple of Congresses despite significant Republican support, which may now vanish.
Truth is, if you really think demography is the main determining factor in politics, with most elements of governing and campaigning being marginal, then there’s not a whole lot to do between election days other than waiting for the next incremental change in the composition of the electorate. I guess you could make the case that an Obama administration would in that circumstance be free to govern as progressively as possible, since voters have predetermined positions that won’t much be affected one way or another. But in the end, I doubt that Chris Bowers, or that many other advocates of “demography as destiny,” really think events in the real world of politics and governing matter so very little.