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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: November 2008

64 Years

On Election Night, I noted that Barack Obama’s was winning the highest percentage of the popular vote for any Democrat since 1964.
But if you put aside LBJ’s historic landslide, you have to go back another twenty years to find another Democratic candidate who won as much as Obama’s 53% of the popular vote: FDR in 1944, who won 53.4% of the vote.


New South Trumps Dixie

Now that NBC has called NC for Obama, as well as the New York Times, we can say that three of the four largest southeastern states, FL, VA and NC voted for an African American presidential candidate, and he only lost by five points in GA, where reports of vote suppression may account for much of the margin.
Please don’t tell me that FL, VA and NC are not really southern states because of their fancy suburbs, snowbird refugees and high tech blah blah. That’s part of the new south. Get used to it. Yes, Dixie still thrives in parts of the southeast, as evidenced by Obama’s much weaker showing in MS, AL, AR, TN and SC. But even in the most conservative areas Dems are often competitive in the state legislatures and even statewide races, as indicated by the impressive numbers of Democratic office holders. Southern states are contributing two of the U.S. Senate pick-ups and four House of Reps. seats to the Dems’ net gain.
The “skip the south” strategy had merit in 2000 and 2004, in part because the Dem presidential nominees weren’t well-suited for the southeast. But now the demographic transformation has reached the point where the largest southeastern states are highly competitive for even liberal Democrats who know how to campaign. Smart Democratic candidates will find the southeast even more hospitable in 2012.


Exit the Tax Issue

It’s obvious that John McCain tried to make Barack Obama’s tax policies the decisive issue–with large undertones of racial politics at or just under the surface–down the homestretch of the campaign. So what do the exit polls tell us about the impact of his argument that Obama wanted to raise taxes on many if not most middle-class Americans?
Well, asked if “your taxes will go up if Obama wins,” 71% of voters said “yes,” even though Obama argued that only 5% of Americans would be exposed to a tax increase under his plan. So McCain succeeded brilliantly on this issue, right? Well, not so much, since 61% of voters said their taxes would go up if the Republican won. And among those expecting a tax increase under an Obama administration, McCain only won by a relatively modest 53-44 margin.
There are all sorts of ways to interpret these findings. Maybe McCain got purchase with his claims that Obama had supported tax increases on the middle class in some obscure budget resolution vote. Maybe Obama’s hammering of McCain for wanting to tax employer-provider health care benefits had a big effect. Maybe voters cynically believed that all politicians secretly want to raise their taxes. Or maybe they thought conditions in the country would require tax increases.
But in any event, it’s reasonably clear that the tax issue, and all the racially loaded Joe the Plumber folderol that accompanied it, was not any sort of potential, much less actual, game-changer for the McCain-Palin ticket. Many millions of Americans bought the supposedly toxic idea that their taxes might go up if Obama won, and either didn’t care, or figured it wasn’t really a distinguishing issue between the two candidates.


Consequences of Proposition 8

We will all obviously be affected by the election results on November 4, some more directly than others. But it’s hard to argue that much of anyone will be so immediately and emotionally affected as the thousands of gay couples who got married in California since same-sex ceremonies became legal on June 17–and who now face official nullification of their marital bonds via the narrowly passed initiative Proposition 8.
Lawsuits have already been launched in California courts to overturn Prop 8 on the highly complex grounds that it represents a “revision” rather than an “amendment” of the state constitution (loose translation: constitutional initiatives must be specific enough so as not to represent a broad-based assault on fundamental rights or judicial prerogatives).
Eugene Volokh has posted a pretty thorough discussion of this challenge, and predicts it will fail based on earlier precedents. In a separate post, he also discusses and rejects the theory that Prop 8 will be held not to apply to existing marriages, either because that would abrogate existing contracts, or because some Prop 8 supporters claimed they had not intention of having that effect. Since the plain language of Prop 8 prohibits “recognition” of same-sex marriages, that seems a reasonable conclusion. (Volokh also suggests that married gay couples will probably be automatically recognized as domestic partners, a status unaffected by the initiative).
How many people are we talking about here? According to one estimate, as of September 17, three months after gay marriages became legal in California, 11,000 couples had tied the knot. You’d have to figure the numbers stayed pretty high in the six weeks between September 17 and election day, if only because couples knew the door to their nuptials might soon slam shut.


Democrats: An extremely dangerous situation is developing just beneath the radar. We need to be fully prepared.

After the 1992 election, it took over a year for the first signs of significant right-wing populist activity to appear in America – signs like the quasi-military “militia” movement in Michigan and elsewhere, the appearance of bunkered apocalyptic religious communities – Waco, etc, and the carefully nurtured paranoid rumors of “Black Helicopters”, UN invasion forces and the “cocaine/mafia hit men” working for Bill and Hillary Clinton.
This time very genuinely disturbing trends are starting to appear even before Obama takes office.
The reason, of course, is obvious. The insidious smears directed at Obama by McCain’s media operation, the right-wing media and third-party internet rumors directly identified him with violent political terrorism, Moslem extremism and thuggery and intimidation by Black militants. Nothing remotely this inflammatory was leveled at Clinton during the 1992 campaign.
Republicans will now try to dismiss this as just the natural excesses of a “hard-fought campaign” and more politically sophisticated Republicans will now ratchet down the rhetoric and concede that none of the charges were literally or even remotely true.
But this uniquely vile propaganda offensive has left a huge toxic residue. There are now millions of Americans who quite sincerely believe that all the accusations noted above about Obama are in large part or in complete measure true. They are particularly concentrated in working class and small town America, where informal “word of mouth” channels of communication are trusted more than national media. The core group that accepts this view are long time hard-right conservatives but their influence extends outward in concentric circles of person-to-person communication.
Many Obama supporters do not directly sense the extraordinary degree of cultural disenfranchisement and political isolation these people are feeling at this moment because they do not ordinarily socialize with this sector of America. But the sense of genuine shock and – yes – fear is very, very real.
Read the following digest of a call-in to G. Gordon Liddy’s radio show, reported by Media Matters:

On the November 4 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio program, G. Gordon Liddy spoke to a caller who stated: “I’m ready to go to the concentration camp, that [Sen. Barack] Obama’s police force — he will round me up. Because I — I’m a white American.” Liddy then said, “Well, listen to this,” and aired an edited clip of Obama [talking about the America Corps program] saying in a July 2 speech in Colorado Springs: “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.” Liddy then stated: “Shades of the Gestapo. The Geheime Staatspolizei,”

This kind of paranoid discourse could previously be assumed to be confined to a relatively small fringe of the conservative right. But, as the crowds at Sarah Palin’s speeches indicated, it has recently metastasised well beyond its traditional boundaries. This new and larger group is composed of basically decent people, but they are genuinely afraid.
As a result, Democrats must seriously anticipate that the increasingly extreme right-wing attitudes and social movements that developed over a three-four year period during Clinton’s first term may start to appear within a matter of a few months rather than years.
What can Dems do? First, while not compromising on needed programs and policies, they must maintain a sincere stance and attitude of inclusiveness – as Obama himself is doing. The basic fact is that these Americans are not our enemies. They are, in Obama’s excellent formulation, potential supporters we have yet to convince.
Second, Democrats at all levels should aggressively insist that the more sophisticated Republican advocates in the media and elsewhere who helped promulgate the vilest of the smears should not be “forgiven” for what they did until they make real and substantial efforts to remediate the toxic legacy of this campaign.
They poisoned people’s minds. That’s not “hardball” politics; that’s just disgusting. They have an obligation to help repair the damage they did to the United States of America.


Notes Towards an Ideological Profile of the House Democratic Caucus

Once everyone’s through with slicing and dicing the election returns and pondering the meaning of Barack Obama’s victory, a major topic for the chattering classes will be the ideological complexion of the Democratic congressional caucuses. This is especially true of the House, where more leftbent progressives have been preoccupied for some time with efforts to curb the influence of party moderates and the moderate-to-conservative Blue Dog Coalition.
It will take some time to figure this all out, but one leading indicator involves candidates endorsed by the more ideologically inclined groups on both sides of the intraparty argument.
According to Chris Bowers of OpenLeft, five members of ActBlue’s BetterDemocrats list of reliably progressive House candidates were among those who won Republican seats last night: Alan Grayson of FL, Eric Massa of NY, Joshua Segall of AL, Tom Perriello of VA, and Gary Peters of MI. Two others, Darcy Burner of WA and Charlie Brown of CA, are in very close races that haven’t yet been decided.
Meanwhile, according to an email from Blue Dog Coalition communications director Kristen Hawn, they’re claiming Bobby Bright of AL and Walt Minnick of ID, who won Republican seats, plus Frank Kradovil of MD, who’s in an undecided race. But of the four incumbent Democrats who lost, two (Nick Lampson of TX and Tim Mahoney of FL) were officially Blue Dogs, while the other two (Nancy Boyda of KS and Don Cazayoux of LA) were closely aligned with the Blue Dogs.
With Democrats making–so far–a net gain of 21 seats, this accounting-by-endorsement method leaves a majority of new Members unaccounted for. Many of them, I would guess from limited knowledge of anything other than their districts, are probably standard-brand Democrats who will largely follow the leadership and aren’t factional by nature. But it does cast some doubt on the widespread assumption than an expanded Caucus would necessarily involve a tilt to the center or right.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist


Outreach and the White Evangelical Vote

I’m still staring at exit polls, but an old friend who’s a bit ahead of me, TIME’s Amy Sullivan, has an interesting piece out about the white evangelical vote. The bottom line is that while Obama didn’t do terribly well in this voting demographic, his numbers were significantly higher in battleground states such as CO, IN and MI where his campaign had a serious outreach effort to evangelicals.
The personal touch helps, particularly among folk who might otherwise think your candidate is the Antichrist.


44 Years

Now that Indiana has been called for Barack Obama, that makes two states–the other being Virginia–which went Democratic for the first time since 1964. And speaking of 1964, Obama’s 52% of the national popular vote is the highest any Democrat has won since 1964. Mention that to the next GOPer you hear arguing that Obama didn’t really do all that well.


Devils in Details

As the final results begin to dribble in, we are learning anew about crucial state and even local variations in how certain ballots are counted. This is particularly true of early/absentee ballots, which some places count first, some last, and some mixed in with Election Day votes.
In my home state of Georgia, big sacks of uncounted early votes seem to be turning up around metro Atlanta. In the one precise account we have, Fulton County (Atlanta) officials are acknowledging that they sent “exhausted” election workers home last night with about 12,000 early votes still untabulated. This news surfaced at about the same time that Republican Senator Saxby Chambless’ vote totals slipped just under the 50% necessary to avoid a runoff in Georgia’s strange system (creating an extra hangover for GOPers who prematurely celebrated a Chambliss win last night).
There are unconfirmed rumors of uncounted early votes elsewhere in metro Atlanta. But unless offset, the Fulton County ballots should guarantee a runoff, given the heavy African-American tilt of early voting in that county. As I noted a couple of weeks ago, this would be a major boon to newly unemployed campaign workers from both parties, who will flood the Peach State for the next four weeks. The CW is that Republicans always win these sort of stand-alone runoffs (that’s exactly what happened in the last statewide general election runoff in Georgia, in 1992), but it’s hard to say what will happen if Barack Obama campaigns personally for Jim Martin and Democrats outspend Republicans as heavily as they probably can.


Downballot Results

Democrats had a very good, though not sensational, election night below the presidential level. The hope that a decisive presidential win would push Democrats over the edge in every close race was not realized, but the fact remains that the Donkey Party now has impressive majorities in the Senate, the House, the governorships, and state legislative chambers.
As expected, Dems picked up Senate seats in NH, VA, NM and CO without breaking a sweat. Kay Hagan’s big win in NC was a bit less predictable. The race everyone considered a true tossup, MN, ended that way; last time I looked, Norm Coleman led Al Franken by 700 votes with scattered precincts still out, and there will definitely be an automatic recount.
With significant votes still out, Gordon Smith of Oregon is hanging onto a narrow lead in a race most expected him to lose. In a true shocker, convicted felon Ted Stevens of Alaska holds a tiny lead over Mark Begich with a small but unknown number of votes remaining to be counted. And there’s one other shoe that could fall: in GA, Saxby Chambliss’ totals are hovering just above 50% amidst confused reports that a lot of early voting ballots haven’t been counted. If he slips below 50%, he could face a December 2 runoff against Democrat Jim Martin.
If Republicans win all the nail-biters, Democrats would still have a net gain of five Senate seats, and most obviously, will no longer need Joe Lieberman’s vote to control the chamber.
There are still eleven House seats undecided, but at present, Democrats have a net gain of 20 seats, and will probably wind up at the low end of what most experts predicted. Republicans contained their losses in part by knocking off four Democratic incumbents, including three (in TX, KS and LA) representing districts that went heavily for McCain. There were some very satisfying Democratic wins over long-time targets, such as Chris Shayes of CT (the sole remaining GOP House member in New England), Robin Hayes of NC, and Marilyn Musgrave of CO. VA produced the biggest single-state gains, with Dems winning an open seat in NoVa and beating incumbents in Hampton Roads and central/southside VA.
Democrats won a net gain of one governorship, winning the two closest races in WA (Christine Gregoire) and NC (Beverly Perdue).
And according to our buddy Matt Compton at the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, Democrats won control of five new legislative chambers: Delaware House, Ohio House, Wisconsin Assembly, New York Senate, and the Nevada Senate. This means Dems control 60 of the nation’s 98 partisan state legislative chambers.
In ballot initiatives, it was a bad night for marriage equality. Though votes are still out, it appears California’s Proposition 8 won by about three percentage votes, in one of three states where gay marriage is currently legal. Gay marriage bans also passed in AZ and in FL.
In better news, abortion bans lost in CO and most notably in SD. A parental notification restriction lost in CA. Also in CA, a rather weak redistricting reform initiative narrowly won, as did a ban on inhumane treatment of farm animals.