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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: November 2009

Turnout Not Main Factor in NJ, VA

Mark Mellman has a post up at The Hill, “Lessons from Elections ’09,” which makes an interesting point about turnout in last week’s election, that “President Obama did a relatively better job rallying the African-American community for Jon Corzine in 2009 than he did for himself in 2008.” Mellman, president of The Mellman Group (political consultants) explains that “African-Americans constituted a greater share of the New Jersey electorate this November than last,” and adds:

Turnout was not the culprit in Virginia, either. In Alexandria, turnout was down by fewer than 1,000 voters, compared to 2005. Gov. Tim Kaine (D) won it by 50 points then; Creigh Deeds by far less — 32 points — this year. Arlington witnessed an uptick in participation, but the percentage of the vote won by the Democrat plunged…In short, these Democrats lost not because they failed to turn out voters, but rather because they had too few voters to turn out.

Hard to avoid the conclusion that we had flawed candidates in those states. next year, however, could be a very different story, says Mellman. “…By then the environment is likely to be meaningfully altered.”
TDS contributor Chris Bowers concurrs — to a point. But he elaborates with some skepticism in his OpenLeft post, “Which is the bigger problem, lower Democratic turnout or voter shift toward Republicans?

Over at Pollster.com, Charles Franklin looks at the data in New Jersey and Virginia. He concludes that a shift of Democratic-voters toward Republicans was a bigger factor in the Democratic defeats in those states than was the lower turnout among (mostly young) Democrats.
Franklin’s conclusions are not entirely convincing, because it is difficult to separate the two variables from each other. For example, the large shift among Independents toward Republicans was partially caused by lower turnout among young, Democratic-leaning Independents. The pro-Republican shift among Independents was not just caused by Independents switching their vote from Democrats to Republicans.
However, even if it is not possible to definitely prove whether lower Democratic turnout or voter shift to Republicans is the main problem facing Democrats, even attempting such a determination may present a false choice. First, both of these problems exist, and so addressing only one is always only a partial strategy. Second, there may well be ways to appeal to both disillusioned voters and to swing voters at the same time.

Bowers cites a range of other factors and concludes, “the best strategies will reject an either / or of exciting the base and appealing to swing voters as an unnecessary false choice.”


Tea Party of Doom

It was a year ago that Igor Panarin, a Russian academic and former KGB analyst, first drew widespread attention in the West, with a front page profile in the Wall Street Journal and a prominent link from Drudge.
His claim to fame?
Professor Panarin predicts that the U.S. will soon break apart. While descriptions of his dystopia vary, in most accounts, six new nations emerge from the rubble — The California Republic, consisting of the entire Pacific coast, under a Chinese sphere of influence; The Atlantic Republic, drawn from the East Coast down through the Carolinas, which would join the European Union; the South, which will fall under the influence of Mexico; the entire Midwest, which would join Canada; Alaska, which would be claimed by Russia; and Texas, with all its talk of secession, which would declare independence.
Panarin hosts a radio show and helps to train state diplomats in Russia, but as Mother Jones reports, Panarin is gaining plenty of new fans here in America:

In September, Chuck Baldwin, a perennial far-right presidential candidate on the Constitution Party ticket, observed that Panarin’s predictions of “some sort of break up of the United States in the near future” was a “very realistic probability.” (Columnist and MSNBC analyst Pat Buchanan linked to Baldwin’s article on Panarin.) Joseph Farah, the founder of the arch-conservative website WorldNetDaily, which is famous for promoting “birther” allegations questioning Obama’s citizenship, wrote in December that he wasn’t “buying into Panarin’s entire prediction” but that “there’s something to it.” More than half of the nearly 3,000 WND readers who responded to a poll attached to Farah’s piece agreed that “the US is on course to break up soon, and another 18 percent said they thought the United States wouldn’t break up, but would ‘continue to lose sovereignty to the UN and other global entities.'”

This week, conservatives took their appreciation a step farther, when Panarin was flown in to give a presentation to a gathering of the Houston Tea Party Patriots at a Hilton Hotel in Texas. In promoting the event, organizers wrote that some called Panarin’s theory a “radical impossibility,” then asked, “But is it?”
When a movement, which claims to fight socialist fascism in the name of freedom, promotes the ideas of a former KGB agent as a way to offer some intellectual heft to its arguments, it becomes increasingly difficult to lend that movement any credibility whatsoever. But these are the same people who insist on comparing health care reform to the Holocaust, so perhaps credibility just isn’t what they’re going for.


New Ads Press Sen. Lincoln on Public Option

Lieberman looks like a lost cause, as far as the public option is concerned. But ActBlue is setting an impressive example of citizen lobbying, via TV ads, to persuade Senator Blanche Lincoln to not filibuster against an up or down vote on the public option.
BlueAmerica’s latest Lincoln ad is very tough, and graphically amusing, depicting Senator Lincoln all gussied up like a NASCAR driver, only the ads pasted all over her jumpsuit are for her many health care contributors. Slide the right-side bar at the link down and view three more ‘Harry and Louise’ style ads depicting a couple at the kitchen table wondering why Sen. Lincoln is so concerned about health insurers, when they can hardly pay their bills. The idea here is to build constituent awareness about her foot-dragging and get them to call her and urge her to get on the side of consumers, who need a public option to have any leverage with private insurers.
Some I guess would argue that these ads may do more harm than good if they alienate Lincoln from her progressive supporters. If she is that petty, however, she would probably vote wrong anyway. So I say it’s time for the full-court press. The ads are honest, both in the facts presented and in depicting the utter bewilderment many of her constituents — especially those Democrats who voted for her — are feeling at her reluctance to even allow a vote on a measure that would let maybe 10 percent of Americans chose government health insurance over private insurance. Will Lincoln be a corporate lackey or champion of the people? Maddow puts the campaign to win Lincoln’s support in perspective right here.
Meanwhile a facebook group has raised over $200,000 in pledges to support Lieberman’s opponent if he votes against allowing an up or down vote on the public option.
(Thanks to commenter pjcamp for correction)


The Texas Tribune Example

Last year, the American Journalism review conducted its fifth census of newspaper reporters who cover state government. Their survey found only 355 full-time newspaper reporters at work in the nation’s state capitols, a decrease of 32 percent from 2003. In the year since this report, the industry has continued to suffer, and local papers across the country have announced more buyouts and early retirements.
But a group of entrepreneurs at the Texas Tribune is engaged in an experiment with the hopes of creating a model that allows local political reporting to survive and even thrive online:

Led by Evan Smith, the former editor of the highly respected Texas Monthly, The Tribune is a nonprofit attempt to use a mix of donations, sponsorships, premium content and revenue from conferences to come up with a sustainable model for journalism that neither depends on nor requires a print product.
At this point, The Tribune has raised $3.7 million, including $1 million from John Thornton, an Austin venture capitalist, $1.6 million from other individuals, $500,000 from the Houston Endowment and $250,000 from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Part of the reason the Tribune method holds so much promise is the degree to which it keeps its mission tightly focused. As the New York Times reports in their profile of the organization, the organization faced a serious decision last week, when the shootings at Fort Hood occurred only 90 minutes from their office in Austin, Texas:

“We were all sitting around talking excitedly about what we were going to do with it,” said Elise Hu, who came to The Tribune from KVUE-TV. “And then you could see Matt,” she said, indicating her colleague Matt Stiles next to her at lunch, “was about to blow his stack.”
“It wasn’t our story. Should we have just been one more news organization rushing to Fort Hood? I don’t think so,” said Mr. Stiles, who joined the Web site from The Houston Chronicle.

The Tribune has very specific beat. It covers politics, policy, and state government. Those are the areas in which its reporters have developed expertise, and when those reporters didn’t see a way they could add value to a story about Fort Hood, they didn’t devote resources to writing it. That’s an excellent example which highlights an important point — on the Internet, journalists really can’t afford be be redundant. When every other news outlet in the world is covering a story, it’s best to focus on what you can offer that is unique.
If The Tribune knows this already, there’s a lot of reason to hope they might have some serious lessons to teach the rest of us in the future.


CA’s Leadership Crisis a Challenge for Dems

It’s frequently said that change comes to California before it comes to the rest of the nation, and if that’s the case America may be in for a rocky ride, according to a new report, published by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, in conjunction with Public Opinion Strategies. The report, based on a survey of 1,500 CA RVs for the L.A. Times and the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, indicates that widespread discontent with state leadership may be creating a political vaccuum. From the exec summary:

Results reveal that voters in California are deeply pessimistic about where things currently stand in their state and are very unhappy with their state leaders. The State Legislature and Governor Schwarzenegger both receive very low approval ratings and it seems that these low marks are more driven by voters’ disappointment with their leaders than anger. Despite their unhappiness voters resist all of the changes presented to them that would help shore up the large budget deficit and eliminate some of the gridlock in Sacramento.

An L.A. Times article by Evan Halper based on the study, reports,

More than a third of those polled said they or a family member had lost a job in the last year. Nearly half said they or someone in their family had been hit with a cut in take-home pay, and 57% said their investments or those of family members had dropped by more than a quarter.
The recession’s impact is particularly strong among blacks and Latinos, with 57% of Latinos and 41% of blacks in the survey saying they or someone in their family had lost a job as a result of the recession. Among Latinos, 21% reported a home foreclosure, a number more than twice the overall rate of those surveyed.
Nearly a quarter of those polled said they or someone in their family had lost healthcare coverage as a result of the recession. And 27% said they or someone in their family had put off or canceled a medical appointment or prescription in the last year because of the cost.

Further,

Amid tough times, “voters seem uninterested in budgetary innovation,” said Stan Greenberg, one of the two pollsters who supervised the survey. His Republican counterpart, Neil Newhouse, concurred, saying the poll indicated widespread voter “distrust” of proposed reforms, in favor of a focus on cutting spending and reducing the power of special interests.
…A solid majority, 65%, opposed plans to place sales tax-like levies on services such as legal advice and car repairs. A proposal to flatten the income tax to make the state less dependent on the wealthy was opposed by 48% of voters and supported by just 33%. The nonpartisan panel had endorsed the argument made by many budget experts that income taxes from wealthy residents make state finances too erratic because they rise and fall dramatically as the stock market moves.
Another proposal being pushed by budget reformers, although not the commission, would ease the restrictions on property tax increases put in place three decades ago by Proposition 13. That idea was also unpopular. Just 30% of voters support such changes even if they would affect only commercial property and not residences.

Another L.A. Times report on the survey by Cathleen Decker indicates that there is an emerging opportunity for Democrats:


The House Vote: Lux’s Cheers and Sneers

Mike Lux has a HuffPo post on the House health care reform vote which provides some illuminating observations about the struggle to unify Democrats in support of the measure, including this tribute to Speaker Pelosi’s leadership:

Nancy Pelosi deserves enormous credit for finding a way to get this done. Like all progressives, I am deeply unhappy with the abortion language that was allowed to be voted into this bill. That language is unacceptable and has to be changed in conference committee. But I was looking at the vote count on Friday night too, and we really were done unless that vote was allowed. There were literally no good choices at that moment, because to let the bill fail or pull the bill from being voted on would have caused everything to get unraveled. We still have a very good chance at stripping this terribly restrictive anti-abortion language in conference committee, and need to keep fighting to do that.
On the final vote, the whipping process was intense and impressive. Democratic leaders I have known in the past have rarely played this kind of hardball, but some kneecaps were broken Saturday night to get these votes, and the Speaker did a masterful job of doing every little thing that needed to be done. She gave no passes to people, and she was very clear there would have been consequences to all who voted no. She got the job done.

After giving due credit to the leadership, Lux has a scold for both the single-payer and Blue Dog purists:

On the other hand, there are some Democrats I am appalled by. As a 30-year supporter of single-payer, and with full knowledge of the imperfections in this bill, I am angry that single-payer supporters Kucinich and Massa were happy to let any hope of health care reform for a generation die because the bill wasn’t everything we hoped it would be. To let another generation go by where tens of thousands of people die every year from being under-insured, and have the insurance companies continue to be allowed to screw people over preexisting conditions, lifetime caps, and recessions is just wrong.
Then there is the large collection of Blue Dogs who care nothing about the President or the Democratic Party’s top priority, let alone all those people without insurance. After all that Rahm Emanuel and Nancy Pelosi did for these reps in the 2006 and 2008 elections, all the money and time and staff and consultant help they gave them, for those Blue Dogs to walk away on the biggest issue, when they were needed the most, is a sign of their selfishness…They are also dumb about their own political fate: if Democrats don’t deliver, Democratic base voters will walk away in massive numbers, and it will be the people in marginal districts that will suffer the most.

Lux names and thanks the conservative Dem House Reps who supported the party on this crucial vote and looks to the future with confidence that Dems will soon pass a transformational health care reform bill, “making history when we do.”


Roots of the GOP woman problem

Anyone flipping through CSPAN in between football games on Saturday had an opportunity to catch a pretty ugly sight. As Rep. Lois Capps spoke out in defense of women’s rights, Republican Congressman Tom Price repeatedly attempted to shout her down, citing parliamentary procedure. This comes just a week after conservatives forced a moderate woman out of the race for the congressional seat in NY-23.
Now POLITICO has a story on the GOP’s struggles in persuading women to run for office:

House Republican leaders have spent years trying to bolster female recruitment, often with frustrating results. While the number of Democratic women willing to challenge sitting Republicans keeps rising, recruiting GOP women to challenge Democratic incumbents is becoming harder.
From 1994 to 2004, the NRCC recruited an average of 20 women a cycle to challenge incumbents, and even they won only three of those seats during the entire decade.
In 2006 and 2008, the number of female challengers dropped to 13 and 18, respectively, with only one winner, Rep. Lynn Jenkins of Kansas.

But this isn’t a story that’s limited to Congress, which makes things all the more difficult for the GOP.
The trend is even more pronounced in the states, where Democrats control an overwhelming advantage in the legislatures that count women as a significant percentage of their members. There are 11 states where women represent at least 30 percent of the legislative districts, and we control both legislative chambers in 10 of them.
If the GOP really were serious about recruiting more women to office, perhaps that’s the place where they should start. But the example of Dede Scozzafava — who was a member of the New York Assembly before being chosen to run in last week’s special election — should raise a red flag for many.


Screwing of Older Workers Could Spell Trouble for Dems

James Oliphant’s Sunday L.A. Times article, “Healthcare Reform Bill Wouldn’t End Higher Premiums Based on Age” raises a touchy issue, which may entail significant political costs for Dems in the mid-terms and ’12, if some adjustment is not made. Oliphant, discussing current health care reform proposals, explains it thusly:

…The far-reaching clampdown on insurers leaves one highly controversial element untouched: the issue of charging higher premiums to older policyholders than to younger, presumably healthier consumers who are less likely to file costly claims…Under the provisions of the bill passed by the House on Saturday, as well as in the probable Senate version, insurers will be able to charge middle-aged consumers at least twice as much as they do younger customers.
…Experts use the arcane-sounding term “age rating,” and they discuss it in terms of ratios — as in a 2-1 formula or a 4-1 formula. Behind the jargon, the issue has huge financial and other implications for millions of Americans and the insurance industry.
For example, according to a recent Urban Institute study, if the age-rating ratio were set at 2 to 1, a typical 58-year-old policyholder would pay about $5,900 a year for health insurance. If the age rating were 4 to 1, the premium could jump to $8,650…Conversely, a 24-year-old would pay about $2,965 under a 2-1 rating system, but the premium could fall to $1,880 if the 4-1 ratio were used.
Advocates for older Americans argue that age rating amounts to discrimination, gives insurers a back-door way to deny coverage to those who need it most, and imposes serious hardship on many middle-aged people who are years away from being eligible for Medicare.
“Age is an immutable characteristic. I can’t make myself younger,” said Natale Zimmer, policy director for OWL, an advocacy group for middle-aged and older women. “To charge someone more simply based on age really amounts to discrimination.”
…Meanwhile, depending on the ratings, older people could have both higher costs and higher out-of-pocket expenses because they are more in need of services.

It’s a difficult challenge, determining fairness in health care premiums. Today’s older health care consumers were told when they were young that they paid relatively high premiums so their costs would be less when they got older. Now they are being told they have to pay more because they are older. Can’t blame them for feeling a little scammed.
The political implications are no less problematic. The importance of young voters in Obama’s election, underscored by the effect of their absence at the polls last Tuesday complicates the political trade-off between making younger voters happy vs. pleasing the older demographic, which turns out on election day at higher rates.
Add to this the fact that older voters are more likely to suffer the ravages of last year’s economic meltdown, in which approximately one-third of pension assets disappeared for most workers who had significant pension holdings. Younger workers will have more time to re-accumulate the missing third, while older workers are more likely to get stuck with the loss. This will not make for happy campers in the older-aged demographic, and unless something is done, incumbents will likely pay the price.
Thus far, Democrats have not been culpable in the rip-off of older workers. It’s been mostly a Republican thing. But if health ‘reform’ that increases costs to older voters is enacted, all bets are off. Conversely, Democrats need a much higher profile as champions of pension reform and moderating health care out-of-pocket costs and premiums paid by older consumers. Assuming they will not react politically to a triple-screwing is wishful thinking, bordering on political suicide.


The House Health Reform Vote

Amidst general pleasure over the House´s passage of health reform legislation Saturday night, there´s also progressive angst over two issues: the narrowness of the vote, which leaves little or no margin for error when the conference committee report comes up, and the passage of the Stupak Amendment, which goes much further than previous House or Senate bills in restricting the ability of consumers to purchase abortion coverage in the new exchanges.
The first concern is probably overwrought. Speaker Pelosi clearly whipped her vote, and gave a free pass to vulnerable Democrats to vote “no.” Since the final version is likely to be less subject to conservative attack than the House bill, Pelosi should be able to hold all 219 Democrats and perhaps add a few.
The Stupak Amendment is more problematic, since 64 Democrats voted for it. But given the arcane nature of the differences between Stupak and earlier anti-abortion provisions, it’s unclear that any Democrats who voted for the House bill would vote against the conference report with a slightly less obnixious anti-abortion provision.
In any event, we should take a deep breath right now and appreciate the historic nature of the House vote, which didn’t look that secure until right before it occurred. Aside from its substantive importance, the vote should prove helpful in diverting the news media from ludicrous overinterpretation of the NJ and VA gubernatorial results.


Judis, Dionne: Elections Not Just Local, Base-Tending Needed

If you suspect that the oft-repeated meme that last week’s elections were about local concerns, rather than national politics is a bit overstated, The New Republic has a couple of posts that add some clarity. First up is
WaPo columnist E.J. Dionne, Jr., author of the recently published Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who explains:

Democrats will highlight Obama’s continued strong approval ratings in New Jersey as part of their larger argument that these contests were local in character. But the disaffection in both Virginia and New Jersey–and the unexpected narrowness of New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s re-election margin, despite his record-breaking campaign spending — should worry all incumbents, particularly governors seeking re-election next year. And after their strong showings in the last two national elections, Democrats happen to constitute a large share of the pool of incumbents.
Sen. Frank Lautenberg, as he made his way to Corzine’s concession speech at a hotel here, said he sees an electorate in a dark mood. “There are two things happening,” the New Jersey Democrat noted. “One is fear. The other is punishment. Voters fear for themselves and their families, and they want to punish anyone who got them into this condition.”
What Lautenberg underscored is a spirit far different than the buoyant confidence Barack Obama inspired a year ago. And the Obama change-agents, particularly the young, were notably absent from the voting booths this week. In Virginia, a state Obama carried comfortably last year, a majority of those who showed up to vote on Tuesday said they had backed John McCain. This much more Republican electorate produced a GOP landslide all the way down the Virginia ballot.
That is the fact from this week that Democrats would be fools to ignore. It’s not a resurgent right wing that should trouble Obama’s party…for the moment, the thrill is gone from politics, and that is very dangerous for the mainstream progressive movement that Obama promised to build.

TNR Sr. Editor John B. Judis also cites Democratic base-neglect, and the economy in particular. According to Judis,

There are two reasons, I think, for the lack of enthusiasm. The first is the continuing economic slump (according to some economists, we can no longer say “recession.”) As I have argued before, rising unemployment almost inevitably makes presidents unpopular. And if unemployment rises above ten percent, and stays there for 2010, the Democrats are going to be in trouble in 2010. Their base will not come out, and swing voters will decide to take a chance on the other party.
The economists in the White House may have good grounds for believing that unemployment will begin to fall by next June without the equivalent of a second stimulus. But if they don’t believe this, or are not sure about it, then the Obama administration better find ways to dole out more money. Increases in spending like this will cause howls of disbelief from the far right and from the would-be centrists, but these kind of measures–and not a further urge to compromise–are what will help the party’s prospects in 2010.
The second reason has more to do with the administration’s political style. While making much of his community organizing background, Obama has failed to keep the Democratic–and more broadly, liberal–base enthusiastic and committed. There is simply no feeling of a political movement or a crusade among the Democratic grassroots the way there was, say, among Republicans and conservatives during a comparable time in Ronald Reagan’s first term.

And the best response, according to Judis:

…Obama has cultivated an insider style of politics aimed at Congress rather than the public. This is not to say that Obama should hold out for a single-payer health insurance program or nationalize the banks. Like Reagan, Obama should be ready to compromise–and also, obviously, to propose actions that will actually work. But in putting forward their programs, Obama and the White House have to begin to wage more of a public campaign that touches upon the ideals of social justice that got him into office. He has to make clear to voters and to what remains of a political movement that he is not just on their side, but fighting for them. He hasn’t quite done so, and that is one reason for the difficulties he and the Democrats encountered in this month’s elections.

With respect to next year’s mid-terms, the challenge to re-ignite the base is clear for Obama, the Democratic Party — and progressive activists alike.