The many engines of the MSM are gearing up to interpret tomorrow’s Senate primaries in Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Arkansas, and if the results in these three states go a certain way (Specter loses, Paul wins, Lincoln loses or gets thrown into a runoff), we will hear a full-throated roar of “ANTI-INCUMBENCY!”, which is already the preferred meme for understanding the 2010 cycle. The subtext is usually that white independent voters–whether Tea Partiers or “centrists” or “populists”–are driving this phenomenon.
It’s understandable that writers pressed for time and space will always try to force elections in widely disparate locations into a single mold, and furthermore, U.S. Senate elections are usually to some extent “nationalized,” and may be so more than is usual this year.
But the dynamics of these races aren’t quite that simple. Yes, the 80-year-old Arlen Specter does seem to be sort of the ultimate symbol of what many consider the corrupt bipartisan status quo in Washington, and he is benefitting from support from the Obama administration, the Rendell organization, and labor. But Specter’s party-switching actually separates him from the Washington crowd, and is a major problem for him in a Democratic primary where many participants have been voting against him since they turned 18. Moreover, on the margins Sestak will benefit from an “electability” factor, since recent polls have shown him doing better than the incumbent against Republican Pat Toomey. And then there’s geography: Specter’s base has always been in Philadelphia, and regional turnout–particularly in Western PA, where Sestak’s running very well, and in Philly, where Specter’s benefitting from overwhelming African-American support–will matter a lot.
In Kentucky, there is no incumbent running in the Republican primary, and in fact, the actual incumbent, Jim Bunning, has endorsed everybody’s favorite “insurgent,” Rand Paul. So instead we are told the race is a referendum on someone not running, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who is strongly backing Trey Grayson. Perhaps that is what’s on the mind of Kentucky’s GOP voters (and we are talking about GOP voters, since KY has a closed primary), but Paul’s endorsements from an array of national conservative figures (Sarah Palin, Jim DeMint, James Dobson) and Grayson’s recent efforts to attack Paul for opposing pork for Kentucky makes this an ideological as well as an “outsider” challenge. On the Democratic side, both major candidates are statewide elected officials, and while national progressives tend to favor Jack Conway, Dan Mondiardo is alleged to have a better grassroots network. So who’s the “incumbent” in that race?
Down in Arkansas, Lincoln is obviously an incumbent under fire from people in both parties, and she, like Specter, is getting help from the president (and a certain former president from Arkansas). And yes, unions in particular are seeking to punish her for flip-flopping on the Employee Free Choice Act, and for a less than constructive posture on a variety of other issues, including heatlh reform. But Bill Halter’s campaign against her was really generated by her terrible early poll numbers against every imaginable Republican. And the outcome will likely be determined not by angry white independents ready to eject incumbents, but by a battle over African-American Democratic base voters, who are tilting towards Halter but with an unusually high number of undecideds (hence the Obama-Clinton involvement).
So it’s not really some simple referendum on incumbents, and independents aren’t a factor at all in Kentucky and may not be crucial in Arkansas, either. Maybe Specter and/or Lincoln will win and screw up the preferred narrative anyway. But if not, let’s look a bit more deeply at what it all means.

The latest polling data indicates that Wall St.’s congressional water carriers have a very tough sell ahead in their efforts to weaken financial reform, as TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira explains in his latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’ at the Center for American Progress web pages. Here’s Teixeira on the public’s distrust of the stock market:

As Congress continues to debate the financial regulation bill there are a couple of things it should keep in mind. One is that the public doesn’t trust Wall Street anymore—not even on the level of ordinary investing in the stock market (much less the elaborate financial shenanigans Wall Street firms have recently engaged in). According to the new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, just 35 percent now believe that “the stock market is a fair and open way to invest one’s money” compared to 58 percent who do not believe the stock market is now fair and open due to “corporate corruption and broker practices.”

If any Wall Streeters were hoping that the public would see less financial regulation as a credible fix, they are courting disappointment, as Teixeira notes:

No wonder the public, by 55-38, says they are more concerned that proposed reform of financial regulations will not do “enough to protect consumers and rein in Wall Street” rather than that reform might limit investment opportunities and hurt the country’s ability to compete in financial markets.

“Lawmakers who are thinking of weakening the reform legislation—perhaps under pressure from the legions of financial industry lobbyists who have descended on Washington—might want to reconsider,” warns Teixeira. “The public is likely to take a very jaundiced view indeed of any legislators who appear to be doing the financial industry’s bidding on this bill.”

In response to the Washington Post’s long pattern of “plague on both sides” editorial bewailing of partisanship and polarization, TDS Co-Editor William Galston and his Brookings Institution colleague Thomas Mann penned an op-ed in that paper which aims to set the record straight.
While they share the Post’s unhappiness with the consequences for governing of polarization, Galston and Mann also insist that its “asymmetrical” nature be acknowledged:

Put simply: More than 70 percent of Republicans in the electorate identify themselves as conservative or very conservative, while only 40 percent of rank-and-file Democrats call themselves liberal or very liberal. It is far easier for congressional Republicans to forge and maintain a united front than it is for Democrats. George W. Bush pushed through his signature tax cuts and Iraq war authorization with substantial Democratic support, while unwavering Republican opposition nearly torpedoed Barack Obama’s health-reform legislation. When Democrats are in the majority, their greater ideological diversity combined with the unified opposition of Republicans induces the party to negotiate within its ranks, producing policies that not long ago would have attracted the support of a dozen Senate Republicans.

Thus, say Galston and Mann, grassroots conservatives are not only supporting but demanding the Republican congressional leadership’s obstructionism in a way that makes negotiations by Democrats largely a waste of time, and forces not just counter-polarization but difficult differences of opinion among Democrats. In a very real sense, governing has become an internal process of the Democratic Party as Republicans simply stand for opposition and obstruction:

[A] Republican Party dominated at the grass roots by angry rejection of all bipartisanship — and of all but the most limited government — may win support in the short term, but it will be hard put to cooperate productively in the serious tasks of governance.

A new AP-Univision poll of Hispanics and non-Hispanics starkly illustrates the very different perspectives of Hispanic and non-Hispanic voters on the controversial new law in Arizona on immigration enforcement. Unsurprisingly, attitudes towards the new law are pretty polarized. Hispanics oppose the law by a 67/15 margin, with fully 60% saying they “strongly oppose” it. Non-Hispanics favor the law by a 45/20 margin, with 31% saying they “strongly favor” it.
Both attitudes appear to be based on an underlying difference of opinion about the advisability of enlisting local law enforcement agencies–i.e., the police officers citizens encounter every day–in immigration enforcement. Hispanics oppose local police enforement of immigration laws by a striking 81/16 margin; non-Hispanics favor it 61/37. Why? Probably because Hispanics by a 73/22 margin believe police “crackdowns” on illegal immigration will unfairly target Hispanics. Non-Hispanics are split down the middle as to whether such crackdowns would unfairly target Hispanics. Beyond that, non-Hispanics seem to have a relatively benign attitude towards the collateral damage that ethnic profiling would inflict on the innocent; only 34% think it would be a very or extremely serious problem if Arizona police stop and question U.S. citizens or legal immigrants as a result of the new law. 73% of Hispanics think it would be a very or extremely serious problem.
So it really does appear that the nationwide Republican rush to endorse the Arizona law represents, among other things, a choice of constituencies; non-Hispanics will tend to approve, though not by massive margins or with great intensity, while Hispanics are going to be unhappy about it in a very personal way. And those conservatives who complain that they only want to target illegal immigrants are ignoring the reality that Hispanic citizens and legal immigrants clear believe local police actions to enforce immigration laws away from the border are inevitably going to compromise their own freedoms.

You already knew it, but WaPo columnist Michael Gerson puts it exceptionally-well in his op-ed today. As W’s former speechwriter and a GOP political operative, his concerns about the Latino vote are of interest. Here’s Gerson on why the GOP’s latest round of immigrant-bashing looks a lot like “political suicide”:

…it would be absurd to deny that the Republican ideological coalition includes elements that are anti-immigrant — those who believe that Hispanics, particularly Mexicans, are a threat to American culture and identity. When Arizona Republican Senate candidate J.D. Hayworth calls for a moratorium on legal immigration from Mexico, when then-Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) refers to Miami as a “Third World country,” when state Rep. Russell Pearce (R), one of the authors of the Arizona immigration law, says Mexicans’ and Central Americans’ “way of doing business” is different, Latinos can reasonably assume that they are unwelcome in certain Republican circles.
…Never mind that the level of illegal immigration is down in Arizona or that skyrocketing crime rates along the border are a myth. McCain’s tag line — “Complete the danged fence” — will rank as one of the most humiliating capitulations in modern political history.
Ethnic politics is symbolic and personal. Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy gained African American support by calling Coretta Scott King while her husband was in prison. Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater lost support by voting against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. A generation of African American voters never forgot either gesture.

Coming after the debate over GOP-sponsored Proposition 187 in California and the disastrous (for Republicans) immigration debate during the last mid term elections, the new Arizona immigration law may well be strike three for the GOP regarding Hispanic voters in particular. (It will probably hurt some with all voters of color). Gerson cites a 2008 poll by the Pew Hispanic Center, which indicated that 49 percent of Hispanics believed “Democrats had more concern for people of their background,” while only 7 percent believed it true of Republicans. Says Gerson, “Since the Arizona controversy, this gap can only have grown. In a matter of months, Hispanic voters in Arizona have gone from being among the most pro-GOP in the nation to being among the most hostile.”
Gerson trots out some interesting demographic data to underscore his point:

…Hispanics make up 40 percent of the K-12 students in Arizona, 44 percent in Texas, 47 percent in California, 54 percent in New Mexico. Whatever temporary gains Republicans might make feeding resentment of this demographic shift, the party identified with that resentment will eventually be voted into singularity. In a matter of decades, the Republican Party could cease to be a national party.

Gerson tries to conclude on a hopeful note for his GOP brethren, pointing out that Hispanics tend to be “socially-conservative” and “entrepreneurial,” adding that “…Republicans do not need to win a majority of the Latino vote to compete nationally, just a competitive minority of that vote.” But cold logic forces his final sentence: “But even this modest goal is impossible if Hispanic voters feel targeted rather than courted.”
The rapidly-tanking GOP brand in Latino communities is one of the reasons why Republican leaders are so excited by Hispanic candidates like Marco Rubio in Florida — they think it helps project an image that they are Hispanic-friendly, despite their miserable track record on issues of Latino concern. Sort of a ‘Potemkin village” with large smiling portraits in the front and very little behind it.
Dems have been given a gift by the xenophobic wing of the GOP. That doesn’t, insure, however, that Latino voters will always turn out for Dems. But it does strongly suggest that Dems have much to gain by supporting accelerated naturalization of Hispanics applying for citizenship, investing in Hispanic registration and GOTV and especially by recruiting and training more Latino candidates.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
The fiscal policy terrain is shifting radically—and rapidly. Europe’s response to the Greek crisis combines debt and enforced austerity. In the UK, the official Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition agreement states that “deficit reduction and continuing to ensure economic recovery is the most urgent issue facing Britain” and commits to a “significantly accelerated reduction in the structural deficit over the course of a Parliament” (that is, between now and 2015). And in the United States, two major economic journalists—David Leonhardt of The New York Times and Steven Pearlstein of The Washington Post—weighed in on Wednesday with major articles. Leonhardt shows that by a widely-accepted metric, cyclically adjusted primary balance (a country’s medium-term deficit as a percentage of GDP, excluding interest payments and assuming full employment), the U.S. is in worse shape than Britain and even Greece. Pearlstein goes a step farther, laying out his own budget that brings together “some of the best ideas of the left and the right.” (A colleague and I intend to emulate his good example in more detail this June.)
In related developments, a well-known conservative, Kevin Williamson, published an article in the National Review Online entitled “Goodbye Supply Side.” In it, he criticized conservatives for “falling for happy talk about pro-growth tax cuts and strategic Laffer Curve Optimizing” and quoted Arthur Laffer himself as saying, “Does every tax cut pay for itself? No.” “The exaggeration of supply-side effect”—Williamson continues—“the belief that tax-rate cuts pay for themselves or more than pay for themselves over some measurable period—is more an article of faith than an economic fact.” In a follow-up piece published on Tuesday, Williamson said that “conservatives would do better to support a budget plan that combines real spending cuts with tax increases than to support a budget that does nothing to reduce spending but leaves taxes where they are or reduces them.” On the other side of the aisle, Leonhardt quotes the redoubtable liberal Robert Greenstein as saying, “Most of the public thinks, ‘If only the darn politicians could get their act together to cut waste, fraud, and abuse, and to make tax avoidance go away and so on.’ But the bottom line is, there really is no avoiding the hard choices.”
I may be a cock-eyed optimist, but I’m seeing signs that the ice is breaking and that a discussion that has been frozen for a generation is beginning to develop. The question now is whether people who have the power to make a difference—starting but certainly not ending with the members of the bipartisan fiscal commission—will have the courage to abandon long-held positions and do what just about everyone knows needs to be done.
U.S. fiscal policy is now in a race between sanity and catastrophe, and the window for action may well be narrower than we suppose. As a number of economists have told me in recent weeks, we know two things about fiscal crises: 1) we can’t predict their timing, and 2) once they start, they move faster than we imagine possible. When they’re imminent, it’s much too late to prevent them. Our real choice boils downs either to effective preemption or to some version of what Greece must now endure.

In their efforts to find something objectionable about Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, some conservatives are resorting to an argument that is so vague as to seem innocuous, but that is also consonant with a serious strain of invidious prejudice: as a lifelong New Yorker, she’s inhabitted a liberal “cocoon” that is remote from the mainstream life of most Americans. Kathleen Parker offered a particularly explicit version of this argument in a Washington Post column yesterday. Here’s a sample:

Certainly New York City dwellers would argue that they struggle with ordinary concerns, just in a more dense environment. But New York, like other urban areas, tends to be more liberal than the vast rest of the country. More than half the country also happens to be Protestant, yet with Kagan, the court will feature three Jews, six Catholics and nary a Protestant. Fewer than one-fourth of Americans are Catholic, and 1.7 percent are Jewish.

This claim that Kagan’s nomination violates some unwritten rules of geographical and ethnic balance on the Supreme Court is spreading pretty rapidly. I did a fairly systematic response over at FiveThirtyEight, noting that (1) this wouldn’t be first time the Court might had three New Yorkers; (2) life in New York isn’t exactly the liberal cacoon that conservatives so often describe it as; and (3) geographical background or even diversity of experience has not in the past been a particulary good predictor of judicial philosphy or contributions to the Court.
If Parker’s argument and many like it strike you as risking encouragement to some very old prejudices, you should check out my response.

So, just three days after Utah’s long-time Republican Sen. Bob Bennett was denied re-nomination, long-time Democratic Rep. Alan Mollohan of West Virginia suffered the same fate, though in his case it was in a primary where he received only 44% of the vote against 56% for state senator Mike Oliverio. Mollohan had been in office for 28 years after succeeding his father, who held the seat for fourteen years before that. Now that’s some serious incumbency!
While it’s natural to link the Bennett and Mollohan defeats to a similar anti-incumbency trend, that’s a bit misleading. Bennett’s problems were clearly ideological in nature. Mollohan’s biggest problem was ethics; he’s been the subject of multiple investigations of conflict-of-interest allegations in his role as an Appropriations subcommittee chairman, and Oliverio’s campaign called him “one of the most corrupt members of Congress.”
With Republicans considering Mollohan an especially ripe target, it’s possible that Oliverio’s win will make the seat an slightly easier hold for Democrats.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Many observers are wondering why the Conservatives failed to gain an outright majority in last week’s elections. After all, Labour has been in power for thirteen years, Gordon Brown is deeply unpopular, and the budget is in crisis. Moreover, David Cameron worked hard to modernize and moderate the Conservative party, and despite a surge after the first debate, the Liberal Democrats scored only a modest gain in the popular vote and actually lost five seats.
The answer is starting us in the face, and it’s disturbing: the Tories fell short because the right-wing anti-Europe, anti-immigrant parties surged. Let’s look at the past three elections:
UK Independence Party
2001 Vote: 390,563 (1.2%)
2005 Vote: 603,298 (2.2%)
2010 Vote: 917,832 (3.1%)
British National Party
2001 Vote: 47,129 (0.2%)
2005 Vote: 192,746 (0.7%)
2010 Vote: 563,743 (1.9%)
Between them, these two parties now enjoy the support of nearly one and a half million British voters – a full five percent of the total.
This may well have made the difference between a Tory majority and the actual result. I count twenty-three constituencies narrowly won by Labour or the Liberal Democrats where the vote for the UK Independence Party alone was greater than the margin of the Conservative defeat. We can’t know for sure, but it seems likely that those votes would have gone to the more Euro-skeptic Conservative candidates had it not been for the UKIP.
This suggests that immigration may have been the sleeper issue in 2010 election – and that the Conservatives will have a strong incentive to respond. They’ve positioned themselves to do so, promising in their manifesto to “take net migration back to the levels of the 1990s – tens of thousands a year, not hundreds of thousands.” Among the steps they propose to achieve this result: “setting an annual limit on the number of non-EU economic migrants” (AKA Muslims); and “limiting access only to those who will bring the most value to the British economy” (AKA university graduates and others with advanced technical skills). By contrast, the Liberal Democrat manifesto does not call for any new numerical quotas and offers undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship. If they enter into a formal coalition with the Conservatives, they will have to go along with – and thereby facilitate – a new immigration regime with which they profoundly disagree.