North Carolina was a happenin’ place politically in 2008, particularly for Democrats, with a very exciting and important presidential primary, and of course, a general election in which the Tar Heel State was one of three southern states carried by Barack Obama. There was also a competitive governor’s election and a couple of very interesting House races.
But this year? Not much excitement so far. In the May Democratic Senate primary, turnout was a languid 425,00, down about 40% from the turnout in the last midterm competitive Senate primary in 2002. But in yesterday’s highly competitive runoff, only 157,000 voters bothered to show up. Nor was this just a Democratic problem: in the three competitive U.S. House runoffs for Republicans yesterday, turnout was 15,241 in the 8th District, 6428 in the 13th District; and 2770 in the 12th District. The apathy was infectious: I had to use the search function on the Charlotte Observer site today to find any coverage of the runoffs.
In any event, in the Senate runoff, Elaine Marshall did a much better job of navigating the circumstances than did her opponent, the DSCC-recruited Cal Cunningham, beating him 60-40 in a race where the only public poll (back in mid-May) had the two candidates tied. A look at the county returns indicates that Marshall pulled third-place primary finisher Ken Lewis’ supporters into her camp, while Cunningham did little to expand his appeal.
While some made this out as an ideological struggle between the more progressive Marshall and the more centrist Cunningham, it looks to me like the latter simply failed to make a good enough case as to why North Carolina Democrats should prefer him to a very familiar figure who, after all, has won four times statewide, including a victory over NASCAR legend Richard Petty.
Having symbolically avenged her 2002 Senate defeat to another nationally-recruited candidate, Erskine Bowles, Marshall must now prove her viability against incumbent Sen. Richard Burr, an invisible man in Washington and to some extent in NC, who could be the ideal representative of an apathetic population. All joking aside, Burr’s small footprint in the Senate could make him vulnerable, even in a pro-Republican year like this one.
The aforementioned GOP House runoffs largely went as expected. In the 8th, the self-immolation of wild-man self-funded conservative Tim D’Annunzio ended in a 61-39 loss to Harold Johnson. In the 13th, BP/Obama conspiracy theorist Bill Randall–like SC’s Tim Scott, a hard-core African-American conservative–easily defeated Bernie Reeves. And in the 12th, past nominee Greg Dority won the nomination to take on veteran Rep. Mel Watt in the runoff that only 2770 voters chose to participate in.
Maybe NC political races will heat up later this summer or sizzle in the fall. But right now, it’s as though 2008 soaked up all the energy anyone wants to expend for a while.

As I expected, the cluster of organizations and interests that represent the most conservative wing of the increasingly very conservative Republican Party had some real fun last night in South Carolina’s runoff elections.
Nikki Haley, the Mark Sanford protege who had staked out the “most conservative” territory in her gubernatorial race long before anything was said about her sex life or ethnicity, won the runoff over congressman Gresham Barrett by a two-to-one margin, essentially winning everywhere other than a few counties in Barrett’s upstate base. Similarly, another Sanford protege with a can’t-outconservative-me rep, state legislator Tim Scott, beat Charleston County Councilmember Paul Thurmond by better than two-to-one for an open congressional seat.
I’ve written enough about Haley over the past few weeks; suffice it to say that she won this race the moment her old staffer, blogger Will Folks, accused her of marital infidelity in a way that failed to convince much of anybody but made the entire campaign All About Nikki. And it was especially appropriate that Sarah Palin endorsed Haley just before the Folks furor began; the Haley saga was a pitch-perfect projection of Palin’s own persecution complex–you know, the Good Old Boys and the liberal lamestream media trying to smear a brave Mama Grizzly for telling the simple right-wing truth.
Scott’s victory was equally interesting, and perhaps an even bigger deal for the Republican Right, which will have an African-American spokesman in Congress for the first time since J.C. Watts retired. The symbolism of an African-American defeating the son of Strom Thurmond within shouting distance of Fort Sumter is obviously very striking. But it’s not as though Scott’s win repudiated any aspect of Thurmond’s legacy other than the blatant racism he abandoned by the 1970s; Scott was himself co-chairman of ol’ Strom’s last Senate campaign.
The third great event for South Carolina conservatives was the absolutely humiliating 71-29 defeat of U.S. Rep. Bob Inglis by Tea Party vehicle Trey Gowdy. This result will serve as an enduring reminder to GOP elected officials that The Movement will find someone to run against them if they stray from orthodoxy. Inglis’ fatal act of sacrilege was probably telling fist-shaking protestors at a town hall meeting to stop paying attention to Glenn Beck.
South Carolina has always been a special place for the more radical variety of conservatives. They certainly seemed to have the whole state wired last night.

Those who think that TX Rep. Joe Barton’s views on the British Petroleum oil spill are outside the mainstream of the Republican Party should read Eugene Robinson’s WaPo column on the topic. Says Robinson:

The Texas congressman’s lavish sympathy for BP — which he sees not as perpetrator of a preventable disaster but as victim of a White House “shakedown” — is actually what passes for mainstream opinion among conservative Republicans today…Barton was only echoing a statement that Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.) had issued a day earlier in the name of the Republican Study Committee, a caucus of House conservatives whose Web site claims 115 members. The statement groused that there is “no legal authority for the president to compel a private company to set up or contribute to an escrow account” and accused the Obama administration of “Chicago-style shakedown politics.”
…Just to review: A group constituting roughly two-thirds of all Republicans in the House takes the position that President Obama was wrong to demand that BP set aside money to guarantee that those whose livelihoods are being ruined by the oil spill will be compensated. In other words, it’s more important to kneel at the altar of radical conservative ideology than to feel any sense of compassion for one’s fellow Americans. This, ladies and gentlemen, is how today’s GOP rolls.

Some Republican leaders smelled the impending danger in putting the profit priorities of a British corporation above the legitimate concerns of working Americans, and tried to back-pedal away from the “shakedown” rhetoric. But others could not restrain their proclivity to grovel before their corporate contributors. As Robinson notes,

While the party leadership has managed to squelch members of Congress who might have been tempted to weigh in on Barton’s side, the conservative amen chorus can’t help itself. Rush Limbaugh called the agreement on the $20 billion escrow fund “unconstitutional” and accused the administration of acting like “a branch of organized crime.” Newt Gingrich said the White House was “extorting money from a company.” Stuart Varney of Fox News claimed — falsely — that Obama had moved to “seize a private company’s assets” and complained that the action was “Hugo Chavez-like.” Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol said that “I have no sympathy for BP,” but then proceeded to be sympathetic, offering that “it’s not helpful for the country, for the economy as a whole, for the president to bully different companies and different industries.” I’d advise these people to get a grip, but they’re just saying what they believe. It just happens that what they believe is absurd.

As TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira has just explained, an overwhelming majority of the public wants BP to take responsibility for the disaster the company has caused, in stark contrast to the aforementioned Republicans. If progressives can successfully remind swing voters in the mid-terms that Republican leaders still cling to a policy of giving corporations — even abusive foreign ones — a free ride, it just might save the Democratic majority.

This is the last multi-primary Tuesday we will see until August, with runoffs on tap in North Carolina, South Carolina and (not so you’d really notice it) Mississippi, and primaries in Utah.
I’ve written up the Carolina runoffs here and the Utah primary here for FiveThirtyEight, so you can check out those posts if you are interested.
To the extent that the MSM even notices today’s primaries, the big news is almost certain to be from South Carolina.
Top billing will be given to Nikki Haley’s gubernatorial runoff win in SC, which will be largely treated as a stirring account of the triumph of an Asian-American woman over slander and bigotry in the paleolithic Deep South. Much less noted will be the fact that Haley’s win will represent a major victory for Jim DeMint’s brand of take-no-prisoners conservatism. Indeed, the ideological character of Haley’s candidacy has been (outside SC in particularly) largely lost in the storms of controversy (real or contrived) about her sex life, ethnicity and religion. The challenge for Democratic gubernatorial nominee Vincent Sheheen between now and November will be to refocus attention on Haley’s ideology–which could be too radical even for South Carolina–and away from her “story” and her Republican tormenters.
Another South Carolina “story” we are likely to hear a lot about tonight involves Tim Scott, an African-American conservative state legislator who is in a runoff with Strom Thurmond’s son (Paul) for the GOP nomination for a relatively safe Republican congressional seat. Like Haley, Scott comes right out of central casting for the conservative movement, and he’s favored over Thurmond today.
The third SC headliner will likely be the mandatory retirement of conservative Republican U.S. Rep. Bob Inglis, who ran a relatively poor second in the primary to Tea Party favorite Trey Gowdy. Inglis’ primary sin was a vote for TARP.
Today’ weather in the Palmetto State is (appropriately) steamy with a chance of thunderstorms, which could hold down what is already expected to be low turnout.
In NC, it’s really too close to call in the Senate Democratic runoff between Secretary of State Elaine Marshall and Iraq War vet Cal Cunningham, but with turnout expected to be relatively terrible, I’d bet on Marshall as the favorite of party activists both locally and nationally.
And out in Utah, the Republican Senate primary between Tim Bridgewater and Mike Lee has become a fascinating struggle between two candidates who are far to the right of what very recently passed for mainstream conservatism. Yet as I noted in my FiveThirtyEight post, Bridgewater is being treated by Lee supporters as some sort of godless liberal RINO. If Lee wins (and it’s anybody’s guess who will prevail), the entire Utah campaign could serve as a case study in how rapidly the GOP has moved right in the last year-and-a-half.

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat penned a thumb-sucker yesterday about the terrrible disappointment, occasionally spilling over into rage and despair, with Barack Obama among liberals. Here’s the nut graph:

American liberalism has always had a reputation for fractiousness and frantic self-critique. But even by those standards, the current bout of anguish over the Obama presidency seems bizarrely disproportionate.

Sure, Douthat has some scattered examples of said anguish. But when you are characterizing the attitudes of those sharing a major ideological self-identification, a bit more precision is in order. And a look at Gallup’s tracking poll at Obama’s approval ratings among liberals and Liberal Democrats makes Douthat’s dark meditation on liberal angst look a bit ridiculous.
According to the latest Gallup survey, 79% of “liberals” approve of Obama’s job performance, compared to 78% month ago, 78% two months ago, 76% three months ago, and a bit over 80% during 2009. If his liberal support has collapsed in “angst,” it’s pretty much hidden in the numbers. And since Douthat’s hinting at some terrible intraparty struggle-for-the-soul-of-the-donkey, it’s worth noting that a reasonably robust 90% of “liberal Democrats” currently approve of the job Obama’s doing, which is well above his average for 2010 and exactly where he stood last Labor Day.
Sure, you can find elite opinion on the Left that’s been souring on Obama steadily as we head towards the midterm elections. But it’s a useful reality check to note that when it comes to actual voting Americans of the liberal persuasion, if there’s any “agony” over Obama, it is mostly derived from anger at the president’s opponents.

As we slog through the shank of 2010 primary season, it should be reasonably obvious to anyone thinking about it that the two major political parties have limited control over the candidate slates they will offer to voters in November. Aside from the anti-establishment mood that is making many GOP (and some Democratic) primary voters react to the Party Label like a red flag, all sorts of factors of ideology, candidate attractiveness, and most of all, money come into crucial play.
But the habit of treating political parties as omipotent agents of their own destiny can be strong, viz. this comment nestled in an ABC story on the campaigns of California Republicans Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina:

“The national GOP wants to make California competitive again, and I think they have decided it’s not just a state they should cede to the Democrats,” says Lara Brown, an assistant professor of political science at Villanova University in Pennsylvania . “Under Howard Dean, the Democratic party adopted a 50-state strategy saying the way to build the party back was to get great candidates no matter what,” she says. “Meg and Carly are part of the same idea by the GOP and are helping even more because they have their own money and the party doesn’t have to invest in them.”

Not to single out Brown for a Copernican Revolution, but she’s got it backwards: Whitman and Fiorina picked the GOP, not vice versa. Meg Whitman’s 80 million smackers in pre-primary spending would have almost certainly won her the GOP gubernatorial nomination even if she had been someone totally different in gender, background and (within the narrow bounds of GOP acceptability) ideology. And if “the national GOP” were truly focused on the “idea” of being as competitive as possible in California, “it” would have probably been wearing a Tom Campbell button on June 8, not backing Carly Fiorina, whose positions on abortion and immigration (not to mention her record as CEO of Hewlett-Packard) could be problematic in the general election campaign.
The essence of party strategy is to develop an infrastructure and a message that is compatible with a broad swath of candidates. That does not include pretending the party chose them from the get-go.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Earth to House Democrats: It’s time to push the panic button. But don’t take my word for it; consider the evidence.
Exhibit A: One of the country’s savviest political scientists, Emory’s Alan Abramowitz, has just published an analysis that says the GOP will pick up 39 seats in the House this November. On the good news side for Democrats, Abramowitz finds more safe seats this year than in 1994 (145 versus 114) and fewer that are marginal (42 versus 55) or that lean Republican (69 versus 87). And there are only 15 open seats this year in Republican-leaning districts, versus 24 in 1994. On this basis he concludes that a Republican tide as strong as it was in 1994 would yield fewer losses for Democrats, but still enough to lose their majority by the narrowest of margins.
Exhibit B: Another of the country’s most experienced survey researchers, Stan Greenberg, who’s hardly unsympathetic to the Democratic cause, has just come out with the most discouraging survey Democrats have seen since, well, his 1994 surveys. He surveyed 1,200 likely voters in the 60 most competitive Democrat-held districts and ten most competitive Republican-held districts. In Tier 1 (the 30 most vulnerable Democratic districts), Democrats trailed by 48 to 39 overall. In Tier 2 (the 30 next most vulnerable districts), they trailed by 47 to 45. And in the contestable Republican districts, they trailed 53 to 39.
A closer look at the data helps explain these results. In the 70 battleground districts, likely voters are much more likely to believe that the country is on the wrong track than are voters nationally. Fully 49 percent in Tier 1 and 46 percent in Tier 2 self-identify as conservatives, and Obama’s approval stands at only 40 percent in both tiers. By 59 to 35 in Tier 1 and 56 to 39 in Tier 2, voters endorse the proposition that “President Obama’s economic policies have run up a record federal deficit while failing to end the recession or slow the record pace of job losses.” (They still blame Bush more than Obama for the state of the economy, however.) In the 60 Democratic districts, only 37 percent of Democrats say that they are very enthusiastic about voting in this year’s election, versus 62 percent for Republicans. While a surge among independents boosted Democrats in 2006 and 2008, this year that key group is breaking for Republicans 50 to 29 in Tier 1 and 51 to 34 in Tier 2. And most discouraging of all for Democrats: Greenberg tested a number of different themes and arguments Democrats might use against Republicans this fall, and not one worked well enough to turn the tide.
Exhibit C: In a survey out earlier this week, Gallup researchers looked at the voters’ broad assessment of the major political parties. They asked (as they have done from time to time), “In general, do you think the political views of the Democratic Party are too conservative, too liberal, or about right?” In 2008, 50 percent said “about right” versus 39 percent “too liberal.” Today, the reverse is the case: 49 percent say “too liberal” and only 38 percent “about right.” During that same period, the share of the electorate assessing Republicans as too conservative has fallen from 43 to 40 percent, while the share seeing them as about right has risen from 38 to 41 percent. Among independents, the share seeing Democrats as too liberal has risen from 40 to 52 percent, versus a decrease from 43 to only 33 percent seeing them as about right.
Democrats must face the fact that much of the legislation that seems both necessary and proper to them looks quite different to the portion of the electorate that holds the balance of political power. And they must face a choice as well–between (to be blunt) the politics of conviction and the politics of self-preservation. They can continue on as they have been going since January 2009, or they can adopt a concerted strategy designed to take the edge off public anger and reduce their losses. They can spend the summer arguing about matters like immigration, climate change, and the war in Afghanistan, all of which are valid and important but way down on the public’s list of the most urgent problems–or they can refocus on jobs and the economy, reinforcing the “Recovery Summer” theme the White House unveiled on Thursday.
It’s too late to enact legislation that will actually affect the economy’s performance between now and November, but it may not be too late for Democrats to better align their agenda with the public’s economic concerns. And they could get lucky: The four remaining employment reports between now and the election might show accelerating job creation in the private sector and a more rapid decline in unemployment than we have seen thus far. That would give embattled incumbents the chance to argue–more credibly than they can now–that we’re on the right track and shouldn’t turn back.
On the other hand, it’s entirely possible that none of this matters now, that the voters likely to turn out this fall have already concluded that with one-party control of the legislative and executive branches, Democrats will continue to take the country further to the left than the majority of the electorate would like. If so, Democrats should probably prepare themselves for the two words they dread the most–“Speaker Boehner.”

If Rep. Joe Barton was entertaining any fantasies that his apology to BP for the government “shakedown” of the oil company in the form of the $20 billion compensation fund had any support among the public, he will be sorely disappointed by the most recent public opinion data. According to TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira’s latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot” at the Center for American Progress web pages, the compensation fund is extremely popular:

…That’s not the way the public feels about this new fund. They approve of it by an overwhelming 82-18 margin in a new CNN poll.

By an even larger margin, notes Teixeira, the public wants BP to fund and carry out corrective action to end the spill as the company’s highest priority:

Nor does the public seem very conflicted about how compensation funds and cleanup efforts may interfere with BP’s profitability–a concern that has been raised by many conservatives. In the same poll, 92 percent think BP’s top priority should be cleaning up the oil spill and paying for the damage it has caused rather than protecting the interests of its investors and employees by continuing to make profits.

The data ought to convince even BP CEO Tony Hayward and Rep. Barton that they have one course of action, as Teixeira says: it’s “Time for BP to pay up, clean up, and quit complaining.”

The bumper sticker above says it well, Big Oil’s Republican toady in the House of Reps could well become the next chairman of the House Committee charged with preventing horrific oil spills. Rep. Barton’s groveling was disgusting enough, punctuated as it was by his ridiculous retraction, which should indicate to his alert constituents that his principles are somewhat flaccid, to put it charitably. According to OpenSecrets.org, Barton received more dough from Oil and gas companies during the entire 1989-2010 election cycle than all other members of the House of Reps. (For an amusing graphic take on the sorry episode, check out Mike Luckovitch’s cartoon here).
In my decades of watching party politics, I don’t recall a more emblematic moment for the GOP. This is who they too often are — groveling lackeys for Big Oil in particular and Big Business in general, even though it insults the families of the workers who were killed in the Deepwater Horizon tragedy, the thousands who have lost their livelihood and turns a blind eye toward the massive destruction of wildlife and our natural heritage. That they tried to wash it away with a half-assed apology was predictable. Most Republicans are pretty clever about hiding their worst impulses, when corporate abuse becomes a major controversy — we don’t hear much from Dick Cheney, for example, on this topic. But every now and then the cover is inadvertently lifted.
Barton may get re-elected despite his screw-up, and he may or may not be removed from his ranking position as chair-in-waiting of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. But If thoughtful voters, not just in Barton’s district, but in every House district in the U.S., needed a clinching argument to vote Democratic in November, Barton has provided it.

A debate among Republican gubernatorial candidates in Georgia this week illustrated just how far the GOP (particularly in the South) has drifted from the impulse that led George W. Bush and John McCain to support comprehensive immigration reform back in the day. Now it’s all about deporting the undocumented pronto, and the only difference of opinion is over how many public employees need to spend their time in the dragnet for illegals.
According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Jim Galloway, Candidate Eric Johnson, who’s struggling to land a runoff spot, came out for requring both teachers and hospital employees to verify the citizenship status of their patrons. Candidate Nathal Deal professed frustration that few cops in Georgia viewed themselves as immigration enforcement officers, but did draw the line at teachers being enrolled in the chore.
All the GOP candidates, of course, supported the idea of Georgia enacting a law like Arizona’s; this is a position that’s becoming as much a litmus test for southern Republicans as attacking unions. That will become significant nationally in 2012 when the Republican presidential nomination contest moves south.