This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
The just-released report from the Pew Research Center, “How the Great Recession Has Changed Life in America,” is probably the most searching investigation of this question produced so far. Although some of the top-line findings have circulated widely, some of the less-noticed details are just as significant. Taken as a whole, the report suggests that the Great Recession will have a more-than-transitory effect on the outlook and psychology of most Americans, with significant consequences for our economy and society. Some key items:
•Not surprisingly, nearly half of all homeowners report a decline in the value of their homes during the recession. What is surprising is how long they think it will take for prices to recover: about half estimate three to five years; about 40 percent expect it will take six years or longer. And because homes constitute the dominant part of middle class households’ net worth, this helps explain why these families think it will be quite some time before their overall financial condition returns to its pre-recession peak. Forty percent estimate three to five years, 13 percent six to ten years, and 10 percent longer than ten years (or never).
•While it is true, as Stephen Rose has recently argued, that the net worth of U.S. households increased during recent decades despite record levels of debt accumulation, it is also true that upper-income households captured most of the gains. The Federal Reserve conducts a triennial survey of family finances, of which the most recent was completed at the end of 2007. From 1998 to 2007, the median net worth of all families increased by a modest $29 thousand, from $91 to $120 thousand. But mean net worth increased by almost $197 thousand, demonstrating the concentration of gains at the top. From other sources we know that overall household net worth declined by nearly 20 percent during the current recession, erasing the decade of modest gains for households at the median. And the Pew report provides evidence that middle-class families were hit harder than those in the upper tier. Among the top 20 percent, almost as many households report being better off as worse off since the onset of the recession. Among middle-class households, 45 percent report being worse off, versus only 21 percent who say they are better off.
•We already knew that long-term unemployment is the worst it has been since the end of the Great Depression. But the Pew report dramatizes just how bad it is. During what was previously the worst recession since the 1930s (1981-82), the median duration of unemployment peaked at 12.3 weeks. In May of this year, the median duration was almost twice as high: 23.2 weeks. Today, 46 percent of all unemployed workers have been out of work for more than six months, versus 26 percent at the height of the Reagan recession.
•The effects of the Great Recession on the labor market extend beyond unemployment. In 1999, the share of the working-age population that is working (the “employment rate”) peaked above 64 percent. In 2007, just before the current downturn, it stood at 63.3 percent. By this May, it had declined by a stunning 4.8 percent points, to 58.5 percent. (By contrast, the Reagan-era recession produced a decline of 2.9 percent points.) Today’s employment rate stands where it was in 1985, erasing a quarter-century of gains.
•While this recession has been bad for everyone, it has been a catastrophe for men. In the fourth quarter of 2007, male and female unemployment rates were almost identical, at a bit under 5 percent. By the end of 2009, the rate for women was 8.7 percent-but for men it was 11.2 percent. (In the male-dominated construction sector, the unemployment rate surged from 7 percent to 20 percent.)
•Most of the jobs lost during the current recession aren’t coming back. Fifty-two percent of currently unemployed workers lost their jobs for reasons other than temporary layoffs–a far higher share than in any other postwar downturn. This is not a cyclical downturn in the labor market. Returning to full unemployment will require many millions of new jobs in companies and even sectors that do not yet exist.
•More than six in ten Americans report having cut back on spending since the recession began, and many expect this to continue after it ends. Pew finds similar patterns of behavior and expectation in the areas of borrowing and saving as well. It’s easy to forget that as recently as 1970 through 1985, household savings averaged 10 percent of disposable income. In the next two decades, the savings rate decline to almost zero before increasing modestly to about 4 percent by 2009. There’s a good reason to believe that this number will continue to increase: only 23 percent of workers say that they are very confident that they’ll have enough income and assets for retirement, versus 32 percent who report little or no confidence.
•Among workers ages 50 to 61 who are currently employed, 60 percent say that they may have to delay retirement, as do even more–69 percent–of workers in this age group with incomes between $30 and $75 thousand. Young adults are already experiencing great difficulty finding jobs and starting careers; in a sluggish labor market, later retirements could make a tough situation even worse.
Despite all this, Americans remain congenitally optimistic: 62 percent expect their financial situation to improve over the next year; 61 percent believe that the damage the recession has inflicted on the economy will turn out to be temporary rather than permanent; 63 percent endorse the proposition that, “America will always continue to be prosperous and make economic progress.”
But there are signs of doubt as well. As recently as 2002, 61 percent thought their children’s standard of living would be better than their own; only 10 percent thought it would be worse. Today, the optimists’ share has declined to 45 percent, while pessimists now constitute fully 26 percent of the population. And doubt tends to reinforce caution. We don’t have enough evidence to conclude that the Great Recession will generate the kind of long-lasting risk aversion that characterized the Depression-era generation throughout their lives. But we do have reason to believe that for some time to come, what Keynes famously called “animal spirits” will remain subdued, which suggests that we’re in for a slow recovery and historically high levels of unemployment for much of this decade. If the Pew report is on target, the “new normal” will be more than a slogan.

Back in March, I recapitulated the overwhelming evidence that the Tea Party Movement, for all the hype treating it as a new or as an independent phenomenon, was actually just a radicalized subset (a large subset, to be sure) of the conservative GOP base.
Apparently the venerable Gallup organization has gotten tired of hearing the same hype, because now it’s releasing an analysis of data collected for several months showing, in its understated way of saying it, that “Tea Party Supporters Overlap Republican Base.”
By just about any measurement you care to use, the two voter segments do indeed “overlap,” with the attitudes of the Tea Party Folk and those of self-identified “conservative Republicans” differing very little, perhaps because they are largely the same people.
Here’s how Gallup puts it:

The Tea Party movement has received considerable news coverage this year, in large part because it appears to represent a new and potentially powerful force on the American political scene. Whether Tea Party supporters are a voting segment that is unique and distinct from the more traditional Republican conservative base, however, appears questionable. There is significant overlap between Tea Party supporters and conservative Republicans, both groups are highly enthusiastic about voting, and both are heavily skewed toward Republican candidates — although the latter somewhat more so than the former.
Republican leaders who worry about the Tea Party’s impact on their races may in fact (and more simply) be defined as largely worrying about their party’s core base. Additionally, GOP leaders eager to maximize turnout this fall may do just as well by targeting the more traditional voting category of conservative Republicans as by expending energy and effort to target those who identify with the Tea Party movement.

So how does one explain this persistent misapprehension of the Tea Party as something entirely new under the sun? I think there are three factors:
(1) Tea Party types are constantly proclaiming their independence, for the simple reason that it increases their leverage over the GOP and also encourages media coverage of the phenomenon.
(2) The Tea Party Movement does indeed have a radical rhetoric that sounds new, though it’s reasonably clear that this simply reflects a radicalization of the Republican Right because of the “betrayals” of the conservative cause it perceives in the “GOP establishment,” and because of the trauma inflicted by recent Democratic victories and also by the economic meltdown and the disappointments associated with Bush-era military crusades in the Middle East.
(3) Many observers do not seem aware of the long history of movement-conservative hostility to the “Republican establishment,” which stretches back to its very beginnings, and indeed, beyond that, if you consider the ancient hostility of heartland “Taft Republicans” to the GOP’s “Eastern Seaboard Establishment,” which predated World War II. To put it another way, many non-conservatives think of the conquest of the Republican Party by the conservative movement as being a long-accomplished fact, dating back to 1994 or even to Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. But to movement conservatives, the struggle is an ongoing effort that will not be complete until every “RINO,” defined ever-more-expansively as anyone resisting the latest conservative line, is driven out of the party or cowed into silence.
The bottom line is that no one should be fooled into thinking that by putting on revolutionary war garb or brandishing well-thumbed copies of the Constitution, conservative activists have changed their basic attitudes or found a large number of new adherents. They’ve always been willing, periodically, to pressure the GOP with threats to stay at home on election day or even occasionally vote for a Democrat; it’s no accident that one of the spiritual fathers of the conservative movement and the Tea Party Movement, direct-mail pioneer Richard Viguerie, celebrated the prospect of a Republican defeat in 2006 in hopes that the party would turn decisively to the right in the wake of voter repudiation. And that’s precisely what it’s done.

Mike Lux has been one of the more unsparing critics of what he terms “the culture of caution” among Democratic Party leadership and the way it dims Dems’ electoral prospects. But in his Open Left post, “Thank You Republicans,” Lux nonetheless sees hope for Dems in 2010.

The good news, however, is that Republicans seem hell bent on saving us from electoral defeat by a dumbness that just seems built into their DNA: continually showing the American people how extremely right-wing they are. This will still be a hellishly tough election for Democrats to do well in, but the Republicans are at least keeping us in the game.
Their incumbent Governor of Texas is thinking about seceding. Their Senate candidates for highly targeted races like Nevada and Kentucky don’t like Social Security, Medicare, or Civil rights laws. The guy who would become the chair of the energy committee in the House, backed up by the Republican study group and many other Republican leaders, apologizes to BP. The man who would be the Republican Speaker of the House wants to raise the retirement age for Social Security to 70 years old, and considers the financial meltdown of 2008 and the resulting loss of several million jobs to be as trivial as an ant. The anti-immigrant nativists in Arizona are stirring up Hispanic voters. In successive Supreme Court nominations, Republicans in the course of playing to their base, insult first Latinos and now blacks by attacking civil rights icon Thurgood Marshall. Every one of these things, when voters are reminded that Republicans are saying them, will be repulsive to both swing and Democratic base voters.

A lot of high-profile Republican candidates of 2010 have some ‘splainin’ to do for their imprudent pronouncements. Sharron Angle, Rand Paul, Joe Barton, Meg Whitman are just a few names that come to mind. And, despite the historical precedent of the party that holds the white house losing seats in their first midterm elections, Dems have a crop of exceptionally-solid candidates in high profile contests. In this context, a series of Dem campaign ads depicting the more clownish GOP statements, followed by a “Sober policies and serious leaders are needed for tough times” message might get some traction.
GOP follies notwithstanding, Dems could still lose control of both houses, if we fail to seize the opportunity. As Lux says:

It remains imperative for Democrats to embrace taking on the deep and persuasive corporate corruption of Washington. It is not enough to remind people how kooky the Republicans have become, Democrats have to become fierce advocates for change and reform, for a government that isn’t in thrall to the banks and BP and the insurance companies. When they do that, the contrast with the ever more extremist pro-corporate all the time Republicans becomes ever clearer.

As Lux concludes, “…Now the Democrats need to be bold enough and tough enough to take advantage of the gifts they have been given.”

Rhodes Cook, senior columnist at Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball, has some encouraging observations for Democratic candidates’ mid term prospects. Cook sees 2010 Dems in much better shape relative to the 1994 disaster. First, it’s about exposure, says Cook:

Fully half of the Democratic seats in that strongly anti-incumbent, anti-Democratic election 16 years ago were in districts that had voted for the Republican presidential ticket in one or both of the previous two presidential elections. This time, just one third of Democratic seats are in similarly problematic territory.
It is an important distinction since the vast majority of House seats that the Democrats lost in 1994 – 48 of 56, to be precise – were in “Red” or “Purple” districts. And this year, the Democrats have fewer of such districts to defend…The number of “Blue” districts they hold has risen by 43, from 128 in 1994 to 171 today, while the number of “Purple” districts they must defend has dropped by 39 (from 77 to 38). Meanwhile, the total of “Red” districts occupied by House Democrats is down this year by four from 1994 (from 51 to 47).

Even in 1994, notes Cook, “House Democrats ran very well in “Blue” districts that year. They lost barely 5% of those that voted for the party’s candidate in the previous two presidential elections.” If that pattern holds in November, Dems should keep their House majority.
Second, Cook sees Dems as “a more cohesive, top-down party than they were in 1994,” and adds,

Now, the Democrats have the look of a much stronger party. They are coming off a string of five consecutive presidential elections since 1992 in which their candidate has swept at least 180 districts each time. The byproduct of this consistent top of the ticket success has been the creation of more hospitable “blue” districts for House Democrats than their colleagues enjoyed in 1994.

Third, Cook finds encouragement for Dems in the House “special elections”:

But in recent decades, if a “big wave” election was brewing, there were signs of it in the special House elections that preceded the fall voting. That was the case in early 1974, when Democrat John Murtha scored a special election victory for a Republican seat in western Pennsylvania that proved a precursor of huge gains for his party that fall.
It was also the case in early 1994, when Republicans picked up a pair of Democratic seats in Kentucky and Oklahoma. And it was the case again in early 2008, when Democrats peeled off a trio of Republican seats in Illinois, Louisiana and Mississippi.
This election cycle, Republican Scott Brown has already scored a conspicuous special Senate election win in Massachusetts. But Republicans have been unable to post a similar high-profile breakthrough on the House side in spite of a handful of opportunities.
To be sure, Republicans did pick up a previously Democratic seat May 22 in Hawaii, where the incumbent had resigned to focus on his campaign for governor. But the victory by Republican Charles Djou was clearly a fluke. In a district that Obama had carried in 2008 with 70% of the vote, Djou prevailed with less than 40% as two major Democratic candidates divided the bulk of the remaining votes. There was no provision for a runoff election.
Much more noteworthy have been the special elections held over the last year in a trio of “Purple” districts. Republicans were unable to win any of them. Two were in upstate New York, the other Murtha’s seat in southwest Pennsylvania.
A GOP victory in the latter contest on May 18 would have been a loud reminder of 1974 – rekindling memories of how Murtha’s special election victory served as a harbinger of his party’s great success that fall.
That the vote last month was a loss for the Republicans, though, underscored the opposite – that winning a House majority this year might not be nearly as easy for the GOP as many political observers have predicted.

As Cook concludes, “…There are plenty of targets for the Republicans this fall. But there are not as many ripe ones as was the case in 1994.”

When House Republican leader (and would-be Speaker) John Boehner claimed the other day that Democrats were “snuffing out the America I grew up in,” it didn’t cause much reaction (or at least far less than his remarks on Social Security and on financial regulation), since it’s the kind of thing conservatives say all the time. But as Mike Tomasky quickly noted, it was a very strange statement if you actually think the problem with Democrats is their addiction to big government and their subservience to unions:

Boehner was born in November 1949. Let’s take a look at the America he grew up in.
In the America John Boehner grew up in, the top marginal tax rate on wealthy earners was 90%. It had gone up there during the war, and five, 10, 15 years after armistice, no sizable group, Democrat or Republican, felt any strong urge to lower it.
In the America John Boehner grew up in, private-sector union membership was around or above 30%. Today’s figure is 7%. The right to form a union was broadly accepted. Outside of a few small turbulent pockets, there was no such thing as today’s union-busting law firms hired by management to go into workplaces and intimidate workers.

That’s all very true. But as Matt Yglesias observes, the country was in fact a lot more conservative back then on the cultural front:

[In] many other respects the America of John Boehner’s youth was a much more right-wing country. Gays and lesbians were stuffed deep into the closet, and there was no suggestion that they should be allowed to serve openly in the military or in any other role. African-Americans were subjected to pervasive discrimination in housing and employment, and in the southern states they couldn’t vote or exercise any basic rights–all this backed by the state, and also by collusion between state authorities and ad hoc terrorist groups. It was a whiter country with dramatically fewer residents of Asian or Latin American descent. It was a more religiously observant country, and it was a country in which Jews were far from fully accepted into American life.
I’m not nostalgic for that era at all. There are a few areas of policy in which I think we’ve moved backwards since the mid-sixties, but I wouldn’t want to return to an America with almost no immigrants or to an America with a single monopoly provider of telecom services. I’m glad airlines can set their own ticket prices and I’m glad black people can sit in the front of the bus. What is it that Boehner misses?

What indeed? Let’s all remember Boehner’s regret for the passing of the good ol’ days of high taxes, strong unions, Jim Crow and homophobia next time we are told that the GOP wants to declare a truce in the culture wars, or only cares about economic or fiscal issues.

As you may have noticed, there’s a big brouhaha brewing with respect to polls conducted by the Research 2000 firm for Daily Kos. Long story short, Markos Moulitsas, who fired the firm for alleged inaccuracy not long ago, is now alleging that some serious book-cooking may have transpired, after reviewing an analysis of some strange and hard-to-explain anomalies in R2K findings. Both sides have lawyered up, and the whole thing may be resolved in court, though R2K could do itself some good by releasing its raw data or at least responding in specificity to the allegations.
Though it’s too early for anyone to start apologizing for reliance on R2K polls, I think I speak for most analysts in saying that we all sort of got in the habit recently of treating R2K’s apparent pro-Democratic “house effect” as a counter-weight to the apparent pro-Republican “house effect” of the Rasmussen firm (though I am not, repeat not, suggesting that Rasmussen is doing anything unethical, there is clearly something about the firm’s technique that tends to produce more robust Republican performance findings than is the case without other pollsters, a concern exacerbated by Rasmussen’s “flood the zone” domination of state polling). In states where both firms released polls, we all kinda figured the truth lied somewhere in between.
One big exception was a much-cited (by me among many others) R2K poll of Republicans which suggested that rank-and-file GOPers had some mighty strange views. But as Tom Jensen of PPP noted the other day, his firm did its own poll of Republicans and reached similar findings. In other words, even if a poll is marred by faulty methodology or worse, the conclusions it supports are not necessarily wrong.
And that leads me to the inevitable fallout from this furor: the perennial complaints that will soon be revived about reliance on polling data generally.
Without question, even in the best of circumstances, there are limits to the utility of polling data, and heavy reliance on any one poll or pollster is generally a mistake. But the answer to insufficient or faulty data is more data and better data, not a refusal to collect or look at it. And that’s why any know-nothing overreaction to the R2K controversy could be its most damaging consequence.

One of the more interesting developments on the June 8 “Super Tuesday Primary” day was the approval of a ballot initiative (Prop 14) by California voters creating a “top two” voting system. Similar to the process already used in Washington State, it essentially abolishes party primaries and provides that the top two finishers in a nonpartisan primary will proceed to the general election.
Over at Sabato’s Crystal Ball, TDS contributor and advisory board member Alan Abramowitz of Emory University has examined the claims of Prop 14 backers like Arnold Schwarzenegger that the new system will reduce ideological and partisan polarization in California, and concludes it’s pretty much a nothing-burger. He takes on two particular illusions associated with Prop 14: the idea that party primaries and gerrymandering are responsible for political polarization in California, and the idea that abolishing party primaries will prevent ideologues from winning elections.
On the first topic, his reseach shows:

The most important source of polarization in California politics is the ideological divide between supporters of the two major parties….In both California and the nation, ideological polarization increased considerably over this time period, but it has always been greater in California. That’s because while California Republicans are as conservative as Republicans in the rest of the country, California Democrats are considerably more liberal than Democrats in the rest of the country.

And on the second topic:

In Washington, which began using the new system in 2008, the electoral consequences were minimal. In all 9 of the state’s congressional districts the open primary produced a general election runoff between the Democratic or Republican incumbent and a challenger from the opposing party and in all 9 general election contests the incumbent was victorious. And based on the winners’ voting records in the 111th Congress, the new primary system has had no effect on partisan polarization–the gap between the state’s Democratic and Republican representatives was just as large in the current Congress as it was in the previous one. Expect the same results in California.

So can we just forget about Prop 14? That’s not quite clear just yet. The new system could produce some strange and unintended consequences.
For one thing, making the primary non-partisan could be a major boon to self-funders, who may simply need high name ID to win a general election spot, particularly in California statewide races where the cost of television advertising will be prohibitive for many candidates. For another, the system could theoretically increase partisan polarization. The “top two” system does not provide any particular incentive for winning an actual majority of votes in a primary; the top finisher still must face the runner-up in the general election, where turnout is very likely to be much higher. So the safe thing to do is to nail down a general election spot by appealing to partisans (Prop 14 does not repeal party registration, which means that candidates will know exactly whom to contact with partisan messages), while beginning the general election campaign by going after the other party’s preferred candidate.
Consider this year’s governor’s race. If Meg Whitman were running with her vast fortune in a “top two” system, perhaps she would not have spent quite so much time attacking Steve Poizner for alleged ideological heresy. But on the other hand, she would have had every incentive to go after Democrat Jerry Brown (whom she largely ignored) hammer and tongs to drive up his negatives in preparation for November.
In effect, Prop 14 makes the general election cycle a lot longer. That does not seem to be a particularly smart way to reduce partisan polarization.