This item is a guest post from Heather Hurlburt, Executive Director of the National Security Network. The views therein are her own.
As a colleague and I have written previously for TDS, the GOP spent the summer using Islam-bashing to paper over a canyon-sized fissure on national security. But the word “fissur makes the problem sound neat and orderly, where what is going on beneath the surface is more of a free-for-all among old-fashioned realists, neocons, paleocons, Tea Partiers and libertarians.
Republicans can be found on at least two sides of every key national security issue we face — how to combat terrorism, how (and even whether) to combat the spread of weapons of mass destruction, how to conduct the war in Afghanistan, how to cope with untraditional threats such as climate change, how to work with and/or hedge against China and other ascendant powers. There is Senator McCain vs. Chairman Steele on Afghanistan; Senator Lugar vs. Governor Romney on arms control; Governor Palin vs. both Rand and Ron Paul on counter-terrorism.
Perhaps most fascinating – and most interesting for progressives thinking ahead to the problem of getting anything done in 2011 – is the crumbling of GOP unity on issues that have, in the past, been among the party’s biggest rhetorical cudgels. And it’s hard to think of a bigger one of those than the defense budget.
At a time when the Tea Party Movement has helped revive demands from the Right for a balanced federal budget, the largest single element of discretionary government spending is our defense budget. Its unfettered growth since 9-11 has left some inside the Pentagon, as well as many outside, uncomfortable; meanwhile, that growth has left key needs of our troops on the ground unfunded.
A number of centrist, conservative and libertarian defense intellectuals – such as Kori Schake of the Hoover Institution and Ben Friedman and Chris Preble of the CATO Institute — have spoken out in favor of spending cuts. They’ve been joined by mainstream media commentators such as TIME’s Fareed Zakaria (formerly of Newsweek). In Congress, Representatives Barney Frank and Ron Paul launched earlier this year a bipartisan Sustainable Defense Task Force (in which this author participated), which prepared a menu of $1 trillion in potential cuts over ten years. Against this backdrop, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has launched an initiative to rein in, if not actually reduce, overall spending.
That effort has produced anxiety in the military and consternation among some GOP thought leaders such as David Frum, Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney. In the neoconservative wing of the GOP, support not only for existing defense spending, but for increased spending pegged to GDP growth, regardless of the threat landscape, is an article of faith.
Even in a time of pinched budgets, the time-tested GOP arguments remain for unscrutinized high defense spending. The Heritage Foundation wonders, “Should the defense of their freedom be sacrificed to liberal lawmakers’ pet causes and to runaway automatic spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid?” The Wall Street Journal editorial page posits that, “We learned on 9/11 that 3% isn’t nearly enough to maintain our commitments and fight a war on terror.” (As though a few more battleships or more nuclear weapons would have prevented 9/11.)
But how does the GOP square this circle with the parts of the party whose main focus is scaling back government and reducing the deficit? The same way they’ve addressed all the other internecine squabbles: intro Sarah Palin. As Josh Rogin has written, Palin is the “Tea Party’s Hawk.” Her message is this: When it comes to scaling back government, everything is on the table — except defense spending of course. That massaged position is an example of why Palin–or “Palinism”–is the glue that bonds the neocons and the more libertarian, deficit-conscious Tea Partiers together on defense spending. Palin’s position, though, is antithetical, or should be, to the libertarians and deficit hawks.
The specifics of the neocon defense budget position provides a ripe opportunity to incense the deficit hawks: Since neocons want to peg defense spending to a certain percentage of GDP, they’re essentially calling for an ever-expanding budget – not just refusing to cut the budget but a legislated, entitled, ever-increasing block of spending, Medicare for the Pentagon. By the unavoidable arithmetic of the federal budget, that means major and unpopular cuts in the actual Medicare program, along with radical changes in other strongly popular domestic priorities from Social Security to environmental protection, particularly at a time when Republicans not only oppose tax increases but are demanding new tax cuts.
Smart GOP strategists know that the contradictions between their positions on defense spending and the budget deficit make them vulnerable. Perhaps recognizing that anti-spending works much better as rhetoric than reality, Republicans did block Congress from creating a Deficit Reduction Commission, which the President ultimately created instead by executive order, but with merely the power to recommend. Reflexive GOP support for ever-higher defense spending is gradually coming underassault from within by Republicans Rep. Walter Jones and Sen. Tom Coburn, among others. When and if specific cuts are proposed, Members of Congress can be expected to engage in ugly bipartisan food-fighting to protect their local prerogatives. And this will only further confuse the GOP deficit-cutting message.
A muddied message from the extreme factions of the GOP will set the stage for a genuinely bipartisan effort to lead on principle and put Pentagon spending in a framework constrained both by our economic circumstances and the objectives we as a society wish to use our military to accomplish – both areas in which public opinion puts neoconservatives at a disadvantage and blunts arguments they have traditionally used on Democrats. It will also further dishearten libertarians, old-fashioned conservatives who favor a smaller military footprint, and Tea-Party-esque supporters who are dismayed by government bloat, waste and corruption wherever it resides.
Of course, there is an alternative – that GOP strategists recognize the perils of their conflicting positions, , and create a situation wherein the two parties find themselves competing to capture the experts and reform and rationalize our Pentagon spending. After all, the 60th anniversary of President Eisenhower’s farewell warning against the excesses of a military-industrial complex arrives next January–not a bad time to start taking it seriously.

You will have no trouble finding both thoughtful critiques and richly-deserved snarkage regarding the Republicans newly-unveiled credo, “A Pledge to America: A New Governing Agenda Built on the Priorities of Our Nation, the Principles We Stand For & America’s Founding Values.” I liked David Corn’s post on the topic at MotherJones.com, which succinctly exposes the GOP document as a collection of predictable Republican cliches and distortions:

…it offers few surprises: tax cuts for all (including the super-rich), slashing federal spending (without specifying actual targets), downsizing government, more money for the military (especially missile defense), and repealing the health care bill. It decries deficits–though it advocates proposals that will add trillions of dollars to the deficit. It calls for reforming Congress–but in non-significant ways (such as forcing legislators to place a sentence in every bill attesting that the legislation is connected to a principle in the Constitution). It’s full of Hallmark-style patriotism: “America is more than a country.” It’s infused with tea party anger: Washington has plotted “to thwart the will of the people and overturn their votes and their values.” It is likely to have little impact on the elections….

Corn links to other critiques, left and right:

liberal Ezra Klein dissects its internal contradictions; tea partier Erick Erickson decries the “Pledge” as a sell-out of the tea party movement; Republican curmudgeon David Frum finds it retro and short on “modern” and “affirmative” ideas for governing during a recessionary year.

But I like Corn’s reverse content analysis:

…Below is a list of words and phrases and the number of times they are each mentioned in the 45-page “Pledge.”
Wall Street: 0
Bank: 0
Finance: 0
Mortgage crisis: 0
Derivative: 0
Subprime: 0
Lobbying: 0
Lobbyist: 0
K Street: 0
Campaign finance: 0
Campaign contribution: 0
Campaign donation: 0
Disclosure: 0
Climate change: 0
Environment: 1 (“political environment”)
Alternative energy: 0
Renewable: 0
Green: 0
Transportation: 0
Infrastructure: 0
Poverty: 0
Food: 0
Food safety: 0
Housing: 0
Internet: 0
Education: 0
College: 0
Reading: 0
Science: 0
Research: 0
Technology: 0
Bush administration: 0
That list is as telling as the actual contents.

Democratic candidates should be able to leverage Corn’s list for crafting responses. Corn is probably right that the Republicans’ latest nothing burger will have considerably less political impact than the ‘Contract for America,’ revealing though it is of the GOP’s intellectual and moral bankruptcy.

In the last week and a half a wide range of pro-Democratic commentators have pointed out the absurd extent to which the media has hyped generic “Republican vs. Democrat” ballot poll results that were unfavorable to the Dems and then ignored subsequent results that contradicted them.
In some cases the mainstream media commentators are simply stuck on a “Dems are in trouble” narrative and are simply too lazy to deal with results that don’t fit their preferred storyline. The conservative media commentators, on the other hand, are perfectly happy to gleefully cherry-pick the data with the same scrupulous regard for empirical accuracy that their grass-roots audience displays in choosing the content for their hand-lettered rally signs.
But the real horse-race situation revealed by the generic ballot data is even closer than you think. Yesterday Nate Silver noted that one poll which asked the same group of respondents both the standard generic “Republican vs. Democrat” question and also about a choice between named candidates found the following:

Republicans did better on the first set of questions, which asked voters whether in general they would prefer to see a Democrat or a Republican elected in the district. On average, over the 31 districts, Republicans led on this question by 6 points: 39 to 33.
When the candidates were named, however, the Democrats’ gap was lessened. They trailed by an average margin of 2 points, 43 to 45. That might imply that the generic ballot overestimates Republicans’ standing by about 4 points, at least in swing districts.

Equally, in TPM yesterday, Josh Marshall noted that the generic ballot itself has been visibly tightening in recent days. Here’s his chart from TPM polltracker:

Now if this isn’t enough to make any Democrat realize that they shouldn’t allow the generic ballot data to demoralize them and deter them from getting out there and working their damn butts off, looking even more closely at the latest data – this time from pollster.com — is really an eye-opener.

Remember, this isn’t based on one poll but rather the average of a dozen polls, making the trend much harder to dismiss as the result of sampling error.
Still don’t feel the adrenaline starting to flow and the desire growing to get out there and fight? Well consider one more fact: Rasmussen polls play an outsized role in this chart. When they are excluded, the Democrats actually pull ahead of the Republicans, 45.0% to 44.1%
So, there it is. Sure there’s a ton of polling data available that can be cited as a basis for pessimism, if that’s what you’re looking for, but the generic ballot data, by itself, is simply not enough to reach a pessimistic conclusion. What the data actually shows is an election that is so close that dedication, effort and hard work by Democrats can still make all the difference in the world in literally dozens of individual races.
So, damn it Democrats, stop obsessing about the generic ballot data and get out there and get to work to change the data.
Let others whose job is forecasting try to predict the future — our job as Democrats is not to predict the future but to create it.
(A note to poll wonks: the last chart is produced with Pollster.com’s “more sensitive” setting for trend smoothing. For most purposes Pollster.com’s default setting is the best compromise, but as the FAQ’s on the pollster.com website notes “at times it (the default setting) may appear to be too conservative or too sensitive. In particular, this somewhat conservative estimator may be slow to chase trends early on, which means it can be slow to accept that public opinion is actually changing”)

The ‘skip-the-south’ school of Democratic strategy may have some splainin’ to do on the day after the midterms, specifically how Democrats took the governorships of the three largest southern states. Granted, this is an optimistic scenario, though not such an unrealistic one, given recent opinion polls. Here’s Republican activist and political commentator Hastings Wyman’s take, in excerpts from his post at the Southern Political Report:

…Although the GOP is poised to take over the governors’ mansions in Oklahoma and Tennessee, Democrats are in a strong position to take the governorships away from GOPers in three larger Southern states – Florida, Georgia and Texas. The Democrats’ prospects are strongest in Florida, where the state’s Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink (D) is leading in the governor’s race, followed by Georgia, where the revelation of Republican Nathan Deal’s undisclosed debts has suddenly made the Peach State race a tossup. Finally, although Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) continues to lead in voter surveys, he hovers under or around 50% and could face an upset on November 2. Democratic victories in one, two or three of these key states would be a major help to the party next year when all states must draw new lines for congressional and state legislative districts.
…At this point, Florida Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink (D) has the edge – though not a wide one – over multi-millionaire businessman (health care) Rick Scott (R) who still hasn’t gotten the backing of his primary foe, GOP establishment favorite Bill McCollum. Sink has had “really, really effective ads so far. They are funny and light,” says University of South Florida Professor Susan MacManus, a political scientist. Moreover, Scott is under fire because his former company, Columbia/HCA, was fined $1.7 billion for Medicare fraud. The fine was levied three years after Scott left the company, but some of the misdeeds occurred while he was still there. Scott notes that he was never charged with a crime, but this is a significant negative in this senior citizen-heavy state. Scott is attacking Sink for connections to the Obama Administration, citing union-sponsored ads attacking Scott for opposing the President’s stimulus package and the GOP is likely to benefit from a much higher turnout, as was evidenced in the primaries. The “Obama for America” group is working on Democratic turnout, but it isn’t finding the kind of enthusiasm that was there in 2008, among volunteers or voters…A CNN-Time survey announced September 8 gave Sink 49%, McCollum 42%. The Real Clear average of polls taken between August 11 and September 7 showed Sink with 43%, Scott 39%. Leans Sink.
With term-limited Gov. Sonny Perdue (R) leaving office, there were contested primaries to succeed him in both parties. The Democrats nominated former Gov. Roy Barnes. For the GOP, ex-Congressman Nathan Deal (R) came from behind to win a hard-fought runoff with 50.2% of the votes…The GOP was looking strong here, but recent revelations that Deal failed to disclose, as required by law, $2.3 million in loans due in February 2011, have quickly turned the race into a battle. There has even been talk of Deal’s withdrawal; however, Georgia law prevents substitution of a party nominee within 60 days of a General Election, so it’s Deal or nothing for the GOP. An InsiderAdvantage survey, announced September 16, showed Deal with 42%, Barnes 42% and Monds 5%. This contrasts with the same firm’s August 18 poll which gave Deal 45%, Barnes 41% and Monds 5%. A Mason-Dixon poll, however, announced September 19, showed Deal leading 45% to 41% for Barnes. Moreover, 700,000 Georgians voted in the Republican Primary, 400,000 in the Democratic Primary, the lowest turnout in the party’s gubernatorial primary since World War II. Toss up.
…After serving 13 years in office and having been reelected by a plurality of 39% in a four-way race four years ago, Gov. Rick Perry (R) faces an electorate that is a bit tired of him. Rice University political scientist Earl Black says, “Perry has alienated enough people over the years that what should be an easy win will be at best a modest win – if he wins.”
He also is being hurt by a divisive primary in which he rallied the state’s Christian conservatives to defeat more moderate US Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R), whose supporters (30% in the primary) may not all line up behind him, but may end up in the column of Houston’s respected former mayor, Bill White, the Democratic nominee, or one of the minor party candidates. White’s biggest problem is Obama’s unpopularity, and that outside of Houston, where the former mayor is well-known, the race may turn on Republican-vs.-Democrat, rather than on the identity of the candidates. Polls have shown a consistent lead for Perry, but he has rarely exceeded 50%, a weak sign for a well-known incumbent. White also places the blame for the state deficit on Perry, who counters that the national recession caused it. A poll of registered voters, taken by the University of Texas/Texas Tribune on September 3-8 gave Perry 39%, White 33%, Glass 5% and Shafto 1%. A Zogby poll released September 8 gave Perry 44%, White 41%. And a PPP (D) survey released September 8 gave Perry 48%, White 42%. Real Clear’s average of polls taken between August 22 and September 6 showed Perry with 47%, White 40%. Leans Republican.

An interesting perspective from a Republican who knows the southern political landscape. In this year especially, you might think Democrats would be wise to invest their resources outside of the south. But it appears that the “time for a change” meme that hurts Democratic congressional candidates just may help our southern candidates for governor in the three largest southern states.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
So you want to run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012? Here’s a hot tip from 2008 nominee John McCain:

Citing his own experience as the Republican nominee for president in 2008, McCain said the still-strong Republican presence in New Hampshire helped catapult his campaign toward the nomination. And since, he predicts, there will be a large group running in 2012, Republicans have to make the strongest showing early on in the campaign.
“For Republicans it seems to me that New Hampshire is still the very key place,” McCain said at the annual Washington Reuters Summit.
McCain also discounted Iowa as a key state to the campaign. McCain has never taken Iowa seriously in his attempts at the party’s nomination. McCain came in fifth in 2000 Iowa caucuses and fourth in 2008.
“The (Iowa) caucuses don’t seem to have the impact anymore that they used to, for the Republicans,” he said.

McCain might have added that this strategy works best if your main NH rival does run in Iowa, and loses there to an underfunded social conservative who goes on to split the vote against you in South Carolina and Florida. But then that would have involved acknowledging that his 2008 nomination was a crazy three-cushion shot that is unlikely to be replicated in the foreseeable future.
Maybe next McCain will offer his advice on how to pick a running-mate who won’t upstage you.

In the regular political column I write for the Progressive Policy Institute over at ProgressiveFix, I observed today that we are getting to the point where all the speculation about individual 2010 contests will begin to yield to hard data, and the actual battlegrounds will emerge.
A good example of how that might be happening is provided by new polls from PPP of two Senate races that have been ostensibly very similar, in WI and CA. In both of these blue states well-regarded but always-vunerable progressive Democratic U.S. senators are under attack from amply-financed Republican “newcomers.”
But according to PPP, Russ Feingold is suddenly in deep trouble against Ron Johnson, while Barbara Boxer is expanding her lead against Carly Fiorina. Both these polls represent a shift by PPP from registered voter to likely voter samples, making the trends interesting measurements of the so-called “enthusiasm gap” afflicting Democrats.
According to an account by its partner DailyKos, PPP finds the “enthusiasm gap” in WI to be “one of the most severe” in the country, with Johnson’s 1-point lead among 2008 voters ballooning to 11 points among likely 2010 voters.
But in California, Boxer’s 49-40 lead among RVs in July is a virtually unchanged 50-41 lead among likely voters today. More specifically, Boxer’s support among Democrats remains very strong, and as PPP’s Tom Jensen notes:

[T]he simple reality is that Fiorina has not proven to be a particularly appealing candidate to California voters. 42% of them see her unfavorably with only 34% rating her positively. Republicans like her, Democrats dislike her almost as much, and independents are slightly negative toward her. Again, not the formula that’s going to get a Republican elected to the Senate from California.
One other factor that should be noted here is that Boxer is just about the only vulnerable Democrat seeking reelection in a state where the majority of voters still approve of Barack Obama’s performance. His approval is 53/42, and by and large the folks that like Obama are supporting Boxer- California’s one of the last frontiers left where he’s not a drag.

Interestingly, PPP also shows Jerry Brown leading Meg Whitman among likely voters by a 47-42 margin in the CA governor’s race, even though Brown is just now getting around to running television ads.
Now it may be that PPP’s current polling in either WI or CA could prove to be an outlier; it happens to all pollsters on occasion. It’s also true that Russ Feingold has a habit of getting into trouble in his re-election campaigns, only to eventually recover and win.
But whether or not these two races in particular are examples, we should soon begin to see disparities in the host of “close races” we’ve all been watching, and separate the sheep from the goats.

As the political ad wars heat up for the Fall stretch of the midterm campaign, television is still regarded as the pivotal media, according to a recent Ad Week report (via Reuters) by Mike Shields. Conversely, spending for digital media has been disappointing this year, as Shields explains:

Following the recent digital-savvy campaigns led by Obama and Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown, many expected a slew of imitators to emerge during the 2010 midterms, leading to a surge in online spending. But political ad insiders say that with the exception of a handful of digital-focused campaigns, few candidates are dumping dollars onto the Web, outside of social media and search. And with six weeks or so to go before Election Day, not many watchers are expecting a sudden surge.
According to Borrell & Associates, political spending on digital media should double this year vs. 2008, reaching $44.5 million. Despite that hefty growth rate, “that’s really not much,” said Kip Cassino, Borrell’s vp of research. Some estimates place digital spending at 1 percent of total political media dollars. “There’s more of it, but it’s still a fraction,” said Evan Tracey, president, campaign media analysis group, Kantar Media.
“Spending has just not developed this year,” said Ted Utz, managing director of the local rep firm Petry Digital. Utz said his company works with around 10 top political ad agencies. “They are staffed up and poised to place digital money, and it’s been really anemic…

Rightly or wrongly, it appears most political campaigns, or the ad agencies advising them, believe that television still provides the most powerful message machine, as Shields explains:

Perhaps the biggest factor holding back digital spending is political consultants’ love affair with TV, which, according to Cassino, gets two of every three dollars spent in this arena. TV has a long track record of getting people elected, particularly in local congressional races, where a candidate might be running “for the 10th or 11th term,” said Cassino. “So they hand digital planning to the kid who comes in as a volunteer.”

Shields notes that political consultants tend to be skeptical about banner ads, and that there is a dearth of studies assessing the impact of digital ads. Of the spending for digital advertising, most of the growth has been in search ads — Google search ads are up 800 percent over 2008, and there has also been an uptick in “locally targeted Facebook self serve ads,” along with some growing campaign interest in YouTube “promoted videos.”
Shield’s article did not break down the remaining 32 percent of political ad spending in terms of print, telephone, radio, billboards, direct mail and other media, all of which can be useful in “micro-targeting” specific constituencies. But it’s clear that political campaign budget managers and consultants still see television as the best way to reach everyone.
Shields quotes a ‘veteran online political ad operative,’ who says that candidates still treat digital media “as a stepchild. “Look at Meg Whitman in California,” he said of the former eBay CEO. “She’s putting all her money in TV.”
With respect to Democrats in particular, more spending on digital ads might nonetheless be a cost-effective investment, especially given concerns about turning out the progressive base. But it’s not hard to understand the lopsided investment in television in light of internet demographics. according to one demographic analysis, 38 percent of seniors age 65+, who turn out to vote in impressive numbers, are internet-active, vs. 93 percent of 18-29 year-olds, 81 percent of age 30-49 and 70 percent of those 50-64 years of age.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Jay Cost is one of those conservative political writers whom I’ve always respected for his interest in empirical analysis and reasoned debate. But in a Weekly Standard column published this week, which pushes back against Democratic efforts to highlight the growing radicalism of the GOP, he made a frankly offensive statement that strays from analysis to agitprop:

At best, this strategy might help swing an odd election here and there to the Democrats–e.g. Delaware and (maybe) Nevada–and increase the historically low levels of Democratic enthusiasm by a point or two. But that’s it. For the swing voters who determine elections, it’s clear by now that the midterm is going to be about the deeply unpopular policies of President Obama.
Attacking the Tea Partiers is not going to distract them because the Tea Partiers have had nothing to do with those policies. This cycle, the GOP has the better argument, and it is not going to take the bait. Republican candidates everywhere will answer the charge of radicalism with a simple question: “Where are the jobs, Mr. President?” The fact that the White House is thinking about such demagoguery is another strong indication that it is simply looking to keep Democratic turnout high enough to prevent a 1974-style tsunami.

It’s “demagoguery” for political leaders of one party to ask voters to compare their policies to those of the alternate party? Last time I checked, the U.S. Congress hasn’t adopted the system that some states have for judicial elections, in which voters simply decide whether to retain or reject incumbents, without knowing anything about their potential replacements. Elections are inherently comparative. Yes, many swing voters do tend to treat elections as a referendum on the party in power, but they don’t have to, and many don’t. And, far from being demagogic, it’s responsible for the major parties to try to educate voters about what they’re choosing, rather than simply what they’re voting against. (What about the center-right voters who pulled the lever for Obama in 2008, but then complained when he turned out to be liberal in office? Should they have paid more attention to what they were voting for?)
In any event, it would be folly for Democrats to accept Cost’s view that the ideas of the GOP are off the table in 2010. There is abundant evidence that the ascendant conservative wing of the Republican Party is determined to pursue policies for which there is relatively little public support, from renewed military aggression in the Middle East, to major changes in Social Security and Medicare, to abandonment of a federal role in environmental protection and education, to destruction of progressive taxation, to maintenance of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and continued assaults on abortion rights. If anything, the Tea Partiers deserve attention for being honest and even proud about the radicalism of their agenda–and Democrats have every right to ask if other Republicans agree with it.
Jim DeMint, who has evolved from a lonely extremist into a genuine Big Dog in the GOP, is clearly not indifferent to the ideological agenda of his party. Yesterday, he announced in The Washington Post and on CNN that the Republican Party would soon be “dead” if it does not keep the outrageous promises it has been making this year. Why is it all right for DeMint to focus on Republican policies, but not all right for Democrats to do the same?
This foot-stamping insistence that the election must be a referendum on the Democratic Party is reckless, in that it excuses the minority party from any inhibition on extreme measures it might take to mobilize its base. At a time when conservative leaders are spewing unprecedented–yes, unprecedented–radical rhetoric about the character, patriotism, motives, and competence of the president and congressional Democrats, labeling liberals “demagogues” for demanding scrutiny of GOP candidates is hypocritical in the extreme. In addition, it is self-defeating: Just wait to see how the Republicans fare in 2012 if their current fervor is given full vent.

Conservatives hoping to steamroller renewed tax cuts for the rich through congress have an uphill struggle to convince the public that it’s a good idea, explains TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira in his latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’:

The Obama administration has proposed letting the Bush tax cuts expire for those making over $250,000 but extending them for those making under that amount. Conservatives in Congress are up in arms about this since keeping the tax cuts for the rich is practically a sacred cause in their eyes.
A sacred cause it may be, but a popular cause it is not. New data from a CBS News/New York Times poll clearly show that the public views tax cuts for the rich and tax cuts for the middle class very differently and no one should be fooled by conservatives’ attempts to conflate them.
Start with letting the tax cuts expire for the rich. The poll simply asked whether such a move is a good idea or a bad idea. By 53-38, the public said this is a good idea.

Letting tax cuts expire for the middle class, however, is an overwhelmingly unpopular idea, as indicated by the 74-19 percent margin among poll respondents. As Teixeira said, “The public’s view is therefore clear, simple, and diametrically opposed to the conservatives…Time for our policymakers to listen up and move forward.”

With the news that Harry Reid’s figured out a procedural path to a stand-alone vote on continuing middle-class tax cuts that will force Republicans to get 60 votes to stop it, and the likelihood that Nancy Pelosi can find a similar path , the probability of a Democratic retreat on this issue has declined significantly.
But just for the record, it’s a good idea to remember that this is probably the one issue on which Democrats from every ideological and strategic perspective ought to be able to agree. Are you one of those Democrats frantic for a R versus D showdown that can energize the base? This qualifies. Are you a deficit hawk? Resisting the tax cut for the rich has an enormous impact on the deficit. Do you think Obama and Dems have to find some topic where public opinion is in their favor? No question that it is on this one. Are you one of the rare Dems who thinks the party needs to show more bipartisanship or “centrism”? Well, pushing for a tax cut is not exactly a Marxist idea.
Democrats need to keep the pressure up to move forward on this most fruitful issue, and prepare to blast the GOP to hell and back next time Republicans pretend to care more about deficits and debt–or the middle-class folk allegedly furious at liberal “elites”– than anything else.