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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: September 2010

Young Voters and Midterm Turnout

For those trying to sort out why prospects for Democrats look relatively poor for November, Gallup has supplied a very interesting data point in a study of interest levels in the elections. Here’s the most important passage:

The gap between young adults (aged 18 to 29) and older adults (aged 30+) in their election attention levels was relatively narrow in 2008 — 12 percentage points — but the 23-point difference today (42% vs. 19%) is similar to the average 26-point gap seen in October-November of prior midterms, from 1994 through 2006.

In other words, the “enthusiasm gap” is partially accounted for by the reemergence of a normal midterm election “gap” between the political involvement levels of younger and older voters, at a time when the former represent an unusually important bloc of pro-Democratic voters. But it’s worth noting that this gap is indeed normal for midterms; i.e., it cannot necessarily be associated with anything that’s happened since November of 2008. And as such, it is equally likely to shrink considerably during the next presidential election cycle.


EDITORIAL: It’s Time To Unmask the Republican Agenda

With the arrival of Labor Day, and the end of Vacation Time for Americans lucky enough to have jobs with benefits, the options for changing the dynamics of the midterm elections have gradually but steadily narrowed. Significant external events could still happen, but probably won’t; the economy is not going to turn around between now and November 2.
Moreover, the opportunity to engineer a basic sea change in public opinion on the Obama’s administration’s agenda is probably past for the time being. Much as the White House’s earlier efforts to convince people that the economy would be far worse without unpopular market interventions made sense, basic judgments have been made by most persuadable voters. The same is true of health reform; the legislation’s beneficial effects will have to kick in before it gets a fresh trial in the court of public opinion.
What Democrats can — and must — do more of during the shank of the campaign season is to challenge Republicans to disclose their own agenda for the country, and draw greater attention to the extremist logic of where Republican positions of current events would lead. The vast majority of all Democratic messaging in the next two months needs to relentlessly focus on this single topic.
This is obviously easier in the case of Republican nominees such as Rand Paul, Sharron Angle and Joe Miller, who have called for phasing out Social Security and Medicare. But many other Republicans are demanding elimination of any federal role in education, energy environmental protection or agriculture, and virtually the entire party is reflexively opposing regulations on a wide variety of subjects where corporate misbehavior has had a devastating effect on the national interest and middle-class Americans individually.
Even those GOP elected officials and candidates who have been careful to avoid such specific positions have accepted the party-wide argument that federal budget deficits must be immediately reduced if not eliminated even as new tax cuts for high-earners and corporations are provided and the defense budget is protected (if not expanded via a new war with Iran which many Republicans have been agitating in favor of for years now). By any sort of math, the Republican agenda means massive steps to eliminate regulations and scale back Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other basic safety net programs.
Democrats need to hammer away at these general and particular implications of the GOP agenda every day and in every competitive contest across the country.
To those who argue that this sort of “negative” campaigning would represent an effort to change the subject from its own performance in office, Democrats must respond: it’s Republicans who are trying to change the subject from a proper comparison of the agendas of the two parties and of individual candidates.
There’s no secret about the Democratic agenda; the administration and the congressional Democratic leadership have been trying to implement it since January of 2009, against the active obstruction of the GOP, which is using every dilatory tactic, most notably unprecedented threats to use Senate filibusters. The public deserves to know exactly what the Republican Party will propose if it gains control of either House of Congress.
At this late date, such a “negative” campaign by Democrats is the right thing to do, and perhaps the only thing to do that can simultaneously persuade swing voters and motivate a high turnout by Democrats. Waiting until next year to force the hand of Republicans is both irresponsible and politically feckless.
However much conservatives and many elements of the media insist the midterm elections are a “referendum” on the Obama administration or this or that Democratic initiative, they cannot wish away the fact that every contest that will decide control of Congress or of state and local governments involves a choice between a Democrat and a Republican–with the former being held strictly responsible for every discontent with the status quo, and the latter free to demagogue and make vague or wild promises without immediate consequences.
Every Democrat reading these words knows the sort of extremist and very unpopular agenda the GOP will be forced to advance in the very near future by its own loose rhetoric, the logic of its conflicting promises, and the growing radicalism of its cadre of politicians. It’s time to tell the country about it right now.


Structural Causes of the “Enthusiasm Gap”

This item by Ed Kilgore was originally published on September 2, 2010.
In analyses of the current political climate, an awful lot of stock has been placed in the so-called “enthusiasm gap” between Republicans and Democrats. Sometimes this “gap” is based on polling that actually asks voters about their level of enthusiasm towards voting this year. The problem with such measurements, of course, is that “very enthusiastic” voters don’t get an extra vote; the key variable is willingness to vote, not the degree of passion with which a vote is cast.
More often than not, though, the “enthusiasm gap” has become synonymous with the more meaningful idea that Republicans will have a turnout advantage in November. And while this probability is frequently identified with a relative level of unhappiness among Democrats for the Obama administration and/or congressional Democrats, it cannot be repeated too often that midterm turnout is invariably higher among older and whiter voters. And it just so happens that the Democratic support base as of 2008 was unusually correlated with the youth and diversity of voters.
That’s true today as well. Looking at Gallup’s latest presidential job approval tracking poll, Obama’s positive ratings remain inversely correlated with age, and thus with the proclivity to vote in midterms, ranging from 56% among 18-29 year-olds; to 38% among over-65s. His approval rating among nonwhite voters, another traditionally underperforming demographic group in midterms, is 65% (among African-Americans, it’s 90%).
Meanwhile, 78% of Democrats and 73% of self-identified “liberals” approve of the President’s job performance. These are not optimal numbers, but nor do they suggest a deep malaise. At this point in his presidency, 70% of Democrats approved of Bill Clinton’s job performance, and he went on to win re-election handily. And since it’s de rigour to compare Obama to Jimmy Carter these days, it’s worth noting the 52% job approval rating among Democrats for Jimmy Carter at this point in his presidency (Carter’s Democratic approval rating eventually bottomed out in the autumn of 1979 at 40%).
None of this provides any Democratic comfort for the midterms themselves, but it should be reasonably clear that structural factors account for much of the “enthusiasm gap.” And the minute the 2012 presidential cycle begins, the same factors will create a much more positive environment for Obama, even if you don’t consider the unimpressive Republican presidential field.


The Conservative Politics of Common Purpose

This item by Ed Kilgore was originally published on September 1, 2010.
The primary defeat of incumbent Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski (confirmed by her concession yesterday) by former judge Joe Miller is generally being interpreted as another scalp for the Tea Party Movement in its assault on Republicans deemed too moderate on this or that key issue. But there’s something going on a bit deeper, if you consider Alaska’s exceptional dependence on the federal government and the past political track record of politicians like Murkowski’s mentor, the late Ted Stevens, who aligned themselves with the anti-government GOP but emphasized their ability to “bring home the bacon” via appropriations.
In endorsing Miller on behalf of his Senate Conservatives Fund, Jim DeMint emphasized this dimension of Murkowski’s defeat:

Joe Miller’s victory should be a wake-up call to politicians who go to Washington to bring home the bacon. Voters are saying ‘We’re not willing to bankrupt the country to benefit ourselves.’

Now it wouldn’t be quite right to accept DeMint’s characterization of either Alaska voters’ motivations or Miller’s ideology at face value. After all, when Miller calls for abolishing the federal Department of Energy, he’s appealing to the rather selfish desire of Alaskans to control their “own” energy resources–whose value is a lot higher than any federal earmark– regardless of what it means nationally.
But it’s true that there’s an element of collective self-denial among those conservatives who are genuinely willing to take on federal spending categories that are popular among their constituents. Miller is just the latest of a number of Republican Senate candidates this year who have called for phasing out Social Security and Medicare. DeMint himself has long described these programs, along with public education, as having seduced middle-class Americans into socialist ways of thinking.
As Republican pols from Barry Goldwater to George W. Bush can tell you, going after Social Security and Medicare is really bad politics. And they’ve yet to come up with a gimmick, whether it’s “partial privatization” or grandfathering existing beneficiaries, to make major changes in these programs popular (I seriously doubt the very latest gimmick, “voucherizing” Medicare, will do any better once people understand the idea). Indeed, Republicans notably engaged in their own form of “Medagoguery” by attacking health care reform as a threat to Medicare benefits.
Yet the sudden Tea Party-driven return to fiscal hawkery among Republicans, particularly if it’s not accompanied by any willingness to consider tax increases or significant defense spending cuts, will drive the GOP again and again to “entitlement reform.” In Senate candidates like Rand Paul and Sharron Angle and now Joe Miller, we are seeing the return of a paleoconservative perspective in the GOP that embraces the destruction of the New Deal/Great Society era’s most important accomplishments not just as a matter of fiscal necessity but as a moral imperative.
You can respect this point of view even if you abhor its practical implications. But there’s little doubt it represents political folly of potentially massive dimensions. Certainly Democrats owe it to these brave conservatives to take them seriously in their desire to free middle-class seniors from the slavery of Social Security and Medicare, and draw as much attention to it as possible.


The Prophet Glenn

This item by Ed Kilgore was originally published on August 30, 2010
Having read in various places that Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” event in Washington turned out to be an apolitical nothing-burger–albeit a bizarre attempt to appropriate the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.–I resolved to watch a video of Beck’s entire 56-minute speech.
It was, without a doubt, one of the more vacuous and cliche-ridden speeches I have ever heard, with vague injunctions to the crowd to look to the future, take responsibility, love their children, get right with God, and stand up for their values. It even ended with that most cliched secular popularization of a fine old hymn, the bagpipe version of “Amazing Grace.” If it was, as so many observers suggested, a primarily religious address, it’s likely that the attendees could have heard a better-crafted and more instructive sermon in virtually any of Washington’s houses of worship.
So was it all just a Beck-a-ganza aimed at marketing his “brand” at the expense of any real purpose?
I might have thought so, until the final portion of his speech, when he started talking about “black-robed regiments” of clergy who, in Beck’s typically distorted reading of history, were the vanguard of the American revolution against godless Britain, and now, after more than two centuries of national infidelity, were being remustered by Beck himself as embodied by the clergy sharing his rostrum. They represented, Beck asserted, 180 million Americans, and they were determined to put God back in charge of the country. As Peter Montgomery of AlterNet (via Digby) has shown, the regiments were led by such theocratic warhorses as David Barton, the “Christian Nation” historian who has devoted his career to the destruction of church-state separation.
Beck’s rather frank appeal to theocracy–a non-sectarian theocracy, to be sure, but one that enshrined a “firm reliance on Divine Providence” as involving very clear rules of individual and national behavior–was the real thrust of his address. And in fact, the bland nature of most of his speech ironically reinforced its radical intent. Anyone who shared any sort of commitment to basic moral values, religious piety, or patriotism ought to go along with what people like Glenn Beck and his allies consider the obvious implications of such commitments in politics: a hard-core conservatism recast as a restoration of faith and national honor. Thus his core audience, the true believers who traveled to Washington to participate in this event, and those who watched it live on Fox, were comforted to know that their political preferences were a faithful reflection of the views of Moses, Jesus Christ, the Founders, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King.
Most readers will probably discern in Beck’s appeal the familiar M.O. of the Christian Right: an effort to divinize a secular political agenda–much of it revolving around the golden calf of absolute private property rights–while anathamizing any opposition as hostile to religion. And that’s why Beck’s game was best revealed not on Saturday, but on Sunday, when he attacked President Obama’s religion as a “perversion:”

During an interview on “Fox News Sunday,” which was filmed after Saturday’s rally, Beck claimed that Obama “is a guy who understands the world through liberation theology, which is oppressor-and-victim.”
“People aren’t recognizing his version of Christianity,” Beck added….
“You see, it’s all about victims and victimhood; oppressors and the oppressed; reparations, not repentance; collectivism, not individual salvation. I don’t know what that is, other than it’s not Muslim, it’s not Christian. It’s a perversion of the gospel of Jesus Christ as most Christians know it,” Beck said.

But Beck is really attacking the idea that anyone can be godly who doesn’t believe God’s Will on this Earth happens to coincide pretty much precisely with the agenda of the right wing of the Republican Party of the United States, circa 2010. All the banalities of his “Restoring Honor” speech depend on identifying piety with his brand of conservatism. And in the effort to set himself up as prophet and pope, he’s in dire danger of setting himself up for a truly biblical fall.
As was illustrated by the strong reaction back in March to his injunctions to Catholics to fight the very idea of “social justice,” Beck is not in the best position to define orthodoxy and heterodoxy in Christian theology. As a Mormon, his own theology is often demonized by conservative evangelical Protestants as a perversion or worse. And in fact, you’d think that anyone associated with an often-persecuted religious minority would be afraid of the power of “black-robed regiments,” and more sympathetic to Barack Obama’s view that doubt about God’s Will on Earth is a distinctively Christian perspective on church and state.
But Beck’s made his choice, seeking to make his radical politics both more acceptable and more militant via identification with the very impulse of religiosity. In adopting the prophetic stance, Glenn Beck is perhaps making a bid to reconcile the Tea Party Movement with the Christian Right (not that they are necessarily two different groups of people), under his leadership. If that’s not what he’s up to, then maybe the “Restoring Honor” rally truly was a nothing-burger, and Beck himself is destined to spend his declining years not as a prophet, but as a late-night infomercial figure promoting motivational materials available at an affordable cost.


Big Campaigns For Small Government

One of the ironies of this campaign year is the number of free-spending rich Republican candidates who are pouring the golden parachutes they earned when exiting (often nonvoluntarily) the private sector to rant against public spending.
We’re seeing a particularly rich example of this dichotomy in Calfornia, where Meg Whitman, who is promising to squeeze public expenditures and lay off many thousands of state workers, is showing just how lavish a campaign apparatus you can buy with around $150 million.
Here’s is Calbuzz’s summary of a chart of Team Whitman helpfully offered by Jerry Brown’s campaign:

Counting people up, across and over (which sometimes puts people in more than one sector of the Invasion of Normandy graphic) we find eight people in scheduling and advance, 10 staff and consultants in policy, 16 in coalitions, 16 in field operations, 27 in fund-raising and finance and 24 in communications, including eight in the research group.
“In the green box marked ‘Miscellaneous Campaign Staff,’ there are an additional four staffers who have made more than $100,000 from Whitman, and we have no idea what they’re doing,” Brown’s research director told Calbuzz.
Brown campaign manager Steve Glazer likens Whitman’s campaign to a massive aircraft carrier that is stalled in the middle of the ocean, floating listlessly, unable to gain momentum despite spending millions and millions and millions on TV and radio advertising, internet communications, mail, telephone banks, fundraising, event planning and execution – you name it, USS eMeg has paid for it.
Whether that’s an accurate portrayal of a campaign operation with no equal in the history of California is still uncertain. This we know: No governor’s office we’re aware of ever had such a massive org chart, unless you count all the agencies and departments that are part of an administration and the CHP protective detail.
Also, no one in a governor’s office ever made this kind of money: strategist Mike Murphy’s Bonaparte Productions, $861,474; adviser Henry Gomez, $769,216; campaign manager Jilian Hasner, $667,552; adviser Jeff Randle, $572,949; security director John Endert, $261,682; communications director Tucker Bounds, $293,349; press secretary Sarah Pompei, $154,872; yadayadayada. That’s not even all the big-tick items and it’s only up to the most recent financial reporting period.

The grand irony is that anti-government campaigns like Whitman’s are like big dinner bells for the political class, offering lots of jobs at unusually high pay in the pursuit, we are told, of tight-fisted austerity. Even if eMeg loses, Republican political operatives will remember her campaign fondly for many years as a wonderful interval when no political attack was too unconscionable and no expense too high.
If she wins, California public employees could have a hard time. But it’s more than a psychic flash to guess that Whitman’s political operations, whether it’s on the public payroll or supported by what’s left of her vast fortune, won’t suffer from lack of financial support.


Jewish Voters Still Overwhelmingly Democratic

Jim Gerstein, executive director of Democracy Corps, has a post up at Politico, vaporizing the GOP meme that President Obama and Democrats are losing support of Jewish voters.
Gerstein begins by pointing out that conservatives tried to peddle this meme in 2000 and 2004 and 2008 with less than impressive outcomes: Al Gore got 78 percent of the Jewish vote in 2000, John Kerry received 74 percent and Obama was supported by 78 percent of Jewish voters, despite an extensive Republican propaganda efforts.
As for the November 2nd midterms, Gerstein says,

Now, with midterm elections approaching, the voices proclaiming Jewish revolt are in full force. This time, they say Democrats will lose Jewish support because Obama is unduly pressuring Israel. As usual, these arguments are based on arbitrary quotes from the leaders of lobbying organizations or someone’s Aunt Esther. It ignores the actual data reflecting the opinions of rank-and-file American Jews.
The starting point for separating anecdote from fact is to understand that Israel is not a voting priority for American Jews. In surveys that my firm has conducted for J Street in the 2008 and 2010 election cycles, only 8 percent to 10 percent of Jews cite Israel as one of the top two issues determining their vote. In other words, an overwhelming 90 percent of Jews don’t consider Israel as one of their top two issues.
For Jews, Israel is a threshold issue rather than a high priority. That is, candidates must demonstrate they are “good enough” on Israel. However, once they pass this threshold — as Obama, Kerry and Bill Clinton did — Jewish voters move on to consider issues that actually affect their daily lives, just like other voters.

Gerstein concedes that there will likely be a decline in Jewish support for Democratic candidates this year, proportional to the decline of support from other constituencies. Republicans will try to exaggerate the significance of the decline, but politically-alert voters won’t buy it. In terms of the latest poll numbers, Gerstein explains:

Currently, the Jewish vote is where we would expect it. Gallup reported in June that Democrats are getting 62 percent of the Jewish vote (which rises to 69 percent when allocating undecided voters). Last week, Gallup reported that Obama’s job approval with Jews remained 13 points above the national electorate, a margin that has remained consistent throughout his presidency…

As Gerstein concludes, “Clearly, Democrats’ political challenges are not with American Jews.”


Lakoff, Westen & Nyhan: Messaging vs. “It’s the Economy”

There’s an interesting discussion going on in the political e-zines about the relative influence of ‘messaging’ and the economy in formulating Democratic strategy. Messaging gurus Drew Westen and George Lakoff have recently posted intriguing and sometimes conflicting arguments about Democratic messaging strategy, while both agree on it’s central importance. Brendan Nyhan, on the other hand has made a well-documented case that “structural factors,” particularly the economy, trump messaging and tactical choices in affecting election outcomes.
Lakoff’s Alternet article, “The Dems Need to Speak to Progressive Values, or Else Lose Badly Come November,” is a hybrid piggy-back/critique of Drew Westen’s recent Huffpo article on Democratic midterm strategy.
After (rightly) praising Westen’s article as “outstanding,” Lakoff explains,

I agree fully with everything he says. But …
Westen’s piece is incomplete in crucial ways. His piece can be read as saying that this election is about kitchen table economics (right) and only kitchen table economics (wrong).
This election is about more than just jobs, and mortgages, and adequate health care. All politics is moral. All political leaders say to do what they propose because it is right. No political leaders say to do what they say because it is wrong. Morality is behind everything in politics — and progressives and conservatives have different moral systems.

Lakoff believes it’s important to understand the moral bearings of Republicans in formulating a sound strategy:

In the conservative moral system, the highest value is preserving and extending the moral system itself. That is why they keep saying no to Obama’s proposals, even voting against their own ideas when Obama accepts them. To give Obama any victory at all would be a blow to their moral system. Their moral system requires non-co-operation. That is a major thing the Obama administration has not understood.

Lakoff joins with many progressives who have said there was never any chance that the Republicans were sincere about bipartisanship and President Obama should accept that as a reality. On HCR, Lakoff adds, “The Obama administration made a policy case, not a moral case…”
I’m sure Lakoff is right that a strong moral case can often excite voters in a favorable way. And just about any progressive policy can be advocated as right and just. But there is danger for candidates in coming off as a high-horse moralist.
One of Lakoff’s more perceptive insights has to do with the center of the political spectrum:

Westen’s discussion of “the center” and of populism in general, misses what is crucial in this election. There is no one “center.” Instead, a considerable number of Americans (perhaps as many as 15 to 20 percent) are conservative in some respects and progressive in other respects. They have both moral systems and apply them to different issues — in all kinds of ways. You can be conservative on economics and progressive on social issues, or conservative on foreign policy and progressive on domestic issues, and so on — in all sorts of combinations.

I think this is important. Just as the term “Independent” is misinterpreted to suggest those who identify themselves as such have a predictable political ideology, those who are often self-identified as “Centrists” or “Moderates” do indeed often embrace liberal AND conservative views on various issues — which makes it close to impossible to formulate a coherent issue-focused strategy to win their votes.
Political ideology is often complex. At the Beck rally the other day, for example, I noticed that his first mention of Martin Luther King, Jr. in his opening speech got a substantial and sincere-sounding applause, presumably from many wingnuts. What’s up with that? Perhaps MLK’s integrity and humility transcend differences on issues. Or maybe it’s just his icon status got some respect from the less unhinged members of Beck’s audiences.
Lakoff argues further that “the swing voters are really swing thinkers.” He emphasizes the importance of appealing to them by “framing all issues in terms of your values. Avoid their language, even in arguing against them…It just activates their arguments in the brains of listeners.”
Over the longer run, Lakoff advocates training “spokespeople all over the country in using such framing and avoiding mistakes.” He concludes, “The Democrats cannot take their base for granted. Only moral leadership backed by actions and communicated effectively can excite the Obama base once more.”
After giving Lakoff and Westen due credit for their interesting and useful insights, it seems prudent to give fair consideration to a different view, well-articulated by Brendan Nyhan in a recent link-rich post shared by Pollster.com and HuffPo regarding what he calls the “tactical fallacy” of messaging gurus and others. As Nyhan explains:

The problem is that any reasonable political tactic chosen by professionals will tend to resonate in favorable political environments and fall flat in unfavorable political environments (compare Bush in ’02 to Bush ’06, or Obama in ’08 to Obama in ’09-’10). But that doesn’t mean the candidates are succeeding or failing because of the tactics they are using. While strategy certainly can matter on the margin in individual races, aggregate congressional and presidential election outcomes are largely driven by structural factors (the state of the economy, the number of seats held by the president’s party, whether it’s a midterm or presidential election year, etc.). Tactical success often is a reflection of those structural factors rather than an independent cause.
What advocates of the tactical view have failed to do is provide a viable counterfactual — where is the example of the president whose messaging succeeded despite a similarly poor economy? TNR’s John Judis has tried to argue that Reagan was more successful than Obama in 1981-1982…but as I have pointed out…the 1982 election results do not suggest Republicans significantly overperformed and Reagan’s approval ratings (both on the economy and overall) were extremely similar to Obama’s at the same point in their presidencies.
The reality is that Obama’s current standing — and the rush to blame it on tactical failures — could be predicted months ago based on structural factors. His approval ratings largely reflect a poor economy. Similarly, Democrats were likely to suffer significant losses in the House no matter what due to the number of seats they currently hold and the fact that it is a midterm election. Nonetheless, expect the tactics-are-everything crowd to be saying “I told you so” on November 3.*
* Bonus prediction: If the economy rebounds before 2012, the media will rediscover the tactical genius of Obama and David Axelrod.

A sobering notion. Maybe the messaging strategies of Westen and Lakoff have very limited value in a tanking economy, and might work better in an economy that is at least moderately hopeful. If Nyhan is right, the Democrats’ best strategy for the 2010 midterms may be to target a few pivotal campaigns and spread campaign resources less broadly.


Finally, there’s a solid, empirically grounded comparison of the size of the Glen Beck rally and the Obama inauguration – Are you ready? The Beck Rally was only 11% of the size of the inauguration.

A couple of days ago I noted that CBS was the only news company that went to the trouble of hiring a professional aerial photo analysis company to estimate the size of the Beckapallosa last weekend and that the estimate CBS received was that only 87,000 people (plus or minus 9,000) had actually attended.
Even ignoring the estimates of the Beck rally’s own organizers and participants, (which were based upon a combination of divine revelation and a handy, unlimited supply of zeros) 87,000 did seem a awfully low number just based on eyeballing the main long distance crowd photos in the press and comparing them with previous demonstrations. But, on the other hand, the photo company’s methodology was the absolutely accepted standard for doing this kind of estimation and several different specialists used the aerial photos to provide independent estimates which were then consolidated into the final figure. I speculated that the explanation might lie in how densely packed the crowd was, which could not be judged in long distance photos, but without additional background information from the photo analysis company the discussion was at a dead end.
Well, the company has now released more information about the estimating procedure – including 400 aerial photos – and it appears that the 87,000 number is indeed very solidly grounded. You can read the details here but the bottom line is that the analysis followed the accepted procedures for this kind of analysis and the company has made their raw data public. From a scientific standpoint, their work is on solid ground.
But the really fascinating fact in the new information is this: this same company was used to estimate the number of people who attended the Obama inauguration. Their estimate at the time — 800,000 — was attacked by many Obama-boosters as far too low but was embraced by the right as the scientific gold standard.
And here’s the critical thing. The company used precisely – precisely — the same methodology to estimate the size of the Beck rally that they used to estimate the size of the inaugural crowd. So even if one wants to question the exact accuracy or precision of their photo analysis methods, they will still produce an extremely good relative comparison between the attendance at the two events.
So, as the saying goes, “just do the math”. The Glen Beck rally, whatever its exact absolute size, turns out to have been just 11% of the size of the inaugural crowd.
It is obviously a pointless task to try and argue about this with the Beck-o-philes themselves. They will undoubtedly discover the dark hand of ACORN, SIEU “thugs”, nuns overly influenced by John Paul II and probably Woodrow Wilson and Mahatma Gandhi in intimidating the photo analysis company into distorting its data.
But a solid, empirically based estimate of the attendance at the rally is indeed important for Democrats because it provides a measure of the organizational and mobilization capabilities of the FOX news/Freedomworks/Americans for Prosperity conservative machine. The 87,000 people they bussed in or provided parking arrangements for at last weeks’ rally was actually very close in size to the attendance at the 9/12 rally last year. It suggests that, despite an entire year of continual and increasingly monstrous progressive outrages against the very fabric of human decency and civilized life, their ability to mobilize their base has not dramatically grown.
Except, of course, in one place – in the lyrical expanses of conservative press releases, where the mundane constraints of empirical data are effortlessly transcended by the miracles of faith-based crowd estimation – the delightful realm where, as in Neverland, Oz and old Disney flicks, “just wishing makes it so”.


Structural Causes of the “Enthusiasm Gap”

In analyses of the current political climate, an awful lot of stock has been placed in the so-called “enthusiasm gap” between Republicans and Democrats. Sometimes this “gap” is based on polling that actually asks voters about their level of enthusiasm towards voting this year. The problem with such measurements, of course, is that “very enthusiastic” voters don’t get an extra vote; the key variable is willingness to vote, not the degree of passion with which a vote is cast.
More often than not, though, the “enthusiasm gap” has become synonymous with the more meaningful idea that Republicans will have a turnout advantage in November. And while this probability is frequently identified with a relative level of unhappiness among Democrats for the Obama administration and/or congressional Democrats, it cannot be repeated too often that midterm turnout is invariably higher among older and whiter voters. And it just so happens that the Democratic support base as of 2008 was unusually correlated with the youth and diversity of voters.
That’s true today as well. Looking at Gallup’s latest presidential job approval tracking poll, Obama’s positive ratings remain inversely correlated with age, and thus with the proclivity to vote in midterms, ranging from 56% among 18-29 year-olds; to 38% among over-65s. His approval rating among nonwhite voters, another traditionally underperforming demographic group in midterms, is 65% (among African-Americans, it’s 90%).
Meanwhile, 78% of Democrats and 73% of self-identified “liberals” approve of the President’s job performance. These are not optimal numbers, but nor do they suggest a deep malaise. At this point in his presidency, 70% of Democrats approved of Bill Clinton’s job performance, and he went on to win re-election handily. And since it’s de rigour to compare Obama to Jimmy Carter these days, it’s worth noting the 52% job approval rating among Democrats for Jimmy Carter at this point in his presidency (Carter’s Democratic approval rating eventually bottomed out in the autumn of 1979 at 40%).
None of this provides any Democratic comfort for the midterms themselves, but it should be reasonably clear that structural factors account for much of the “enthusiasm gap.” And the minute the 2012 presidential cycle begins, the same factors will create a much more positive environment for Obama, even if you don’t consider the unimpressive Republican presidential field.