Even as many of us deplore the hard cold cash which is dominating the end-game of this election cycle, signs are growing that the most conspicuous vote-buyer, Republican Meg Whitman, is about to lose her $180 million (give or take ten million or so; the final numbers aren’t in) gamble to become governor of California.
Already losing ground in virtually every recent poll, Whitman had a fine opportunity to score some points in an appearance with Jerry Brown and incumbent Arnold Schwarzenegger at the annual California Women’s Conference, an nonpartisan event attended by about 14,000 women. As a female running as a competent outsider, you’d figure this would be a good venue for Whitman; she could have perhaps even resuscitated the “Whoregate” brouhaha to instill some sisterly solidarity in the audience.
Instead, with an assist from moderator Matt Lauer, Whitman floundered in the quasi-debate, and got herself heavily booed. Lauer ambushed both candidates by proposing that they agree to pull all negative ads between now and Election Day (a rather odd idea since the final ads are already booked; Lauer also asked the candidates to talk their allies into pulling “independent” negative ads, which would be, er, illegal), which Brown (knowing it wasn’t going to happen) agreed to and eMeg resisted in a time-draining series of defensive statements. Here’s how Calbuzz sardonically summarized the event:

In a remarkable few moments of unscripted political theater, eMeg turned cheers to jeers at the California Women’s Conference in Long Beach, as she fumbled and stumbled through an excruciatingly awkward exchange about TV attack ads with Democratic rival Jerry Brown and NBC’s Matt Lauer, who moderated the unusual session, which also included outgoing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
As on two previous occasions when she was forced to react in real time outside the accustomed comfort of her campaign cocoon – her famously awful 2009 press conference when she tried to defend her decades-long failure to vote and the presser she convened a few weeks ago to answer questions about employing an undocumented housekeeper for nine years – eMeg on Tuesday displayed a rare combination of political tone deafness and an utter inability to think on her feet.
By the time the fireworks ended, Whitman had not only failed to take advantage of a chance to boost her sagging standing among women voters, a week before the Nov. 2 election, but also succeeded in making her male opponent look good.
In the process, she managed to embarrass herself with a thoroughly dopey performance before the state’s political press corps and most of the TV cameras south of the Tehachapis, making major campaign news out of what should have been a feel-good appearance at a touchy-feely event.

So with all that record-breaking money, the most favorable political environment since at least 1994, and an opponent in an anti-incumbent year who was first elected to statewide office 40 years ago, Whitman appears to be losing this contest the old-fashioned way: poor campaigning. Just goes to show that politicians do have some control over their electoral fate, even if it’s primarily at the margins.

If Republicans do better than expected on November 2, there will be a lot of talk about voter anger and anxiety, Democratic missteps, the economy, the fiscal situation, health care reform, and so on and so forth. Some of this talk will be interesting and relevant.
But any analysis of surprising Republican wins (if they happen) that doesn’t dwell at some length on this year’s massive deployment of “independent” money won’t be getting the story right.
A New York Times editorial yesterday nicely captured how two shadowy conservative groups suddenly painted a bullseye on sophomore Rep. Bruce Braley of Iowa:

Bruce Braley, a Democrat from northeastern Iowa, has been a popular two-term congressman and seemed likely to have an easy re-election until the huge cash mudslide of 2010. The Republican Party had largely left him alone, but then a secretive group called the American Future Fund began spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on distortion-heavy attack ads….
The fund, based in Iowa, has spent at least $574,000 to run a series of anti-Braley ads. One that is particularly pernicious shows images of the ruined World Trade Center and then intones, “Incredibly, Bruce Braley supports building a mosque at ground zero.” Actually, Mr. Braley has never said that, stating only that the matter should be left to New Yorkers.
Another implies that Mr. Braley supports a middle-class tax increase because he voted to adjourn the House at a time when some Republicans had proposed cutting income taxes on everyone. In fact, Mr. Braley supports extending the Bush-era tax cuts for the middle class, while letting them expire for families making $250,000 or more to avoid adding $700 billion to the deficit.
Mr. Braley has also been the subject of $250,000 worth of attack ads by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which also has not disclosed its contributors.

The kind of money being tossed into this race by the American Future Fund and the Chamber is some serious jack for a place like northeastern Iowa. If Braley ultimately loses, you can attribute that to an incumbent’s complacency, or the Mood of the Midwest, or any number of other factors, but you can’t escape the reality that Braley would be coasting to re-election if two anonymous schmoes with big checkbooks hadn’t gotten up one fine morning and decided to take Braley out. They dialed up an upset in IA-1, and whether or not it happens on November 2, it’s sign of the new political world we must all get used to now that the U.S. Supreme Court has gone the extra mile in ensuring that unlimited use of anonymous corporate cash in campaigns is treated as central to the preservation of liberty. And that’s why in this supposed land of equality, some Americans, and even some political candidates, are more equal than others.

Today’s must-read for serious political junkies is a post by pollster.com’s Mark Blumenthal about factors that might be temporarily inflating Republican advantages in polls. It’s a fine refresher course on the various objective and subjective factors used in screening for likelihood to vote, and suggests that “attentiveness” to an election campaign is one factor that tends to decline in importance just prior to Election Day.

If we could see everything about how pollsters model likely voters and all of their data, my educated guess is that the more these models rely on self-reported attention paid to the campaign, the more they tend to produce outsized Republican leads. My sense is that polls that have depended more on other means to model the likely electorate, including the internal campaign polls that also make use of previous vote history gleaned from voter files, have produced results that have been more consistent over time.

So maybe those Gallup and Pew generic ballot polls that have so badly frightened Democrats over the last few weeks are a bit exaggerated after all.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
California’s ballot-initiative system has a way of touching off culture wars that dwarf the buzz surrounding mere state and congressional elections. (Think of Proposition 8 or Proposition 187.) But even by California standards, this year’s Proposition 19 is becoming something of a legend. In case you haven’t heard, Proposition 19 would legalize the possession and cultivation of small quantities of marijuana, while enabling the state and/or local governments (in theory, at least) to license and tax larger commercial pot-growing enterprises. The initiative has been hailed not only by Californians with a taste for cannabis, but by economic boosters, who hope it would transform California by creating a massive new growth industry that solves the state’s chronic fiscal problems.
In fact, there’s so much interest in Proposition 19 that polls show nearly everyone in California already knows about the initiative–without advocacy groups spending more than a few dimes. As Firedoglake’s Jon Walker explains:

According to a Field Poll (PDF), as of mid-September, a remarkable 84 percent of likely voters in California know that prop 19 is on the ballot. Among that same group, just under 40 percent had heard about Prop 23 and Prop 25, two other important measures to be decided this November. For a historic comparison, look at the numbers for 2008′s Prop 8, California’s hotly contested anti-gay marriage initiative, from around roughly the same time in the election cycle. A Field poll (PDF) from mid-September 2008 found that only 70 percent of likely voters had heard that Proposition 8 was on the ballot.
Even more impressive than the generally high awareness of Prop 19 among voters is how nearly every likely voter under 30 has heard of Prop 19. Looking at the cross tabs (via the Sacramento Bee) from this Field Poll, we see 94.4 percent of likely voters under 30 have heard or read about Prop 19. (To give you an idea of how broad this awareness is, that 5.6 percent who is unaware is probably greater than the poll’s margin of error for that subgroup.) Almost no politician in the country has name recognition among young voters anywhere near 94.4 percent.

This phenomenon is making it extremely difficult for political analysts to gauge support for Proposition 19 via traditional means. For one, the marijuana-legalization initiative has not generated the kind of epic pro and con spending that usually has a major effect on voter attitudes. The most prominent opposition group, Public Safety First, had spent about a quarter-million dollars as of October 16, the California equivalent of pocket change–something all the more remarkable when you consider that virtually every major statewide candidate has gone on record opposing the initiative. The biggest spender on the pro side, a medical-marijuana dispensary which may be positioning itself to become a major commercial pot retailer in the future, has spent under a million dollars. Until yesterday, neither side had run TV ads. Meanwhile, about $120 million is being spent on other California initiatives, including around $37 million on Prop. 23 (pro: $9 million; anti: $28 million), which would suspend the state’s landmark carbon-emissions law; $25 million on the far less sexy Prop. 25 (pro: $8 million; con: $17 million), which would abolish the two-thirds requirement for passing a budget in the state legislature; and even $5 million on Prop. 22 (pro: $4 million; con: about $1 million), which involves an arcane system whereby the state “borrows” local transportation funds.
Three recent polls have shown support for the measure dropping into negative territory: Reuters/Ipsos (43 percent ‘yes’ / 53 percent ‘no’); PPIC (44 percent ‘yes’ / 49 percent ‘no’); and L.A. Times/USC (39 percent ‘yes’ / 51 percent ‘no’). SurveyUSA still has the initiative with majority support at 48 percent to 44 percent, but it also shows opinion trending negative. But because of the unusual nature of Proposition 19, many analysts are loath to take them at face value.
They are concerned that numbers might be skewed by something like a stoner Bradley Effect–Nate Silver has dubbed it the ‘Broadus Effect,’ after Snoop Dogg–in which marijuana-legalization supporters tell interviewers they don’t favor legalized pot when they actually do. (With the Bradley Effect, racially-motivated voters won’t admit to pollsters that race would affect their votes.) There’s some evidence that this is occurring, since the anonymous robo-poller SurveyUSA–which would be least likely to skew in this way–shows the strongest levels of support for the initiative.
But there are factors pushing the other direction too. One possible explanation for the polling trend is that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s apparent effort to undercut Proposition 19, by pushing through legislation that all but decriminalizes small-scale pot possession, has worked. This new law, which Schwarzenegger signed on September 30, makes possession of under one ounce of pot an “infraction” punishable by a $100 fine–significantly less than the average California speeding ticket. This may have deflated support for Proposition 19 among voters who are less motivated by the desire to fire up a doobie themselves as by concerns about the injustices caused, particularly against minorities, by criminal sanctions on the use of marijuana.
Another possibility is that voters were affected by the publicity surrounding U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s assurances that the feds will not let California license commercial marijuana operations. This statement makes the economic and fiscal arguments for Proposition 19 a great deal weaker.
And finally, it may be that softer support for Proposition 19 has been revealed by likely-voter screens–which pollsters usually introduce closer to Election Day, and which tend to focus on an electorate that is older and whiter than the registered-voter or “all adults” samples typically applied earlier in the electoral cycle.
Only on election night will we know the voters’ true intentions. No one should be that astonished if Proposition 19 passes, and it may well be that the pro-legalization youth vote can rescue a few notable Democrats in very close races. As it is, Jerry Brown appears to be pulling away from Meg Whitman in the governor’s race, despite or maybe even due to eMeg’s astonishing campaign spending; and Barbara Boxer is maintaining a small but steady lead over Carly Fiorina. Yet, by the same token, it would be a little foolish for Democrats to rest all their hopes on a last-minute, unpolled surge of pot-smoking youngsters at the polls: They’ve been burned that way before.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Recently, three respected national surveys–Gallup, Pew, and now Battleground–have given Republicans a double-digit edge among likely voters. While I’m no expert on this history of public opinion research, I can think of no parallel to these findings during my three decades of involvement in national politics.
There are only two possibilities: Either this election is so distinctive that existing likely voter models, which are derived inductively from past experience, are simply inapplicable, or we are looking at a potential Republican sweep of historic proportions, larger even than 1994, long regarded as the ne plus ultra of contemporary swings. If so, the oft-repeated characterization of this election as a “wave” seems inadequate; tsunami would be more like it.
In particular, these findings have implications closely contested Senate races, which are numerous right now. During recent decades, three elections–1980, 1986, and 2006–have featured tossup races that all ended up falling in the same direction. If Republicans enjoy anything like a double-digit edge on November 2, 2010, may well be another such election.
This is a time of testing–for Democrats, but also for the profession of survey research. On November 3, one or the other will have to go back to the drawing board.

Many journalists never bother to acnowledge when their theories or predictions don’t pan out. That’s not true of TAP’s Mark Schmitt, who’s acknowledging that his sanguine attitude towards what Barack Obama might be able to accomplish substantively and poltically via a sort of post-partisan pragmatism wasn’t terribly prescient after all:

Republican intransigence and Democratic fecklessness have been well chronicled. But the more troublesome error in the theory appeared only after those barriers were overcome. Obama’s legislative victories, the most significant for a Democrat since Lyndon Johnson, began to seem like a burden rather than a source of future strength. The Obama presidency isn’t over, but his theory of governing — that change is possible by bridging partisan differences and enacting incremental policies that would pave the way for bigger proposals — is defunct. What comes next?

As someone who shared much of Schmitt’s optimism, I guess it’s time for a little self-criticism as well. My own theory of “grassroots bipartisanship” suggested that Obama’s conspicuous post-partisan approach might either split the GOP or force it into a position of self-destructive extremism. The split never happened; in effect, the right wing of the GOP has killed off its moderate wing, such as it was. So the GOP has been encouraged (not that it needed much encouragment) to become extremist, but so far, has not paid any tangible political price for it. Indeed, GOP extremism has excited the party’s conservative base, boosting midterm turnout.
Now it’s almost certain that this short-term outcome is the result of the economic calamity and the inability of Democrats to do much about it that voters will praise (avoiding greater calamity will await the praise of historians). Combined with the pro-GOP tilt of the midterm electorate, and the usual midterm reaction to any new administration, the economy has been enough to largely insulate the newly radical GOP from the consequences of its own bad behavior.
But that’s the short-term outcome. Emboldened by their initial success, and pushed by an activist base that will now be convinced the GOP has a mandate for extremism, the Republican Party going forward is in a fine position to squander its midterm wins and remind swing voters why they got so throughly sick of Repubican rule in 2006 and 2008.
So I’m not ready just yet to accept that Obama’s original “theory of change” was fatally flawed, and might not succeed in the long run. But Schmitt’s obviously right: this is not where we were supposed to be two years after Barack Obama’s election, and fresh thinking about the strategic and tactical challenges facing progressivism and the Democratic Party are most definitely in order. But panic, or a kneejerk decision to emulate Republican extremism, are neither fresh nor a form of thinking

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
As Election Day approaches, national pundits are naturally focused on certain highly competitive marquee contests. And when observers need some comic relief from the tension of the campaign trail, there’s always Christine O’Donnell to supply fresh material.
But there are a significant number of “sleeper” races around the country that haven’t attracted much national attention, even as they rivet the locals. And one of the most surprising is down in South Carolina, where the once-legendary Nikki Haley’s cakewalk to the governorship is stumbling a bit.
Remember Haley? When she was last on national political radar, she was the triumphant Asian American who–with an assist from Sarah Palin–trounced the good ol’ boys of South Carolina politics in a GOP primary and runoff, despite their efforts to destroy her with false charges of marital infidelity and nasty appeals to ethnic and religious bigotry. In a state as heavily Republican as South Carolina, in a year like this, it was assumed she’d win the general election easily, and given the circumstances, many people outside the Palmetto State who had little reason to like Haley’s hard-right politics felt pretty good about the glass-ceiling implications of her victory.
But in South Carolina itself, Haley has been seen less as a gender or ethnic pioneer (on the latter front, her Democratic opponent, Vincent Sheheen, is himself of Lebanese–i.e., Arab–extraction) than as a protégé of semi-disgraced outgoing Governor Mark Sanford. And Sanford’s administration was marked by endless feuds with other Republicans, and of course, by a sex scandal that is the essential context for understanding why South Carolinians are still talking about Haley’s sex life.
If Haley were facing a really poor opponent, concerns about her of any nature, particularly among Republicans, would probably be muted. But Sheheen has proved to be a gamer; winning his primary convincingly, doing a good job of fundraising, and, in the most startling development of the general election contest, earning the endorsement of that great scourge of liberalism, the Chamber of Commerce.
For her part, Haley seems to have rested on her primary-victory laurels a bit too much. The most notable policy initiative of her campaign has been a proposal to eliminate SC’s corporate income tax, which as observers from around the political spectrum have noted, would only benefit a small number of very large businesses. This position made even less sense when Haley paired it with a suggestion that the sales tax on groceries should be reinstated, on grounds that the exemption didn’t create “a single job” (nor did it, in fact, improve national security, either; who cares?). More recently, she borrowed former primary opponent Andre Bauer’s highly demagogic idea of requiring drug tests for anyone applying for unemployment benefits.
At the same time, details about Haley’s past have come out that have nothing to do with sex, including some questionable consulting contracts and a history of filing her taxes late.
Moreover, the sex stuff just won’t go away. Her two accusers, blogger Will Folks and political operative Larry Marchant, have both filed sworn affadavits attesting to their allegations of illicit liaisons with Haley. The Folks affidavit, as explained in a long Charleston City Paper article on the persistence of the whole story, gets very specific about the time, place and manner of the alleged trysts. The Haley camp has clearly decided to gut it out and continue to accuse her accusers of nasty political motives.
The underlying problem for Haley is that she’s pledged to resign as governor if she is subsequently proven to have lied about the alleged infidelity. And that promise, unfairly or not, is bound to raise unhappy memories of Mark Sanford’s confessional press conferences once he finally admitted to his own adulterous adventures, which made South Carolina a national laughingstock.
So Haley is, by all accounts, losing support as Election Day approaches; but the question is whether the election is close enough for that to matter. Rasmussen shows Haley up by nine points, after leading by 17 points in September. A Crantford Associates survey at the end of September had Sheheen within four points of Haley. (Crantford is a Democratic firm, but the poll was not for a campaign.) And a new Insider Advantage poll just out late last week has her still up by 14 points. But it cannot be a good sign for Haley that a Republican group opposing her candidacy, called Conservatives for Truth in Politics, has been formed by with two prominent Charleston Republicans.The wild card is candidates’ debates, of which two still remain. The first featured lots of charges and counter-charges, and though Sheheen by most accounts did well, he didn’t score any sort of breakthrough. The bigger question is whether Haley can avoid big mistakes, and not do anything that reinforces of existing doubts about her past and present character.
It’s anybody’s guess as to how deep those doubts have sunk. Chris Hair, author of the Charleston City Paper article summarizing the sex rumors, says:

The Republicans may not like it. The Democrats may not like it. But the 2010 gubernatorial race comes down to one thing and one thing only: Did Nikki Haley have an affair with Will Folks?

Even if that’s true–and it’s probably a big exaggeration–Haley currently seems to have most South Carolinians convinced that the rumored affair did not occur. But thanks to a less-than-sterling campaign and perhaps a bit of complacency, she hasn’t left herself a very large margin for error. It’s lucky for her that South Carolina politics is so thoroughly dominated by the Republican Party that she claims she’s fighting to purify.

In their Saturday New York Times op-ed “Can Democrats Still Win?” TDS Co-Editor Stanley B. Greenberg and James Carville, Bill Clinton’s campaign manager, take on the common political wisdom that says a Republican takeover of congress is a done deal.
The authors, both founders of Democracy Corps, begin with a discussion of the 1998 midterm elections, noting predictions that the Dems were doomed in that election, including Speaker Gingrich’s boast that GOP gains could exceed the landslide of 1994. Greenberg and Carville note that their early polling that year affirmed a bad outcome for Dems, but once the impeachment battle got underway, their subsequent polling indicated that voters were indeed ready to move-on, to end impeachment and have congress focus on more substantive issues that affected the daily lives of Americans..
Enough Democratic candidates got the message and began to focus their campaigns on the findings of the Greenberg/Carville polling, while Republicans doubled down on the scandal-mongering in their ads. The result, as the authors write:

Democrats surprised everyone: no net losses in the Senate and a net gain of five seats in the House — the best showing for the incumbent president’s party in a midterm election since 1934. Newt Gingrich resigned.

Greenberg and Carville concede that it’s a very tough environment for Dems:

With the 2010 midterm elections just over a week away, Democrats find themselves in a similarly perilous situation. There are fears that Democrats could lose as many as 50 House seats; the Senate could go either way. A survey last week by our polling group, Democracy Corps, had Democrats down five points in the House ballot. Add to this early voting, heavy campaign spending by outside corporate groups, high unemployment and the general feeling that the country is on the wrong track, and it is hard to imagine that Nov. 2 will be a good day for Democrats.

But even in this context there are a couple of factors Dems can leverage:

…In our latest national poll, we found that the Republican Party and the Republicans in Congress are as unpopular as the Democrats — unusual for a party riding a wave of support. With Republican candidates like Sharron Angle, Joe Miller, Christine O’Donnell, Rand Paul and Carl Paladino dominating the spotlight, Republicans find themselves no more appealing to voters now than they were in 2008.
In addition, there are signs that voters are still open to hearing from Democrats. An NPR poll that surveys likely voters in key House districts found this month that a Democratic message focused on the middle class and American jobs won out over a Republican message of deficit reduction and wasteful spending. (Disclosure: Greenberg Quinlan Rosner helped conduct this survey.) True, voters are not particularly moved by Democratic messages about Republican extremism or the policies that produced the recession. But they are open to hearing about how to repair the economy and put Americans back to work. This is surprising, because voters normally tune out the party they want to punish at the polls.

Greenberg and Carville conclude that “…based on our experiences leading up to the last supposed Democratic debacle, candidates may have more control over their destinies than they think.” Coming from the team that advised the only Democrat since FDR to win two consecutive Presidential elections — as well as advocated the strategy that helped Dems hold the line in ’98 midterms — their advice merits serious consideration from Democratic candidates and campaigns.

No matter what happens in the mid term elections, expect an intensified debate about the future of the Democratic Party in general, and an even more heated discussion about the breadth of the Democratic Tent — more specifically what to do about the ‘Blue Dogs.’
The debate has been going on for a few years. But a re-opening salvo has just been fired by Ari Berman, in his New York Times op-ed “Boot the Blue Dogs.” Berman, a contributing writer for The Nation and author of “Herding Donkeys: The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics,” argues that the Democratic tent has gotten too big, and the time has come to purge the party of conservative Democrats who are obstructing not only the Democratic agenda, but also the party’s ability to grow. He makes a strong case:

With President Obama in office, some notable beneficiaries of the Democrats’ 50-state strategy have been antagonizing the party from within — causing legislative stalemate in Congress, especially in the Senate, and casting doubt on the long-term viability of a Democratic majority. As a result, the activists who were so inspired by Mr. Dean in 2006 and Mr. Obama in 2008 are now feeling buyer’s remorse.
…Democrats would be in better shape, and would accomplish more, with a smaller and more ideologically cohesive caucus. It’s a sentiment that even Mr. Dean now echoes. “Having a big, open-tent Democratic Party is great, but not at the cost of getting nothing done,” he said. Since the passage of health care reform, few major bills have passed the Senate. Although the Democrats have a 59-vote majority, party leaders can barely find the votes for something as benign as extending unemployment benefits.

Berman sees two pivotal benefits of dumping the ‘Blue Dogs’:

…First, it could enable them to devise cleaner pieces of legislation, without blatantly trading pork for votes as they did with the deals that helped sour the public on the health care bill. (As a corollary, the narrative of “Democratic infighting” would also diminish.)
Second, in the Senate, having a majority of 52 rather than 59 or 60 would force Democrats to confront the Republicans’ incessant misuse of the filibuster to require that any piece of legislation garner a minimum of 60 votes to become law. Since President Obama’s election, more than 420 bills have cleared the House but have sat dormant in the Senate. It’s easy to forget that George W. Bush passed his controversial 2003 tax cut legislation with only 50 votes, plus Vice President Dick Cheney’s. Eternal gridlock is not inevitable unless Democrats allow it to be.

Berman adds “Democrats aren’t ideological enough. Their conservative contingent has so blurred what it means to be a Democrat that the party itself can barely find its way.” He does not say exactly how Democrats should get rid of the Blue Dogs, but withholding financial support from them and otherwise disciplining Democratic members of congress who refuse to support the majority agenda are measures that have gained support among Democratic progressives who want to diminish the power of the Blue Dogs.
Single-payer, pro-choice, tax-the-rich, withdraw-from-Afghanistan progressive Democrat that I am, I worry about the effects of a wholesale purge of the Blue Dogs. I think it’s a mistake to stereotype all Blue Dogs as ideologues. Many are, but some are fairly progressive, and merely want to survive in their conservative districts, hoping to lead their constituents forward to a more progressive vision. Some Blue Dogs in marginal districts deserve a little wiggle room.
Use redistricting where possible to reduce Blue Dog numbers, while not cutting the number of Democratic districts, yes. Allocate less Party money to Blue Dogs and give it to needy progressive candidates in close races, sure. Invoke stronger party discipline with respect to committee assignments on those who fail to support the party a standard percentage of the time, of the time, absolutely.
As for conservative Democratic Senators (‘Blue Dogs’ is a term usually reserved for House members), it’s easier to draw a line in the sand. Cloture betrayal, as Ed Kilgore has persuasively argued, should invoke party discipline.
Generally, Dems should use more carrot and stick to sway the Blue Dogs in a progressive direction. But let’s not lose sight of the fact that majority status is so important for getting anything done in congress, that it would be a mistake to embrace a level of rigid ideological purity that denies Dems the speakership, committee chairs and the ability to enact legislation.

The real issue about Rand Paul’s religion is not what he believed in college, it’s what he believes today. Paul says he is a Christian but at the same time he also says he is a disciple of Ayn Rand.
Sorry, but that’s pure crap. You can’t be both at the same time. Just take a look at what Ayn Rand said about religion:
Ayn Rand on God:

Every argument for God and every attribute ascribed to Him rests on a false metaphysical premise. None can survive for a moment on a correct metaphysics.

Ayn Rand on Faith:

…. The alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind
Faith is the worst curse of mankind, as the exact antithesis and enemy of thought.

Ayn Rand on Christian Compassion:

Now there is one word–a single word–which can blast the morality of altruism out of existence and which it cannot withstand–the word: “Why?” Why must man live for the sake of others? Why must he be a sacrificial animal? Why is that the good? There is no earthly reason for it–and, ladies and gentlemen, in the whole history of philosophy no earthly reason has ever been given.
It is only mysticism that can permit moralists to get away with it. It was mysticism, the unearthly, the supernatural, the irrational that has always been called upon to justify it… one just takes it on faith.

Mysticism, of course, was one of Ayn Rand’s favorite synonyms for religion and her view gets genuinely vile when you add in her countless statements that literally dripped with contempt and loathing for the weak, the helpless, the needy – the people Jesus called “the least of these”. Her “Virtue of Selfishness” described such people as contemptible failures and parasites — inferiors to be despised, not comforted.
So here are three questions the press should demand Paul answer:

1. You have described yourself as a follower of the libertarian philosophy of Ayn Rand but Rand was a militant atheist who said that every single argument for God is false. Which view do you reject today — Ayn Rand’s “objectivist” philosophy or Christian belief.
2. Ayn Rand said that faith is a “curse of mankind”, one that “destroys the mind” – how can you call yourself a follower of Rand and a Christian at the same time?
3. Christianity is based on compassion; Ayn Rand’s doctrine of “The VIrtue of Selfishness” says Christian compassion is not just wrong but contemptible. Which of these two doctrines do you disavow?

It’s possible that at this late stage of the campaign Rand Paul might just throw Ayn Rand under a bus to win the election (it would certainly be consistent with her advice to be totally selfish). But he’s already shown various times that he absolutely hates to disavow his extremist libertarian philosophy. As a result, questions that force him to directly face a choice between the doctrines of compassionate Christianity and Ayn Rand’s genuinely vile philosophy could produce some interesting fireworks.
Update: as the exchange in the comments section indicates, Paul could try to avoid the challenge posed by the questions above by quibbling about whether or not he is exactly a “follower” of Ayn Rand. A questioner need only replace the word “follower” with “stong admirer” to prevent this attempted evasion.