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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: February 2011

Is the Center Still Vital?

This item by TDS Contributor and Progressive Policy Institute senior fellow and managing editor Lee Drutman is cross-posted from Progressive Fix.
Over at Third Way, Bill Galston and Elaine Kamarck have published a new analysis about the role of moderates in American politics, “The Still-Vital Center: Moderates, Democrats, and the Renewal of American Politics.” It’s a keen paper, and I generally suspect they are right in their basic thesis: American government would work a whole lot better if there were more moderates running the place and that self-identified moderates have a more coherent worldview than many critics think.
Galston and Kamarck have pulled together some solid survey data on moderates, enough to conclude that, “moderates have mixed opinions about the overall stances of the two parties.” They’re more like Democrats on social issues, a little more like Republicans on foreign policy, and about split on economic policy.
But in general, moderates are more likely to support Democrats. Since 1980, the U.S. electorate has hovered around 20 percent liberal, 33 percent conservative, and 47 percent moderate. This means that Democrats need moderates more, since liberals make up only one-fifth of voters. Conservatives outnumber liberals by a substantial amount, so Republicans need fewer moderates to establish a winning coalition. This is the kind of simple math that liberals keep forgetting. Obama, like every Democrat before him, couldn’t have won without strong support among moderates.
But there’s also a puzzle here, and one that continues to frustrate centrists: If moderates consistently represent almost half of the electorate, why are there so few moderate representatives, and why is our politics so polarized?
Galston and Kamarck put a lot of emphasis on primary elections as a culprit, since they are generally low-turnout affairs, in which extremist candidates who are able to mobilize a small but loyal following can win. (Witness Christine O’Donnell winning Delaware’s Republican primary with 30,561 votes in a state of 900,000 people).
They advocate for open primaries so that voters from both parties can participate, which might, as they write, “open up the possibility that moderate and compromise might be rewarded rather than punished.” By all means! But already half of the states do this, and I’ve yet to see any systemic evidence that states with closed primaries turnout candidates any more extremist. Moreover, Alan Abramowitz has made the case that primary voters are actually not that different from general election across a number of ideological indicators.
But the ability of ideologues to triumph in primaries points to a larger problem: that moderate voters tend to be the least engaged and least educated part of the electorate. This extends as well to general campaign work, contributions, and even just talking to other people about politics.
In Abramowitz’s recent book The Disappearing Center (reviewed here by me), he shows that 56 percent of strong liberal or conservatives reported being politically engaged in 2004, as compared to 36 percent of those who “lean” liberal or conservative, and just 20 percent of those who say they are moderate, or of no ideology. And according to National Election Studies data, 43 percent of self-identified conservatives had a college degree, 32 percent of self-identified liberals had a college degree, but only 18 percent of moderates had a college degree. This is something centrists are going to have to grapple with.
In Abramowitz’s story, the plight of the moderates is mostly a story about less-educated, less-engaged citizens who don’t know or care enough about politics to pick a side. Were they to get wealthy and educated, like the partisans, they would presumably then know enough to pick one of the two distinct teams in American politics. But lacking the means or the will to pick a side, they call themselves moderate, feel disengaged and disenchanted by politics, and try to get on with the business of making a living.


TDS Co-Editor William Galston: Colorado vs. Ohio

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
In some presidential cycles, an incumbent’s reelection strategy doesn’t matter all that much. When the economy is very strong (1984), the incumbent wins big; when it’s very weak (1932), he loses even bigger. And when a party chooses a nominee seen as outside the mainstream (1964, 1972), it suffers a crushing defeat. It’s possible that one or more of these circumstances could prevail next year. The economy could over- or under-perform current projections; the Republicans could choose a nominee who’s too conservative or lacks credibility as a potential president. But it’s more likely that both the economy and the presidential nomination contest will yield results in the zone where strategic choices could prove decisive. In that context, two recent events are alarming, because they offer clues to what may well become President Obama’s reelection strategy.
The first was a Ron Brownstein interview with David Axelrod, who said that he saw Michael Bennet’s 2010 senatorial victory in Colorado as “particularly instructive.” As Brownstein noted, Bennet prevailed by mobilizing “enough minorities, young people, and socially liberal, well-educated white women to overcome a sharp turn toward the GOP among most of the other white voters in his state.” The second event was DNC chair Tim Kaine’s selection of educated, new economy Charlotte, North Carolina, as the site for the 2012 Democratic convention. In the process, he rejected three Midwestern finalists: St. Louis, Minneapolis, and, most notably, Cleveland.
Taken together, these clues suggest that the Obama’s 2012 campaign will focus more on the Democratic periphery–territory newly won in 2008–than on the heartland, where elections have been won and lost for the past half-century. This could turn out to be a mistake of epic proportions. Why? Because the United States looks a lot more like Ohio than like Colorado.
Here’s a snapshot from the exit polls in the 2008 election, versus the 2010 Ohio and Colorado Senate elections, broken down by education level:
4% of the 2008 national electorate had less than a high school education; that’s true of 1% of the 2010 Colorado electorate, and 3% of Ohio’s.
20% of the 2008 electorate had a high-school diploma but nothing else; the number dropped to 12% in Colorado and rose to 25% in Ohio.
31% of the 2008 electorate had “some college;” the numbers were 20% for Colorado and 32% for Ohio
28% of the 2008 electorate were college graduates; 39% of 2010 Colorado voters achieved that level, and only 24% of Ohio’s.
And the number for post-graduates is 17% for national 2008 voters, 28% for Colorado’s 2010 voters, and 15% for Ohio’s 2010 voters.
In other words, the 2010 Colorado electorate was a total outlier (67 percent with a B.A. or more), while Ohio was a near-microcosm of the national presidential electorate. Every Midwestern state for which exit polls are available looked pretty much like Ohio.
Now let’s look at the new Gallup state-by-state survey released on February 21. It shows that between 2008 and 2010, Democratic identifiers and leaners have declined as a share of the electorate in every state. The median loss was 6.1 percent. And every Midwestern state was at or above the median, raning from 6.1 percent in Minnesota to 9.2 percent in Wisconsin.
No wonder that Democrats lost 2010 Senate races in Wisconsin, Ohio, Iowa, Missouri, Indiana, light blue Pennsylvania, and even dark blue Illinois, or that they lost gubernatorial races in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa. Small consolation that Democratic gubernatorial candidates managed to scratch out victories in Illinois (by 20,000 votes out of 3.5 million cast) and Minnesota (by 9,000 out of 2 million).
The Midwest is home to large numbers of white working-class voters, who accounted for nearly 40 percent of all voters nationwide in 2008. Obama has never done very well with this group, losing them by 2 to 1 against Hillary Clinton in the primaries and by 58 percent to 40 percent against McCain in the general election. And they turned against Democratic candidates in the vast majority of 2010 House and Senate races.
As a recent Washington Post/Kaiser/Harvard survey reveals, white working-class voters are even more disaffected today. They are gloomy about the present and think it will be a long time before the economy recovers. They fear that the job market of the future will have little use for workers with their level of education and skills. Only 14 percent say that the president’s economic policies are working, and a large majority think that his administration isn’t doing enough to look after their economic interests. Remarkably, when asked which party better understands the people’s economic priorities, they give the Republicans a 14-point edge. Moreover, white working-class voters have long tended toward conservatism on social issues, nationalism in foreign policy, and hawkishness on defense.


TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira: Huge Majority Wants Infrastructure Investment

In their monomaniacal obsession with budget cuts, Republicans and conservatives feel compelled to pretend that there is little public support for any increased federal spending. Recent polling, however, indicates that there is overwhelming public support for one particular category of big-ticket spending — modernizing America’s deteriorating infrastructure, according to Ruy Teixeira’s latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’ at the Center for American Progress web pages. Teixeira explains:

Eighty percent declared themselves in agreement with President Barack Obama’s State of the Union call for a major effort to rebuild and modernize America’s infrastructure in a new Hart Research/Public Opinion Strategies survey for the Rockefeller Foundation.

Nor will conservatives be very happy with the high levels of public support for progressive measures to facilitate infrastructure modernization indicated in the poll:

What’s more, the public backs a number of government actions to provide additional funding for infrastructure projects. These include a National Infrastructure Bank (60 percent support), issuing national transportation bonds (59 percent), and eliminating oil company subsidies (58 percent).

So much for the GOP myth that increases in government spending are opposed by the public across the board. Members of congress should not be intimidated by conservative fear-mongering about federal spending for needed modernization. As Teixeira puts it, “Infrastructure investment is important — and the public’s got your back.”


Pushing Back Against Hooverism

New York Times economic columnist David Leonhardt wrote a piece yesterday that every Democratic activist and elected official should read and then try to put into as plain a form of English as possible. Its title is plain enough: “Why Budget Cuts Don’t Bring Prosperity.” And its content wouldn’t have seemed that striking until very recently, when one of America’s two major political parties suddenly embraced the belief that government spending had somehow caused a private-sector housing and financial crisis and then a demand-side recession, and that radical cuts in government spending would put the economy on the right track via “business confidence” or some such magical term.
The simplest term for this delusion is probably Hooverism, since many Americans are aware, however dimly, that the Great Depression was significantly worsened by the policies of a president who was ideologically opposed to any major stimulation of the economy by the public sector. Now it’s true that many of today’s conservative activists deplore Hoover’s handling of the Depression, but only because they believe he was too active in trying to use government to revive consumer demand and prevent the collapse of public and private investment–or according to one recent conservative account, he was too “pro-labor” in his wage policies!
Here’s Leonhardt’s take, which is what virtually every politician in either party would have odded at until quite recently:

[N]o matter how morally satisfying austerity may be, it’s the wrong answer. Hoover’s austere instincts worsened the Depression. Roosevelt’s postelection reversal helped, but he also prolonged the Depression by raising taxes and cutting spending in 1937. Only the giant stimulus program known as World War II finally ended the Depression. When the private sector is hesitant to spend, the government has to — or no one will.

Leonhardt makes the crucial point that interest-rate signals simply aren’t supporting the common conservative argument that the public sector is gobbling up resources for pointless programs and redistribution that the private sectors needs to produce jobs:

In the early 1990s…government borrowing was pushing up interest rates. When the deficit began to fall, interest rates did too. Projects that had not previously been profitable for companies suddenly began to make sense. The resulting economic boom brought in more tax revenue and further reduced the deficit.
But this virtuous cycle can’t happen today. Interest rates are already very low. They’re low because the financial crisis and recession caused a huge drop in the private sector’s demand for loans. Even with all the government spending to fight the recession, overall demand for loans has remained historically low, the data shows.

The impact of budget cuts on the current economy seems to be lost on
Republicans who are constantly predicting gloom and doom over entitlement spending projections that extend for the next several decades. And again, the credit markets are showing no signs at this point of panicking over long-term deficits and debt, much less short-term deficits and debt. Indeed, the U.S. economy is actually doing better than those of countries who have adopted austerity policies. As Leonhardt observes:

For the sake of the economy, the best compromise in coming weeks would be one that trades short-term spending for medium- and long-term cuts. Beef up the cost-control measures in the health care overhaul and add new ones, like malpractice reform. Cut more wasteful military programs, like the F-35 jet engine. Force more social programs to prove they work — and cut their funding in future years if they don’t.
By all means, though, don’t follow the path of the Germans and the British just because it feels morally satisfying.

So here we are, with Republicans threatening to shut down the federal government and create a debt-limit crisis unless Democrats agree to deep short-term spending cuts, exactly what the economy does not need. This is a manufactured crisis that Democrats need to expose early and often, and if impugning Herbert Hoover’s memory helps get the job done, so be it.


The Footloose Presidential Field

Politico‘s Jonathan Martin makes a pretty interesting point today about one potential implication of Sen. John Thune’s decision not to run for president in 2012: This could be the first presidential election since 1904 without a sitting member of Congress in the mix.
He goes on to discuss various reasons for this development, including Tea Party antipathy towards Washington, and the advent of a younger conservative leadership cadre that’s not quite ready for the presidential campaign trail.
But he doesn’t mention another explanation that makes at least as much sense and applies to candidates who have never served in Congress: it’s a lot easier to run for president (unless you are the incumbent) these days if you don’t hold a full-time elected office.
After all, the presidential field in 2012 will likely include two candidates who have never held an office other than in Washington, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum. And it could include a number of candidates who have ended or are nearing the end of service as governors (former governors Mike Huckabee, Tim Pawlenty and Sarah Palin; Haley Barbour, who leaves office in Mississippi at the end of this year; and possibly Mitch Daniels, who leaves office at the end of 2012). What all these folk have in common is the time to get to know the fine citizens of early caucus and primary states. National conservative stars like Chris Christie, who is only in the second year of a first term as governor, or Marco Rubio, in his first year as a senator, have day job responsibilities that can’t really be shirked at this point in their careers. And at least one potential candidate, Mike Huckabee, may pass up a second presidential run because he has no way of supporting himself if he leaves his highly-paid gig at Fox News.
Having said all this, it’s possible that Rep. Michele Bachmann will wind up spoiling Martin’s scenario by running for president (in that case she would be bucking a historical trend even older than that of sitting congressmen running, in seeking to become the first House member since 1880 to get elected). And it’s worth remembering that five sitting U.S. senators (four of them Democrats) made the race in 2008.
Still, one suspects the wave of the future in preparing for presidential runs is probably represented best by someone like Newt Gingrich, who parleyed national fame gained in Washington to put together an impressive network of organizations and publishing outlets that paid the bills and gave the would-be president all sorts of excuses to go on television and press the flesh in places like Dubuque, Manchester and Charleston. And then, of course, there’s Sarah Palin, who may have set a precedent by leaving her elected “day job” without even completing a term, blaming the resignation on her enemies, and then “going rogue” as a national celebrity with no responsibilities more serious than those of, say, a Kardashian.


Gallup: Strong Support for Collective Bargaining for Public Employees

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker apparently thinks he is poised for a big victory. But the latest Gallup opinion data indicates that he may instead be opening a big can of self-sabotage. Gallup is not infrequently accused of conservative bias in survey methods, which makes this lede from Dennis Cauchon’s USA Today article, “Poll: Americans favor union bargaining rights” all the more interesting:

MADISON, Wis. — Americans strongly oppose laws taking away the collective bargaining power of public employee unions, according to a new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll. The poll found 61% would oppose a law in their state similar to such a proposal in Wisconsin, compared with 33% who would favor such a law.

The 28 point advantage favoring public employee unions in this controversy is impressive, but Independents were even more opposed to limiting public employee bargaining rights, with 62 percent opposed vs. 31 percent favoring limits. Wisconsin voters can’t be all that different from this nationwide survey sample in their views on the topic.
Not content to advocate an unpopular policy, Gov. Walker seized the opportunity to showcase his ignorance of labor history and a certain flair for Orwellian ‘logic,’ quoted by Cauchon:

“Most people … mistakenly think worker rights come from collective bargaining,” Walker told USA TODAY Tuesday. He said his plan would not remove union workers’ protections from wrongful termination or inappropriate discipline or hiring. “When you alter collective bargaining, it doesn’t alter workers’ rights,” he said.

Just wait till he starts meddling with Wisconsin’s educational system.


New GQR Polls: Wisconsin Voters Diss Walker’s Mess

Evan McMorris-Santoro’s report at TPM on new polls of Wisconsin voters, conducted by GQR Research for the AFL-CIO 2/16-20 should give the demonstrators some encouragement in their struggle against Gov. Walker’s union-busting. McMorris-Santorro explains,

Sixty-two percent of respondents to the poll said they view public employees favorably, while just 11% said they had an unfavorable view of the workers whose benefits packages Walker says are breaking the state budget.
Meanwhile, just 39% of respondents had a favorable view of Walker, while 49% had an unfavorable view of the freshman Republican governor. Voters are split on his job performance, with 51% saying they disapprove of the job Walker has done.

As the GQR pollsters explain in their analysis, “Since the protests began, Governor Walker has seen real erosion in his standing, with a majority expressing disapproval of his job performance and disagreement with his agenda.” And when read the following description of the conflict in Madison, 52% of respondents said they don’t favor Walker’s scheme, with just 42% favoring it:

As you may know, Governor Scott Walker recently announced a plan to limit most public employees’ ability to negotiate their wages and benefits. The plan cuts pension and health care benefits for current public workers, and restricts new wage increases unless approved by a voter referendum. Contracts would be limited to one year, with wages frozen until a new contract is settled. In addition, Walker’s plan also changes rules to require collective bargaining units to take annual votes to maintain certification as a union, stops employers from collecting union dues, and allows members of collective bargaining units to avoid paying dues. Law enforcement, fire employees and state troopers and inspectors would be exempt from the changes.

…Which underscores the importance of unions telling their side of the story. The survey also found that 53 percent of voters rate unions favorably, with only 31 percent rating them unfavorably. Of those polled, 67 percent said they sided with the public employees, 62 percent with the protesters, 59 percent with the unions and 56 percent with Democrats in the state legislature. A majority, 53 percent, disagree with Governor Walker and 46 percent disagree with Republicans in the state legislature.
When asked, 58 percent of respondents oppose eliminating collective bargaining, 57 percent oppose cutting wages for public employees and half are against cutting pension benefits for public employees. Independents (59 percent) don’t like it much, either, nor do a third of Republicans, along with 78 percent of Democrats. Three out of four respondents said they opposed taking away public employees’ collective bargaining rights, including nearly half of Republicans.
It appears Governor Walker may have succeeded in currying favor with the Koch brothers. But Wisconsin voters are unimpressed with his polarizing attack against state workers.


Two Down

Even as a vast number of potential 2012 Republican presidential candidates continue to defy the usual rules of the cycle calendar by refusing to move towards formal declarations of candidacy, at least we are getting some definition of the field by the occasional statement of definitive non-candidacy. First, last month, was Mike Pence, who decided he’d rather run for governor of Indiana. And then yesterday came the announcement by South Dakota Sen. John Thune, whose prospective candidacy appeared to be based on his non-offensiveness to any major conservative faction, his looks, and his proximity to Iowa.
Thune was also one of those possible candidates whose support seemed to be centered among Republican insiders and gabbers disenchanted with better-known figures like Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich. Tim Pawlenty or Sarah Palin. Said insiders and gabbers will now likely shift their affections to the remaining Dark Horse Saviors like Haley Barbour (who spent yesterday in Des Moines), Mitch Daniels or (though he has repeatedly said he won’t run) Chris Christie. Hope springs eternal in the mover-and-shaker breast.


A Test of Theories

As Washington prepares for an ever-more-probable government shutdown over failure to reach agreement on a continuing resolution for current-year appropriations, Ezra Klein offers a useful observation about what a shutdown would mean, and why it could happen despite pious talk (from Democrats, anyway) about compromise:

Republicans and Democrats, it seems, govern rather differently. Republicans are proving themselves willing to do what liberals long wanted the Obama administration to do: Play hardball. Refuse compromise. Risk severe consequences that they’ll attempt to blame on their opponent. The Obama administration’s answer to this was always that it was important to be seen as the reasonable actor in the drama, to occupy some space known as the middle, and to avoid, so much as possible, the appearance of dramatic overreach. This is as close as we’re likely to come to a test of that theory. In two separate cases, Republicans have chosen a hardline position and are refusing significant compromise, even at the risk of terrible consequences. Will the public turn on them for overreach? Rally behind their strength and conviction? Or not really care one way or the other, at least by the time the next election rolls around?

It may very well be, of course, that the GOP’s commitment to a hard-line position makes the Democratic position somewhat irrelevant; Democratic offers to compromise–or for that matter, a countervailing Democratic hard line–won’t move them, or necessarily influence public opinion, either. But how the two parties extricate themselves from a shutdown–short of abject surrender–could be pretty important.


Koch Bros Support WI Union-Busting

Eric Lipton’s WaPo article “Billionaire Brothers’ Money Plays Role in Wisconsin Dispute” raises disturbing questions about the motivation of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who has introduced a measure that would dismantle public unions. Lipton writes,

State records also show that Koch Industries, their energy and consumer products conglomerate based in Wichita, Kan., was one of the biggest contributors to the election campaign of Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, a Republican who has championed the proposed cuts.
…Campaign finance records in Washington show that donations by Koch Industries and its employees climbed to a total of $2 million in the last election cycle, twice as much as a decade ago, with 92 percent of that money going to Republicans. Donations in state government races — like in Wisconsin — have also surged in recent years, records show.

Lipton points out that direct campaign contributions are just one pipeline for Koch money for union-bashing. As Lipton explains,

But the most aggressive expansion of the Koch brothers’ effort to influence public policy has come through the Americans for Prosperity, which runs both a charitable foundation and a grass-roots-activists group. Mr. Phillips serves as president of both branches, and David Koch is chairman of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation.
…The organization has taken up a range of topics, including combating the health care law, environmental regulations and spending by state and federal governments. The effort to impose limits on public labor unions has been a particular focus in Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, all states with Republican governors, Mr. Phillips said, adding that he expects new proposals to emerge soon in some of those states to limit union power.

Lipton reports that Tim Phillips, the president of the right-wing Americans for Prosperity, told an anti-union counter-demonstration at the capitol, composed of members of the Wisconsin chapter of the organization “We are going to bring fiscal sanity back to this great nation.” As Lipton notes,

What Mr. Phillips did not mention was that his Virginia-based nonprofit group, whose budget surged to $40 million in 2010 from $7 million three years ago, was created and financed in part by the secretive billionaire brothers Charles G. and David H. Koch.

Lipton adds that Bob Edgar, president of Common Cause warns that the Koch brothers are using their money, in Lipton’s words “to create a façade of grass-roots support for their favorite causes.” Edgar adds “”It is not that these folks don’t have a right to participate in politics. But they are moving democracy into the control of more wealthy corporate hands.”
Paul Krugman explained it well in his Sunday column,

In principle, every American citizen has an equal say in our political process. In practice, of course, some of us are more equal than others. Billionaires can field armies of lobbyists; they can finance think tanks that put the desired spin on policy issues; they can funnel cash to politicians with sympathetic views (as the Koch brothers did in the case of Mr. Walker). On paper, we’re a one-person-one-vote nation; in reality, we’re more than a bit of an oligarchy, in which a handful of wealthy people dominate.
…What Mr. Walker and his backers are trying to do is to make Wisconsin — and eventually, America — less of a functioning democracy and more of a third-world-style oligarchy. And that’s why anyone who believes that we need some counterweight to the political power of big money should be on the demonstrators’ side.

Governor Walker knows that if he hangs tough, he will earn the gratitude of the Koch brothers, and likely become the new GOP poster boy for anti-union conservatism. The question is whether the people of Wisconsin will see through the Koch Brothers’ astroturf counter-demos and take a stand for workers’ right to union representation.