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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: September 2011

Conservative Word Games Manipulate Immigration Debate

Gabriel Thompson’s “How the Right Made Racism Sound Fair–and Changed Immigration Politics” at Colorlines.com goes long and deep into the psychology of conservative lingo and terminology used by the MSM in the immigration debate. A teaser:

…Colorlines.com reviewed the archives of the nation’s largest-circulation newspapers to compare how often their articles describe people as “illegal” or “alien” versus describing them as “undocumented” or “unauthorized.” We found a striking and growing imbalance, particularly at key moments in the immigration reform debate. In 2006 and 2007, for example, years in which Congress engaged a pitched battle over immigration reform, the New York Times published 1,483 articles in which people were labeled as “illegal” or “alien;” just 171 articles used the adjectives “undocumented” or “unauthorized.”
That imbalance isn’t coincidental. In the wake of 9/11, as immigration politics have grown more heated and media organizations have worked to codify language they deem neutral, pollsters in both parties have pushed their leaders toward a punitive framework for discussing immigration. Conservatives have done this unabashedly to rally their base; Democrats have shifted rhetoric with the hopes that it will make their reform proposals more palatable to centrists. But to date, the result has only been to move the political center ever rightward–and to turn the conversation about immigrants violently ugly.

Thompson, author of “Working in the Shadows: A Year of Doing the Jobs (Most) Americans Won’t Do,” has written an excellent analysis which merits a close read — especially by Dem candidates and staffers who are involved in immigration politics.


Imaginary “Centrists”

You knew this would happen the moment the president’s job speech and his deficit reduction proposal were interpreted as a “move to the left” aimed at “energizing the base:” MSM and conservative jabberers would have to come up with some “Democratic centrists” who were offended by the “move.”
And like clockwork, Mark Penn popped up with a HuffPo column that is careening around the chattering classes, accusing Obama of waging “class warfare” by proposing upper-crust tax rates closer to those that prevailed before Bush’s 2001 tax cuts.
Watch in awe as U.S. News‘ Ken Walsh turns Penn’s isolated protest and scattered Senate objections into a major factional fight:

Some centrists such as Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana are firmly opposed to higher taxes on energy companies, which provide jobs and an economic foundation for her state. Other centrist Democrats such as Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska oppose any tax increases.
In sum, moderate Democrats argue that Obama is departing too far from the political center and this move to the left will hurt him and other members of his party in 2012.
A leading advocate of that centrist position is pollster and Democratic strategist Mark Penn, who was a senior adviser to President Bill Clinton in his 1996 re-election campaign and to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2008. In an essay for the Huffington Post, Penn argues that, “Barack Obama is careening down the wrong path toward reelection. He should be working as a president, not a candidate. He should be claiming the vital center, not abandoning it. He should be holding down taxes, rather than raising them. He should be mastering the global economy, not running away from it. And most of all, he should be bringing the country together rather than dividing it through class warfare.”

Lord a-mercy, Ken. Mary Landrieu is from Louisiana, and is going to defend the bottom line of the oil and gas industries as a matter of constituent services as much as ideology. It has nothing to do with being a “centrist,” and does not represent the views of anyone else who is not equally beholden to fossil-fuel energy interests. Aside from being perpetually to the right of virtually every other Democrat in the Senate, Ben Nelson is a highly endangered incumbent up for re-election in a deeply red state; of course he’s going to object to anything and everything Obama says and does.
As for Penn, anyone taking his opinion to account as representing anyone other than himself and his corporate clients needs to remember that the position on taxes that now supposedly makes the president anathema to “centrists” is not only the same one that Obama consistently promoted during the 2008 campaign, but the same one promoted by Penn’s boss Hillary Clinton. Obama hasn’t shifted at all; Mark Penn has.
It seems reasonably clear, moreover, that Obama’s much-ballyhooed “shift to the left” is really little more than a change in strategy–or arguably, a pivot anticipated by his strategy all along–to reflect the fact that he’s gotten all the mileage he’s ever going to get from promoting bipartisanship in the face of obdurate Republican opposition, and it’s time to draw lines in anticipation of 2012. People supposedly representing the “left” and the “center” in the Democratic Party have often disagreed violently on Obama’s strategy, but it’s doubtful they do at this particular moment.
Barack Obama himself probably represents the views of Democratic “centrists” about as much as any politician presently does. And from what I regularly read and hear, if there are “Democratic centrist” dissenters from Obama’s general direction, they are more rather than less likely to think he remains too accommodating to conservative opinion on taxes and a variety of other issues.
And if there is some Penn-Landrieu-Nelson bloc in the Democratic Party, it could easily meet at one of Burson-Marsteller’s smaller conference rooms, with plenty of space at the table for interns and lunch.


Creamer: ‘Class Warfare’ Long Waged by GOP

The following article, “Obama Isn’t Trying to Start ‘Class Warfare’ — He Wants to End the Republican War on the Middle Class” by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer is cross posted from HuffPo.

History will record that on September 19, 2011, the Republicans made a huge political miscalculation — a miscalculation that could potentially doom their chances for victory next year.
If I were a Republican, the last thing I’d want to talk about is “class warfare.”
For 30 years — whenever they have been in power — Republicans and their Wall Street/CEO allies have conducted a sustained, effective war on the American middle class.
Much of the success of their war has resulted from their insistence that it didn’t exist. They have talked instead about how the economy needs to reward all those “job creators” whose beneficence will rain down economic prosperity on the rest of us.
They fund right-wing organizations that divert our attention by whipping up worry that gay marriage will somehow undermine heterosexual relationships. They start wars that help pad the bottom lines of defense contractors but do nothing to make us safer.
And all the while they quietly rig the economic game so that all of the growth in the Gross Domestic Product goes into the hands of the top two percent of the population — while they cut our pay, destroy our unions and do their level best to cut our Social Security and Medicare.
There has been a “class war” all right — a war on the middle class. And the middle class has been on the losing end.
Today the truly rich control a higher percent of our wealth and income than at any other time in generations. Income inequality is higher than at any time since 1928 — right before the Great Depression.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, “the richest five percent of households obtained roughly 82 percent of all the nation’s gains in wealth between 1983 and 2009. The bottom 60 percent of households actually had less wealth in 2009 than in 1983… ”
Today, 400 families control more wealth than 150 million Americans — almost half of our population.
American workers have become more and more productive — but they haven’t shared in the income generated by that increased productivity, so now they can’t afford to buy the products and services they produce.
The success of the Wall Street/CEO/Republican war on the middle class rests, in part, in the old frog in boiling water story. If you put a frog in a pot of boiling water, they say, the frog will jump right out. But if you put a frog in a pot and gradually turn up the heat until it boils you end up with a cooked frog.
Republican policies have gradually shifted wealth, income and power from the middle class — and those who aspire to be middle class — into their own hands and for obvious reasons they haven’t wanted to focus too much attention on “class warfare.”
So now if the Republicans want to talk about “class warfare” — in the words of George Bush — “bring ’em on.”


Citizens United Ruling Has Upside for Dems

Adam Liptak, Supreme Court correspondent for The New York Times, writes about an overlooked upside to the Citizens United high court decision in his article, “A Blockbuster Case Yields an Unexpected Result.” While Democrats rightfully lament the free ride the ruling gives to corporate political expenditures, it turns out that it bolsters transparency in disclosure. As Liptak reports”

An often-overlooked part of the Citizens United decision actually upheld disclosure requirements, saying that “transparency enables the electorate to make informed decisions and give proper weight to different speakers and messages.”
Lower courts have embraced the ruling, with at least nine of them relying on Citizens United to reject challenges to disclosure laws, often in cases involving political spending related to social issues. In particular, courts have rejected efforts by groups opposed to same-sex marriage to keep their supporters and spending secret.
Put another way, you can make the argument that Citizens United has been good for gay rights. “Even Justice Scalia supports donor disclosure,” said Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign, a national gay rights group.

As Scalia is quoted, “Requiring people to stand up in public for their political acts fosters civic courage, without which democracy is doomed.” Liptak acknowledges, however, that the court did affirm “that secrecy may be warranted when there is hard proof of illegal harassment of supporters of controversial causes.”
The good news from the Republican point of view is that the filthy rich can spend unlimited amounts of money on ads to defeat progressive political candidates. The bad news for the GOP is that we get to know who they are. Scant comfort many Dems would say. But it could have been worse.
Interestingly, the decision has reversed a trend most Democrats have been concerned about, as Liptak puts it in perspective:

…The Supreme Court has long been comfortable with disclosure requirements. But Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, a law professor at Stetson University in Florida, said that lower courts had in the years before Citizens United grown skeptical of compulsory transparency, sometimes saying that it chilled First Amendment rights by imposing burdensome reporting requirements. “Before Citizens United, there was a very alarming trend in this area,” she said.
In a recent article in the Georgia State University Law Review, Professor Torres-Spelliscy described “the dramatic 180-degree turn that the law has taken” in the wake of Citizens United on the issue of disclosure…These days, Professor Hasen said, “lower courts have been taking their cue from Citizens United that disclosure laws, even if they are intrusive, are constitutional.”

No doubt the proponents of unbridled corporate funding for political ads were hoping for a provision affirming their right to total anonymity. Dems can at least be grateful that all but one Supreme Court Justice disagreed (Thomas). But Democrats should not delude themselves that transparency will be widely shared — and it’s up to Dems to make sure the public is well-informed about who is funding all the ads.


‘GOP’ Means…What?

Apparently there has been some hand-wringing going on at the Wall St. Journal about using the term “GOP,” as Francie Grace reports in her post, “What Does ‘GOP’ Stand For?” at CBS News Politics:

The elephant – symbol of the Republican Party since 1874 – remembers that GOP stands for “Grand Old Party,” but increasingly, the elephant is standing alone…At least that’s the thinking at The Wall Street Journal, which has decided to stop using the acronym to refer to the 148-year-old political party.
In an internal memo issued to staffers last week, Journal higher-ups said the term GOP will be dropped because not all readers know what the letters mean, and some may not realize that they are a reference to the Republican Party.

Grace adds that reporters will still be able to use the term in quoting people who say it. There’s a bit of convoluted logic behind the WSJ’s reasoning, having to do with the word “Grand” supposedly indicating some pro-Republican bias. Horrors, you say, aghast that the Journal would stoop to such political bias. Here’s a taste of the tortured soul-searching behind the decision from the text of the memo:

“Because the short form may seem baffling (or even spin-doctored) to some new readers, we want to avoid its use in articles and headlines,” says the memo. “Beginning in December, use it only in the direct quotations and then be sure to explain what GOP means. Even among people who know that GOP refers to the Republican Party, many may not know that it stands for Grand Old Party.”

We’ll all sleep a little better, knowing that the WSJ remains ever-vigilant against creeping conservative bias. ‘Grand’ indeed. Harrumph.
But the fun behind Grace’s post is in the comments section, where wisecracking Dems have their say. Among the printable responses: “This is the party of Greed Over Principle whose goal is to create a Greedy Oligarchic Plutonomy,” writes ProgressiveRepublican. “(G)reed, (O)bstruction, & (P)aranoia party,” says mb99. “greed Over Prosperity,” adds wdrussell1. “Guardians of Privilege” from 88 Ronin. It continues in similar fashion with some of the funnier ones on the randy side.
You may have noticed that TDS has a suggestion in our rotating banner above (available as a bumper sticker for $2 here). But we do encourage all Dems to join the fray and make their creative contributions by clicking on the “have your say” button at the bottom of the article.


Five Things All the GOP Candidates Agree On. (They’re Terrifying.)

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
By the very nature of political journalism, the attention of those covering the 2012 Republican presidential nominating contest tends to be focused on areas of disagreement between the candidates, as well as on the policy positions and messages they are eager to use against Barack Obama. But there are a host of other issues where the Republican candidates are in too much agreement to create a lot of controversy during debates or gin up excitement in the popular media. Areas of agreement, after all, rarely provoke shock or drive readership. But the fact that the Republican Party has reached such a stable consensus on such a great number of far-right positions is in many ways a more shocking phenomenon than the rare topic on which they disagree. Here are just a few areas of consensus on which the rightward lurch of the GOP during the last few years has become remarkably apparent:
1. Hard money. With the exception of Ron Paul’s serial campaigns and a failed 1988 effort by Jack Kemp, it’s been a very long time since Republican presidential candidates flirted with the gold standard or even talked about currency polices. Recent assaults by 2012 candidates on Ben Bernanke and demands for audits of the Fed reflect a consensus in favor of deflationary monetary policies and elimination of any Fed mission other than preventing inflation. When combined with unconditional GOP hostility to stimulative fiscal policies–another new development–this position all but guarantees that a 2012 Republican victory will help usher in a longer and deeper recession than would otherwise be the case.
2. Anti-unionism. While national Republican candidates have always perceived the labor movement as a partisan enemy, they haven’t generally championed overtly anti-labor legislation. Last Thursday, however, they all backed legislation to strip the National Labor Relations Board of its power to prevent plant relocations designed to retaliate against legally protected union activities (power the NLRB is exercising in the famous Boeing case involving presidential primary hotspot South Carolina). Meanwhile, at least two major candidates, Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul, have endorsed a national right-to-work law, and Romney and Perry have also encouraged states like New Hampshire to adopt right-to-work laws.
3. Radical anti-environmentalism. Until quite recently, Republicans running for president paid lip service to environmental protection as a legitimate national priority, typically differentiating themselves from Democrats by favoring less regulatory enforcement approaches and more careful assessment of economic costs and market mechanisms. The new mood in the GOP is perhaps best exemplified by Herman Cain’s proposal at the most recent presidential debate that

(apparently, energy industry or utility executives) should dominate a commission to review environmental regulations–an idea quickly endorsed by Rick Perry. In fact, this approach might represent the middle-of-the-road within the party, given the many calls by other Republicans (including presidential candidates Paul, Bachmann, and Gingrich) for the outright abolition of EPA.
4.Radical anti-abortion activism. Gone are the days when at least one major Republican candidate (e.g., Rudy Giuliani in 2008) could be counted on to appeal to pro-choice Republicans by expressing some reluctance to embrace an immediate abolition of abortion rights. Now the only real intramural controversy on abortion has mainly surrounded a sweeping pledge proffered to candidates by the Susan B. Anthony List–one that would bind their executive as well as judicial appointments, and require an effort to cut off federal funds to institutions only tangentially involved in abortions. Despite this fact, only Mitt Romney and Herman Cain have refused to sign. Both, however, have reiterated their support for the reversal of Roe v. Wade and a constitutional amendment to ban abortion forever (though Romney has said that’s not achievable at present).
5. No role for government in the economy. Most remarkably, the 2012 candidate field appears to agree that there is absolutely nothing the federal government can do to improve the economy–other than disabling itself as quickly as possible. Entirely missing are the kind of modest initiatives for job training, temporary income support, or fiscal relief for hard-pressed state and local governments that Republicans in the past have favored as a conservative alternative to big government counter-cyclical schemes. Also missing are any rhetorical gestures towards the public-sector role in fostering a good economic climate, whether through better schools, basic research, infrastructure projects, and other public investments (the very term has been demonized as synonymous with irresponsible spending).
Add all this up, and it’s apparent the Republican Party has become identified with a radically conservative world-view in which environmental regulations and collective bargaining by workers have strangled the economy; deregulation, federal spending cuts, and deflation of the currency are the only immediate remedies; and the path back to national righteousness will require restoration of the kinds of mores–including criminalization of abortion–that prevailed before things started going to hell in the 1960s. That Republicans hardly even argue about such things anymore makes the party’s transformation that much more striking–if less noticeable to the news media and the population at large.


Calling All Progressive Dems: A Time to Fight

Should you find your enthusiasm for activist politics waning, Robert Reich has a Monday morning energizer in his latest blog entry “Don’t Be Silenced,” via RSN:

We’re on the cusp of the 2012 election. What will it be about? It seems reasonably certain President Obama will be confronted by a putative Republican candidate who:
Believes corporations are people, wants to cut the top corporate rate to 25% (from the current 35%) and no longer require they pay tax on foreign income, who will eliminate capital gains and dividend taxes on anyone earning less than $250,000 a year, raise the retirement age for Social Security and turn Medicaid into block grants to states, seek a balanced-budged amendment to the Constitution, require any regulatory agency issuing a new regulation repeal another regulation of equal cost (regardless of the benefits), and seek repeal of Obama’s healthcare plan.
Or one who:
Believes the Federal Reserve is treasonous when it expands the money supply, doubts human beings evolved from more primitive forms of life, seeks to abolish the Internal Revenue Service and shift most public services to the states, thinks Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, while governor took a meat axe to public education and presided over an economy that generated large numbers of near-minimum-wage jobs, and who will shut down most federal regulatory agencies, cut corporate taxes, and seek repeal of Obama’s healthcare plan.

That’s the default scenario, the one which will become reality if Democratic apathy is allowed to fester. The rest of Reich’s column is more of a challenge to progressive/left Dems to fight for the causes that once made the Democratic Party a great champion of working people:

…Within these narrow confines progressive ideas won’t get an airing. Even though poverty and unemployment will almost surely stay sky-high, wages will stagnate or continue to fall, inequality will widen, and deficit hawks will create an indelible (and false) impression that the nation can’t afford to do much about any of it – proposals to reverse these trends are unlikely to be heard.
Neither party’s presidential candidate will propose to tame CEO pay, create more tax brackets at the top and raise the highest marginal rates back to their levels in the 1950s and 1960s (that is, 70 to 90 percent), and match the capital-gains rate with ordinary income.
You won’t hear a call to strengthen labor unions and increase the bargaining power of ordinary workers.
Don’t expect an argument for resurrecting the Glass-Steagall Act, thereby separating commercial from investment banking and stopping Wall Street’s most lucrative and dangerous practices.
You won’t hear there’s no reason to cut Medicare and Medicaid – that a better means of taming health-care costs is to use these programs’ bargaining clout with drug companies and hospitals to obtain better deals and to shift from fee-for-services to fee for healthy outcomes…Nor will you hear why we must move toward Medicare for all.
Nor why the best approach to assuring Social Security’s long-term solvency is to lift the ceiling on income subject to Social Security payroll taxes.
Don’t expect any reference to the absurdity of spending more on the military than do all other countries put together, and the waste and futility of an unending and undeclared war against Islamic extremism – especially when we have so much to do at home…
Although proposals like these are more important and relevant than ever, they won’t be part of the upcoming presidential election.

The choice facing progressive Dems is between whining and hand-wringing about inadequate leadership of the Party on the one hand and doing something to change it on the other. Reich sounds the call to arms to put real progressive policies back on the agenda:

…I urge you to speak out about them – at town halls, candidate forums, and public events. Continue to mobilize and organize around them. Talk with your local media about them. Use social media to get the truth out.
Don’t be silenced by Democrats who say by doing so we’ll jeopardize the President’s re-election. If anything we’ll be painting him as more of a centrist than Republicans want the public to believe. And we’ll be preserving the possibility (however faint) of a progressive agenda if he’s reelected.

Re-read that last graph. That alone is reason enough to push hard from the left inside the party — it actually strengthens Dem defenses against the GOP default scenario and it lays the foundation for a stronger progressive future for the Democratic Party, win or lose in 2012.
Still not juiced? Reich’s clincher:

Remember, too, the presidential race isn’t the only one occurring in 2012. More than a third of Senate seats and every House seat will be decided on, as well as numerous governorships and state races. Making a ruckus about these issues could push some candidates in this direction – particularly since, as polls show, much of the public agrees.
Most importantly, by continuing to push and prod we give hope to countless Americans on the verge of giving up. We give back to them the courage of their own convictions, and thereby lay the groundwork for a future progressive agenda – to take back America from the privileged and powerful, and restore broad-based prosperity.

Grumble and gripe about inadequate leadership in your party, if you will. But do something this week to advance progressive policies and federal, state and local candidates who support them. Your actions add legitimacy to your critique.


Obama and the Jewish Vote

Predictably enough, the Republican win in a special election for NY’s ninth district has created a new cacophany of claims that the Obama administration’s Middle East policies are alienating Jewish voters. Most prominent was Dan Senor’s Wall Street Journal op-ed yesterday, which had probably been written days–maybe even weeks or months–earlier.
Eric Alterman has the 411 on Senor and his claims:

Senior is a Republican partisan who publicly considered–and then backed away from–a run for Kirsten Gillibrand’s Senate seat. To say that he is rather heavily invested in an analysis that relies more on propaganda than evidence is to state a truism. So, too, Matt Brooks, executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, who argues, “It’s very easy to extrapolate to the 2012 election and say Obama is going to have trouble with Jewish voters in battleground states like Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania.” These two are hardly alone in their views, which threaten to cement into conventional wisdom any minute now. The reporter Ben Jacobs, writing in the Jewish magazine Tablet, insists that “the issue on voters’ minds was Israel” and that this accounts for the Democrats’ loss.
Reporters always say this kind of thing. But if they stopped to think about it for even a moment they would realize that a) they cannot read people’s minds, and b) when tens of thousands of people undertake, individually, to decide between a set of choices, it is foolish to ascribe a single motivation to all of them. (Remember, most of the eligible voters decided to stay home. And let’s not forget furthermore that a significant percentage of the district’s voters are in fact, Catholic.)…
As unpopular as Barack Obama may be with some Jews, remember that New York City Republicans are not a lot like “real Republicans,” those nutty folk who keep debating one another about whether America should let sick, poor people die or give them the death penalty. And for those Jews who might think of straying next year, Democrats have two words for them: “Rick Perry.”

That’s a good thing to keep in mind when predictions are made of this or that constituency abandoning Obama. There will be at least two presidential candidates on the ballot.


Dem Goal for 2012: Bust Some GOP Trifectas

Forbes, ‘the capitalist tool’ has a post by Ed Cain, “Of Trifectas and the Electoral College,” pointing out that 20 states now have Republican control of all houses of their state legislatures, plus the governorship. Cain riffs on Nick Baumann’s Mother Jones piece I flagged yesterday, which discusses the Republican plans to ‘reform’ their electoral college vote allocation in PA and perhaps other states. (Nate Silver also weighs in with a longish analysis of the GOP’s PA gambit in today’s five thirty eight blog).
But Cain’s post also sounds an alarm about the danger facing Dems when 40 percent of the states are under complete Republican control. Only 8 states, 16 percent of the 50 states, have Democratic trifectas. In the remaining 22 states no party controls both the governorship and state legislatures.
The consequences include, as Cain explains:

Now that Republicans now control twenty trifectas across the country (state governments run by one party in the House, Senate, and Governorship) changes to state laws, redistricting, and electoral rules are all fair game. This could tilt not only future congressional elections, but the presidential election in 2012.
Since 2010 was a census year, districts will be drawn up without a fight in 20 states by Republicans, and changes to these districts won’t happen again until 2021, after the 2020 census. This is a major structural shift, and one that gives Republicans, who already benefit from the Electoral College more than Democrats, a serious advantage leading into the 2012 election cycle.
…The redistricting across the country could give Republicans a firm control of the House until as late as 2022, making the 2010 victory a possible 12 year coup, and making another federal trifecta, like the one Democrats enjoyed for two brief years between 2008 and 2010, exceedingly unlikely for Democrats. Republicans, on the other hand, have the electoral upper hand for the conceivable future.
…Republicans are very good at politics, and they’re especially good at taking old rules and using them to achieve legislative victory. As we’ve seen in Wisconsin and Michigan in the past year, Republicans are willing to take extreme positions even in the face of public outcry. That’s why we’ve seen union-busting in Wisconsin in spite of protests and public backlash, and equally radical moves in Michigan under its own Republican trifecta.

Some of the damage is done, since reapportionment after the 2010 census is in place in some states and the consequent gerrymandering is set or in motion. But the good thing is that the margin tilting the balance of power in state legislatures is often a matter of flipping a few votes, and that can be changed every two years. If Dems have just a fair year in 2012, it is possible that it could make a big difference in the “trifecta” spread.
I would encourage all Dems to do a little research and adopt a candidate or two in a state legislature where the margin for busting a trifecta is fairly close (map here has a useful rollover widget for this), and make a contribution. It doesn’t have to be your own state. It would be great if some energetic blogger could put together a list of state legislature candidates across the country who have a good shot at winning a race in states where the GOP trifecta margin is fairly close.
Just thinking here.


Coalitions Forming to Fight War on Voting

The title of the WaPo article by Krissah Thompson and Aaron Blake we flag here will not come as a shocker to TDS readers, or to anyone who is paying attention to what is happening to their voting rights: “Republicans rewriting state election laws in ways that could hurt Democrats.”
We’ve covered this story from a lot of angles, not because we like being messengers of bad news. But it is important for Democrats to keep up with the multi-pronged assault on their voting rights, if we’re going to take it on. Blake and Thompson review the situation to date, and then report on some challenges being mobilized:

They have curbed early voting, rolled back voting rights for ex-felons and passed stricter voter ID laws. Taken together, the measures could have a significant and negative effect on President Obama’s reelection efforts if they keep young people and minorities away from the polls.
……This year, more than 30 states debated changes to their voting laws. A dozen passed more restrictive rules requiring voters to present state-issued photo IDs, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, although Democratic governors in four states vetoed them. Florida and Ohio will cut nearly in half the number of days for early voting, and Florida lawmakers reversed rules that had made it easier for former felons to vote.
…Heather Smith, president of Rock the Vote, a group focused on registering young voters, said she is most worried about new restrictions on third-party voter registration groups in Florida. Volunteers for groups like hers must now fill out paperwork with the state, then obtain a set of numbered voter-registration forms and return those forms to the registrar’s office within 48 hours. If the paperwork is not in order, the volunteer and the group face fines
…Pennsylvania lawmakers are considering the latest, and perhaps most potent, legislation, a measure that would divvy up electoral votes by congressional district rather than use the winner-takes-all approach. The change would almost ensure a net gain of 20 to 24 GOP electoral votes in the 2012 presidential election.

How bad is it in historical context?

“It all hits at the groups that had higher turnout and higher registration in 2008,” said Judith Browne-Dianis, a civil rights lawyer who co-directs the Advancement Project, which has been tracking the new regulations.
…Twenty-five percent of African American voters do not have a valid government-issued photo ID, compared with 8 percent of whites, according to a study by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School. The report also found that 15 percent of voters earning less than $35,000 per year do not have such an ID.
…The Rev. Jesse Jackson, who ran for president in 1984 and 1988, urged civil rights lawyers at the Justice Department this summer to reverse some of the new restrictions. “All that we worked for in the last 50 years is on the chopping block,” Jackson said.
…”It just seems like a partisan setup [that is] all about who is going to be in the White House in 2012,” said Browne-Dianis, whose group has issued a report arguing that the vote among young people and minorities is being suppressed. “This really is the worst rollback of voting rights that we’ve seen in a century.”

The good news is that dazed Democrats are starting to wake up and organize some resistance, as the authors report:

Smith said Rock the Vote may file a lawsuit to try to get some of those rules overturned. Her group, which calls the new laws a “war on voting,” will announce a new initiative this fall called “You can’t stop us.”
…In Wisconsin, which passed a law requiring identification to vote, her group has started a “Got ID?” campaign, which buses students to the Department of Motor Vehicles and helps them gather the documents they need to receive an official ID.

It’s going to take energized voter registration coalitions in many states to offset the damage already done to voting rights. And it’s going to take an equally-vigorous education campaign to insure that the public gets it that only the most conservative demographic groups are really safe from the Republican war on voting.