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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: November 2011

Democratic Strategy Notes

Beth Fouhy explores the intersection of electoral politics and OWS in this morning’s AP update, “Democrats See Minefield in Occupy Protests.”
Many pundits agree that President Obama’s strong card is his impressive accomplishments in international affairs. But how much his achievements will factor into voter choice is an open question. Maryland University political scientist Thomas F. Schaller offers some insights in his post, “Will Obama’s Foreign Policy Wins Lead to a Win Next Year?” at Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball.
Robert Kuttner’s “Don’t Save Republicans from Themselves” at The American Prospect makes the case, short and sweet, for Dems to hold the line and refuse to sign on a Supercommittee deal favored by the GOP before the automatic cuts kick in. Says Kuttner: “The Democrats are holding all the cards. Is this really the moment to save the Republicans from themselves?”
Republicans are running scared about the Supercommittee deliberations. According to a Newsmax.com report, “Norquist: Democrats Sabotaging Supercommittee to Help Obama” by Paul Scicchitano and Kathleen Walter, the GOP’s chief government-basher has gotten his knickers all in a twist over, horrors, a political party putting political advantage before the good of the country.
Gingrich’s GOP opponents would have no trouble compiling a richly-detailed “Top Ten Reasons Why Newt is Unelectable,” list. But this latest revelation could be the deal-breaker.
David Catanese’s Politico update, “Outside groups begin assault with ads” reports that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is shelling out $1 million for their first salvo of ad buys targeting a dozen [Democratic} Senators and 50 congress members, including Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Jon Tester (D-MT).
Here’s the Chamber’s attack ad targeting Sherrod Brown because he opposed unlimited drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and supported ending oil subsidies.
Meanwhile, Republicans are apparently having a hard time finding well-rounded candidates to help them take back control of the U.S. Senate, reports Jennifer Steinhauer in her New York Times article, “Feuding Hurts G.O.P.’s Hopes to Win Senate.” “The biggest fear among Republicans is of divisive primaries in which Tea Party-backed candidates prevail in states where they cannot win the general election, as happened in 2010 in Delaware, Colorado and Nevada, or that weaken the preferred candidate in the process.”
The Grey Lady also has a nicely-packaged wrap-up of “The Battle for the Senate” to date with a color-coded map and snap-shot summaries for each race.
The Republican House Freshman aren’t doing so well in fund-raising, reports Fredreka Schouten in USA Today. “Two-thirds of the Republican freshmen who captured Democratic-held seats in the GOP’s 2010 takeover of the U.S. House of Representatives saw their fundraising dip in the past quarter, campaign-finance reports show…The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has seen its fundraising surge, collecting $6.6 million in September, nearly double its August haul. The National Republican Congressional Committee raised $3.8 million in September, a 27% increase from its total the previous month.”
2011 may go down in U.S. political history as the GOP’s year of strategic blunders. Evan McMorris-Santoro of Talking Points Memo piles on in his post, “The Arizona Immigration Bill Seems To Have Created A New Swing State.
Barbara Morrill has posted “The John Boehner Cries Caption Contest” over at Daily Kos. More than 200 entries so far.


Walker Recall has 58% Support, Voter Suppression Underway

It looks like the movement to recall Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has big mo, and the Governor is leveraging his powers to suppress a key constituency — young voters, as John Nichols explains in his Nation post, “As Wisconsin Governor’s Poll Numbers Tank, GOP Moves to ‘Rig’ Recall“:

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s support has collapsed, according to a new poll that shows that 58 percent of voters favor recalling the Republican whose anti-labor initiatives provoked the mass demonstrations that anticipated the Occupy Wall Street movement.
According to a new St. Norbert College/Wisconsin Public Radio survey of Wisconsin voters, only 38 percent of voters now support retaining Walker as governor. That represents a ten-point drop in support for the governor since last spring, when it was presumed that he had bottomed out. In fact, they have continued to decline, with significant movement of previously undecided voters into the anti-Walker camp. Thirty-seven percent of Wisconsinites now “strongly disapprove” of Walker’s governorship, while 21 percent merely disapprove. Among the most engaged (and presumably likely) voters, the figure rises to a remarkable 61 percent overall disapproval number for the governor. Significantly, while attitudes toward President Obama and the state’s Republican senator, Ron Johnson, have remained relatively steady, Walker’s numbers have tanked. That’s a serious problem for the governor, as it suggests that voters are crossing partisan and even ideological lines to oppose him.

Nichols reports that The Republican-controlled Joint Committee for Review of Administrative Rules has ordered Wisconsin’s Government Accountability Board, which oversees state elections, to subject proposed voting-rights rules to a process that gives Governor Walker and Republican legislative leaders authority to reject rule changes. This gives Walker the power to interfere with the recall election by making decisions about student i.d.’s, address verification and electronic circulation of recall documents.
Nichols quotes Rep. Mark Pocan a Democrat from Madison, “Republicans are trying to make it harder for students to vote and they should be ashamed of themselves…Today, Republicans sent a strong signal that Scott Walker wants the fairest election he can rig.”
Other Republican-sponsored voter suppression initiatives were already underway in Wisconsin, and Nichols notes the irony that Walker was first elected in 2002 as a Milwaukee County executive, as part of a recall campaign. Now he is fighting to survive one as the nation’s poster-boy union-basher, pitted against a rapidly-growing coalition of the working people of Wisconsin.


Why Newt is Romney’s Dream Opponent

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
In his pursuit of a presidential nomination that a majority of his party’s voters clearly do not want to give him, Mitt Romney has been extraordinarily lucky. Aside from the sheer number of potentially formidable opponents who chose to forgo a run in 2012, the rivals he has actually faced each seem to possess qualities that cast Romney’s own shortcomings in a more favorable light. His authenticity issues, for instance, paled in comparison to those of Tim Pawlenty, who spent most of his brief campaign trying unsuccessfully to convince Tea Partiers that he looked good bellowing anti-government slogans in a tricorner hat. His ideological heresies, meanwhile, might be extensive, but unlike Rick Perry he has never told his conservative tormenters they didn’t have a heart because they disagreed with him. And while Mitt’s buttoned-up, Mormon persona is a bit boring and wonky, Herman Cain has done more than enough to demonstrate the downside of an exciting and unpredictable personality.
None of Romney’s opponents, however, have greater potential to make him shine in comparison than Newt Gingrich. That’s because Gingrich, the latest candidate to surge in the polls on a wave of anybody-but-Mitt sentiment, is the only candidate with a longer and more contradictory track record than Romney, effectively nullifying the most grievous charge levied against the former Massachusetts governor. Indeed, if Gingrich has a divinely appointed role to play in the ongoing GOP nomination drama, one might argue it’s to make Romney look like a piker when it comes to the art of flip-flopping.
Consistency is always going to be a problem for a pol of Gingrich’s rare vintage, who made his first congressional bid in 1974 when Mitt Romney was still at Harvard Business School. Indeed, Gingrich anticipated Romney’s moderate-Republican incarnation of the 1990s by more than two decades, serving as Nelson Rockefeller’s southern regional campaign coordinator in 1968 and then running distinctly to the left of his Democratic opponent in his first two congressional races.
But Gingrich’s most notable flip-flops have been far more recent and abrupt. Both before and during the United States’ intervention in Libya earlier this year, Gingrich seemed to shift positions constantly. And his double back-flip on Paul Ryan’s budget proposal–he was for it, then dismissed it as “right-wing social engineering,” and then endorsed it all over again, all within a couple weeks–nearly destroyed his 2012 campaign before it got off the ground.
The Gingrich flip-flop that plays most directly into Romney’s hand, however, concerns the former Speaker’s shifting positions on heath care reform. Gingrich’s early and strong support for the idea of an individual mandate (particularly as encompassed in a Heritage Foundation proposal for universal health coverage during the 1990s, but reiterated as recently as 2008) will be hard to ignore once attention is drawn to it. To the extent that it closely mirrors Romney’s own image problems over having enacted an individual health care mandate in Massachusetts, it reinforces the perception that this is a heresy conservatives can be forgiven for having once endorsed.
Likewise, when it comes to the environment, Romney’s prior green leanings are nothing compared to the symbolism of Gingrich’s past support for Mother Earth. The fact that Gingrich was concerned about global climate change (he co-sponsored a Global Warming Prevention Act back in 1989) before he wasn’t hardly distinguishes him from other leading Republicans like Romney, of course. But the specificity and visibility of his support for climate change action–including his decision in 2008 to cut an ad for the Alliance for Climate Protection promoting bipartisan action on climate change–far outdoes anything the other candidates have ever publicly said or done on the issue. The ad, which Gingrich now calls “the single dumbest thing I’ve done,” shows the former Speaker and then-current Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, sitting closely together on a couch with the Capitol in the background, warbling in tandem about the need to come together for climate change solutions.
It is hard to imagine, short of tenderly kissing Barney Frank after agreeing with him on housing policy, what Gingrich could have possibly done to provide a more damaging optic from the perspective of the Tea Party folk on whom his candidacy now relies. Sitting in front of the Capitol with Pelosi indelibly reminds viewers of his long Beltway insider pedigree. Chatting and smiling with “Princess Nancy” is a supreme symbol of the now largely extinct desire for bipartisanship that Tea Partiers hate intensely, and it’s all the more shocking coming from the man who now regularly refers to the opposition as “the secular socialist machine.” The Pelosi ad is already beginning to pop up all over the blogosphere, and the more Gingrich apologizes, the more he reinforces the impression that he, not Mitt Romney, is the champion flip-flopper in the GOP presidential field.
Of course, it’s always possible Gingrich can overcome his own record, or convince conservative voters that his years of vicious partisanship and conservative ideological agitation are more important than his moments of cuddling up to Democrats and adopting trendy liberal causes. And maybe Tea Partiers really would prefer to support just about anybody against Romney; it is notable that Gingrich, Cain, and Perry have all in turn managed to reach levels of support in the polls higher than Romney’s support at its peak. But if Romney does win the nomination, it’s increasingly clear he owes it less to his own virtues than to a field of rivals who seem determined to show just how much worse Republicans could do.


Silver Sheds Light on Uses, Limitations of Political Forecasting

Political statistics junkies will be buzzing today about Nate Silver’s “A ‘Radical Centrist’ View on Election Forecasting,” a characteristically-perceptive analysis at his Five Thirty Eight blog. It’s a response to a recent critique of Silver’s New York Times Magazine article, “Is Obama Toast? Handicapping the 2012 Election.” The critique, entitled “Why Data Wonks Are Wrong About Presidential Elections,” written by Ron Klain, a former Biden staffer, argues that statistical forecasts don’t help much with campaign strategy.
I haven’t yet read Klain’s post, so I can’t make a sound assessment about how accurately Silver describes his argument. But Silver’s post has merit even as a stand-alone essay on the nuances and concerns of political forecasting, one likely to be widely-discussed in poly sci classes this week.
I can certainly see good uses of forecasting in formulating strategy. Ad placement and timing, candidate travel, messaging and policy positions can all benefit from political forecasting. That’s not to say forecasting is the primary strategy tool for political campaigns, nor to deny that it’s been overvalued.
To a some extent, political forecasting is a sideshow of more immediate use to academics, journalists, gamblers and water-cooler chat than it is to political campaign workers. Accurately predicting which candidate wins gives political forecasters some cred as advisers and commentators. And, “If the election were held today” polls, more than forecasts, can tell a candidate that she/he is not doing well with union members, single women or suburbanites, for example. That can be helpful for tweaking messaging, ads and other campaign activities.
But Silver makes it clear that it would be folly for a campaign to marshal most of it’s resources in response to a forecast or poll and he is quite candid about the limitations and misuses of forecasting:

…Forecasters who are not conscientious about their methodology will wind up with models that make overconfident forecasts and that impute meaning to statistical noise…I would not paint all the forecasters with the same brush. Two political scientists who I know have a very sophisticated understanding of these problems are Larry Bartels at Princeton and Robert Erikson at Columbia. Others, like Hans Noel, will publish models, but provide very explicit disclaimers about their limitations. But there others who tweak as many knobs as they can, and there are bloggers and reporters who take all of the results at face value and don’t distinguish the responsible forecasts from the junk science. The problem is made worse when a game show is made out of forecasting and everyone competes to see who can get the most overfit model published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Silver weighs the relative influence of economic statistics, campaign strategy, candidate skills and ideology and unpredictable events, and discusses the difficulty of quantifying such factors. He notes that a lot of forecasting models flunked last year, and he cautions that the 2012 elections are likely to be especially problematic for forecasters. “We have already had an extremely wide array of outcomes in the various special and interim elections that have taken place around the country so far this year,” says Silver, “and we’ve had a very wild Republican primary, suggesting that voter preferences may be more malleable than normal.” He adds that even the best forecasting models don’t do such a great job of explaining the why of outcomes.
Alan I. Abramowitz, senior columnist for Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball and member of the TDS Advisory Board, also has an insightful critique of Silver’s New York Times Magazine article, noting “several problems with Silver’s model,” among them,

…First, it isn’t really a forecasting model because the growth rate of the economy during the year of the election won’t be known until long after the election is over. In addition, the measure of the opposition candidate’s extremism is highly subjective…More importantly, Silver’s model may underestimate Barack Obama’s chances of winning a second term in the White House because it does not take into account the advantage enjoyed by first-term incumbents. And that advantage, as we have seen, is quite substantial.

But Silver does believe that political forecasting models can be made better and better, and can be increasingly useful in political campaigns. Anyone interested in data-driven political analysis should find Silver’s perspective a good read.


Will Jobs Loss in GA help Dems?

Let’s go whole hog with the economic determinist theory of election outcomes for a moment, and assume that the unemployment rate is one of the better statistical indicators for election predictions.
Yes, that could mean Dems are headed for defeat in the 2012 presidential election. But if the theory is valid, there should be some positive correlation between unemployment rates in the states and whether or not incumbents or their party’s state-wide candidates, especially governors, get re-elected/elected. Seems like a worthy notion to test out.
If indeed state-wide officials are to be held accountable for their states’ economic performance, that should be good news for Georgia Democrats, since Republican Governors and the GOP-dominated state legislature have presided over steeply-rising unemployment in the Peach State. Georgia now ranks 49th in job-creation and is one of only 7 states to lose jobs in 2011.
As Gracie Shepherd explains in her Augusta Chronicle article, “Democrats criticize Deal administration’s lack of job creation“:

“We used to be an economic engine that drove the region. Now, we are nothing more than a caboose,” said Eric Gray, the communications director for the Georgia Democratic Party.
Georgia is one of only seven states to lose jobs in 2011, he said, and has lost 8,200 jobs so far. Deal made promises on his campaign to “kick-start the economy,” but the results aren’t there, Gray said.
“When did you ever think that we would have to look up to Alabama or Mississippi?” Gray said. Indiana is the only state doing worse than Georgia on job creation, he added.

All of which posits a daunting question to the Republicans who have controlled Georgia’s governorship and legislature since 2003, “O Mighty Job-Creators, Where are the f__king Jobs?,” as one of the OWS signs so eloquently put it.
There is some evidence that a blue tide is beginning to rise in Georgia. As the latest email from the state’s Democratic party puts it: “The Democratic Party of Georgia posted big wins throughout the state last week, solidifying the strategy of raising Democratic performance in key races by over 5% from previous elections.”


TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira: Public Wants More Wealth-Sharing

In this week’s edition of his ‘Public Opinion Snapshot,’ TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira clears up any lingering confusion about what the public wants to do about festering economic inequality. Teixeira explains:

In the most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, 76 percent agreed and 60 percent strongly agreed that “The current economic structure of the country is out of balance and favors a very small proportion of the rich over the rest of the country. America needs to reduce the power of major banks and corporations and demand greater accountability and transparency. The government should not provide financial aid to corporations and should not provide tax breaks to the rich.”

As Teixeira says, “That’s impressively high support for such a strong statement.” And it’s not just one poll:

Along the same lines, in a new poll from the Public Religion Research Institute, 60 percent agreed that “our society would be better off if the distribution of wealth was more equal,” compared to just 39 percent who disagreed. And, by 63 percent to 33 percent, respondents agreed that “we need to dramatically reduce inequalities between rich and poor, whites and people of color and men and women.”

No doubt, GOP defenders of preserving extreme wealth for their cronies will find these polls disturbing. As Teixeira says, “Conservatives are frantically trying to convince the public that this whole inequality thing is overblown. These data suggest their arguments aren’t getting much traction.”


Political Strategy Notes

For a striking visual representation of how geographically broad-based was the victory over union-bashing in Ohio, take a gander at the map in Dante Atkins’s Daily Kos post “That’s not ‘overreach.’ That’s just the Republican Party.”
Also at Kos, Chris Bowers reports on the Walker recall campaign, along with the effort to recall GOP Wisconsin state senators, as well as dirty tricks being used to obstruct the recall.
With just a few more states to go in the redistricting process, Stuart Rothenberg’s Roll Call post “House Overview: What’s In Play? Democrats Look to Take Back the Chamber in 2012” has an iffy prognosis for Dems. “At this point, with redistricting still up in the air in key states, Democrats appear positioned to gain House seats, but not all that close to the 25 seats they would need to regain a majority in the House…Democrats need some breaks in the final redistricting states, some additional recruits and almost certainly a shift in the national political environment to improve their chances of winning back the House.”
Elizabeth Warren’s first TV ad is out with a simple, direct populist message that ought to win some Bay State swing voters. ActBlue has raised over $2.5 million for her campaign from almost 60 thousand supporters.
Again at Kos, via Alternet, in his article, “10 Stories of People Moving Their Money, Despite Banks” Efforts to Stop Them,” Markos Moulitsas succinctly debunks the myth that banks really welcome the withdrawal campaigns because it relieves them of the administrative costs associated with smaller depositors. Says Kos, “…Not only do they relentlessly advertise for new business on billboards, TV, direct mail and other places, but they fight tooth and nail to prevent people from closing their accounts.” Kos could have also mentioned that megabanks have bent over backward to persuade migrant workers to become depositors, despite their very modest average balances.
Did you know that a third of 18 year-olds have no driver’s license? Further, “18 percent of Americans over the age of 65, one- quarter of African-Americans, and 15 percent of low-income voters do not have a photo ID.” These and other facts bearing on voter suppression can be found in “Protecting The Right To Vote: Testimony for the Committee on the Judiciary” submitted by Demos.
Voter suppression is critical for Republican success in the southern states, where the African American and Latino populations are growing fastest. The Economist doesn’t take voter suppression into consideration in “The politics of the South: Hunting for votes,” but the overview of Democratic prospects in the region in light of recent elections is discouraging, with some exceptions. Still, as The Economist warns, President Obama “will struggle to keep his job next year unless he can win at least one of the three southern states he carried in 2008: Florida, North Carolina and Virginia.” Without addressing the topic directly, the article lends support to the argument that the Obama campaign may now have better prospects in the Rust Belt.
Speaking of Democratic ineptitude in the south, Ashton Pittman, progressive columnist for “The Student Printz,” serving southern Mississippi, has a revealing column explaining why “Democrats Can Only Blame Themselves” in the magnolia State. Pittman explains: “For the first time since Reconstruction, Republicans are likely to hold the majority in the Mississippi House of Representatives. In an election that saw progressive victories all across the country, including a major one right here in Mississippi, the Democratic party in Mississippi has only itself to blame..Things were so bad for the Democratic party that it wasn’t even able to field candidates for lieutenant governor, secretary of state, or auditor.” But it’s the whys of it that makes Pittman’s column a good read for Dems who want to do better in the deep south, where highly favorable demographic trends are in motion.
Danielle Kurtzleben of U.S. News Politics has a fun featurette, “The 10 Most Unionized U.S. Cities.” Hint: If you guessed Frisco and Vegas like I did, you would be wrong. Interesting, though, that all but two of the top ten are in CA or NY.
Ezra Klein has a stinging critique of “The Democrats’ Peculiar Negotiating Strategy” up at his WaPo wonkblog. After citing a depressing litany of right turns and cave-ins in the negotiating process, Klein concludes, “So far, Republicans have not said yes to any of the deals the Democrats have offered. They continue to assume a better deal is just around the corner, and thus far, they have been right.”
Also at The Post, Eugene Robinson makes a persuasive case that “Republicans aren’t closing the deal with voters.” Says Robinson: “The Republican field has utterly failed to develop a convincing narrative about the economy. The candidates act as if widespread disappointment with the performance of Obama and the Democrats will be enough to win the election. But voters are being given every reason to suspect that GOP policies will make things worse.”


TDS Co-Editor William Galston: Forget the 2008 Map: A New Poll Shows Why Obama’s Re-Election Is Riding On Ohio

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
As the headline in Thursday’s Politico boldly touted (“Ohio back on Obama’s dance card”), the Obama campaign is suddenly refocusing on the Buckeye state. There’s a positive reason for this reported shift in the Obama campaign’s thinking: Coupled with the rebuke Ohio swing voters administered on Tuesday to an overreaching Republican governor, Mitt Romney’s lack of populist appeal makes Ohio a more tempting target than it appeared just a few months ago. But there’s a negative reason as well: “Virginia and North Carolina, key to Obama’s victories in 2008,” the article continues, “are becoming more and more uncertain.” Indeed, if Obama hopes to win reelection, he needs to double down on Ohio, Pennsylvania, and the rest of the heartland–and acknowledge that his “new majority” coalition–upscale professionals, single women, young adults, and minorities–won’t be enough to get the job done.
To understand the significance of this reconsideration, let’s look at five key states: Virginia and North Carolina–two of the biggest prizes of 2008’s “expand the playing field” strategy; Ohio and Florida–the major swing states on the narrower playing field of national elections prior to 2008; and Pennsylvania, which every winning Democratic candidate in the past half century has carried.
First, the 2008 results:
Galston_Table01.png
Note that Obama’s share of the popular vote was two percentage points lower in Florida than it was nationally, and three points lower in North Carolina. Because 2012 is shaping up as a closer election than 2008, Obama is vulnerable in these two states, among others.
And now here’s the current situation, based on statewide surveys conducted within the past month:
Galston_Table02.png
Galston_Table03.png
There are a number of key takeaways from Tables 2 and 3. First, they are consistent with the results of the legislative elections in Virginia: That state is likely to be closely contested in 2012, the Republicans are considerably stronger than they were four years ago, and there’s no guarantee that the winning 2008 coalition can prevail this time.
Second, Obama is doing reasonably well in Ohio, although his lead over Romney is well within the margin of error. One hypothesis, to which the recent referendum results lend credence, is that Governor Kasich’s unpopularity is giving the president a bit of a boost. (Only 36 percent of Ohio voters approve of their governor’s job performance, while 51 percent disapprove.) But Obama’s margin is nowhere near as large as the margin by which Kasich’s anti-collective bargaining legislation was repealed–in part, we may conjecture, because two-thirds of Ohio voters also expressed their disapproval of the individual health insurance mandate at the heart of the president’s health reform legislation.
Conversely, Obama is doing poorly in Florida, with significantly lower job approval, “deserves reelection” numbers, and vote shares than in the other key swing states.
And finally, considering that Obama won Pennsylvania by more than 10 points in 2008, his standing there is surprisingly weak today, perhaps because there’s nothing dragging down Republicans in that state. On the contrary, 46 percent of Pennsylvanians approve of Republican governor Tom Corbett, versus only 31 percent who disapprove–a 15-point positive advantage that is the mirror-image of Kasich’s 15-point net negative rating.
Let’s put this in the context of Electoral College arithmetic. Of the states that Obama won in 2008, he is certain to lose Indiana, he will be hard-put to reproduce his razor-thin edge in North Carolina, and his chances of prevailing in Florida appear well short of 50-50. Those three states alone accounted for 53 of Obama’s 365 electoral votes in 2008.
Given all this, it would political malpractice for the Obama campaign not to go all-out in Ohio. At the same time, they should focus on fortifying the president’s standing in Pennsylvania, a state that traditionally has given Democratic presidential candidates a share of the popular vote about two percentage points higher than their national average. Winning Pennsylvania is a necessary condition of Democratic victory; winning Ohio is a sufficient condition.
As I’ve argued before, the president’s path to victory in 2012 runs through the heartland, not around it. And that means addressing the concerns of heartland voters, who mirror the demography of the U.S. population more closely than they do Obama’s “new majority.”


High Court to Rule on HCR Law as Public Support Rises

Mallory Simon reports at CNN on the likely timetable for the U.S. Supreme Court hearings and their decision on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act:

Oral arguments would probably be held in late February or March, with a ruling by June, assuring the blockbuster issue will become the topic of a hot-button political debate in a presidential election year.

As Simon reports, a key issue to be decided by the Supremes is “whether the ‘individual mandate’ section of the law – requiring nearly all Americans to buy health insurance by 2014 or face financial penalties – is an improper exercise of federal authority.”
The Republican hope is that the high court will rule the Act unconstitutional. Simon quotes CNN’s senior legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, “Many states have challenged this and said, ‘This is different because it requires individuals to buy a private product, that is health insurance,’ and that is something [they feel] the federal government simply does not have the authority to do.”
If the court made such a ruling, would that mean state laws requiring drivers to purchase car insurance would also be in jeopardy? It’s OK for state governments to make such a requirement, but not the federal government?
As for the political consequences of the Supreme Court ruling, Toobin speculates:

“If the law is struck down, if the central achievement of President Obama’s domestic policy is struck down, I think that would be very, very bad for him; the idea that he spent all this time on something that was unconstitutional,” Toobin said. “If he wins, I think it’s a benefit. Gratification by a basically conservative Supreme Court, I think, will be seen as a victory for him and will likely give him some momentum heading into the convention…”

Mallory reports that the White House nonetheless feels confident about the challenge, since three out of four circuit courts have upheld the Affordable Care Act’s constitutionality, including rulings by “highly conservative judges.”
It also appears that the tide of public opinion may be turning in favor of the Act. According to “CNN Poll: Support rises for health insurance mandate” by Bill Mears and Paul Steinhauser,

The public is divided over the idea of requiring all Americans to have health insurance, according to a new national survey. But a CNN/ORC International Poll [conducted 11/11-13] also indicates that support for the proposal, a cornerstone of the 2010 health care reform law, has risen since June.
According to the poll, 52% of Americans favor mandatory health insurance, up from 44% in June. The survey indicates that 47% oppose the health insurance mandate, down from 54% in early summer…”The health insurance mandate has gained most support since June among older Americans and among lower-income Americans,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. “A majority of independents opposed the measure in June, but 52 percent of them now favor it.”

Some might argue that there is little reason to hope that the Supreme Court has gotten any better since Gore v. Bush, in terms of doing of the GOP’s bidding. But it seems to me that there is less cover here for a politicized decision, particularly in light of the courts of appeals rulings. It’s going to take some awfully tortured reasoning by five justices to argue that the coverage requirement is illegal. It could happen, but I’m betting that there is at least one conservative justice who doesn’t want such an embarrassing mockery on his legacy.
In sum, the legal arguments supporting the law’s constitutionality are strong, and the public, though divided, favors the mandate, and increasingly so. Unless the High Court is now hopelessly — and shamelessly — politicized, the law will likely be upheld.


Walker Recall Campaign Ready to Launch

Andy Kroll has a good update at Mother Jones, “It’s Recall Time for Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker,” surveying the prospects for getting rid of the Badger State’s union-basher in-chief. As the recall effort kicks off, Kroll sets the scene:

That fight begins at 12:01 a.m. on Tuesday with the launch of the official Walker recall campaign. Organizers have 60 days to collect at least 540,208 signatures to trigger a recall election for Walker. (Another 540,208 additional signatures are needed to recall Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch.) The grassroots groups spearheading the recall effort under the “United Wisconsin” banner say they hope to collect as many as 700,000 or 800,000 signatures by mid-January. That’s roughly 12,000 or 13,000 a day. If they do, it will set up a bruising, cash-flooded, two-month recall campaign next spring, and an actual election between early April and early June, depending on legal challenges and potential primary races on either the Democratic or Republican side.

Despite the euphoric hopes of recall leaders in the aftermath of the Ohio victory over union-bashing legislation, it’s harder to mobilize support for recalling an elected official. It’s the difference between asking voters to take a stand against legislation they don’t like, though it was enacted by someone they may have voted for on the one hand, and asking a lot of voters to repudiate their earlier votes for a candidate. Also, the Democrats have to run a good unity candidate against Walker in the recall election. Fortunately, there are several strong possible candidates, including Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, former Rep. Richard Obey, outgoing U.S. Sen. Herb Kohl and Mahlon Mitchell, president of the firefighter’s union and protest spokesman.
The Ohio vote awakened many voters to the dangers of union-busting politicians, and Walker has been a particularly nasty opponent of unions. Moreover, even if the recall effort fails, it won’t be by much, and that will send a message to political leaders to avoid getting branded as union-bashing errand boy for the Koch brothers.
The recall campaign has some other cards to play, as Kroll notes:

…Walker’s full budget, passed in June, closed a two-year shortfall of $3 billion by slashing almost $800 million from public schools, trimming tax credits for the poor, rewriting state pension law while cutting investment and corporate taxes. He passed a controversial voter ID bill that critics say disenfranchises students and seniors, and signed two GOP-friendly redistricting bills. Also looming large is a John Doe investigation into possible campaigning by employees for Milwaukee County while on the clock when Walker was the county executive. (Eleven people have been granted immunity in the probe.) In September, the investigation captured national headlines when the home of a close Walker aide, Cynthia Archer, was raided by FBI agents.

As for the latest polling figures, Kroll cites surveys by Public Policy Polling (PPP) and Wisconsin Policy Research Institute (WPRI):

PPP’s and WPRI’s surveys detected a similar split on recalling Walker–48 percent of respondents favored it and 49 percent opposed in PPP’s poll, while WPRI reported a 47-49 split. But Maslin, who worked as former California Gov. Gray Davis’ pollster during his own recall election (which he led to his replacement by Arnold Schwarzenegger), dismissed these findings as the work of “fly-by-night cheap pollsters.” He repeated his belief that Walker is vulnerable, and said that his experience in California convinced him that Walker has only a five- or six-week window to win over angry voters before their attitudes are frozen in place as the recall effort ramps up.

Owing to a quirk in Wisconsin election law, however, Gov. Walker can accept unlimited donations until the recall election date is set in stone. The Koch brothers and anti-union corporate leaders will likely load up Walker’s coffers during the next 60 days. ActBlue has a donation page for contributors to the recall effort right here.