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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: November 2011

It’s No Accident That the Tea Party’s Presidential Candidates Keep Flaming Out

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Last week was a difficult week for the Tea Party. Tuesday’s election results firmly rebutted the idea that the movement had touched off an irresistible rightward wave in American politics, one that would not subside until it submerged the Democratic Party and its union/liberal allies once and for all. Meanwhile, the process of choosing a champion to drive Barack Obama out of the White House is not going well at all. With only seven weeks until actual caucus and primary voting begins, how did the movement arrive at this seemingly hopeless state?
Tea folk knew they’d have a fight on their hands, but they weren’t prepared for it. They wanted to fight off the Beltway hacks and RINOs who had so disingenuously sucked up to the movement in its early days; the devious Mitt Romney was these types’ obvious choice, reflecting as he did their own lack of principle, so Tea Partiers would have to come up with their own candidate. Their chosen method for asserting their interests–namely, by ruthlessly enforcing ideologically rigidity–has proven itself flawed, but they have stuck with it regardless. Despite the electoral defeats of Tea Party candidates like Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell in 2010, to most Tea Partiers the lesson of the midterm elections was that the only thing keeping the Republican Party from an enduring majority was its lack of ideological rigor and its cowardly refusal to adopt total war tactics. The very concept of political “overreach,” the term most often applied to the losing side in Ohio’s recent Issue 2 battle, is alien to the Tea Party mind, in which extremism in the defense of liberty is never a vice.
As we’ve seen, the movement has enough size and muscle to give its preferred candidates significant national clout. But with its ideological extremism and insularity, it has also been selecting for candidates who are all but guaranteed to succumb to the intense public scrutiny of a presidential race. It’s no accident that we have seen so many Republicans ascend to frontrunner status, only to flame out in glorious balls of fire.
All along, Tea Party supporters have been holding their own mini-primary during the lead-in to actual voting. Initially, their problem seemed to be an embarrassment of riches when it came to candidates seeking their favor. With Sarah Palin on the sidelines, Michele Bachmann was often called the “Queen of the Tea Party.” But despite her win at the Iowa GOP Straw Poll and her frontrunner status in many national polls, Tea Partiers abandoned her for what then looked like a behemoth of a candidate in Rick Perry, who had thrilled hyper-conservatives in Texas with harsh anti-government rhetoric and event hints of secession as a last resort.
But having brushed aside Bachmann and other Tea Party favorites, Perry promptly lost most of his Tea Party admirers when he reiterated and then clumsily defended his support for making the children of undocumented workers eligible for in-state tuition at Texas colleges–a position that Tea Partiers found deeply offensive, especially when he made the supreme mistake of saying those who disagreed with him had “no heart.”
When Perry crashed, it was not surprising that Tea Partiers flocked to the banner of Herman Cain, one of the earliest Tea Party boosters as a nationally syndicated radio talk show host. The glib former pizza executive seemed the epitome of the citizen-politician, fond of attractively simplistic cure-alls like a modified flat tax plan, long popular in Tea circles.
But just when non-Tea Partiers were coming to grips with the strange possibility that Cain would have to be taken seriously as a candidate, his amateurism, so attractive to his fans, began to undo him. Even if he forges his way through the current sexual harassment allegations without being proved a predator and a liar, the bloom is off his rose. The days when Cain could count on universally positive feelings from Republican voters are long gone, and there is a palpable fear (nicely reflected by Michelle Bachmann’s comment that the GOP couldn’t afford any “surprises” from its nominee) that he is one press conference away from complete, final disaster. Any chance that Rick Perry could quickly ride back into contention, meanwhile, probably expired during the November 9 debate in Michigan. Questions about Perry’s debating skills aside, any Tea Party champion worth his salt can list the federal agencies he’d shut down in his sleep.
Which brings us to the movement’s current, desperate state. As ace political analyst Ron Brownstein recently noted, there are virtually no signs of growing Tea Party acceptance of Mitt Romney as the “inevitable” nominee; instead, there is incipient panic that the inability of the right to settle on a competent candidate could let Romney win by default. Brownstein quotes FreedomWorks spokesperson Adam Brandon as saying his group may decide to endorse someone–anyone–in order to stop Romney and avoid a division of the Tea Party vote. But who?
Some Tea Party supporters greatly admire Ron Paul as a prophet whose cranky monetary theories and cheerful support for a return to Coolidge administration levels of taxation and spending have now become mainstream. But as a battery of four late-October state polls conducted by CNN illustrated, Paul actually draws a majority of his support from non-Tea Party Republicans and Independents, and it’s implausible in any event that super-patriots will rally around a candidate who defends Iran’s right to pursue nuclear weapons. Michelle Bachmann, for her part, hasn’t had a good week on the campaign trail since August.
It is possible that the lightly regarded Rick Santorum, who is slavishly reduplicating Mike Huckabee’s 2008 campaign strategy in Iowa, could pull off a surprise in the first caucus state by finishing ahead of a collapsing Perry and Cain. If that were to happen, the Pennsylvanian could become a Christian Right/Tea Party lighting rod, and his views are more acceptable to right-wing power centers like the Club for Growth than were Huck’s four years ago.
The only non-Romney candidate with positive momentum in the polls, however, is Newt Gingrich. He’s certainly among the last candidates you’d figure to become a vehicle for the Tea Party Movement. He is, after all, the consummate career politician, someone who by his own admission began fantasizing about political power from a very early age. Conservatives graphically recall how Bill Clinton ran circles around Gingrich during their period of shared power in the late 1990s. His horrific mistake last May of dismissing Paul Ryan’s budget proposal as unrealistic was precisely the kind of Beltway thinking Tea Party activists hate, and hurt him as much in Tea circles as Perry’s later heresies on immigration. And for those worried about Cain’s history with women, is Gingrich-the-admitted-adulterer, whose campaign earlier imploded because he’d rather cruise the Mediterranean with his third wife than attend to his campaign, a better bet?
The very fact that it’s possible to discuss Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum as practical options for the once-invincible right-wing movement shows how rapidly it has lost its way. If you were to script the 2012 Republican presidential nominating contest according to the most lurid Tea Party conspiracy theories of secret Establishment manipulation of events, the results would look a lot like what we are seeing right now.
But no elaborate conspiracy theories are needed to explain the collapse of all the movement’s various champions. They wanted hard-core ideologues who scorned experience, conventional political skills, and any hint of sweet reasonableness, and that’s what they got: candidates likely to crumble under the glare of a national spotlight or be torn down for insufficient orthodoxy by the movement’s very supporters–or, in the case of most figures who have already risen and fallen during this election cycle, both.


Ohio Lessons Can Help Obama Win Working Class Votes

In his National Journal post, “A Model for Obama?,” Ronald Brownstein sorts out the political leanings of white workers in Ohio, in light of a Hart Research/AFL-CIO survey of voters conducted 11/6-8 and the vote on issue 2, which repealed the ban on collective bargaining for Ohio public workers. Brownstein explains:

As impressive as the depth of the win was its breadth…the survey, released Wednesday afternoon, offers the best picture available of the coalition that overturned Kasich’s prized legislation:
–The repeal campaign won broad support. Fully 86 percent of union members voted to repeal, but so did 52 percent of non-union voters. A solid majority of every age group voted to repeal. Not only did 92 percent of liberals vote to repeal but so did a preponderant 70 percent of moderates. (Conservatives supported maintaining the law by almost two-to-one). Nearly three-fifths of independents voted for repeal, along with over nine-in-ten Democrats. Almost three-fifths of whites, as well as a big majority of minorities, voted to repeal.
–The repeal vote reached well into the groups that powered the Republican surge in 2010. A 54 percent majority of whites older than 60 voted to repeal, according to figures from the survey provided by Hart Research’s Guy Molyneux. So did a 61 percent majority of whites without a college education. Even a 55 percent majority of non-college whites who do not belong to a union voted to repeal. All of those are groups that have not voted much in recent years for anything favored by Democrats. Even 30 percent of self-identified Republicans and one-fourth of voters who backed Kasich in 2010 voted to repeal.
The success of the repeal vote among the overlapping groups of senior and blue-collar whites – each of which, nationally, gave 63 percent of their votes to Republican House candidates in 2010, according to exit polls – might be the most striking result in the poll. For Democrats who want a class conscious message from Obama in 2012, it’s evidence that these prodigal Democratic voters can still be reached with an edgy on-your-side appeal.

The white house should learn the important lesson from the vote and the poll, argues Molyneux:

The idea that you can get Democratic voters, not just young and African-American voters, but working class voters energized and excited about fighting for their economic interests is a lesson I hope the White House will take on this…What killed Kasich was the sense that he was looking out either for the rich and powerful or his own party’s political interests. Either way he was not focused on helping average working families in Ohio. And I think that’s what Obama needs to set up about his opponent – motives and concern and in whose interest they are going to govern.

In his New York Times op-ed “How Obama Can Win Ohio,” John Russo, co-director of the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University, offers this encouraging assessment:

According to CNN exit polls from the last few elections, union household voters remain a strong presence in Ohio, even after more than three decades of de-industrialization. Twenty-eight percent of Ohio voters come from union households, compared with 23 percent nationally. In 2008, they underperformed for Obama, who won 56 percent of their votes in Ohio versus 59 percent from union households across the country. No similar data exists for the 2010 midterm election, but many labor leaders admit that Kasich beat the Democratic governor, Ted Strickland, in part because voters from community groups and union households either voted Republican or stayed home (essentially giving half a vote to Kasich).
If union households in Ohio lost their enthusiasm for Democratic candidates in recent years, Kasich’s actions, together with the national Republicans’ just-say-no politics and kill-Medicare initiatives (like the Paul Ryan budget), have made the Democrats look a lot better than they did in 2010.
It all comes down to math. In 2008, 2,933,388 Ohioans voted (or 51.5%) for Obama, 258,897 more than McCain won. If union households maintain their proportion of the electorate, and if just 1 percent more of them vote for Democrats, they can add 15,700 votes to the Democratic vote and subtract the same number from the Republicans – a swing of more than 31,000 votes. If Ohio’s union household voters increase their support for Democrats by 3 percent – that is, if they match the national average for union household voters – they would generate 47,100 additional votes for Obama, a swing of 94,200 votes. That alone could give the president Ohio’s electoral votes.
But because of Senate Bill 5, we might reasonably expect an even larger shift. A recent Quinnipiac poll suggests that the anger generated by the anti-union bill and the organizing fostered by the effort to overturn it has 70 percent of union household voters planning to support Obama and the Democrats in 2012. That translates into an increase of 219,829 votes for Obama, a swing of almost 440,000 votes. Put differently, a mobilized Ohio labor movement with 742,000 members, including many teachers, police officers, and firefighters who have often voted Republican, will be more likely to vote for Democrats in 2012.

Russo believes that Obama must press the case for “a positive economic vision and a program for economic change” and the President’s jobs legislation and Obama’s recent initiatives on mortgages and student loans should help.
Writing in The Daily Beast, Michael Tomasky adds in his post, “Ohio Vote Shows Obama Winning Back the Rust Belt“:

…The larger context in which this vote took place is important, too. And that context is Operation Wall Street, income inequality, Republicans in Congress killing the jobs bill piece by piece, Obama finally getting some blood flowing through those veins again instead of water. People have started to care about class issues, and it’s pretty clear what they think: The Republican Party isn’t representing them (unless they happen to live in a household with an income of at least $368,000 a year). In the new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, 76 percent agreed that “the current economic structure of the country is out of balance and favors a small proportion of the rich over the rest of the country.”
What this means for next year is twofold. First, it suggests that Davids Plouffe and Axelrod should work the Rust Belt. Plouffe in particular has been signaling a strategy that would put more emphasis on Virginia and Colorado and North Carolina (where the convention is being held) at the expense of states like Ohio, Wisconsin, and Michigan. But the way Democrats and majorities of independents are acting in those Rust Belt states now, they’re looking more like states Obama can hold. You may have seen the Ohio poll in which, despite his low approval rating, Obama beats all the Republicans handily–Mitt Romney by nine points, 50 to 41, and the others by double digits.

Tomasky believes the Ohio vote debunks the conventional wisdom that Dems can win either the base or the center, but not both. As Tomasky says, “…What the Ohio result shows is a way to unite liberals and moderates, Democrats and independents, behind one message that both want to hear. That hasn’t happened much in recent American history. The White House had best be alert to it.”
In the wake of the Ohio vote it’s now clear that the GOP made a huge blunder in declaring class war on unionized workers, providing Dems with a powerful weapon. As Molyneux puts it, “…If the class-conscious Ohio repeal campaign genuinely offers Obama a roadmap to remaining competitive with more older and blue-collar whites, he can keep graying Rust Belt states like Ohio and Wisconsin in play – and reduce his need to repeat his 2008 breakthroughs in the diverse and fast growing new swing states across the Sun Belt.”


Latest survey from GQRR and Democracy Corps

Unmarried women – who make up more than a quarter of America’s voting-eligible population — today feel disengaged and alienated from politics and that threatens their participation in the next election, according to new focus group research. The perceived failure of the new president to fulfill a key campaign promise to change Washington leaves these unmarried women appalled with both parties and politics in general. Few doubt the President’s intentions. However, most doubt his effectiveness and this leads them to the broader conclusion that it may not matter who they send to Washington. The economy hasn’t gotten better in their view and the government has become increasingly dysfunctional and embarrassingly ineffective. These women stand by the President for the most part, but are in a far different place than they were in 2008. As one woman memorably noted, she will vote for the President, but will not put his bumper sticker back on her car this year.
The good news is that a message speaking directly to their economic concerns and to the plight of the middle class re-opens them to the person and, to some extent, the process. Some begin to believe politics can matter again.
The Voter Participation Center (VPC) partnered with Democracy Corps and Finding Common Ground to produce a series of focus groups exploring common values among people of color, youth, affluent suburban voters and unmarried women. This memorandum isolates one population, unmarried women, and focuses more on their mood and level of political engagement a year before Election Day. These are focus groups and not projectable to the larger population of unmarried women in the country, but the sentiments we heard are broadly consistent with recent survey results and sentiments in other groups in this project.
KEY FINDINGS
The single women we talked to in Raleigh were articulate and well informed. Many are struggling economically, but despite that, remain hopeful and optimistic about their lives. Unfortunately, they do not see much help from their government or a political recourse for their frustration. Washington to them is dysfunctional, corrupt, infantile and, most poignantly, irrelevant to their lives. Although they love the President and see some things to admire in the Republican candidates, they do not believe any candidate, or either party, is capable of delivering meaningful change. Out of habit and duty, they may vote, but without the conviction that their vote will make a real difference. Other unmarried women, similarly disengaged from politics, but less committed to the franchise, will not vote.
The answer is a greater focus on the plight of the middle class, as well as these women’s lives. The 2012 election needs to get personal for them, and fast.


TDS Co-Editor William Galston: The Brand of Conservatism That Will Win (and the One That Will Fail) in 2012

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Tuesday night’s election results illuminate the terrain on which the 2012 election will be fought. The American people want government to address their problems, but not at the cost of excessive intrusion in their lives. They recoil from ideologically motivated attacks on workers and on women. While they are open to a moderate brand of conservatism, they will reject a harder-edge and more extreme version.
In Virginia, Republicans picked up at least half a dozen seats in the General Assembly and appear poised to take control of the senate, which would give them unified control of the state government. Governor Bob McDonnell’s low-key style has played well with the electorate, which regards him more as a pragmatic problem-solver than as a partisan ideologue. For example, while his approach to transportation left many Democrats and northern Virginians dissatisfied, he did not reject an expanded role for the public sector. He framed the state’s all-consuming transportation debate as a matter of means rather than ends–addressing the backlog with a long-term bond issue rather than immediate tax increases–a characterization that most Virginians seemed to accept. At least for now, his moderate conservatism defines the center of Virginia politics, which is good news for national Republicans such as Mitt Romney and not such good news for the Obama team.
In Ohio, the electorate delivered an instructive split decision. On the one hand, more than six in ten Ohio voters rebuked Republican governor Bob Kasich for attacking the state’s public employees. While surveys showed that voters favored proposals to make state workers contribute more for health care and retirement, they rejected moves to strip them of collective bargaining rights, a measure favored by hard-core conservatives but not more mainstream voters. Kasich, they judged, had gone too far, and they responded with a stunning reprimand.
But by an even larger margin, these same voters also endorsed a referendum that would block the state from implementing an individual mandate like the one contained in President Obama’s health reform bill. Every survey I’ve seen shows the same thing: While Americans endorse major provisions of the bill such as guaranteed issue of insurance regardless of preexisting conditions, they reject the individual mandate and want to see it repealed. The margin in favor of repealing the mandate was 67 to 27 in the March 2011 Kaiser Family Foundation poll (although additional facts and arguments did move respondents in a more favorable direction). An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll from June of this year showed that while 31 percent were more likely to vote in favor of a presidential candidate who supported requiring all Americans to have or purchase health insurance, 50 percent would be less likely. In 1996, Bill Clinton’s signature domestic policy achievement–welfare reform–was a large plus in his successful reelection campaign. The Affordable Care Act seems unlikely to play that role for Barack Obama next year.
So the message from two key states–one the symbol of Obama’s new majority, the other of the classic battleground–is much the same. While the voters are open to moderate conservatism, they won’t follow along if conservatives go too far. But when they think liberal governance goes too far in the other direction, they’ll reject that too. Despite the polarization of today’s party politics, there is still a center of gravity in the electorate that isn’t entirely comfortable with either party and wants to see less confrontation and more compromise. They’re seeking a point of equipoise, which today’s political system is poorly structured to provide.


What Exactly Makes a Candidate ‘Serious,’ Anyway?

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Has Herman Cain’s campaign always been a joke, or were pundits right to take it somewhat seriously? In the wake of multiple allegations of sexual harassment levied against him, was the media asking the wrong questions by focusing on how it might help or hurt his supposed “candidacy”–as opposed to, say, his book sales? The question of what makes a “serious” candidate for the presidency is at least as old as such twentieth-century developments as state primaries and electronic media. But the angry disputes over the seriousness of candidates for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination are a sign of something new and strange: a tumultuous environment in one of our two major parties that the old rules of analysis set by practitioners, historians, and political scientists may not be adequate to explain.
Indeed, the meteoric trajectories of such untraditional figures as Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, and Herman Cain have inspired much anxiety over the forces behind their rapid rises and falls. Jonathan Bernstein has his own theory of how so many “clowns” have wound up cutting capers on the GOP campaign trail, mostly involving the proliferation of “business plan” candidates who are building up their profiles in order to sell books or land TV gigs. But more often the media is getting blamed for giving unserious candidates the oxygen they need to gum up the works. Conservative commentator James Poulos expressed this feeling vividly in the context of Herman Cain’s sudden notoriety:

The media salivates over whatever is of the least substance–as, every week, a freshly manufactured fetish object takes pride of place. Cain runs an operation so unready for prime time that Sarah Palin can’t take it seriously, preferring–how low the bar–Newt Gingrich.
Sadly, the Cain Train is now the locomotive of a Republican race for the White House that’s run off the rails. The grand theme is a total lack of seriousness. Not seriousness in the self-serious sense that, say, Jon Huntsman would use it. Seriousness in the sense that everyone, from Cain to his fans and critics to their proxies in the chattering class, seems positively thrilled to fight to the death over the trivialities of political theater.

This is a complaint often made in the past by progressives, who seem convinced, for example, that Sarah Palin was purely and simply a media creation (an opinion that betrays ignorance of her celebrity status in pro-life circles well before John McCain brought her to the attention of national media types). But if it may be satisfying to easily discomfited souls to dismiss the unexpected success of unconventional candidacies as products of an out-of-control media culture, it’s probably a good idea to take a fresh look at the question of why this or that would-be president should or should not be taken seriously. In a campaign season in which the GOP nomination is effectively comprised of two separate, parallel races–one for the hearts of the Tea Party movement, and one for those of the conservative establishment–it turns out that the question of who’s serious and who’s not is one over which the mainstream media exercises surprisingly little authority.
To clear up one immediate source of confusion, candidacies can have serious consequences even if the candidate has no plausible path to the nomination. This year, for example, Michele Bachmann was probably never in a position to become the nominee. But it was clear from the beginning that she could, and eventually did, end Tim Pawlenty’s very serious candidacy by beating her fellow-Minnesotan in the Iowa GOP Straw Poll. Similarly, nobody much thinks Rick Santorum is going to be raising his hands in triumph in Tampa next year as the GOP nominee. But his tortoise-like campaign in Iowa could develop sufficient momentum to deny another serious candidate, Rick Perry, a win over the ultimate serious candidate, Mitt Romney, in the Iowa Caucuses on January 3.
Another issue that often causes a dialogue-of-the-deaf on the seriousness of this or that candidate is how broadly you define the “elites” who clearly have some role in shaping the presidential field. Some observers seem to think there is a shadowy, Illuminati-esque cabal of rich folk who literally sit around and decide GOP (and for that matter, Democratic) nominations. Others focus on “Beltway elites,” including K Street lobbyists and big-time pundits. Many definitions of Republican elites seem to assume they are composed of people who are ideologically moderate, or at least disinterested in non-economic issues. Others, like Jonathan Bernstein, have a more sophisticated view of elites as including major advocacy-group players like the Right-to-Life movement and the Christian Right, who have an effective veto-power over candidates–not to mention relatively new, ideologically driven money titans like the Koch brothers or Art Pope, who don’t fit into standard categories. Candidates who are deemed “serious” by elements of this broader set of elites should be taken seriously by journalists as well.
Still another source of rancor and debate in this discussion is the important distinction between candidates who are long shots because they aren’t well known and those who simply can’t win because their views are not within a party’s mainstream. Ron Paul supporters are forever complaining that their man never gets media attention commensurate with his standing in the polls or his ability to turn out crowds. But Paul’s wildly heterodox foreign policy views alone guarantee a cap on his levels of support, and mean that he could never, ever win a GOP nomination even with (or perhaps especially with) universal name ID and unlimited cash. Herman Cain, on the other hand, had always (at least until recently) enjoyed incredibly high favorable marks among the segments of the GOP electorate that had heard of him–and his popularity in the party grew, absent any media goading, alongside his name recognition.
But the biggest factor that suggests a re-evaluation of measures of candidate seriousness is the existence this year of an intense GOP intraparty struggle which has scrambled a lot of the conventional rules. For the Tea Party movement–which appears to represent roughly half the GOP primary electorate nationally, and a lot more than that in some states–candidate credentials like broad name ID or prior experience or early-state positioning or even money have become vastly less important than fidelity to an exceptionally narrow set of conservative principles. That explains why Rick Perry’s heresy on immigration policy was so damaging once it became clearly known to his Tea Party base, and why much of that base immediately gravitated to Herman Cain, whose lack of political experience is considered an actual asset in Tea Party circles. And it’s also why Newt Gingrich, considered laughably “un-serious” as a candidate by most of the political world, is getting another audition now that Cain seems to be on the edge of imploding. The criteria for seriousness in the sub-primary being conducted by the Tea Party to choose a champion against Mitt Romney are not the same as the conventional criteria for the party as a whole.
All in all, it seems wise for media commentators to suspend their prior assumptions about candidate seriousness for the duration of this particular nomination cycle and just follow the lead of Republican voters. If anything is clear, they know what they want far better than anyone who is tempted to tell them who they can or cannot support.


Political Strategy Notes

Alan I. Abramowitz writes on “Why Barack Obama Has a Good Chance of Winning a Second Term, And why Nate Silver may have underestimated his chances” in Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball. As Abramowitz says, “According to the Time-for-Change forecasting model, which has correctly predicted the winner of the popular vote in every presidential election since 1988, Barack Obama has a good chance of winning a second term in the White House next November. The main reason for this is that the Democratic Party has only held the White House since 2008. That makes Obama a first-term incumbent, and first-term incumbents rarely lose…Could Barack Obama be the next Jimmy Carter? There is clearly a chance that he could, if the condition of the U.S. economy deteriorates in 2012 and/or the president’s approval rating slips further into negative territory. But because of the first-term incumbent advantage, the model gives Obama a good chance of winning a second term even with fairly modest economic growth next year and an approval rating in the low- to mid-forties…”
Also at the Crystal Ball, Glen Bolger’s “Obama’s Destiny: Does It Lie in Demographics, or in the Political Environment?” gives Obama the edge in demographics, but the shaky economy makes it too close to call.
Nation of Change has has an update on Bank Transfer Day, noting “The day was a huge success with over 250 events in every corner of the country and over 10,000 people attending, and that’s counting only the events tracked by MoveOn.org and Rebuild The Dream…Move Your Money made local news all over the country – in Madison, Oakland, Detroit, Atlanta, Baltimore, Seattle, Albuquerque, St. Louis, and dozens of other cities…Let’s make every day Bank Transfer – continue to spread the pledge to your neighbors and communities. Demand that banks be held accountable.”
In his Washington Post column, “The right-wing’s shellacking,” E. J. Dionne Jr. has an insightful observation about the one downer in the Ohio vote: “One of the only referendum results the GOP could cheer was a strong vote in Ohio against the health-insurance mandate. While health-reform supporters argued that the ballot question was misleading, the result spoke to the truly terrible job Democrats have done in defending what they enacted. They can’t let the health-care law remain a policy stepchild.”
For the centrist take on Tuesday’s elections, check out Mark Trumbull’s Monitor post, “Election results 2011: Voters signal that GOP overreached.” Also Joe Klein’s Swampland post “Election 2011: A Victory for the Silent Majority.”
Seniors may be a fairly quiet high-turnout demographic. But that doesn’t mean they are not pissed off. Jennifer C. Kerr reports for the AP that “The Associated Press-LifeGoesStrong.com poll found a baby boom generation planning to work into retirement years — with 73 percent planning to work past retirement, up from 67 percent this spring…In all, 53 percent of boomers polled said they do not feel confident they’ll be able to afford a comfortable retirement. That’s up from 44 percent who were concerned about retirement finances in March.”
A blue tide is rising in the once-red ‘burbs of Philly. The Inquirer’s Anthony R. Wood and Josh Fernandez have the skinny here.
Guess who is taking Michigan for granted. Lisa Lerer and David J. Lynch report at Bloomberg.com on “Romney Defends Auto Bailout Opposition in His Native State.” Their article quotes David Cole, chairman emeritus of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor: “”Without the intervention of the Bush and Obama administrations, we would have seen the liquidation of both Chrysler and probably GM,” Cole said in August. “That would have taken the whole industry down. We would have seen a disaster in terms of the job impact.” Michigan’s Republican Governor Rick Snyder agrees: “It wasn’t just one or two companies at risk, but the entire national supply chain,” Snyder told the Detroit News. “Losing that would have had a devastating impact on the economy.” But Romney just doubled down in last night’s debate: “My view with regards to the bailout was that, whether it was by President Bush or by President Obama, it was the wrong way to go…”
Romney nonetheless got a free ride from his competitors last night, according to Paul Begala’s zinger-rich review of the proceedings at The Daily Beast. Begala observes: “I am astonished that no one laid a glove on Mitt Romney. They didn’t even take a swing. (And yet his hair was oddly tousled. How much you wanna bet he focus-grouped the new ‘do?).” As for Perry, Begala eulogizes “It was as dramatic and cringe-worthy a self-immolation as I’ve ever seen. I was in the room, 10 feet from Howard Dean when he screamed in Iowa. I was in the hall in Richmond when George H.W. Bush looked at his watch in the middle of a debate. But I have never seen a more devastating moment of self-destruction. What’s next, Perry endorsing Cain’s 9-9… ummm, what’s the third number?”
Perhaps this video clip of tea party Congressman Joe Walsh’s meltdown could be a useful resource for Psych 101 classes studying the “type A” and “authoritarian personality.”
Where are the Democratic women candidates? Democratic gains notwithstanding, there wasn’t much in Tuesday’s elections to cheer about in terms of women’s empowerment, as the Center for the American Woman in Politics reports: “Women failed to gain ground in the 2011 state legislative elections…With legislative contests in four states, even if every outstanding race is decided in favor of a woman, the national total will drop from the current number of 1740,” observed CAWP director Debbie Walsh…”The national total of women elected statewide will increase by just one — to 72 — as a result of elections in three states. It’s discouraging that we’re nowhere near the peak statewide number of 92 women, achieved in 2000.”


Creamer: Progressive Victories Hold Lessons for 2012

The following article, by Democratic Strategist Robert Creamer, author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
A year ago the Empire struck back. Right Wing money capitalized on anger at the economic stagnation that their own policies caused just two years before. They brought a halt to the hard-won progressive victories that marked the first two years of Barack Obama’s presidency.
Last night the progressive forces tested some of the weapons and tactics they will use in next year’s full-blown counter offensive. They worked very, very well.
Progressives won key elections in Ohio, Maine, Mississippi, and Arizona.
The importance of yesterday’s labor victory in Ohio cannot be overstated. It could well mark a major turning point in the history of the American labor movement -and the future of the American middle class.
The people of Ohio rejected right wing attempts to destroy public sector unions by an astounding 61% to 39%. Progressives in Ohio won 82 out of 88 counties.
In his “concession,” the author of the union-stripping bill, Governor John Kasich, looked like a whipped dog. He was.
Last night’s victory will have a direct and immediate impact on the livelihoods of thousands of middle class state employees in Ohio. It will stall similar attempts to destroy unions in other states. It will turbo-charge the campaign to oust Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker who jammed a union-stripping measure through his own legislature. And it will massively weaken Kasich and other Republicans in Ohio.
But last night’s victory also carried critical lessons for the progressive forces throughout America as we prepare for the crossroads, defining battle of 2012.
Lesson #1: Creating a Movement. The industrial state labor battles that culminated in last night’s overwhelming Ohio success transformed the image of unions from a large bureaucratic “special interest” that negotiates for workers and are part of the “establishment” — into a movement to protect the interests of the American Middle Class.
The Republican Governors who began these battles hoped to make a bold move to destroy union power. In fact, they have succeeded in creating their worst nightmare — the rebirth of a labor movement.
That is critically important for the future of unions – which by any measure provide the foundation of progressive political power in the United States. It also provides an important lesson for every element of the Progressive community.
These battles put the “movement” back in “labor movement.”
And the importance of “movement” can’t be overstated. Particularly at a time when people are unhappy with the direction of the country and desperately want change — they don’t want leaders who appear to be embedded parts of the status quo. They want to be part of movements for change.
Movements have three critical characteristics:
They make people feel that they are part of something bigger than themselves.
They make people feel that they themselves can play a significant role in bringing about that larger goal.
They involve “chain reactions” — they go viral. You don’t have to only engage people in movements one by one or one or group by group. They begin to engage each other.
Because they make people feel that they are part of something larger than themselves — and that they can personally be a part of achieving that larger goal — movements inspire and empower. And for that reason they give people hope.
To win, Progressives must turn the anger and dissatisfaction with the present into inspiration and hope for the future.
The labor movement turned the battle in Ohio into a fight for the future of America’s middle class. It turned the battle into a fight over the dignity of everyday working people — and their right to have a say in their future. Instead of being about “contracts,” it was about “freedom.”
Lesson #2: It’s much easier to mobilize people to protect what they have than to fight for something to which they aspire.


Arizona Trending Blue

Arizona is starting to look like blue territory. Latino voters are wielding new clout, even on the Republican side. John Nichols reports in The Nation:

Arizona State Senate President Russell Pearse, the author of that state’s draconian anti-immigrant legislation, was removed from office in a recall election that saw the right-wing Republican defeated by moderate Republican Jerry Lewis. Randy Parraz, the co-founder of Citizens for a Better Arizona, the group that organized the recall drive, said: “This election shows that such extremist behavior will not be rewarded, and will be held accountable.”

Andrei Cherny, Arizona Democratic Party chairman (and TDS Advisory Board member), issued the following statement:

“Tonight, mainstream Arizona dealt a bitter blow to extremism. In choosing Greg Stanton as Phoenix’s mayor, in electing Jonathan Rothschild as Tucson’s mayor, and in recalling Senate President Russell Pearce, the voters have launched a new era of responsible leadership.
“I congratulate Greg Stanton and Jonathan Rothschild, two honorable public servants who share the voters’ priorities for their cities. For the first time in a generation, there will be Democratic mayors in both Phoenix and Tucson — a victory not just for Democrats but for every citizen who cares about the future of these great cities. And I especially congratulate the voters of Legislative District 18 for their courageous decision to stop Russell Pearce’s reckless reign of power over their district, the state Senate and the state of Arizona. Voters are fed up with overreach, abuse of power and attacks on common sense. They expect leaders who will focus on a stronger economy, safer streets and better schools. Tonight, voters are the real winners.”

Other Democratic victories in AZ included: Daniel Valenzuela, Phoenix City Council; Paul Cunningham, Tucson City Council; Regina Romero, Tucson City Council; Shirley Scott, Tucson City Council; and John Williams, Surprise City Council.


TDS Co-Editor William Galston: Obama’s 2008 Coalition Won’t Save Him This Time

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
The latest Gallup report, based on a massive sample of more than 39,000 adults, contains troubling news for Democrats. Individuals identifying with the Democratic Party are a smaller share of the American people than they were early in 2008, and their views are less representative of the people as a whole. This means that the Obama team, which faces the crucial choice of either doubling down on its 2008 winning mix of professionals, young people, and minorities or rebuilding support among Independents in the heartland, should emphasize the latter option. Any general election strategy that relies solely on mobilizing the party’s diminished base will have a hard time forging a majority of the popular vote.
Democrats and Democratic-leaning Independents now total 43 percent of the people, down from 50 percent in the first quarter of 2008. During the period, Republicans and Republican-leaning Independents rose from 37 to 40 percent. (Pure Independents who don’t lean toward either party rose from 12 to 15 percent of the total.) As a result, the earlier 13-point gap in party identification shrank to only 3 points, which, as Gallup notes, is “more in line with the pattern … in place between 2001 and 2004.”
While the ideological center of gravity of the Democratic Party has moved left, the country as a whole has moved in the opposite direction. In early 2008, 35 percent of Democrats and leaners called themselves liberals, versus 23 percent conservatives. (The rest identified as moderates.) By 2011, the liberal share of the part had risen 2 percentage points to 37 percent, while the conservative share shrank by 3 points, to only 20 percent. At the same time, conservatives increased their share of the total electorate from 40 to 42 percent, while liberals dropped a point to only 21 percent.
These may not appear to be notable changes, but they are. The sample is so large that the margin of error is only plus or minus one percentage point, so nearly all the shifts are statistically significant. And these results are politically significant as well, because they portend a much closer election than 2008 turned out to be. If the electorate of 2011-2012 is closer to the one that prevailed during the first Bush administration, then the Obama campaign would have to do an even better job of mobilizing the base than it did in 2008.
This casts in high relief the fundamental choice facing the Obama team: The first option is to run a campaign that amounts to 2008 on steroids, mobilizing huge numbers of upscale professionals, unmarried women, young adults, and minorities–the coalition that reelected Colorado Senator Michael Bennet in 2010. This approach implies a focus on “new majority” states such as Colorado, New Mexico, Virginia, North Carolina, or even Arizona and Georgia, which the Obama team reportedly regards as being within reach. Option two would focus on rebuilding support among Independents, which include large numbers of white working-class and middle-class families–an approach compatible with an all-out effort to win the heartland states stretching from Pennsylvania to Iowa that gave Obama one-third of the 365 electoral votes he ended up winning.
For reasons that I’ve laid out at length in “One Year to Go: Barack Obama’s Uphill Battle for Reelection in 2012,” the latter is the course more likely to succeed in the end. Briefly: It won’t be possible to recreate the political context that permitted the extraordinary mobilization of young adults and Hispanics in 2008. And it’s no accident that no Democrat since JFK has won the presidency without carrying Ohio, which is a demographic, economic, and political microcosm of the country as a whole. Most Democrats remember that Obama’s share of the popular vote topped John Kerry’s by 5 percentage points. They are likely to forget, however that liberals contributed less than one point to that increase, while moderates contributed about two and a half points and conservatives, about one and a half. Reenergizing the party’s liberal base is a necessary but not sufficient condition for victory next year.
This latter strategy–rebuilding support among Independents–implies that Obama’s task is one of persuasion as well as mobilization. He will have to convince some of the voters he has lost since his inauguration to give him a second look and another chance. This may seem to be mission impossible. If it turns out to be, his chances of winning reelection are remote.


Union-Busters Stomped in Ohio, Despite Dirty Tricks

Ohio voters had their say on Tuesday, and more of them voted against the Republican union busting law than voted for Governor John Kasich. According to the latest returns (with 99 percent of precincts reporting), 61 percent of voters opposed the union-busting legislation, which stripped collective bargaining rights from 350 thousand public employees, with 39 percent supporting it.
A visibly shaken Governor Kasich hemmed and hawed on camera about how he was going to take some time for “reflecting” on the vote. Apparently it hadn’t occurred to him that Ohio voters respected their teachers, fire fighters, police and other public servants more than fat-cat ideologues who want to crush trade unions in the Buckeye state.
You won’t be shocked to learn that union-busters tried the usual dirty tricks, including the old “Election day is tomorrow” (not today) robo-calls. GOP media errand boy Mike Huckabee even ‘jokingly’ suggested creating confusion about election day at a pancake breakfast/rally in Mason, Ohio on Friday, according to Molly Reilly’s HuffPo report:

“Make a list,” said Huckabee, referring to supporters’ family and friends. “Call them and ask them, ‘Are you going to vote on Issue 2 and are you going to vote for it?’ If they say no, well, you just make sure that they don’t go vote. Let the air out of their tires on election day. Tell them the election has been moved to a different date. That’s up to you how you creatively get the job done…The crowd laughed at Huckabee’s remarks. In 2009, he made a similar joke in Virginia, saying, “Let the air our of their tires … keep ’em home. Do the Lord’s work.”

What ‘Lord’ would that be? This one doesn’t quite pass the ‘WWJD’ sniff test.
Indeed, his remarks raise a serious question: If someone repeatedly advocates illegal voter suppression in a ‘joking’ manner, should he/she be held accountable? Maybe it’s time for the authorities to answer that question.
So, how did the ‘We Are Ohio’ coalition defeat the lavishly-funded union-busters? Mike Hall explains it well in his AFL-CIO Blog post “Ohio Voters to Kasich: “No, No, No“:

After the Ohio legislature rammed the law through in late March–ignoring an outpouring of public opposition including demonstrations that brought thousands to the state capitol in Columbus–Ohio working families began a massive mobilization to repeal the law.
In just a matter of weeks, volunteers from the We Are Ohio coalition collected more than 1.3 million signatures to put S.B. 5 repeal on the ballot. With polls showing growing support for repeal and a rapidly shrinking approval rating, in August Kasich even offered a so-called compromise. But working families rejected the deal and continued the fight for full repeal.
As the election drew near, unions and community groups knocked on doors, made phone calls and distributed literature around the state. In the past weekend alone, volunteers knocked on more than 450,000 doors.

When well-organized people power goes up against big right-wing money, don’t bet against the people.