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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: January 2012

The Many Accidents That Will Probably Produce Romney’s “Inevitable” Nomination

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Having spent much of 2011 writing incessantly about the Republican presidential nominating contest, I’m simultaneously relieved and saddened by the impending end of the “invisible primary” and the beginning, with the Iowa caucuses, of actual voting. In the words of Jerry Garcia: “What a long, strange trip it’s been.” And the oddest thing of all is that the outcome most often predicted by the laziest and most conventional-wisdom-bound analysts, the nomination of Mitt Romney, is now, according to InTrade, something on the order of an 80 percent probability.
If you choose to believe Romney’s nomination was determined long ago by a shadowy GOP Establishment that Republican voters follow like sheep, or that conservatives are setting aside their ideology in deference to Mitt’s superior “electability,” or that the party’s “base” understands they must “move to the center” to win close general elections–well, be my guest. But for my part, I think it’s reasonably clear that Romney’s nomination, if it indeed occurs, will be mainly attributable to a demolition derby similar to, and perhaps even weirder than, the one that haphazardly produced John McCain’s nomination in 2008. Romney’s own nomination may now be approaching inevitability, but let’s not forget that it was once very much preventable.
What’s clear is that a GOP electorate which has serially preferred such unlikely candidates as the hyper-extremist Michele Bachmann, the neophyte Herman Cain, and the ultimate retread Newt Gingrich, in some cases by very large margins in national and many state polls, has not suddenly been won over by the virtues of Mitt Romney. Indeed, despite Romney’s mild upward trend in support in the last few weeks, he is still the favorite candidate of no more than a fourth of Republicans other than in his second home, New Hampshire.
The long and short of it is that an essentially anti-Romney party (defined as its actual voting members, not elected officials, pundits or other elites) has failed either to unite behind or eliminate any of his rivals (with the exception of early casualty Tim Pawlenty). Bachmann was never going to be the nominee, yet she served Romney by croaking TimPaw’s candidacy and then locking down enough Christian Right support in Iowa to divide its ranks. Cain spectacularly self-destructed. Gingrich built his surge on a combination of debate performance–a fuel that could sustain him only so long as debates were held regularly–and the public’s temporary amnesia about his personal and political history. Ron Paul soaked up oxygen and activists in Iowa, the one and only state where the lay of the land and the nominating contest rules gave him a chance. And Rick Perry has run an amazingly inept campaign that serves to remind us all that high-paid political wizards often don’t know their asses from page eight when the chips are down, and that state-level success is not always transferable to the big stage.
This is not a narrative that suggests Romney’s nomination was inevitable. Here are just a few what-ifs that might have produced a very different end to the invisible primary:
1) What if Tim Pawlenty had not staked everything on the Iowa Straw Poll? The most important asset held by TimPaw’s low-energy campaign was potential. He was more than acceptable to every single element of the GOP, and he positioned himself almost ideally to benefit from the inevitable demise of other candidates. But he wasn’t around to reap the harvest when nearly all of them imploded, because he threw all his money into Ames and lost. What if he had kept his powder a bit dryer?
2) What if Mike Huckabee or [fill in the blank] had run? When Huck pulled back from a 2012 campaign in May, he was running first in the most recent national poll of Republicans that included his name, and also had the best favorable/unfavorable ratio in the field. Had he run, he would have been the instant and perhaps overwhelming front-runner in Iowa, where he beat Mitt Romney handily despite a vast financial disadvantage. Considering the heights deeply flawed candidates like Bachmann, Cain and Gingrich reached before their inevitable crashes, how high might Huckabee have flown, with his powerful appeal to evangelical Christians and his knack for gaining favorable “earned media,” even from liberals? And is there any chance Romney would have risked a second loss to Huck in Iowa? No, not one.
I won’t go through the exercise of examining what might have happened if other potential candidates–notably John Thune, Mike Pence, Haley Barbour, and Mitch Daniels–had run, but again, the appetite of Republican voters for even the most flawed non-Romney candidates suggests that any or all of them might have found traction.
3) What if Rick Perry had run a minimally competent campaign? Though it was only a few months ago, it’s hard to recall what a big, brawling, behemoth of a candidate Rick Perry looked to be when he announced in August. He had money. He had charm. He had that supposedly dazzling jobs record in Texas. He had Tea Party street cred, but the Establishment liked him, too. And so did GOP voters initially, rocketing him to the lead in polls just about everywhere other than New Hampshire. But then he stumbled serially in debates, deeply offending conservatives with his bleeding-heart position on immigration, and subsequently killing every potential comeback moment with gaffes. Exactly how hard was it for Team Perry to figure out that he had a big problem on immigration policy that simply required a well-timed flip-flop or at least some outspoken empathy with nativists? How difficult should it have been to convince their candidate that debate prep ought to occupy some of his time? And what, exactly, did Perry have to lose that kept him from running the kind of vicious, negative campaign against his rivals–any or all of them–that he was accustomed to running back home in Texas? It’s all a mystery, and one that helped Romney immensely.
4) What if anti-Romney conservatives had united behind anyone? The most abiding question is what might have happened if the conservatives who kept saying they wanted anybody other than Romney had figured out a way to identify that “anybody” and gotten behind that candidacy. Perhaps they thought Romney couldn’t win and they were free to back their personal favorites. Maybe they figured somebody else would take the risk of going medieval on him and taking him down. But in the end, even the famously disciplined shock troops of the Christian Right couldn’t make up their minds, and unless a final Iowa surge by Rick Santorum provides a lightning rod, they will go to the caucuses fatally divided when they might have been united.
But none of these what-ifs happened, and so at the end of the invisible primary Mitt Romney is the lucky fighter whose glass jaw somehow didn’t get hit. He’s even luckier that conservative hatred for Barack Obama virtually guarantees that most will loyally support him in the general election, after securing as many pledges of fidelity to the Holy Cause as they can extract. Whether the charmed life he’s live so far in 2012 deludes him into thinking it will be an easy win in November will go a long way towards determining his–and our–ultimate fate.


Political Strategy Notes

Nate Silver gives Romney a 42 percent chance of winning the Iowa caucuses, followed by Ron Paul at 34 percent and Rick Santorum at 20 per cent. The final Des Moines Register poll, which has an impressive track record, indicates a 2 point lead for Romney over Paul. Ezra Klein also sees a Romney win. Howard Dean and Ed Schultz predict a Santorum upset nonetheless.
Mark Blumenthal has an instructive post at HuffPo Pollster, “Newt Gingrich Under Attack: How Much Did Negative Ads Matter?” As Blumenthal explains, “Assuming that 45 percent of the ads run in two markets were anti-Gingrich, and using the statistics we provided from the IowaPolitics records, Hutchins estimated that the average television viewer in those two markets would have seen anti-Gingrich ads roughly 60 to 80 times in December.” But John G. Geer argues at Politico that it isn’t the attack ads that have tanked Newt; it’s the frontrunner scrutiny of his lengthy baggage.
Give it up for John Nichols, whose Nation post headline “Iowa’s $200-Per-Vote Caucuses Reward Negatives, Nastiness, Narrow Thinking” pretty much nails the dark side of the caucuses.
For those who take the Iowa Caucuses more seriously, Kyle Leighton’s “Just Who Votes In The Iowa Republican Caucuses?” at Talking Points Memo has the skinny: “A recent national Public Policy Polling (D) survey of Republican primary voters showed that 42 percent considered themselves “very conservative,” while the latest numbers from the Des Moines Register released Saturday night show that only 34 percent of likely GOP caucus-goers define themselves that way. There are the same amount of moderates in both sample sets, so data shows the Iowa group is tilted a little more to the center on the ideological scale. There is confirming data in other PPP numbers specific to Iowa…NBC News and Marist College recently partnered to run a survey with a huge sample size of Iowans: they polled nearly 3,000 registered voters in the state and then whittled down to who would be voting in the Republican caucuses…Nearly a quarter of respondents described themselves as moderates or liberals, and only 46 percent said they were evangelical or fundamentalist Christians. A majority, 54 percent, said they were definitely not. The cross-party voting affects the numbers strongly on other labels: nationally, the PPP numbers show that 57 percent of Republican primary voters view themselves a supporter of the Tea Party. But NBC/Marist data from Iowa shows a 46 – 47 split against support of the conservative movement..”
Lest anyone be tempted to read too much into the Iowa Caucus results, however, Juan Cole has a couple of pie charts in his “Conservative White People’s Primary” that put the demographics into clear perspective.
The Nation’s editor Katrina vanden Heuval has an interesting WaPo op-ed “Voting rights, super PACs and the media cloud the election” urging readers not to get too distracted by the horse race aspect of the primaries. Instead “pay attention to three issues that could affect the outcome of the election, even though they have nothing to do with the campaigns themselves” — the impact of voter suppression, big money from the super PACs and MSM “false equivalence” reportage.
Ronald Brownstein reports at National Journal on Santorum’s success in winning support of working-class Republicans.
Mark Lander of the New York Times ponders the ramifications of the Obama campaign’s strategy targeting the “do-nothing congress.” Joshua R. Earnest, the president’s deputy press secretary, describes the meme thusly: “the image of a gridlocked, dysfunctional Congress and a president who is leaving no stone unturned to try to find solutions to the difficult financial challenges and economic challenges facing the country.” Not bad, but “do-nothing Republicans” would be a more accurate term, since more congressional Dems have negotiated and compromised in good faith, than have Republican House members.
Sasha Issenberg’s Slate.com post “The 12 Kinds of Undecided Voters,”
 is more intuitive than data-driven.” But it nonetheless sheds some light on a large constituency.
John Huntsman may be toast. But he should get a consolation prize for the most creative attack ad thus far, “The Ron Paul Twilight Zone.”
Iowa does get one thing very right, however, according to “GOP windbags have little to say about a huge Iowa success story” by Daily Kos’s Meteor Blades. “In all the hot air that has been expended in what one person rightly called a glorified straw poll, hardly anything has been said about one of the state’s major accomplishments, getting roughly 20 percent of its electricity from 2800 wind turbines across the state…Many Republicans seem to view wind power, and fossil-fuel alternatives in general, as a socialist plot…While the Republican candidates pretend to care about jobs and pretend that Democratic efforts to create more of them have been utter failures instead of just not enough, wind power has generated more than $5 billion in private investment in Iowa, some 4000 jobs with a payroll of $70 million.”


The Flawed ‘Book’ on the GOP’s Strategy vs. Obama

In his The Plum Line column, Greg Sargent reports on “The GOP’s game plan to end Obama’s presidency,” based on “the book,” a 500-page memo the GOP has compiled, featuring the President’s quotes and videos the Republican plan to use against him. Sagent explains:

National Republicans who are putting together the battle plan to defeat Obama face a dilemma. How do they attack Obama’s presidency as a failure, given that voters understand just how catastrophic a situation he inherited, continue to like Obama personally, and see him as a historical figure they want to succeed?…The answer is simple: Republicans will make the argument that Obama fell short of expectations as he himself defined them.
…The game plan is to remind Americans of the sense they had of Obama as a transformative figure in order to claim that he fell short of the promise his election seemed to embody:

One reason for the strategy, notes Sargent, is President Obama’s likability. The GOP apparently is concerned that personalized attacks against the President could backfire, because polls indicate that many who disapprove of his record like him nonetheless.
The “Obama vs. Obama” strategy is rooted in a double-barreled assault: “Republicans will now attack him for failing to transcend partisanship and achieve transformative change.” Sargent elaborates on the strategy’s built-in weakness :

…Obama had barely been sworn into office before the national Republican leadership mounted a concerted and determined effort to prevent any of Obama’s solutions to our severe national problems from passing, even as they openly declared they were doing so only to destroy him politically. Republicans have admitted on the record that deliberately denying Obama any bipartisan support for, well, anything at all was absolutely crucial to prevent voters from concluding that Obama had successfully forged ideological common ground over the way out of the myriad disasters Obama inherited from them.

Further, polls indicate that the public is not likely to be hustled by the GOP faulting Obama for inadequate bipartisanship, especially since the president has taken so much heat from inside his party about excessive bipartisanship. Most voters now know that Republicans have no intention of extending anything resembling a bipartisan spirit toward the President. Blaming the President for the failure of bipartisanship is a very tough sell.
The second prong of the GOP strategy, blaming the President for the failure to achieve transformative change, is also made problematic by the public’s awareness of Republicans’ refusal to negotiate in good faith on anything. Also, whether you like the Affordable Care Act or not, Dems can make a compelling case that the legislation is, in fact, transformative. Dems, however, have failed thus far to vigorously defend the legislation and ‘sell’ the extraordinary benefits of the act for millions of citizens. It’s about turning the ACA into a political asset, instead of a source of concern.
In terms of the economy, Sargent notes another major flaw in the GOP strategy:

While it’s true that disapproval of Obama on the economy is running high over government’s failure to fix the economy, the independents and moderates who will decide the presidential election agree with Obama’s overall fiscal vision — his jobs creation proposals and insistence on taxing the wealthy to pay for them. They also recognize that Republicans are more to blame than Dems for government’s failure to implement those proposals…

If the Republicans stick with the flawed strategy of ‘the Book,’ Democrats shouldn’t have much trouble crafting a persuasive response. In a way, GOP complaints about the failure of bipartisanship and the inability to create transformative change call attention to their responsibility for both failures. Instead of ‘Obama vs. Obama,’ their strategy could end up looking like ‘Republicans vs. the GOP.’