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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: February 2012

Brownstein: Polls Give Obama Edge, Romney Worries

Ronald Brownstein’s “Obama Is Reassembling the Coalition That Swept Him to Victory” at The Atlantic delineates the breadth and depth of the Obama revival:

The Pew survey, closely tracking last week’s ABC News/Washington Post poll, shows that in a potential general election match-up against Mitt Romney, Obama’s support among many of the electorate’s key groups has converged with his 2008 showing against John McCain. In almost all cases, that represents gains for Obama since polls from last year.
Whether the electorate is viewed by race, gender, partisanship or ideology (or combinations of the above), Obama’s numbers against Romney now closely align with his support against McCain, according to the 2008 exit polls. Overall, the Pew survey put Obama ahead of Romney by 52 percent to 44 percent, close to his actual 53 percent to 46 percent victory over McCain.
On the broadest measure, Pew found Obama attracting 44 percent of whites (compared to 43 percent in 2008) and 79 percent of non-whites (compared to 80 percent in 2008). In the Pew survey, Obama attracted 49 percent of whites with at least a four year college degree (compared to 47 percent against McCain) and 41 percent of whites without one (compared to 40 percent in 2008).

Brownstein goes on to note an “almost exact” reversion to 2008 figures along ideological lines, with Obama doing the same with liberals, moderates, Republicans, Democrats and self-described Independents. In match-ups with Romney, Obama’s support from white men without a college degree is down 5 points from his margin over McCain in 2008, but he has offsetting gains with white women of all educational levels. Brownstein reports that Romney is also tanking with Independents and tea party-followers, mostly because of his inconsistency on issues and his elitist image.
Brownstein concludes that “The deterioration of Romney’s personal image, and Obama’s improved standing among the groups at the core of his 2008 coalition” indicate that Romney will have tough time reconstructing a winning image — if he gets the GOP nomination.


Gauging Candidate ‘Likeability’ an Elusive Challenge

One of America’s most treasured conceits is that our electorate votes on the basis issues and their interests, which they very often don’t do in the real world. A host of other factors come into play, including judgements about character, family tradition, party loyalty and others.
I’ve often wondered about the role of “likeability,” for lack of a better term, in candidate choice. I suspect that, who knows, maybe 5 percent of voters or more cast their ballots for a candidate because they like his/her personality. Sometimes this works to the benefit of Democrats, as possibly in 1960, when JFK got elected, or maybe ’92 and 2008, when Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, respectively, won.
I don’t know of any definitive measures for quantifying “likeability” in a useful way, although there have been a some dicey attempts. In 2007, for example, a Quinnipiac University poll asked respondents about their “preferences for guests at Thanksgiving dinner” The results indicated more Republicans wanted to have Obama over for Thanksgiving dinner than Hillary Clinton or John Edwards, while Dems preferred Giuliani as a Republican guest over McCain and Thompson.
In that same year, an Associated Press/Yahoo survey quizzed the public about their choices for a bowling teammates. As for the most and least welcome bowling teammates, Hillary Clinton was last choice for 39 percent of respondents and first choice for 20 percent of respondents, while Giuliani was favored by 17 percent and opposed by 13 percent.
Neither one of these polls seems a very serious effort to quantify likeability for purposes of voting. Just because you want to have dinner or bowl with a candidate, it doesn’t mean they have nailed your vote. But it does seem like there should be a way to measure the phenomenon. There have also been “who was more likeable?” questions in polls to assess debate performance, but not much correlation with voting choices.
The “favorability” ratings in many polls are useful. But a favorable opinion about a candidate can be based on issue positions and job performance, well as personality factors. It’s not quite the same thing as ‘likeability,’ which is hard enough to define, much less quantify. Yet it could be a pivotal factor in a close election.
Obama seems to have likeability, which may be reflected in his substantially higher approval and favorability ratings than his party. He conveys a positive spirit and an appealing, relaxed demeanor, which I doubt can be convincingly quantified. Maybe that’s why he was called “No Drama Obama” toward the end of the ’08 campaign, while McCain was awash in tense theatrics. The wingnuts’ shrill personal attacks against him notwithstanding, my hunch is that Obama’s likeability will serve him well again in November.


How Long Can the Santorum Surge Last?

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
For all those waiting for the Republican primary to end, you’ll have to wait a bit longer: On Saturday Rick Santorum became the 11th Republican politician to lead a national presidential nomination poll during the 2012 cycle. And not just by a little–the Public Policy Polling survey showed Santorum with a 15-point (38-23) lead over Mitt Romney. According to PPP, Santorum was trouncing the field in the demographic categories that have looked difficult for putative nominee Mitt Romney from the beginning: Tea Party supporters, evangelicals, and those who call themselves “very conservative.” So is this the long-awaited consolidation of the party base around a challenger who can beat Romney? Or just another bump in a predestined road to victory for Mitt?
To answer this question, let’s start with the things Santorum has going for him. If his surge in national polls can be attributed to any one factor, it’s the familiar murder-suicide scenario: The Romney-Gingrich cage match of Super-PAC-driven negative ads in South Carolina, Florida, and Nevada left Santorum as the only candidate with strongly positive personal ratings. PPP’s favorable/unfavorable ratios for the four remaining candidates certainly reinforce this interpretation, showing Romney at 44/43, Gingrich at 42/44, Ron Paul at 35/51–and Santorum at 62/24. With Santorum now dominating the very voter categories Gingrich was winning prior to Florida; with no life-giving televised candidate debates on the immediate horizon; and with Sheldon Adelson showing no signs of writing another gigantic check for his Super PAC, Newt may have run out of steam for the third and final time.
But what’s to keep the Romney Death Star from training its guns on Santorum just as it did on Newt (and before that, on Rick Perry)? That’s easy: The very conservative opinion-leaders who helped Mitt take down Newt–and whose support he ultimately needs–don’t want him to. Already the air is full of public and private pleas to Romney that he go easy on Rick, who unlike Gingrich has not spent several decades alienating powerful conservative leaders one at a time, and doesn’t have the glaring marital history and Freddie Mac baggage for opponents to exploit. And any temptation in Romney’s camp to go after Santorum with a clawhammer is also inhibited by Mitt’s own sinking favorability ratings among both primary and general-election voters. He can’t afford much more blowback from going nuclear on an opponent.
Amidst all this bad news for Romney, another PPP survey released on Monday showed Santorum’s new national lead spreading to Michigan, a February 28 primary state where Romney, as a local native, was assumed to have a big advantage. Rickymania may also have spread to the other state holding a primary that day, Arizona, where Romney was also thought to be in the driver’s seat (in this case because of AZ’s sizable Mormon population).
In the end though, Mitt’s money may come to the rescue. Even if he doesn’t go heavily negative, Romney can use his heavy money advantage to saturate the airwaves in these two states; Santorum can’t possibly match that unless his top Super-PAC donor, Foster Friess, drops an unimaginable amount of money on him. And if Romney does stage a February 28 comeback, the road gets much rockier for Santorum. Gingrich is likely to make a final stand on Super Tuesday in Oklahoma, Tennessee, and certainly Georgia, which will make a conservative consolidation for Santorum difficult. Rick won’t win Mitt’s own Massachusetts and isn’t even on the ballot in Virginia. His best shot then would rest on a breakthrough in Ohio–but that’s only possible if the money is there.
Perhaps the Pennsylvanian can navigate this series of landmines and slug it out with Mitt until the bitter end. But the qualities that made uber-conservative voters prefer almost everybody else at one point or another have not gone away. He’s still the guy who got waxed by 19 points in his 2006 Senate race; he’s still the social-issues zealot whose presence on the ticket would mobilize pro-choice and gay-rights activists more than anyone this side of Pat Buchanan; and he’s still the one-time would-be Beltway power broker whose intimate connection to ongoing scandals like the K Street Project has barely been mined. Even if Romney can’t go nuclear on him, Democrats can–to the point where the supposedly dominant economic issues of this general election could become secondary for many swing voters. That prospect should put plenty of doubt in the minds of Republican primary voters if Santorum ever appears to have a real shot at winning the nomination.
The best indication that the Santorum surge could turn out to be fleeting came on the same day as his startling national survey results, when the annual presidential straw poll at the American Conservative Union’s CPAC conference was won by none other than Mitt Romney. Even as the CPAC audience cheered Santorum’s culture-war zingers, the secret-ballot went to Mitt. Conservatives may talk like they want another Barry Goldwater, but in their hearts, they’d settle for another Richard Nixon.


Obama, the Super-PACs and the Future of U.S. Democracy

In her WaPo op-ed “A make-or-break moment for democracy,” Katrina vanden Heuval takes a clear-eyed look at President Obama’s approval of Super PAC spending for his re-election, and comes up with a compromise most progressives should be able to endorse. As vanden Heuval explains the dilemma facing Democrats:

President Obama’s decision to endorse super-PAC money as part of his reelection effort exposed the enduring divisions within the progressive community between pragmatism and idealism. Robert Reich, for example, put his disappointment bluntly: “Good ends don’t justify corrupt means.” Jonathan Chait disagreed, writing that “if you want to change the system, unilateral disarmament seems like a pretty bad way to go about it.”
The ambivalence is palpable — and understandable. I’ve felt it myself. On the one hand, we are seeing our worst fears realized. When the Supreme Court handed down its Citizens United decision, the concern was not just that one party would take advantage of it, but that both parties would decide they had to adapt to it. The president has never held high moral ground on campaign finance (he withdrew from public financing in the 2008 campaign) but his willful, if reluctant, decision to submerge himself further in a system that actively stains our democracy is troubling.

Troubling yes, but unavoidable as a practical matter, vanden Heuval believes:

And yet, I understand his decision. I even reluctantly agree with it. I remember how massively George W. Bush outspent Al Gore in 2000, both during the campaign and the recount. I remember the price that John Kerry paid for staying within the campaign finance system in 2004, leaving him exposed to the Swift Boat attacks in August as he tried to stretch his public allotment over three months instead of just two.
There are times when you cannot win with one hand tied behind your back, when you cannot fight fire only with a philosophical opposition to fire. This is surely one of those times…

And the available remedies are limited:

…The Roberts’ court’s warped decree leaves us only two long-term exit routes from this growing disaster: pass a constitutional amendment to reverse Citizens United or shift the balance of the Supreme Court. The first will be difficult under any circumstance; the second will be impossible if Obama isn’t reelected.
After all, Obama’s loss will likely mean Mitt “Corporations are people” Romney will ascend to the Oval Office. Romney doesn’t believe in campaign finance laws of any kind, really; he has defended the Citizens United decision and supports unlimited contributions to candidates themselves. His Supreme Court picks would, at best, solidify the anti-reform regime on the court. At worst, they would tilt it further to the right, enshrining for generations the notion of the sale of democracy to the highest bidder….

“Should the Obama campaign really sit passively and allow Karl Rove to distort our election results again?,” asks vanden Heuval. The only sane answer is “no.” But she also urges corrective action from the President and progressives:

…If he is going to endorse the use of super PACs, then he should endorse, as a central plank of his campaign, the fight to end them forever…The president seems to understand this. It was heartening, for example, to see him come out in favor of a constitutional amendment to reverse the damage.

“President Obama has identified this election as a “make-or-break moment for the middle class,” notes vanden Heuval. “It surely is. But it is also a make-or-break moment for our democracy….It’s up to us now to push him…Pragmatism, after all, yields only temporary solutions; our long-term course must be guided by larger ideals.”


Political Strategy Notes

According to Brian Beutler’s Talking Points Memo post “Dems Plot Payroll Tax Cut End Game,” Dems will amend the GOP proposal to include extended unemployment insurance and Medicare physician reimbursements. Expect tricky parliamentary chess moves ahead.
In a video released by the White House this morning, President Obama is urging supporters to pressure Congress to extend the payroll tax cut before it expires. Noting that wage earners will have to shell out $40 more per paycheck if the tax cut lapses after February, Obama called on supporters to post at Twitter and Facebook, explaining what they could do with $40 more per paycheck.
Rick Santorum is the only Republican presidential candidate who has ever won a swing state, as he recently bragged. But he is also the only one who lost one by 18 points, and it seems like a good time for Dems to better understand why. Julie Hirschfeld Davis has the skinny at Bloomberg Businessweek. It had to do with a little too much emphasis on “cultural issues” and alienating women, as well as Santorum “moving his family to suburban Virginia, yet still claiming a property tax deduction and tuition reimbursement in Pennsylvania.”
At The Daily Green Jim Dipeso, policy director for Republicans for Environmental Protection, has a post, “Swing Voters Want Renewable Energy.” Apparently there are a few Republican environmentalists, who are not just industry puppets providing cover. Dipeso cites a State of the Rockies Project poll of voters in six states indicating agreement that “renewable energy would create jobs in their states” and 80 percent believed “it’s possible to have both a strong economy and to protect land and water.” Dipeso also discusses an encouraging Third Way focus group of mid-western and southern swing voters who support moderate government regulation to protect the environment.
Speaking of swing voters, Ryan Lizza’s “Obama’s Swing Voters” in The New Yorker flags five interesting links. which are “far more informative than much of the horse-race analysis…”
Despite polls indicating most Catholics are not opposed to government funding for birth control, the Republicans continue to parrot the meme that President Obama is somehow dissing their faith. They are also trying to generalize it more broadly with repetition of terms like “Obama’s war on religion.” Unfortunately, memes don’t have to be true to be effective. “Since winning 54 percent of the Catholic vote in 2008, the president’s approval rating among Catholics had fallen to 39 percent in the latest Rasmussen Reports poll. And Republicans are eagerly trying to drive that wedge between Obama and Catholics even deeper,” reports Hayley Peterson in the Washington Examiner. it appears that the Obama campaign might benefit from more creative outreach to Catholics and other religious groups.
Craig Gilbert reports in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on the impact of the Catholic vote in key battleground states. Gilbert notes that “New Hampshire (38%) and New Mexico (36%) had a higher percentage of Catholic voters than Wisconsin (33%) in 2008, according to exit polls.” Other battlegound states in which Catholics were a quarter or more of the electorate include PA, FL, MI, IA and CO.
Good to see that the Obama campaign is alert to the importance of the high-turnout senior vote, as evidenced by this excellent YouTube clip, which should be sent to all your senior relatives and friends. Actually there are quite a few YouTube video clips about Obama and seniors here.
Douglas Schoen warns at The Daily Beast that it’s “Not Too Late for Americans Elect to Win 2012 Presidential Election,” noting that “A recently completed Americans Elect survey found that and voters favor, 58 percent to 13 percent, having an alternative presidential ticket that is independent of the Democratic and Republican parties on the ballot in 2012.” Schoen also cites a Washington Post/ABC News poll in November showing even stronger support for an Independent ticket.


Mitt’s Attack Ads, Big Bucks to Flood MI, AZ

TDS Managing Editor Ed Kilgore takes a look at “The Crux of the Matter in Michigan” at The Washington Monthly, and offers an insightful take on the next moves in the GOP field’s chess game:

…Rick Santorum is harvesting momentum from a great Tuesday night and some mutually assured destruction between Romney and Gingrich to move well ahead in state thought to be a stronghold for Mitt. But Republican elites are certain to be privately beside themselves at the thought of a guy like Ricky–who sometimes seems as determined to repeal the Second Vatican Council as the New Deal–going up against Barack Obama.
In MI, as nationally, PPP finds Gingrich’s favorability ratios cratering (at 38/47) and Romney’s foundering (at 49/39, a vast deterioration in this state from earlier readings), even as Santorum’s stay all clean and starchy (at 67/23)…
You have to figure the prevailing sentiment in elite GOP circles is that they’d love to see Ricky succumb to foul play, but don’t want their own, or even Mitt’s, fingerprints on the weapon. But there’s not a lot of time for dithering or scruples or wishing and hoping Ricky does himself in: a double Santorum win in MI and AZ on February 28 would be a serious problem for Romney, and for the party. I’m not privy to the internal councils of Republicans, but it’s likely they are waking up to this reality, and will ultimately either unleash Mitt to go hog-wild-negative, or push enough money in his direction to saturate media in these two states with enough positive propaganda to nominate the Infernal Prince of Darkness himself (so long as he promised to cut taxes, bash unions and oppose legalized abortion).

Mitt’s avalanche of money and hard-hitting attack ads worked well in FL. Santorum’s hope is that there may be a point at which the strategy produces diminishing returns — even among GOP voters.


TDS Co-Editor William Galston: Why Obama Would Be Glad If the Culture War Is a Major Election Issue

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
The furor over the Obama administration’s contraception coverage decision has generated a spate of articles proclaiming the return of the social issues in the 2012 campaign. But while they’re being discussed more, I doubt that they’ll prove decisive. Unless something drastic happens between now and November, trends in employment and real income will determine the result.
Now comes the traditional “to be sure” paragraph.
To be sure, it’s possible to sketch a scenario in which the social issues matter a lot. Imagine a very close election the outcome of which hangs on a handful of large states in the mid-Atlantic and Midwest. These states have high percentages of Catholics who favor government programs when they help the middle class, lean toward cultural traditionalism, and maintain a visceral loyalty to the Church even when they disagree with it on specific policies. It’s no accident that Pennsylvania’s Democratic senator is pro-life and served in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps after college.
Still, countless surveys have placed the social issues far down on the list of public concerns in an election cycle dominated by worries over growth, jobs, deficits, and debt. They are highly salient in the base of the Republican Party, but no one should confuse those voters with the national electorate. If the economy improves fast enough to allow abortion, gay marriage, and religious freedom to emerge from the shadows, Obama will win anyway.
That said, the contraception episode was what the tennis commentators call an unforced error. If recent reports are accurate, the president knew that his decision would create a firestorm. During the extensive deliberations that preceded it, Vice President Biden and many others counseled compromise. (Months ago, the White House was aware of the compromise the president eventually accepted.) Surely Obama knew that Catholics are a large and strategically located swing vote. And yet, despite well-received campaign speeches in favor of religious liberty (and against tone-deaf secularism), as president Obama chose to treat mandatory contraceptive coverage purely as a public health issue. That may indeed be his considered view.
It may also reflect election-year imperatives of base mobilization, especially women and pro-choice groups. And apparently it was bolstered by a political cost/benefit analysis. Politico reports that the president was encouraged by David Plouffe, who reviewed private polling data and concluded that “the vast majority of Catholic voters, who don’t adhere to the church’s dictates on birth control anyway, wouldn’t punish Obama for his decision.”
But when the backlash from supporters as well as adversaries escalated (even loyalist Tim Kaine, now running for Virginia’s open Senate seat, pleaded for a shift), Obama unceremoniously abandoned the position he had staked out just days earlier. I can imagine the advice he got before this reversal: “Mr. President, we have to get this behind us so we can get back to the issues that are working for us. It’s better to take the hit now than to let this controversy linger.” Whatever the motivation for the initial decision, the latest shift can only be interpreted as a response to intense political pressure.
I’m sure Obama meant what he was saying about religion’s role in public life during the years preceding his presidency. But when the crunch came, it took a back seat to other considerations. We reveal ourselves most clearly, not when we declare the things we deem worthy, but when we are compelled to choose among them. All things considered, this has been an instructive episode.


TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira: Public, GOP at Odds Over Obama’s SOTU Proposals

It was predictable that Republicans, lead by Mitch Daniel’s gloomy official response, would line up to trash President Obama’s state of the union speech and the major progressive proposals he advanced in it. But a recent National Journal poll, conducted 1/26-29 by Princeton Survey Research Associates International, shows that the public strongly approved of the President’s proposals, according to TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira’s latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot‘. Teixeira explains:

In that poll, 76 percent supported imposing a minimum tax on money American companies earn overseas to encourage U.S. job creation. Seventy percent supported imposing a fee on large banks to be used to help homeowners refinance mortgages at low interest rates. Sixty-five percent supported establishing a new rule that those who earn $1 million or more annually must pay at least 30 percent of their income in taxes. And 58 percent supported reducing federal aid to colleges that raise tuition too fast.

Teixeira sees “a theme here: the idea that even big institutions and the wealthy need to conduct themselves responsibly and make contributions to the common good. These data show the public gets it even if conservatives don’t.”


Jobs-Elections Nexus Coming Into Focus

This item by J.P. Green was originally published on February 3, 2012.
Democrats have reason to be encouraged by this morning’s report that that the economy added 243,000 jobs in January and the overall unemployment rate has dropped to 8.3 percent. Of course the Administration should vigorously exercise its bragging rights concerning the monthly report, and especially the overall favorable employment trend of recent months.
For those who want a more nuanced understanding of what the latest employment numbers may mean for the 2012 elections, however, Nate Silver’s “Obama’s Magic Number? 150,000 Jobs Per Month” at his FiveThirtyEight NYT blog may be the most incisive data-driven analysis yet published on the relationship of employment to presidential politics. Silver takes a sobering look at the connection, and explains:

No economic indicator is the holy grail…And there are a number of non-economic variables pertinent to predicting presidential elections — wars, candidate quality and ideology, turnout, scandals and so forth…But if you want to focus a single economic indicator, job growth during the presidential election year — especially as measured by the series called nonfarm payrolls — has a lot going for it.
…Data related to the change in the level of employment have had among the highest correlations with electoral performance in the past. The correlations aren’t perfect by any means. But if you perform a true apples-to-apples comparison (that is, looking at the economic indicators alone rather than muddying them with other sorts of extraneous variables), they do at least as well as anything else in predicting elections, and slightly better than some other commonly used metrics.
Just as important, there are a lot of qualitative reasons to focus on the jobs numbers. They measure something tangible and important. They receive much attention from economists, investors, political campaigns and the news media, and therefore inform the public discussion. They are released every month after only a minimal lag. They are subject to revision, and the revisions can be significant, but they aren’t quite as bad as those for other economic series like G.D.P. or personal income growth. The jobs numbers are calculated in a comparatively straightforward way, and are usually in pretty good alignment with other economic measures. They don’t need to be adjusted for inflation.

Silver then taps some creative methodology to correlate the nonfarm payroll growth rate with the popular vote margin of defeat or victory for the incumbent party in 16 post WWII presidential elections, and he comes to some interesting conclusions, including:

Overall, the relationship between job growth and electoral performance is good but not great…Roughly speaking, there were 10 election years in which you could make a pretty good prediction about the election outcome from knowing the jobs numbers alone: 1948, 1960, and then the eight elections from 1980 onward…In six other elections, you would have needed to look beyond the jobs numbers to come to a good prediction about the outcome.

Citing some of the complicating factors that can cloud his data-driven analysis, such as Eisenhower’s charisma, the Watergate scandal and foreign policy debacles. Regarding a possible Obama-Romney race, Silver argues,

…If we knew nothing else about the election but how many jobs were created between January and October 2012, we would deem Mr. Obama to be a favorite if the economy created more than 107,000 jobs per month and an underdog otherwise. Basically, this would represent job creation at about the rate of population growth.

That’s good news for Obama. The “what have you done for me lately?” factor may signal even better news:

…The public has tended to give greater weight to recent job growth, discounting earlier performance when the trajectory seems positive…If you break it down in more detail, you’ll find that job growth during the third year of a president’s term has a positive effect on his re-election odds, while the coefficients attached to the first two years are negative.
But none of these results are statistically significant or particularly close to it; only job growth during the fourth year of a president’s term has a clear effect.

Silver then factors in presidential approval ratings into his calculations, which indicate:

Mr. Obama’s approval rating is now 46.5 percent, according to the Real Clear Politics average…That isn’t terrible — it’s in the range where Mr. Obama might be able to eke out a victory in the Electoral College — but it’s somewhat below average. From 1948 through 2008, the average president had an approval rating of 52 percent as of Feb. 1 of the election year, according to the Roper Center archives.
If Mr. Obama has an approval rating of 52 percent by November, he will almost certainly win re-election. He’d also be a favorite if he’s at 50 percent. And 48 percent or 49 percent might also do the trick, since at that point Mr. Obama’s approval rating would likely exceed his disapproval rating.
But Mr. Obama is not quite there yet. The surest way for him to improve his approval rating will be to create jobs at a rate that exceeds the rate of population growth.
We can come up with an estimate of just how many jobs this might be if we put a president’s approval rating as of Feb. 1 and the payrolls numbers into a regression equation…I’ll spare you the math (although it is straightforward), but this works out to a break-even number of 166,000 jobs per month — not a huge number, but more than the 107,000 that we had estimated before accounting for Mr. Obama’s middling approval rating.
…If you run another version of the analysis that considers a president’s net approval rating, along with the rate of payroll growth net of population growth, you come up with a break-even number of 151,000 jobs per month.

The Wall St. Journal is predicting an average of 155K jobs being added per month in 2012, notes Silver. But he adds that forecasting track records are “frankly pretty mediocre.” Taking all of the factors into consideration, Silver ventures, ” If payrolls growth averages 175,000 per month, Mr. Obama will probably be a favorite, but not a prohibitive one. If it averages 125,000 per month, he will be a modest underdog.”
Silver’s numbers appear to be sound enough, and 150K jobs per month seems like a good guidepost. Rachel Weiner cautions at WaPo’s The Fix, however, that “No president in recent history has been reelected with unemployment above 8 percent, and analysts suggest it would take growth of between 167,000 and 260,000 jobs a month to get there by November.”
It would be interesting to see what Silver’s analysis could do scaled down to the state level, taking into consideration Geoffrey Skelley’s point at Sabato’s Crystal Ball that “after all, presidents are elected in 51 individual battles (50 states plus Washington, D.C.).” It might be worthwhile to look at needed job growth and margins of victory in the half-dozen most volatile swing states. That could be helpful to Dems in terms of laser-targeting resources.


TDS Strategy Memo: After the primaries Democrats will be on receiving end of a propaganda campaign of a scope and ferocity unparalleled in American history. Dems must anticipate this onslaught and begin now to plan how best to respond.

This item by Andrew Levison was originally published on February 2, 2012.
The Republican primary campaign has provided a foretaste of the bitter and divisive super-PAC driven media tactics that will be used against Obama in the fall. The fundamental and inescapable fact is that Democrats will be on the receiving end of a propaganda campaign of a scope and ferocity unparalleled in American history. Democrats must begin planning now how they will respond.
The attack will be three pronged:
First, there will be a “high road” attack directly sponsored by the Republican presidential candidate – now almost certainly Romney – and the RNC. It will be based on sanctimoniously accusing Obama of having “failed” — that he has not fulfilled his campaign promises and that his policies have proved ineffective. The media has already reported on this planned campaign and how it will reduce the need for Romney to attack Obama personally by using Obama’s own words against him.
This part of the three-pronged approach does not represent any major departure from the practices of past campaigns. Where it will significantly differ is in the use of bogus “facts” and statistics on a scale that would have been previously unacceptable. Years ago statements such as “the stimulus did not create any jobs” and “unemployment has risen under Obama” would have been dismissed as simply false by the media as soon as “mainstream” economists objected. In the modern “post-truth” Fox News world, on the other hand, even the most unambiguously false charges will be described as “debatable” rather than nonsense.
The second prong of the strategy will be a feverish invocation of the culture war narrative — one that will far excel Sarah Palin’s sneering and divisive “we’re the real, the good America; they are the degenerate coastal elites” framework that she used in the 2008 campaign.
The ads – which will come from Super-PAC’s more than official sources — will be ugly and distasteful: they will portray Obama as deeply “un-American” – foreign and alien to the heartland values and daily life of the “real” America. Romney and the Republicans have already made this the centerpiece of their “hardball” attack. Obama “goes around the world apologizing for America.” “He wants to turn America into France.” “He is a socialist who hates free enterprise.” The third-party ads will repeat these same accusations but with an overt appeal to prejudices that will be more accurately described as xenophobic rather than racial. The ads will identify Obama not with ghetto hoodlums or Black Panthers but rather with foreign ideas and ethnicities — “commies”, “America-hating Muslims” and “illegal aliens and foreigners,” all of whom support his goal of undermining America.
The most important and destructive change in 2012, however, will be in the vastly expanded dissemination of a third, flagrantly dishonest and utterly propagandistic “low road” attack – one that will be conducted both above and below the radar.
In 2008 the low road attack on Obama was conducted largely outside the official candidate and Republican party media or the major PAC’-s (one clumsy ad by the McCain campaign that attempted to make a “dog-whistle” suggestion that Obama was the anti-Christ was a notable exception). Most of the 2008 low road attacks circulated under the radar – through distribution to informal e-mail lists and comment threads, through micro-targeted direct mail, through robo-calls and through phone banks run by shadowy outside firms. Within these closed communication channels the claims were widely circulated that Obama was a secret Muslim, a radical/communist, a sympathizer with domestic terrorist bombers, and that he was behind a range of “Birtherist” and other conspiracies. Media Matters for America made pioneering attempt to map these “below the radar” attacks during the 2008 campaign and to outline how they were circulated and amplified within the various conservative communication networks, but the study was discontinued after the elections.
Observers were at first uncertain how important these sub-rosa attacks would be in the 2008 election but the absolutely pivotal role they played became very clear as the passion and enthusiasm of the Republican base became largely driven by these “disreputable” views rather than the more policy-based attack made by McCain himself. The real energy of the Republican base in 2008 was reflected in the almost fanatical Sarah Palin supporters whose enthusiasm vastly exceeded any support for McCain himself and whose signs and shouted slogans reflected the “disreputable” rumor-based views rather than opposition to Obama’s actual platform or priorities.
(The influence of the rumor-based attacks reached a dramatic climax when McCain – in the most honorable single action of his campaign – explicitly rejected the claim of a woman who asked why he didn’t tell voters “the truth” – that Obama was a Muslim terrorist and a traitor during one rally in September. McCain tried to reason with the woman, arguing that Obama was not a terrorist but simply an American with whom he disagreed but the crowd howled its fierce disapproval of his conciliatory remarks.)
Democrats should not assume that Romney will behave as honorably in 2012 as did McCain in 2008. While Romney will hold himself personally aloof, there is little or no chance that he will explicitly disavow the massive low road campaign that will be launched on his behalf.
In 2012 this low road attack – which will once again circulate in large part “under the radar” by e-mail, phone, mail and social media –will have three key characteristics: