I’m back with another brief review of some of the better stuff I’ve published at the Washington Monthly, this time on the broader context for understanding the Super Tuesday Republican presidential primary results.
Frankly, I thought Mitt Romney was a bit of a victim of the expectations game going into Super Tuesday–and perhaps even of the fact that a lot of “analysis” was written early on the evening of February 6 when Santorum was leading in Ohio and nobody had a clue who was going to win caucuses in ND and AK (Romney did):

[T]he bottom line is that Romney won Super Tuesday but seems to be losing the spin wars over its meaning. And for a candidate whose elite opinion-leader backing remains perhaps his most important asset other than cash, that matters.

There was also some questionable analysis of why the deal went down as it did. For the second week in a row, all sorts of pundits seemed surprised to learn that Rick Santorum had “lost” the Catholic vote in OH, and some wondered if recent publicity over his negative remarks about John F. Kennedy might be a factor. This was my reply:

[I]t’s worth saying again: in every state where there has been entry or exit polling, Santorum has “lost” the Catholic vote from the very beginning, and in fact, has performed more poorly among Catholics than among Protestants. The JFK thing may not have helped, but it was happening well before that.
In those same states, moreover, Mitt Romney has finished first among Catholics everywhere other than in SC, where Gingrich edged him out (in GA, for example, where Newt won big overall, Mitt beat him among Catholics 38/34, with Santorum taking 21%. Meanwhile, Newt won half the Protestant vote, with Santorum edging Mitt in that category).
Santorum’s voting base is white evangelical Protestants, a category that happens to overlap signicantly with three other demographics where he does well: “very conservative” voters, Tea Party supporters, and voters from rural and exurban areas. Romney does best among moderate and “somewhat conservative” voters, and urban/suburban voters, and best we can tell, Catholics voting in Republican primaries tend to be more urban and relatively moderate ideologically.

I’ve already crossposted my TNR column on another strange meme coming out of Super Tuesday–that Mitt Romney had to perform better in the South to win the nomination and/or win the general election.
I agree with Ruy Teixeira and many others that the current situation in the GOP is a great boon to Obama and to Democrats. But Obama still has a series of complex strategic challenges, particulary in terms of messaging. In a discussion of Paul Glastris’ new cover article in the Monthly, “The Incomplete Greatness of Barack Obama,” I had this observation:

First, while the President must of course explain and defend his record, too much dwelling on past accomplishments as opposed to future plans can reinforce the Republican strategy of making the 2012 elections a referendum not only on the president’s record, but on general perceptions of life during the last four years. Indeed, given the emptiness (on some subjects) and radicalism (on others) of the GOP agenda, you can be sure Mitt Romney will lift heaven and earth to keep the focus on the incumbent. If the president runs an entirely positive (as opposed to comparative) campaign, he could help the opposition turn the election into a de facto referendum and lose the opportunity to quite legitimately demand a choice between the two candidates’ visions and agendas for the future.
Second, while reminding Americans of the conditions he inherited from his Republican predecessor is always in order (and necessary, in fact, to any comparative effort to ask whether a return to Bush’s policies or a more conservative version of them is what voters really want), too much talk about that will sound defensive, backward looking, and when it comes to the details of the financial crisis, confusing.
It will require an unusually deft touch for Obama to simultaneously defend himself from attacks, explain his accomplishments (and their context), offer a forward-looking agenda, and also keep the focus on GOP radicalism. But that’s what he needs to do unless he just wants to hope that improving conditions in the country and Republican mistakes grant him re-election by default.

The “bin Laden is dead, and GM is Alive” bumper sticker is not a bad short slogan for the president’s re-election campaign in terms of reminding the general public. But it’s also good to know that his foreign policy record has earned the respect of credible experts.
Dems looking to get up to speed on the President’s foreign policy achievements should read “Obama as progressive pragmatist,” by Martin Indyk, Kenneth Lieberthal and Michael O’Hanlon at Politico. The authors, top Brookings international affairs advisors and co-authors of “Bending History: Barack Obama’s Foreign Policy,” offer insightful observations Dems can leverage, among them:

…On balance, Obama has proved tough, disciplined and, overall, reasonably successful in addressing the nation’s immediate security challenges. One might call him a reluctant realist: Holding onto his idealistic visions and pursuing them where possible but adroitly shifting to tougher measures when necessary.
…He has been disciplined and pragmatic — keeping Robert Gates, President George W. Bush’s defense secretary, at the Pentagon, for example; and hiring his chief rival, Hillary Clinton, at the State Department; working closely with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and other top economic officials to cope with the urgency of the global financial crisis on taking office; tripling combat forces in Afghanistan; keeping U.S. troops in Iraq 20 months longer than originally promised; “rebalancing” toward Asia to reassure the region that the United States is reliable; and remaining resolute in the pursuit of terrorist leaders like the now late Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki.
In other words, Obama is a pragmatist. A progressive one, to be sure — since he sought, where possible, to make inroads in the pursuit of his bigger hopes. But a pragmatist just the same — and a hawkish one in many ways.

Not all Democrats like President Obama’s extended stay in Afghanistan, nor his retaining Geithner. But it’s hard to deny that his foreign policy is meeting with success overall. Further, despite current conflicts, the authors argue that “the threats to U.S. interests have been contained to date, and Obama has successfully mobilized other key countries, beyond a tight circle of allies, to increase pressure dramatically on Tehran as well as Pyongyang.” They also credit the President with “returning to diplomacy and countering the perception of Washington as prone to knee-jerk military interventionism.”
The President, unlike his predecessor, has avoided disaster, particularly regarding challenges associated with North Korea and Iran, and there is no reason to think that his adversaries could do any better. As the authors conclude, “…On balance, this president possesses an effective, even fairly strong, foreign policy track record to date — very different and far better than his Republican opponents are painting in their presidential campaigns.”

The GOP echo chamber trumpets the meme that President Obama’s auto bailout and stimulus policies were a failure. But the public isn’t buying it and has a much more positive view of both measures, as TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira points out. On the stimulus:

In a new Pew Center poll, 61 percent said the economic stimulus plan in 2009 mostly helped the economy, while just 31 percent thought it mostly hurt.

Regarding the auto bailout:

…In the same poll, 56 percent of the public described the bailouts for General Motors and Chrysler as mostly good for the economy, compared to 38 percent who thought the bailout was mostly bad for the economy.

No surprise that the conservative echo chamber would try to put two such successful progressive policies in a bad light. So far, however, polls indicate most voters aren’t so easily hustled. As Teixeira says the public is willing to “give credit where credit is due.”

The executive summary below is cross-posted from Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research:
Greenberg Quinlan Rosner conducted a survey on behalf of EMILY’s List and the Planned Parenthood Action Fund to explore the impact of the birth control debate on voters in eight battleground Senate states.
The debate on birth control provides a boost for Democratic candidates who support access to birth control. In fact, nearly half of voters say that if their member of Congress supported the Blunt Amendment (which would have allowed employers to opt out of covering birth control), it would make them less likely to support him or her. A near consensus exists that women should have access to birth control, that insurers should cover it, and that the decision to use birth control is a private one.
Key Findings:
*By wide margins, battleground voters believe that Democrats do a better job on access to birth control, women’s health issues, and abortion. While they give the Republicans an advantage on protecting religious freedom, voters are split on which party would respect their individual religious faith.
*Voters strongly oppose the Blunt Amendment. A majority believe that religiously affiliated hospitals and colleges should not have a religious exemption. Nearly half say that they would be less likely to support a candidate for office if he or she supported the Blunt Amendment, including a majority of Independents.
*Access to birth control has the potential to impact actual races. As a starting point, in this battleground, a generic Republican leads a generic Democrat by 5 point. In a generic informed match-up between a Democrat and a Republican given to half the sample, the Democrat trails. The other half sample received the same information with language about birth control, and the candidates are tied.
*Voters object to a wide range of attacks on access to healthcare and contraception occurring at the federal and state levels. Moreover, they strongly oppose attempts to defund Planned Parenthood.

Nearly two thirds oppose prohibiting Planned Parenthood from receiving federal funds to pay for birth control, maternity care, and cancer screenings; most oppose it even when it is specified that some clinics provide abortion services. More generally, voters oppose eliminating federal Title X funding for health clinics that provide services – including access to birth control – to low income women.
Over half oppose so-called conscience clauses for pharmacists and health providers to opt out of prescribing and filling prescriptions for birth control, support requiring an employer to provide coverage for birth control through their insurance plans, and would allow women to get emergency contraception over the counter without a prescription.
Even on issues related to abortion, the electorate is divided; voters split evenly on a conscience clause when it includes abortion and undergoing an ultrasound prior to having an abortion, though a majority opposes an “invasive” ultrasound similar to what was proposed in Virginia.

All of Romney’s glaring weaknesses notwithstanding, his Ohio win feeds an image of a competent winner, which can only grow as he clinches the nomination. As Greg Sargent notes at the Plum Line: “Dems have not undermined impressions of Romney’s competence at all — which may loom larger in the general election than anything else.”
Yet more indications of Romney’s weakness with working class voters continue to surface: Tom Curry reports at MSNBC.com that “On Tuesday in Ohio, early exit poll data indicated that Romney won 34 percent of those without a college degree, lagging behind former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, who won 38 percent of those voters. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas won 12 percent of those voters and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich won 14 percent…When exit poll interviewers asked voters which candidate best understands the problems of average Americans, Santorum led by 33 percent to 22 percent for Romney.”
There was no possibiity of a happy outcome for Dems in the Kaptur-Kucinich House race, which had to result in a net loss of a Democratic House seat. Progressive Dems lost an eloquent voice in the House with the defeat of Kucinich to the more moderate Kaptur, who reportedly brought home the bacon. The outcome provides a regrettable, but instructive lesson in the importance of redistricting as a political weapon to divide and disempower the opposition. Kucinich joins Barney Frank as a leading progressive House member undone by redistricting, though in Frank’s case it was Democrats who did the damage.
NPR has that handy chart you’ve probably been looking for, classifying the GOP primaries and caucuses ahead by winner-take-all vs. proportional delegate selection. Hint: It’s hard to see how Romney can blow it.
Jonathan Merrittt writes in The Monitor that “Religious pollsters and demographers have long warned that young people were leaving churches in alarming numbers…according to Notre Dame professor David Campbell and Harvard professor Robert Putnam, the fusion of faith and partisan politics – particularly the conservative type – is at least partly to blame…”The best evidence indicates that this dramatic generational shift is primarily in reaction to the religious right,” they wrote in the latest Foreign Affairs in an essay titled “God and Caesar in America: Why Mixing Religion and Politics is Bad for Both.” They explain: “And Millennials are even more sensitive to it, partly because many of them are liberal (especially on the touchstone issue of gay rights) and partly because they have only known a world in which religion and the right are intertwined…In effect, Americans (especially young Americans) who might otherwise attend religious services are saying, ‘Well, if religion is just about conservative politics, then I’m outta here…”
TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira has a post, “Can Obama Recapture the Hispanic Vote?” at The New York Times, as part of a forum on “The last gasp of the GOP?” Says Teixeira: “…It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the current anti-immigrant tilt of the Republican Party, especially as displayed in the primaries, has decisively turned off Hispanic voters and thrown them into the arms of the Democrats.”
At The Daily Beast, Wayne Barrett makes a strong case that Romney’s limp critique of Rush Limbaugh’s misogynist meltdown was likely attributed to Clear Channel’s generous support (over $726K) of Romney’s campaigns. In addition, “Romney’s former company, Bain Capital, acquired Clear Channel in 2008 with another Boston-based investment firm, Thomas H. Lee Partners (THL)…The $26 billion merger, which was launched simultaneously with Romney’s first presidential candidacy in late 2006…placed Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and much of the talk-show right under Bain/Lee control…”
Guess who is paying for the broadcast of Limbaugh’s daily bile-fest to the American Forces Network? That would be you.
Limbaugh may have given a hot-foot to a sleeping giant as Steve Kornacki argues at Salon.com: “It’s also worth noting that single women tend to participate in elections at a lower rate than married women. The Voter Participation Center estimates that if turnout levels were equalized at the married rate, roughly 6 million new unmarried women would head to the polls. In demeaning an intelligent, well-spoken 30-year-old single woman, Limbaugh is doing his part to wake these nonvoters up.”
Gerald F. Seib of the Wall St. Journal flags some interesting stats from a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll indicating that President Obama loses the male vote by 6 and 4 percent against Romney and Paul, respectively. But Obama wins the male vote by 6 and 5 points against Gingrich and Santorum respectively.
George Monbiot of Guardian UK has a post “How Ayn Rand Became the New Right’s Version of Marx” at Reader Supported News. Monbiot observes “…The belief system constructed by Ayn Rand, who died 30 years ago today, has never been more popular or influential…Ignoring Rand’s evangelical atheism, the Tea Party movement has taken her to its heart…She is the guiding spirit of the Republicans in Congress…I wonder how many would continue to worship at the shrine of Ayn Rand if they knew that towards the end of her life she signed on for both Medicare and social security. She had railed furiously against both programmes, as they represented everything she despised about the intrusive state. Her belief system was no match for the realities of age and ill health.”

The strategy memo below by Bill Burton, co-founder of Priorities USA Super-PAC, is cross-posted from Benjy Sarlin’s post at Talking Points memo:
TO: Interested Parties
FR: Bill Burton, Priorities USA Action
RE: Super Tuesday Memo: Romney’s Agenda for the Wealthy Hurting Him With Those Who Are Not
Mitt Romney’s narrow win in his home state of Michigan was only possible because of overwhelming margins with the wealthiest Republican primary voters. In what has become a predictable outcome during the Republican nomination fight, Romney once again lost voters making less than $100,000 per year.
Between Cadillacs, NASCAR, and $10,000 bets, Romney certainly has done his fair share to demonstrate an inability to understand the economic challenges facing most Americans. But more importantly, Americans understand that Romney’s policies would primarily help himself and other extremely wealthy individuals at the expense of the middle class.
On Wednesday, the Tax Policy Center released its analysis of Romney’s budget-busting tax plan showing that he would provide a new tax cut of $250,000 to those earning over $1 million a year but he would raise taxes on those struggling to get by. His other economic ideas seem designed to simply make life more convenient for the very wealthiest: deregulating Wall Street, rolling back clean air protections, cutting taxes for big corporations and bashing unions.
Romney’s agenda for the wealthy is measurably hurting him with those who are not. In a recent CNN poll, 65% of voters said Romney “favors the rich.” That’s substantially higher than any of his Republican primary opponents. Even John McCain and President Bush did not have such dismal numbers on a similar question. Exit polls have shown him underperforming with middle class votes in every primary so far and general election polls show a decisive majority of Americans believe Romney does not understand their needs.

Read more…

With public outrage about the Citizens United decision growing, it’s good to see other smokescreens for hiding big money political donors from the public being outed. The New York Times editorial “The I.R.S. Does Its Job” calls attention to a tea party charade that both hides the identity of conservative political donors and soaks American taxpayers:

Taxpayers should be encouraged by complaints from Tea Party chapters applying for nonprofit tax status at being asked by the Internal Revenue Service to prove they are “social welfare” organizations and not the political activists they so obviously are.
Tea Party supporters claim they are being politically harassed with extensive I.R.S. questionnaires. But the service properly contends that it must ensure that these groups are “primarily” engaged in social welfare, not political campaigning, to merit tax exemption under section 501(c)(4) of the tax code.
Such I.R.S. inquiries are long overdue and should be applied across the board to the growing number of organizations, allied with the major political parties, that are also ludicrously posing as “social welfare” groups. Legitimate social welfare organizations are allowed limited political activity. But these political offshoots are using that tax status in a transparent ploy to keep big donors secret while funneling the money to campaigns. Chief among these groups are American Crossroads, the campaign machine created by Republican guru Karl Rove, and Priorities USA, the Democratic counterpart founded by former White House aides, now openly encouraged by President Obama as he runs for re-election.

The editorial cites other groups like “the conservative American Action Network, a “social welfare” claimant reported by the Center for Public Integrity to have spent more than 80 percent of its expenditures on the 2010 elections; and Americans Elect, a third-party effort enjoying “social welfare” secrecy as it secures ballot space across the nation.” The editorial rightly commends the I.R.S. for doing “its duty to enforce the tax code and root out political operatives who are abusing the law and conning taxpayers and voters. ”

TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira has a blistering critique of Linda Killian’s book, “The Swing Vote: The Untapped Power of Independents,” at The New Republic. Teixeira takes on the cherished myth that refuses to die, “…that independents are all swing voters ready to move right or left politically–or in Killian’s feverish imagination, toward some inchoate centrist formation of the No Labels variety.”

…This premise is based on the greatest myth in American politics: that independents are actually independent. They are not. As numerous studies have shown, the overwhelming majority of Americans who say there are “independent” lean toward one party or the other. Call them IINOs, or Independents In Name Only. IINOs who say they lean toward the Republicans think and vote just like regular Republicans. IINOs who say they lean toward the Democrats think and vote just like regular Democrats.

Unlike the proponents of the Independent voters as pivotal force myth, Teixeira has the numbers to back up his assertions:

…In 2008, according to the University of Michigan’s National Election Study (NES), 90 percent of independents who leaned Democratic voted for Obama, actually a higher level of support than among weak Democratic partisans (those who said they were “not very strong” Democrats), 84 percent of whom voted for Obama. Among Republican-leaning independents, a still-high 78 percent voted for McCain, compared to 88 percent support among weak Republican identifiers.
Evidently, these two groups are quite different animals. On the one hand, we have a group of “independents” who voted 90 percent for Barack Obama. Moreover, as Alan Abramowitz and others have shown, the policy views of Democratic-leaning independents look just like the policy views of Democratic identifiers. On the other, we have a group of “independents” who voted 78 percent for John McCain and have policy views that look just like Republican identifiers. Clearly it does tremendous violence to the data to lump these two disparate groups together and give them a label–“independents”–that implies they do not have partisan inclinations.

Teixeira acknowledges that there is a comparatively small demographic of “so-called pure independents” who “split their vote much more evenly between the parties…In 2008, according to the NES, they were just 7 percent of all voters and only 20 percent of nominally independent voters.”
Taking this more sober view of Independents is a prerequisite for formulating a useful strategy, as Teixeira explains:

Clearly, from the standpoint of a political campaign, it makes no sense to treat all independents as an undifferentiated mass of swing voters who are located in the center of the political spectrum. The Obama campaign, for example, should have different strategies for appealing to Democratic-leaning independents (24 percent of their 2008 support), pure independents (6 percent of 2008 support) and Republican-leaning independents (4 percent of 2008 support), since each of these groups looks, thinks and acts differently from the others. To do otherwise would be political malpractice.

Thus, Teixeira adds, “…Killian’s book cannot be taken seriously as analysis, whatever its pretensions. It adds nothing of value to our understanding of independents in general and of swing voters in particular.” For that, Teixeira recommends William G. Mayer’s anthology, “The Swing Voter in American Politics.”
No doubt the Independent voter zombie will rise again to annoy serious political scientists. But no politician who wants to win should pay it much attention. As Teixeira advises “Do not cower behind chimerical third-party movements that aspire to lead an army that does not exist.”

This item is crossposted from The New Republic.
After just barely pulling out a win in Ohio, Mitt Romney has “won Super Tuesday” by most media accounts. But even with his successes (wins in Virginia, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Idaho, and a decent shot in Alaska), you’ll likely hear some people echo a recent claim by Newt Gingrich: that Romney can’t be confident of the nomination if he can’t win anywhere in the South.
This concern didn’t suddenly present itself: Mitt’s first real stumble in the race, of course, was in South Carolina, where he got righteously stomped by Newt. While he recovered nicely in Florida, he ran no better than even with Gingrich in those northern and northwestern Florida counties considered the authentically Southern parts of that very diverse state. And Romney continued to show Southern discomfort last night, losing Georgia to Gingrich and Tennessee to Santorum (who also won quasi-Southern Okahoma). Yes, Romney won Virginia, but Gingrich and Santorum weren’t even on the ballot there. Can Mitt win while losing every other Southern primary from here on out? The answer is that yes, he can–though perpetual weakness in any one region does theoretically reduce his margin of error.
Figuring out if he is indeed weak in this region, and how much it matters, gets into the always-difficult issue of how you define the South. If it means the eleven former Confederate States of America, then five states, accounting for 258 out of the national total of 2286 GOP delegates, have already voted. Mitt Romney is estimated to have won at least 115 of them. The six remaining states (Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Texas) account for another 382 delegates. None of these six are winner-take-all states, which means that Mitt Romney is very likely to accumulate delegates even if he loses the statewide vote.
If “the South” is expanded to all former slave states, then you can add Oklahoma to the states that have already voted–which contributes another eight delegates to Romney’s totals. Down the road, that expanded definition would add Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri and West Virginia, and another 182 delegates (of those, only Maryland is winner-take-all). The expanded total of 564 delegates still on the schedule for “the South” certainly makes the region a big prize, but it’s only about the same number of delegates still to be awarded by the decidedly un-Southern California, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Puerto Rico, and Utah. And the bulk of winner-take-all states are outside the region: California, D.C., New Jersey, Puerto Rico, Utah, and Wisconsin, along with the Mitt-friendly “Southern” states of Delaware and Maryland. So long as Romney can keep raising money (or, in a pinch, contributing from his own pocket), he can certainly win the nomination while maintaining his current mediocre performance in the South.
But the frequent exclamation that “Romney can’t win without the South” isn’t just about delegate allocations. It’s often meant to imply that a GOP candidate who is weak in this “base” region will struggle to win the general election. So far, though, there are no indications that those Southern voters who are pulling the lever for someone else in the primaries won’t settle for Mitt Romney in a general election. In Georgia, for example, 81 percent of today’s voters said they’d “definitely” vote for the party’s nominee and another 11 percent “probably” would; a big chunk of the probables and the holdouts appear to be Ron Paul supporters, many of them not actually Republicans. Moreover, the Southern states where Barack Obama is likely to be competitive (North Carolina, Virginia, Florida, Maryland, Missouri, and Delaware) tend to feature the kind of larger urban areas where Romney has done well throughout the country, and where his relatively strong appeal across party lines will be a bigger factor than whatever marginal discouragement is suffered by the “very conservative” voters he lost in the primaries.
The underlying reality is that there is nothing particularly mysterious about Romney’s relative weakness in Southern primaries. He’s doing well in the South among precisely the same kind of voters (urban-suburban dwellers, self-identified moderates and “somewhat conservative” voters, Catholics and other non-evangelicals) as elsewhere; there just happen to be more “very conservative,” rural and exurban, and evangelical voters in the South, especially the Deep South.
It is true, however, that if Romney exhibits chronic weakness in both the South and the Midwest, he could still, in theory, lose the nomination–particularly if Santorum and Gingrich can divide the states and avoid dividing their votes. I wouldn’t bet against Mitt even then, since he can continue to pile up votes from unpledged officeholders, the bicoastal states, and Western Mormons, while consistently picking up delegates in his “weak” areas (including some big hauls, as in Ohio and Virginia, where his superior organization gives him significantly more delegates than he ought to win based on his popularity).
At the moment, though, Romney seems to be in danger of eluding a third opportunity to nail down the nomination (the first after his strong showings in Iowa and New Hampshire, the second after big wins in South Carolina and Nevada). And perceptions that he can’t win in specific regions of the country, or specific segments of the party, certainly won’t help. Unfortunately for Romney, those fears will continue to bedevil him until it’s clear that he can’t be mathematically denied the nomination.

TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira has an article at Foreign Policy arguing that, regardless of the Super Tuesday outcome, “the Republican Party will have a huge problem expanding beyond its base and forging a winning coalition. Teixeira sees the GOP brand, as exemplified in the person of front-runner Mitt Romney, tanking with four key constituencies. First, Latinos:

Start with Hispanics — who accounted for 55 percent of population growth in the last decade — and the immigration issue. Romney, who is typically viewed as the “moderate” in the race, has been aggressively conservative in this area in an effort to outflank his more ideological opponents. He has promised to veto the DREAM Act, which would provide a path to citizenship for illegal aliens who came to the United States as minors with their parents, opposes in-state college tuition for illegal immigrants, and raised a much-mocked scheme for their “self-deportation.” More generally, he has consistently sneered at any sign of softness among his primary opponents on these issues, raising the specter of an increasing flood of illegal immigrants coddled by the law and provided with benefits they don’t deserve.
No wonder Hispanics, despite the bad economy and concerns about the level of deportations on President Barack Obama’s watch, are supporting the president at levels above those he received in 2008, when 67 percent voted for him…Indeed, a just-released Fox News poll — not usually considered a Democrat-friendly source — has Obama garnering 70 percent of the Latino vote, compared with just 14 percent for his closest Republican opponent, an incredible 5-1 ratio.

Rergarding African American voters, Teixeira notes, “The president could certainly match his 80 percent overall support from minority voters in 2008. If that comes true, he has huge leeway to lose white votes. Amazingly, he could approach the levels at which congressional Democrats lost the white working class (30 points) and white college graduates (19 points) in the wipe-out 2010 midterm election and still win the popular vote.”
With respect to white, college-educated voters, Teixeira cited Rush Limbaugh’s misogynist meltdown as the latest debacle for conservatives, and adds:

And it may be one reason that Romney’s appeal among these voters — despite his so-called moderate views — may be evaporating. Recent polls show him running at about where McCain did with this group in the 2008 presidential election (a modest 4-point margin) and sometimes worse.

Lastly, there is Romney’s deteriorating image among working-class voters, exacerbated by his long string of tone-deaf “Richie Rich” gaffes. Teixeira explains:

…Romney appears incapable of capturing the large margins among white working-class voters that Republican candidates need in order to win a general election. In a just-released NBC poll, Romney’s margin among these voters was a mere 5 points, far less than McCain’s 18-point margin in 2008 and less still than the 25 points or more Romney probably would need in order to win, given the United States’ shifting demographics.

Teixeira notes that it’s not only Romney: “The Republican candidates, however, also all subscribe to a range of positions — opposition to the auto-industry bailout, opposition to raising taxes on the rich, support for Rep. Paul Ryan’s unpopular Medicare “reform” plan, and support for attacks on collective bargaining — that do not endear them to these voters.”
Teixeira cautions that the Republicans’ troubles don’t guarantee that their nominee is “doomed to lose.” We can be sure, however, says Teixeira, that the GOP nominee “is likely to pay a significant price for the Republican Party’s refusal to compromise its ideology in the face of a changing electorate.”