Mariana Carreno, features editor for Portada, has a richly-detailed “Special Report: Political Advertising; Courting the Latino Vote.”
Karen Tumulty discusses the GOP pitch to Latino voters at WaPo, but the appeal is limited, considering Romney’s bridge-burning policies on immigration.
Lots of good posts about ALEC’s 180 degree cave on social issues and desperate struggle to survive, including this New York Times editorial, “Embarrassed by Bad Laws,” which notes “John Timoney, formerly the Miami police chief, recently called the law a “recipe for disaster,” and he said that he and other police chiefs had correctly predicted it would lead to more violent road-rage incidents and drug killings. Indeed, “justifiable homicides” in Florida have tripled since 2005.”
David Brooks gives surprisingly fair coverage to “The White House Argument” re the budget and debt, no doubt causing causing wingnut grumbling and teeth-grinding.
The Nuge has made himself the target of a Secret Service investigation, but he will probably walk with a very light slap on the wrist and GOP pats on the back. The incident may bring unwanted attention, however, to his reported inclusion in a “Chickenhawks” website listing outspoken conservatives who did not deign to serve in the military when called (backstory here and here).
The Pew Research Center poll “With Voters Focused on Economy, Obama Lead Narrows” notes a 10 percent drop in ‘swing voters’ (includes ‘leaners’) to 23 percent from June 2008. The poll, conducted April 4-15, indicates the President has lost some ground vs. Romney during the last month among most demographic groups, but still leads 49-45 overall.
Political poll junkies should not miss Mark Blumenthal’s illuminating post at HuffPo, which explains why “In late October, polls will be highly predictive of the outcome, but now, with more than 200 days remaining until the election, the predictive accuracy of polling is less than 50/50.” In other words, you’re better off flipping a coin.
Not surprising then, that CNN “Poll of Polls” calls Prez race a “dead heat.”
Joan Walsh weighs in at Salon.com on the progressive populists vs. Third Way dust-up with some insightful observations, including. “A recent Greenberg Quinlan poll…found that roughly three-quarters of those polled backed a feisty fairness message.” Walsh then crunches recent unemployment trends, indicating that “Declining unemployment alone can’t explain the relative change in the president’s political fortunes. His return to the populism that marked the end of the 2008 campaign almost certainly played a role. He has set up the 2012 election as a contest between the GOP’s message of “You’re on your own” vs. “We’re all in this together.” His economic feistiness, not just the GOP’s contraception craziness, is likely driving his revival among women, who remain the most vulnerable in a recession.”
Demos has a useful primer for Dems in this year of GOP voter suppression, “Got ID? Helping Americans Get Voter Identification.”
Larry J. Sabato has a funny and instructive read for those who think presidential politics is predictable.

The following report, by Stanley Greenberg, James Carville, and Erica Seifert on behalf of Democracy Corps and Women’s Voice. Women Vote Action Fund, is cross-posted from GQR.com.
Executive Summary
Last month, virtually all House Republicans voted for Paul Ryan’s latest budget plan (“The Path to Prosperity”)–and according to the latest battleground survey by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for Democracy Corps and Women’s Voices. Women Vote Action Fund, they will pay the price in November. In this survey of 1000 likely voters in the 56 most competitive Republican-held districts, the climate has shifted in favor of the Democrats. Voters view the Democratic Party more favorably than the Republican Party, the President is viewed far more favorably than Mitt Romney, and both the President and congressional Democrats have made gains on the ballot since last September.
Key Findings
• The President’s approval and vote against Romney has surged in the battleground. Obama is now tied (with a marginal 1-point advantage) with the presumptive GOP nomi-nee. This compares favorably to the 7-point deficit he faced against Romney in these dis-tricts in December. Just 32 percent give the former governor a positive rating.
• Democrats are winning the image battle, up and down the ticket. While half of the voters in these districts register cool feelings toward the Republican Party and Republican Con-gress, the Democratic Party has enjoyed an 8-point bump in favorability since September 2011, and Democrats in Congress have seen a 7-point rise.
• Republican incumbents have not improved their vote position in the 33 districts where we have been tracking since March 2011– something you would expect from incumbents building support at home. In September, these incumbents were winning by a sizeable 14-point margin, 53-39. They now have just an 8-point lead, 49 to 41 percent, hovering just below the 50 percent threshold.
• Republican incumbents’ job approval rating is just 41 percent, and just 37 percent in the top tier of the most competitive 28 districts.
For more in-depth analysis, visit Democracy Corps.

Ed Kilgore has a post up at Political Animal, demonstrating that “voters are currently breaking down pretty much as they did in 2008.” He notes further,

In the context of a contest in which Obama is shown as leading Romney by four points (among registered voters), as compared with his seven-point win over John McCain, here are the changes in Obama’s margin from 2008 among basic demographic groups: Men: -5; Women: Even; 18-29: -6; 30-44: -2; 45-64: Even; Over 65: +2; White: -3; Black: +2; Hispanic: +4; >100k: +4; 50-100k: Even; <50k: -13; Republicans: -2; Democrats: +7; Independents: -14. Among white voters, Obama's big glaring losses as compared to 2008 are with those earning less than $50,000 (-12) and independents (-18).

As he concludes, “All in all, the partisan patterns established in 2008 have proved to be impressively durable during the Obama administration. ”

I side more with Democrats who believe that now is probably not the best time to give full vent to our internecine ideological battles, since we are about to experience an unprecedented level of Republican attacks, fueled by record-level spending. One thing we all ought to agree on: this election is the best chance the Republicans have ever had to institute a reactionary takeover of the white house, both houses of congress and Supreme Court, and create a government more extreme than anything Reagan or Goldwater thought possible. The consequences would reverberate for decades.
A majority of the Supreme Court and House of Reps are already there. But think how much worse it could get if the Republicans win the political trifecta — veto-proof domination of the executive, legislative and judicial branches. It could happen — especially if we waste energy marinating too long in our internal divisions, while the GOP juggernaut, strengthened by successful voter suppression laws, builds traction.
I don’t mean to go all chicken little — Dems have an equally good chance of holding the presidency and perhaps one house of congress. Most of the polling data, historical experience and sober punditry points to a close election. Yet we should be clear that this election is about two profoundly different directions for America, one of which points to a far more repressive society. That shouldn’t happen because Democrats were distracted by internal ideological disputes.
That’s the perspective I bring to the ongoing debate between the Democratic centrists and progressive populist wings of the Democratic party. The centrists are energized by the recent Third Way study urging a more aspirational/less class-confrontational tone in Democratic messaging. The progressive populists believe, on the contrary, that a focus on fairness in economic policy in our messaging is the key to victory.
To get up to speed on the debate, read the Third Way report, “Opportunity Trumps Fairness with Swing Independents.” Ari Berman’s “Why Economic Populism Is a Winning Strategy for Obama” at The Nation and R.J. Eskow’s HuffPo post “How “Centrist” Democrats Are Helping Conservatives – and Failing America’s Moms” provide sharp critiques of the Third Way study.
Let’s give a fair and respectful hearing to both arguments. That dialogue can help hone messaging for both camps — to defeat Republicans.

Conservatives and even some moderates are still bellyaching about the lack of bipartisanship in Washington as if it were the fault of both parties. After 3+ years of unrelenting GOP obstruction in congress, matched by President Obama’s remarkable willingness to compromise, angering his base on numerous occasions, it certainly looks like the false equivalency bipartisanship laments are directed at the low-information segment of swing voters, a.k.a the politically clueless.
I suggest directing the persuadables among them to Jonathan Chait’s post, “Why Did Obama’s Bipartisanship Fail?” at New York Magazine, which patiently makes a compelling case that Washington gridlock is rooted in the knee-jerk right.
Chait walks his readers through a depressing litany of political manipulations by the National Rifle Association as ‘exhibit A’ of conservative’s rigid inability to negotiate anything resembling a reasonable compromise. As he puts it, “Here is an example of a single-issue lobby that has gotten 100 percent of what it wanted, yet has remained implacably hostile.”
Chait cleverly dissects the political paralysis of the GOP by using criteria proposed by a conservative writer, Peter Berkowitz in The Weekly Standard: As Chait explains:

…Headlined “Supposing Obama Were a Bipartisan,” the piece conveyed a note of skepticism that the newly elected president truly would live up to his image. Berkowitz listed seven things Obama could do to prove that he actually was the bipartisan figure he presented himself to be. Here is his list, in italics, interspersed with my update:
1. Obama should defend the integrity and independence of the executive branch that he will soon head by resisting calls from congressional Democrats to pursue criminal investigations of Bush administration officials.
Done.
2. Obama should reappoint Robert Gates secretary of defense.
Done.
3. Obama’s first appointment to the Supreme Court should be a judge’s judge, a Democrat no doubt, but one who commands the respect of conservative court watchers.
This one is sort of hard to define, but Obama’s first appointment, Sonia Sotomayor, was generally described as mainstream by Republicans.
4. Obama should institute a practice of regular consultation with members of Congress, including Republicans, perhaps inviting them to the White House once a month to compare notes and exchange views.
Obama did begin his presidency by consulting with Republicans, some of them repeatedly. Obama was stunned when the GOP leadership indicated in the opening weeks of his presidency it would totally oppose any economic stimulus plan, and announced that his defeat was their top priority. Republicans would probably reply that the ideology of his agenda left them with no choice. In any case, the causes of the breakdown of the meetings simply beg the question.
5. Obama, who has touted his support for charter schools, should endorse school choice.
Done.
6. Obama should clearly state his opposition to reviving the so-called Fairness Doctrine.
If you don’t know what this one means, it was the focal point of right-wing paranoia during the initial months of the Obama presidency. Conservatives convinced themselves that Obama was planning to revive the “Fairness Doctrine” in a way designed to close down large segments of the conservative media. It was a pure fantasy, and nothing like it ever happened or was ever considered.
7. Obama should call on public universities to abolish campus speech codes and vigorously protect students’ and faculty members’ speech rights.
Obama did not do this, as far as I know. But if he had done it I don’t think anybody would have noticed. This item, the last on Berkowitz’s list, seems like an idiosyncratic list-filler. (I also hated speech codes when I was in college, but has this issue popped up at all since 2008?)

Chait adds “So it seems that, depending on how you measure things, Obama fulfilled virtually all of Berkowitz’s criteria for bipartisanship. And yet, by August of 2009, Berkowitz himself was accusing Obama of having pulled a “bait and switch.”
As Chait concludes, “It seems overwhelmingly likely that the wall of conservative rage and distrust would have been built almost regardless of what Obama did, and that conservatives would have interpreted almost any agenda he put forward through a lens of paranoia.”
After three plus years of this predictable melodrama, it appears that anyone who reads Chait’s article and still insists that both parties are equally at fault for Washington gridlock are either rigid ideologues, terminal dimwits or conflict-averse neurotics.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
In his TNR column last week, my esteemed colleague and mentor William Galston expressed one of the more regularly repeated convictions about presidential politics: Reelection campaigns are a referendum on the incumbent. As he wrote:

One of the best established findings of contemporary political science is that in presidential contests involving an incumbent, the incumbent’s record is central to the public’s judgment. A race for an open Oval Office is about promises and personalities; a campaign for reelection is about the record and performance of the person currently occupying the White House.

In other words, the results of November’s election will hinge on what voters think of Barack Obama, not what they think of Mitt Romney. But is this really true?
Judgments of the incumbent’s record are certainly central to any campaign for reelection–but so are judgments of the challenger‘s record, character, ideology, agenda or party. After all, life today looks a little better if you know that tomorrow could be worse. This argument isn’t just academic: It affects how Obama runs his campaign. Should he focus only on his own achievements? Or should he emphasize Romney’s failings and the agenda of the G.O.P.?
It turns out that political science is not an infallible guide to this particular subject. The sample size of recent presidential reelections is limited, and the most recent, in 2004, cut against the “referendum” hypothesis, and the closely associated belief that undecided voters will break sharply against incumbents late in the election cycle. The 2004 election also showed that drawing attention to doubts about the challenger is not always a waste of time–it certainly wasn’t for George W. Bush. Arguably, 1996 was similar: The Clinton campaign spent the early stages of the cycle feeding on negative perceptions of the opposition party.
A more nuanced version of the referendum hypothesis holds that challengers to even the weakest incumbents must cross some threshold of credibility before achieving victory. Take 1980, one of the prior elections that is often cited by both supporters and doubters of the referendum hypothesis. The contest between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan was very close until Reagan, in that contest’s sole televised debate, famously asked, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Reagan was urging voters to make the election a referendum, just as Carter, in the same debate, was urging them to choose between two different agendas for the future. (If, of course, presidential re-elections are automatically referenda, then Reagan’s peroration would have been unnecessary and irrelevant.) Reagan’s entreaty ultimately won out, of course–but it did not necessarily have to be so. Even 1980 was, in an important respect, a “comparative” election. Jimmy Carter was a famously wounded incumbent representing a deeply divided party, and (towards the end of the cycle) bleeding support to a third-party candidate as well. That set the threshold for Reagan quite low, but he still had to achieve a certain level of credibility and approval to win. His campaign message and debate performance satisfied that criterion, overcoming Carter’s efforts to describe him as an extremist.
If economic conditions–or, for that matter, the perceived security and status of the United States–deteriorate to the levels bedeviling Carter in 1980, then the threshold Mitt Romney must cross to win may well be very low. But it still exists, and with Romney’s favorability ratings–and just as importantly, those of his party–at perilously low rates, Democrats would be foolish not to keep them as low as possible. And if, as is presently more likely, objective conditions in the country improve at a modest rate, then all sorts of factors could be decisive: including the populist “base mobilization” efforts that Galston cautions against, the arguable responsibility of past Republican administration and current Republicans members of Congress for poor economic conditions, and yes, comparisons of the two futures offered by the candidates.
Interestingly enough, just as Galston is warning Democrats not to ignore the “referendum” hypothesis, a smart Republican commentator, National Review‘s Ramesh Ponnuru, has warned Republicans not to rely on it. Ponnuru cites 2004 as a precedent, suggesting that partisan polarization has changed the usual dynamics:

The strategic insight of the Bush re-election campaign in 2004 was that times had changed. The nation was divided 50-50 between the parties. The number of committed partisans had increased, and the number of true swing voters — as opposed to voters who say they are independent but reliably vote for one party — had shrunk. In a polarized country, no president could hope to achieve high approval ratings for very long.

It followed, though, that a president could win re-election even with approval ratings that would once have spelled doom. In a 50-50 America, every presidential election was a choice between the incumbent and the challenger and not just a referendum on the incumbent. If voters who didn’t approve of the incumbent could be persuaded to prefer him to the challenger, the incumbent would win.

That was Bush’s game plan. Republicans portrayed Kerry as an effete liberal who would raise taxes and wouldn’t assert the national interest. They didn’t try to persuade Americans that Bush had been a terrific president or even that Kerry was unpresidential. They just made the case that Bush was better than the alternative.

When they had to contemplate a choice between Bush and Kerry, some voters found themselves starting to approve of the president by comparison: At the end of February 2004, when Kerry locked up the nomination, Bush’s approval rating was at 44 percent in the RealClearPolitics average of polls. By Election Day, it had climbed five points.

Bush did not win in a landslide. In fact, no president has ever won re-election with a lower percentage of the major-party vote. But win he did. (Then, with Kerry out of the picture, Bush’s numbers resumed falling.)

If Ponnuru’s analysis is correct (and I see no reason why it isn’t), then the hyper-polarized atmosphere of 2012 may be even less conducive to a referendum.
In any event, as Galston himself notes cogently, Obama is not entirely the “master of his own fate.” There is only so much he can do to make life happier for Americans between now and November, and other actors, including the Iranian regime and the U.S. Supreme Court, could have an important impact on the dynamics of the election. So what is Team Obama to do? Certainly it should make every effort to defend the president’s record. But campaigns must work with the material at hand. Given the behavior of the GOP during the Obama administration, the ideological agenda it has foisted on its nominee, and the characteristics that have made that nominee such a hard sell to his own party, a strong “comparative”–or if you insist, negative–campaign against Romney is both wise and inevitable.

The following article by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
There is a new study out by a pair of political scientists saying that the current Republican caucuses in Congress are the most conservative in a hundred years. I think they are underestimating.
The 1911-12 congressional Republicans, after all, at least had some Teddy Roosevelt Republicans still in the Congress, so while a distinct minority, the party had some reformers and moderates in their caucuses. No, I think you would have to go back into the 1800s, into the Republican Congress swept into power with William McKinley’s 1896 election, to find a party as thoroughly reactionary as this one. This is somehow appropriate, because these Republicans clearly do want to repeal the 20th century. Starting with the early Progressive movement reforms Teddy Roosevelt got accomplished, the tea party GOP is trying to roll back all the progress our country has seen over the last century plus.
Let’s go back to those late 1890s Republicans — who they were, what they believed, how they operated. This was the heart of the era dominated by Social Darwinists and Robber Baron industrialists, and the McKinley presidency was the peak of those forces’ power. The Robber Barons were hiring the Pinkertons to (literally) murder union leaders, and were (literally) buying off elected officials to get whatever they wanted out of the government: money for bribery was openly allocated in yearly corporate budgets. These huge corporate trusts were working hand in hand with their worshipful friends in the Social Darwinist world, the 1800s version of Ayn Rand, who taught that if you were rich, it was because that was the way nature meant things to be — and if you were poor, you deserved to be. Any exploitation, any greed, any concentration of wealth was justified by a survival of the strongest ethic. It was an era where Lincoln’s and the Radical Republicans of the 1860s’ progressive idea of giving land away free to poor people who wanted to work hard to be independent farmers through the Homestead Act was being overturned by big bank and railroad trusts ruthlessly driving millions of family farmers out of business. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act was being completely ignored by McKinley. And of course, none of the advances of the 20th century were yet in place: child labor laws, consumer safety, the national parks or later environmental laws, consumer safety, popular election of Senators, women’s suffrage, a progressive tax system, decent labor laws, a minimum wage, Social Security, Glass-Steagall, the GI Bill, civil rights laws, Medicare, Medicaid, Legal Services, Head Start. None of it existed.
Flash forward to today. With the exception of women’s suffrage (and given the gender gap, I have no doubt that secretly Republicans would be happy to get rid of that), various high-level Republicans from this session of Congress have argued for the repeal or severe curtailment of all of those advances. This is not just Conservative with a capital C, but Reactionary with a capital R.
This is why the worship by so many pundits and establishment figures of bipartisanship and meeting in the middle as the all-around best value in American politics is so fundamentally wrong as a political strategy for Democrats. With the Republicans in Congress actually wanting to repeal the gains of the 20th century, for Democrats to meet them halfway becomes a nightmare strategy. Repealing half of the 20th century is just not a reasonable compromise, even though that would be meeting the Republicans halfway. What we need to do instead is to propose our own bold strategy for how to move forward and solve the really big problems we have. Our country needs to have this debate, and I am confident once people understand the two alternatives, they will choose our path forward rather than the Republicans’ path backward.
Ultimately, this is a debate about values. Conservatives believe in that old Social Darwinist philosophy: whoever has money and power got that way because nature intended it, and they ought to get to keep everything they have and to hell with anyone not strong to make it on their own. Selfishness is a virtue, as Ayn Rand said; greed is good, as Gordon Gekko proclaimed in the movie Wall Street; in nature, the lions eat the weak, as Glenn Beck happily proclaimed to a cheering audience. That is the underlying ethic of the Ryan-Romney Budget. What progressives argue is the opposite: that we really are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers; that we should treat others as we would want to be treated, and give a helping hand to those who need it; that investing in our citizens and promoting a broadly prosperous middle class that is growing because young people and poor people are given the tools to climb the ladder into it is the key to making a better society and growing economy.
The debate is well worth having. The good news is that the Republicans are hardly shying away from it: by embracing this radically retrograde Ryan-Romney Budget, they are wearing their hearts on their sleeves and openly yearning to return to 1896. The Democrats should welcome this debate with open arms.

Mark Schmitt, who has been monitoring the depradations of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) over several election cycles, has an instructive post up at TNR about their influence. Schmitt’s post, “A Surprisingly Effective New Path to Neutralizing the Political Influence of Big Business” should provide some encouragement to Dems, who are interested in exploring some less traditional paths to check the GOP’s corporate funders.

In the past, progressives have responded by trying to create a “counter-ALEC,” a network of progressive and moderate state legislators, though they’ve never quite reached the necessary scale. (I served on the board of one such counter-ALEC, the Center for Policy Alternatives, which dissolved in 2008.) And they’ve tried various means to expose ALEC’s operations to scrutiny, publicizing its role in drafting and promoting model legislation at the state level, and its funding by the now-notorious Koch brothers. This time, progressives tried a new tactic, encouraging a boycott of the mainstream corporations that fund ALEC. And it seems to have worked: Coca-Cola, Kraft, Wendy’s, and several other large corporations on ALEC’s “Private Enterprise Board” announced they would drop their support of the organization.

Schmitt goes on to argue that the boycott threat compelled companies to rethink whether they really wanted to sub-contract out their lobbying efforts to benefit their companies to an organization that was more obsessed with extremist ideological crusades.

A number of those donors seem to have decided that, faced with even modest amounts of negative publicity, the access provided by ALEC wasn’t worth the price of being associated with political positions they didn’t want to publicly endorse. Far from “intimidation,” what the boycott threat did was force the companies to make a more careful, deliberate choice about what kind of political speech it actually wanted to support and put its reputation behind.

As Schmitt explains, it’s really about understanding the psychology of corporate decision-making:

…Corporate political giving is not typically about political speech, or trying to change the actual outcome of elections. It’s about access to the elected officials, whoever they are. What organizations like ALEC do is sell access, which they in turn use to promote a broader range of conservative causes. Boycotts and shareholder activism can break that pattern–not by intimidation, as conservatives suggest, but by forcing the decision out of the hands of the lobbyists alone and into higher levels of the company. A similar tactic was developed by The Center for Political Accountability, which uses shareholder resolutions to encourage companies to disclose their political giving. More than 100 companies have agreed to disclosure, but much of the value comes not just from disclosure, but from forcing companies to consider at a high level whether the organizations they are supporting really reflect the values the company wants to express.

Schmitt acknowledges that “ALEC will survive, with fewer donors and perhaps less of the sheen of a mainstream organization,” but adds that “the apparent success of the ALEC boycott has revealed an untapped path toward rebalancing the power of money in American politics.”
As Jason Easely puts it at Politicus USA, “In an incredible display of the power of boycotts, it only took 5 hours for ColorofChange to get Coca-Cola to stop supporting ALEC…One of the reasons ALEC has been successful is that it wasn’t until the last few years that the left started to expose them. All of these stealth threats to democracy need to operate out of the public view…The power of the boycott should never be doubted..”

Today begins the great tax battle, simplistically pitched as “The Buffett Rule” vs. Eric Cantor’s tax plan. Associated Press’s Alan Fram has a pretty good stage-setter, noting that “neutral economists” say neither plan does much for the economy or job-creation. But “The Buffett rule is clearly popular. An Associated Press-GfK poll in February showed that nearly 2 in 3 favor a 30 percent tax for those making $1 million annually, including most Democrats and independents and even 4 in 10 Republicans.”
Just to show you how moderate the “Buffett Rule” is compared to progressive proposals elsewhere, Barrie Mckenna reports on the Globe and Mail that “François Hollande is leading France’s presidential race with a promise to slap a 75-per-cent levy on everyone earning more than €1-million ($1.3-million).”
McKenna also reports that up in Canada, where 80 percent of voters want a tax hike on the rich, the Ontario New Liberal party’s Andrea Horwath is proposing a 2 percent tax hike on people earning $500,000 or more, and a conservative spokesman, Jim Doak of Megantic Asset Management, likens it to “ethnic cleansing,” whining “It’s nasty…She’s defined a group, not by culture or by language, but by how much money it makes, and she wants to get rid of them.”
President Obama has a big lead in the quest for electoral votes, 242 to 188 for the Republican nominee, according to the Associated Press. The AP says 9 states with 104 electoral votes (FL, CO, IA, NH, NM, NV, NC, OH, and VA) will likely decide the election. David Jackson’s USA Today post has one-graph run-downs for each of the nine states.
WaPo’s Chris Cillizza also sees nine swing states, but would substitute WI for NM in the AP’s list. Cillizza adds, “There’s no doubt that the 2012 playing field will be narrower than the one Obama dominated in 2008. But the president still retains far more flexibility than Romney in building a map that adds up to 270 electoral votes.”
L.A. Times political reporter Mark Z. Barabak says about a dozen states are still in play.
But the Obama campaign is betting on a state that made none of the lists, Arizona. As Adam Nagourney reports in the new York Times, “Obama strategists are simply following the same techniques they used in 2008 when putting states like North Carolina and Indiana into play. Then, too, there was much initial skepticism, though both states ended up going for Mr. Obama…This is in no small part because of the increase in Latino populations and a series of legislative efforts aimed at immigration — with the Republican governor and state Legislature of Arizona leading the way — that polls suggest have created a backlash among many Latino voters.”
Michael Tomasky talks sense at The Daily Beast about the Ann Romney-Hilary Rosen tea-pot tempest. Noting that most of America’s 5.6 million stay-at-home moms do so because of economic necessity, he adds “…I doubt pretty strongly that they identify much with Ann Romney or are rallying to her husband’s cause.”
Chris Cilliza and Aaaron Blake make an instructive point about “How YouTube and Twitter are hurting Mitt Romney.” They explain: “Ten years ago (or even maybe five years ago), the ability for anyone to quickly and easily upload video and share it was nonexistent. Finding quotes — or images — from candidates in obscure places or at anything other than sanctioned campaign events was virtually impossible…Given those limitations, it was far easier for candidates to put their primary rhetoric behind them when they became the nominee. To call them on their past contradictions involved a) finding some tape (audio or video) of their remarks, b) convincing a news operation to run it, and c) hope that average voters saw the report. All of those barriers have now fallen. ”
Thomas B. Edsall has a column at the NYT “Let the Nanotargeting Begin,” which takes an interesting look at which media and products are favored by each party’s voters. Among the fun observations: “The top-ten Republican-tilted shows are “The Office,” “Rules of Engagement,” “The Mentalist,” “New Yankee Workshop,” “The Big Bang Theory,” “Castle,” “Desperate Housewives,” “Dancing With The Stars,” “The Biggest Loser,” and “Grey’s Anatomy.” The top ten most Democratic-leaning shows are “Washington Week,” “Tavis Smiley,” “Late Show with David Letterman,” “The View,” “PBS NewsHour,” “NOW” on PBS, “House of Payne,” “ABC World News Now,” “60 Minutes” and “Insider Weekend.”
Self-described “liberal” Chris Mooney, author of author of “The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science — and Reality,” opines that “Liberals and conservatives don’t just vote differently. They think differently” at the Washington Post. A 3,500+ comment donnybrook ensues.

The Republicans just can’t get any mainstream traction with their tired meme equating fairness in taxation and the ‘Buffett rule’ with ‘class warfare.’ It’s not a big mystery why, as TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira explains in his new ‘Public Opinion Snapshot‘:

Probably what bothers conservatives the most is that the Buffett rule is so damn popular. In a March Ipsos-Reuters poll, an overwhelming 64-30 majority said they favored the rule.

Teixeira notes that “conservatives have spent a lot of energy–joined by some political commentators–arguing that the whole idea of fairness is misguided, vaguely un-American, and against our country’s rugged individualism.” But few are buying it, adds Teixeira:

…A just-released ABC/Washington Post poll found that 52 percent of Americans believe unfairness in the economic system that favors the wealthy is the bigger problem in the country compared to 37 percent who believe overregulation of the free market that interferes with growth and prosperity is the bigger problem.

As Teixeira concludes, “Conservatives better get used to it. Fairness is here to stay in the public debate and, so far, they’re on the wrong side.”