The following post is by Alan I. Abramowitz, author of The Polarized Public:
For the past 8 months, Rasmussen has consistently found more Republicans than Democrats in its national party id polling and that’s among adults, not likely voters or registered voters. They’re virtually alone in this regard and well off of the overall polling average which has a D lead of about 7 points with Rasmussen removed.
Do we need any more proof of Rasmussen’s Republican slant? This isn’t just a “house effect.” Rasmussen is a shill for the Republican Party as is clear from the wording of many of the questions he asks as well as his results. For more evidence, see Nate Silver’s 2010 polling post-mortem in which Rasmussen received the worst rating of any major polling organization for accuracy and bias:
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/04/rasmussen-polls-were-biased-and-inaccurate-quinnipiac-surveyusa-performed-strongly/
As in 2010, Rasmussen is “flooding the zone” by releasing numerous state and national polls, thereby strongly influencing polling averages because of the frequency of his polls and their outlier results.

The following article by Mike Lux, author of The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Sometimes candidates running for office say especially ridiculous things, but the conventional wisdom crowd doesn’t even notice because it sounds like something they already assume to be true. Mitt Romney’s statement on Wednesday that the Obama administration had pursued the “most anti-investment, anti-business, anti-jobs series of policies in modern American history” is the ultimate example of this.
Mitt Romney shouts from the rooftops how pro-business he is, but here’s the deal: he is only pro-certain kinds of business. His policies, whose only differences with George W. Bush’s policies are that Romney’s are more extreme, are lavish in being supportive of the biggest banks and his old pals in the leveraged buyout world; the biggest fossil fuel energy companies; big insurance and pharmaceutical companies; the biggest defense contractors; the companies who dominate certain industries like retail and agribusiness. Romney is pro-incumbent businesses who are already big and wealthy and powerful, and pro-financial sector businesses who make money off of financial speculation and tax loopholes. But that’s pretty much it. For the 200 or so big conglomerates in those categories, he is all for them.
But for all the small businesses that got destroyed in the wake of bank collapse caused by financial speculation, he’s no help at all. For the small community banks and credit unions competing with the Too Big To Fail banks, he has nothing to say. For green jobs companies fighting to compete with oil and coal companies and all the solar, wind, and conservation industries being created in China and Europe, Romney will not lift a finger. For the small retailers trying to compete with Wal-Mart, there will be no targeted help of any kind. For independent bookstores and publishing houses trying to survive Amazon’s anti-competitive practices, there will be no relief at all. The auto industry and their suppliers would be gone if Romney had been president these last four years. U.S. steel and rubber companies would have been decimated. Home construction companies and realtors would just have wait to let the housing market “hit bottom,” and would continue to be decimated in the meantime.
And in community after community, all those local businesses who survive because teachers and cops and firefighters and road construction workers have jobs and the money to come in and buy things would be out of business. As entrepreneur Nick Hanauer said so brilliantly, it isn’t the rich people who create the jobs, it is the middle-class people who are their customers, and in Mitt Romney’s economy, a whole lot less of them would have jobs. That is not pro-business.
The contrast between President Obama’s speech and Mitt Romney’s economic speeches yesterday could not have been clearer. Romney believes in siding with the incumbents — the most powerful businesses who make money because they dominate the marketplace and because their lobbyists and their political money get them extra tax breaks and subsidies they can manipulate. Romney wants the wealthy people and businesses at the top to stay firmly and permanently planted at the top of the heap, and give them ever more tax cuts and loopholes and subsidies from our government. Obama’s speech made clear that his vision of the future is more firmly planted on the side of growing the middle class and helping up and coming entrepreneurs rather than just the incumbents. And it was Obama who made the decision to save the American auto industry and the hundreds of thousands of small businesses who supply parts and sell those cars and have autoworkers as customers. It was Obama who is pro-solar and wind and energy conservation. It is Obama who wants to expand broadband internet access, which could create millions of new jobs all across the country. It is Obama whose stimulus bill and fiscal relief for state and local governments that has created or saved the jobs and customers that kept hundreds of thousands of local businesses alive.
Both Romney and Obama have businesses that they are for helping, but the number of businesses in Romney’s case is so much smaller, because he wants to help only the biggest, wealthiest, and most politically powerful. Obama is pro-business, the difference being that the number of businesses he is working to help is a whole lot bigger.
As weak as our economy is right now, Romney’s version of economics would break us, causing a depression as millions more people get laid off, millions more homes get foreclosed, and a few powerful banks and companies rob the rest of us blind. That isn’t pro-business, it’s pro-economic collapse.

Commenting on all of the Hoo Ha surrounding President Obama’s recent remarks about the private sector doing fine, Brendan Nyan’s post “Do campaign gaffes matter? Not to voters” at the Columbia Journalism Review makes a few excellent points, including:

…Journalists routinely promote the importance of these sorts of pseudo-controversies, even though there is little convincing evidence that gaffes affect presidential election outcomes…there is no evidence that the president has been damaged by the incident thus far. As Emory’s Alan Abramowitz pointed out by email, Obama’s job approval and trial heat numbers against Romney have not declined since the press conference…
…When we compare Obama’s approval from the three days before the “doing fine” statement to the three days afterward, we see that the proportion of Americans who approve of the job he is doing actually increases from 46% to 49%. Without further calculations, it’s not clear whether such a change is statistically significant given the margin of error on the polls, but the result is certainly inconsistent with the notion that the president has been hurt by the statement.

And it’s not about President Obama having Reaganesque teflon. It’s more that negative ads don’t seem to have much lasting impact, as Nyhan explains:

…Negative ads are indeed the most likely way that Republicans might try to make the quote salient in the fall. The problem, however, is that evidence for the effectiveness of negative ads is quite limited. The best experimental evidence suggests that the effects of television advertising decay quickly. Moreover, as Georgetown University political scientist Jonathan Ladd pointed out on Twitter, the relevant question is whether ads (or speeches or commentary) that exploit gaffes are more persuasive than the material Republicans would otherwise have used. How much will it matter if a Romney ad quotes the “doing fine” statement or, say, criticizes the stimulus or healthcare reform instead?

Same seems to go for presidential candidate gaffes, says Nyhan:

One way to evaluate the claim that gaffes affect election outcomes is by considering recent history. Indeed, Cillizza cites two examples as evidence in his most recent piece (the second was also cited by Tumulty): John Kerry’s March 2004 statement that “I actually did vote for the $87 billion [to fund military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan] before I voted against it,” and John McCain’s statement, in the early stages of the financial crisis in September 2008, that “the fundamentals of our economy are strong.” However, it’s not at all clear that the statements in question were the reason that the campaigns turned out as they did, rather than the winning candidates’ underlying advantages in the campaign fundamentals. Both George W. Bush in 2004 and Obama in 2008 performed approximately as well as election forecasting models expected, which suggests that these campaign events had limited influence.
Moreover, the effect of gaffes is not always clear even when they take place in high-profile presidential debates. As UNC political scientist James Stimson points out in his book Tides of Consent, Gerald Ford actually gained ground on Jimmy Carter after a widely-criticized gaffe in which he falsely said Eastern Europe was not dominated by the Soviet Union during a 1976 debate.

Nyhan argues “the biggest reason that gaffes are perpetually hyped by the media in the absence of evidence that they matter to voters–is that, despite all the cutbacks in journalism, too many reporters are chasing too few stories at this point in the presidential campaign…”
In concluding, Nyhan asks an excellent question: “Why not devote more resources to investigations, enterprise stories, and down-ballot races, and reduce the number of reporters covering the minutiae of the presidential campaign? We, the readers, will be just fine without them.” Amen.

Ed Kilgore sets the stage at The Washington Monthly for President Obama’s “reboot” speech today in bellwether Ohio: “A “reboot” isn’t needed because of the “private sector is fine” gaffe or the alleged rebellion of the Clintonites or the sudden bullishness on Romney on Wall Street or any of the other snail’s-eye-view crap we’ve been hearing the last week or so. It’s needed to reflect a full commitment by the Obama campaign to a comparative message…”
Has Obama’s message been too complex? Michael Finnegan argues that it is in the L.A. Times: “But when it comes to the core message that each candidate is trying to get across in TV ads and campaign appearances, Romney has boiled it down to a simple argument. Obama has not…Blaming Obama is indeed the premise of Romney’s argument, along with a promise to create jobs by shrinking government…Obama’s counter-argument is layered with nuance and complexity.”
In their Common Dreams post, “Wisconsin Blues” (via Reader Supported News), George Lakoff and Elisabeth Wehling have some framing advice for progressives in the wake of the WI Recall: “What progressives need to do is clear. To people who have mixed values – partly progressive, partly conservative – talk progressive values in progressive language, thus strengthening progressive moral views in their brains. Never move to the right thinking you’ll get more cooperation that way…Start telling deep truths out loud all day every day: Democracy is about citizens caring about each other. The Public is necessary for The Private. Pensions are delayed earnings for work already done; eliminating them is theft. Unions protect workers from corporate exploitation – low salaries, no job security, managerial threats, and inhumane working conditions. Public schools are essential to opportunity, and not just financially: they provide the opportunity to make the most of students’ skills and interests. They are also essential to democracy, since democracy requires an educated citizenry at large…”
Aaron Blake’s post, “House GOP previews fall ad strategy ” at The Fix is more about how much the NRCC is spending on campaign ads and where than on message content.
In similar vein, Dave Nyczepir reports on “5 media markets already flooded with ads” at Campaigns & Elections.
Also at WaPo, Paul Farhi asks “Presidential campaign ads are ubiquitous, but do they work?” Farhi notes, “John Kerry and his Democratic allies ran almost 200,000 more commercials than George W. Bush did in 2004 and lost in a close election. On the other hand, Obama had a narrower advertising advantage over Sen. John McCain in 2008 and won relatively easily.”
In his L.A. Times article, “Arizona shows Democrats’ strength, weakness on retirement programs,” Dan Turner has a different take on Rob Barber’s win in AZ: “If there’s a less obvious takeaway from the Arizona election, it might have something to do with Social Security and Medicare. Republicans grumble that their candidate, Jesse Kelly, who lost to Giffords in a narrow contest in 2010, failed this time around only because Barber was the emotional favorite…but the fact remains that the district in question has a comfortable GOP majority and Barber was heavily outspent. Meanwhile, the major area of difference between the two candidates concerned Medicare and Social Security, and it would be tough to deny that Kelly’s hard-line stance on privatizing these federal entitlement programs scared off many of the district’s elderly voters of both parties.”
At National Journal’s ‘Hotline on Call,’ Sean Sullivan adds: “The early vote accounted for about 75 percent of the total vote in Arizona on Tuesday, a disparity the Barber campaign anticipated, given recent voter patterns. In 2010, Gabrielle Giffords won the early vote but lost the Election Day tally. The same thing happened to Kelly in the special election primary this year.”
Fun stat of the day: Romney tanking in his three home states.

Nate Cohn reports at The New Republic that “Obama’s Problem With White, Non-College Educated Voters is Getting Worse“:

…over the last four years, Obama’s already tepid support among white voters without a college degree has collapsed….Since February, 25 state and national polls from Quinnipiac and Pew Research disaggregated Obama’s standing against Romney by educational attainment. The dataset has weaknesses, as the Quinnipiac state polls sample six somewhat unrepresentative East Coast states. Even so, the degree of consistency across the six states and the six national polls is striking: Of the 25 polls, 22 show a larger drop-off among non-college educated white voters.
On average, Obama has lost nearly 6 percentage points among white voters without a college degree. Given that Obama had already lost millions of traditionally Democratic white working class voters in 2008, this degree of further deterioration is striking. In the three national polls conducted since April, Obama held just 34 percent of white voters without a college degree, compared to 40 percent in 2008. Thirty-four percent places Obama in the company of Walter Mondale, George McGovern, and the 2010 House Democrats. These are landslide numbers.

Cohn reports that the same polls show Obama holding his own with educated white voters. He adds, “If Obama’s enduring strength among educated and non-white voters keeps Obama competitive in traditionally Republican states like Virginia and North Carolina, but Romney doesn’t get his end of the bargain in Democratic-but-white-working-class states like Wisconsin, the electoral map starts to look a lot better for Obama.
Moreover, notes Cohn, Romney is having trouble sealing the deal with less educated white voters. “In all but one of the 25 polls, less educated whites were more likely to be undecided than college educated whites. In the six national polls, 5 percent of college educated whites were undecided compared to 9 percent of whites without a college degree.”
As for messaging, Cohn sees Romney’s image as a potent Obama asset. “Depicting Romney as a plutocratic corporate raider seems likely to resonate with working class voters, especially since many traditionally have voted for Democratic presidential candidates.”

Tired of all the campaign 2012 jabber? Take a peek at America’s longer-range (12 year horizon) political future at Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, where some of America’s top political visionaries share their insights in a forum on “Decision 2024: Our Parties, Our Politics.”
Included in the forum are: “Demography and Its Discontents” by Ruy Teixeira; “Can the GOP Evolve?” by David Frum; “The Browning of America” by Gary Segura; “The Center Must Hold” by Christine Todd Whitman; “Yes, Labels!” by Nancy L. Rosenblum; “The Millennials Grow Up” by Andrew Baumann & Anna Greenberg; “The Importance of Philosophy” by Felicia Wong; and “The Coming Resource Wars” by Kevin Drum.
A couple of teasers from the editors’ introduction:

…Being Democracy, we told them not simply to tell us–and you–that this demographic would have more electoral power, or that interest group might shift allegiances. We asked them all to describe the impact such changes would have on governance and policy-making.
Electoral demographer Ruy Teixiera, one of the country’s leading experts in this field, espies a progressive opportunity created by new demographic realities–but only if we shift our economic policy priorities from security to opportunity. The writer David Frum sees a Republican opportunity in the years ahead, but only if the party becomes more like conservative parties in other countries. Gary Segura of Stanford argues that that the growing Latino population will move our politics to the left and force the GOP to make some tough choices…Pollsters Andrew Baumann and Anna Greenberg take up the issue of young voters and find that while they are in general more liberal and will shift our politics leftward, they may well force the Democrats to change their posture on a bedrock progressive issue. Felicia Wong of the Roosevelt Institute worries that the middle class will keep sinking, and calls on progressives to articulate first principles more effectively to keep that from happening.

As pivotal as the 2012 elections are to America’s future, it’s also important that we mine the insights of the nation’s more perceptive political visionaries about the longer haul. This Democracy forum is a good start.

This article by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Everyone who watches politics pretty much agrees that last week was Obama’s roughest week yet in this campaign, and I am not going to argue that point for a moment. But I see some potential silver linings in the mess that was last week, one of which may well be seen after this election as the most important messaging turning point in this campaign. If Obama and his team take the right lesson from last week, they will put themselves on a course toward victory.
I see two smaller rays of light, and one potential very big one. In terms of the first, I hope last week definitively ends the over-confidence factor among Democrats. Given how embarrassing the GOP primary process was, all the mistakes Romney has already made, and all the talk from the campaign about the five paths to Electoral College victory, a lot of Democrats have been making the mistake of being relaxed about this campaign, which is crazy when you look at the economy. A wake-up call, especially now as opposed to having a rough week in September, is exactly what the doctor ordered for my fellow Democrats. Romney is still a terrible candidate who is completely out of touch with middle-class voters, but in this economy that factor alone will not win this race.
The second silver lining is that all the talk about Bain that has resulted from pro-Wall-Street Democrats attacking the Obama team for daring to criticize how a Wall-Street firm makes its money is keeping the issue alive. The more people talk about Bain, the more curious voters are about what all the controversy is about, and the better for Obama. If people take time to learn how Bain made its money — sweetheart deals, tax loopholes, loading companies up with debt and siphoning off their profits, slashing jobs and wages and benefits — the more they will understand that Mitt Romney is not who we want as president. As irritated as I am with Clinton and other Democrats, they are keeping the issue in the news, which is good for us.
The biggest silver lining, though, might be because of the president’s worst mistake last week. I can tell you that as someone who has been arguing vociferously for months now that the president should stop saying the economy is getting better, my heart sank when I heard him say his line about the private sector being fine, and I immediately knew it would become the subject of innumerable Republican attacks. The silver lining is this is that perhaps the reaction to this mistake will finally convince the Obama campaign that they are playing with fire when they try to make the argument that the economy is getting better. As a recent Democracy Corps memo eloquently puts it:
It is elites who are creating a conventional wisdom that an incumbent president must run on his economic performance — and therefore must convince voters that things are moving in the right direction. They are wrong, and that will fail. The voters are very sophisticated about the character of the economy; they know who is mainly responsible for what went wrong and they are hungry to hear the President talk about the future. They know we are in a new normal where life is a struggle — and convincing them that things are good enough for those who have found jobs is a fool’s errand. They want to know the plans for making things better in a serious way — not just focused on finishing up the work of the recovery.
It has been clear to me for some time in looking at all kinds of polling and focus-group data that voters are way ahead of the elites about the nature of this economy. The middle-class voters who will help decide this election understand to the bottom of their toes that this economy is not just in a typical downturn, that something big, fundamental, and historic is going on. They feel every day the way the middle class is getting hammered, and they are coming closer and closer to becoming less “middle-income” and more “low-income.” They are far less worried than elites about the month-to-month upticks and downticks of an economy in deep trouble. And they know the problem isn’t so much the politicians as the wealthy and powerful economic special interests that are pulling the strings.
In this context, it makes no sense for the Obama campaign to keep arguing that things really aren’t as bad as they seem, or that things are getting better. Presidents and the people close to them always feel a need to do that, but in this context, it just doesn’t work. What does is to be straight with the American people, fully acknowledging the pain they are feeling and making it clear that their instinct is right, that the economy is in a deep hole because of decades of having our priorities screwed up. We are at a make or break for the future of America’s middle class, and we need to put government back on the side of that middle class. Here’s the paragraph Greenberg tested in the DCorps focus groups that worked the best:
We’ve got to do everything possible to get people back to work. Unemployment is too high and we know that new jobs pay less and offer fewer benefits. It is really a struggle. That’s why we have to address not just the recovery but the fact that the middle class has taken it all on the chin for years and that’s got to change. We’ve been exporting American industries and outsourcing American jobs. The cause of healthcare, college, groceries and gasoline keep going up but the middle class can’t catch a break. They’ve taken on more debt and can’t save for education or retirement. At the same time, Wall Street’s big banks and the richest got big tax breaks and oil industry got special interest subsidies. This election is about the future of the middle class. We will put tax rates for those earning over $200,000 back up to where it was under President Clinton, eliminate special interest subsidies and cut our deficits over the long term. We have to protect retirement by securing Social Security and Medicare, expand support for education, training and innovation, American industries and make college affordable. We need an America where the middle class can proper again.
We are going to be seeing Obama’s private-sector-doing-fine quotation over and over in Republican TV ads. But if the president and his team internalize why people are reacting so negatively to what he said and pivot decisively away from the things-are-getting-better message and toward a message about fighting for the middle class in historically bad times, this week will ironically come to be seen as the turning point that headed President Obama toward reelection.

The following memo is cross-posted from Democracy Corps.
What is clear from this fresh look at public consciousness on the economy is how difficult this period has been for both non-college-educated and college-educated voters – and how vulnerable the prevailing narratives articulated by national Democratic leaders are.[1] We will face an impossible headwind in November if we do not move to a new narrative, one that contextualizes the recovery but, more importantly, focuses on what we will do to make a better future for the middle class.
It is elites who are creating a conventional wisdom that an incumbent president must run on his economic performance – and therefore must convince voters that things are moving in the right direction. They are wrong, and that will fail. The voters are very sophisticated about the character of the economy; they know who is mainly responsible for what went wrong and they are hungry to hear the President talk about the future. They know we are in a new normal where life is a struggle – and convincing them that things are good enough for those who have found jobs is a fool’s errand. They want to know the plans for making things better in a serious way – not just focused on finishing up the work of the recovery.
We are losing these voters on the economy, but holding on because Romney is very vulnerable. They do not trust him because of who he is for and because he’s out of touch with ordinary people; he is vulnerable on the Ryan budget and its impact on people; he is vulnerable on the choices over taxes. But in the current context, it produces a fairly diminished embrace of Obama and the Democrats, the lesser of two evils, without much feeling of hope.
But we underscore the sentiment they expressed in the postcards to the President they wrote at the end of the exercise: overwhelmingly, these voters want to know that he understands the struggle of working families and has plans to make things better.
With the economy faltering, we conducted fairly open-ended focus groups among white non-college-educated voters in Columbus, Ohio and college-educated suburban voters in suburban Philadelphia. We excluded strong partisans from both camps. These were all independents or weak partisans and ticket-splitters–swing independent voters–and the groups included an even mix of 2008 Obama and McCain voters.
Job losses have left them struggling to pay the bills.
The discussion always begins with discussion of their experience with job losses for themselves and their families — and how that has left them struggling to pay for groceries. Most have jobs now, but speak about their lower wages and benefits. Because wages are down, there has been a dramatic rise in discussion of very basic pocketbook issues. And this does not seem like some passing phase.
This has not been a pocketbook-level recovery for ordinary Americans. This is especially true for non-college-educated voters, who have been uniquely hit by this economy. They, their families, and people they know are on food stamps, on unemployment, and on disability.
We’ve had a lot of layoffs in our family and my husband just got over that. He drew unemployment for a year and a half. (Non-college-educated woman, Columbus, OH)
I had to go in for hernia surgery on Friday. I’m unemployed, you know it’s expensive, they don’t care. Nobody cares. (Non-college-educated man, Columbus, OH)
They have trouble finding work that will pay the bills. And for many older workers, it is difficult to find work at all.
I’m getting paid $7.70 an hour …I’m 53 years old…If I want a job, that’s what I’ve got to do. And actually… I’m having problems trying to get a full-time job because people are looking at it and saying, you know, we’ve only got a couple years. Most companies are looking and saying, we probably got a couple good years out of you, possibly less, that’s about it. And I mean, they all – used to be the laws were there that says, actually, you’re supposed to get two, 10-minute breaks… and a half hour lunch. Laws have changed now, companies don’t have to give that… And they’re working us to the bone. It’s like, wow, we’re back in the 1900s, you know…Because you’re just slave labor, you know. (Non-college-educated man, Columbus, OH)
Things are really tough, I’m self-employed, I’m just drumming up work and it’s just, like, living, like, from pay to pay, from job to job. And you know, I can’t buy things for my kids or my grandkids like I – like I was before. And it upsets me, because you know, come Christmas time and stuff like that, their birthdays and stuff like that, you know, I can’t give them what I want to get them. (Non-college-educated man, Columbus, OH).

Read more…

In my June 8 post on “The Recall in Broader Perspective,” I briefly referenced the GOP meme “that public workers have extravagant pensions, propagated by Republicans who amplify a few horror stories as emblematic of public worker retirement benefits.” It’s part and parcel of a broader Republican scam vilifying public workers as overcompensated in general.
For a revealing example, see Josh Barro’s Bloomberg.com post, “Does Obama Know Why the Public Sector Isn’t ‘Doing Fine’?” in which he spotlights city employees of San Jose, CA, where

…Costs for a full-time equivalent employee are astronomical and skyrocketing. San Jose spends $142,000 per FTE [full-time employee] on wages and benefits, up 85 percent from 10 years ago. As a result, the city shed 28 percent of its workforce over that period, even as its population was rising.

The unspoken, but unmistakable gist of Barro’s post is “See, those greedy public workers are responsible for causing their own layoffs.” Without even taking a look at nation-wide data, Barro is clearly suggesting in his post’s title that San Jose’s experience is somehow typical of public workers in cities across the nation. Worse, he takes it a step further and blames public worker unions in his concluding sentence, “If the president wants to know why state and local governments can’t afford to hire, he could start by asking his own supporters in public employee unions.”
That’s why Romney can say stuff about President Obama like “He says we need more firemen, more policemen, more teachers. Did he not get the message in Wisconsin?” and get away with it, while media dimwits point their fingers at Obama for his one gaffe in three years.
Had Barro clearly presented his horror story as an exceptional case, that would be defensible. Or had he backed it up with some credible national data, you could grudgingly credit him with a solid argument. But he didn’t do that because he couldn’t.
As David Cooper, Mary Gable, and Algernon Austin of the Economic Policy Institute note in their report, “The public-sector jobs crisis“:

Despite these significantly higher levels of education–and contrary to assertions by some governors in recent state-level debates–the most rigorous studies have consistently shown that state and local government employees earn less both in wages and total compensation than comparable private-sector workers (Keefe 2010). Using data from the Annual Social and Economic Supplement of the Current Population Survey and standard regression models for wage analyses, we compared the wage income of private-sector employees with that of state and local government workers. After controlling for education, experience, sex, race, ethnicity, marital status, full-time/part-time status, number of hours worked, citizenship status, Census region, metropolitan status (whether residing within or outside the boundaries of a major metropolitan area), and employer size, we find that state and local government employees make, on average, 11.7 percent less in wages than similar private-sector employees.

if those greedy public workers can be faulted for their extravagant compensation packages, what should be done about their better-paid private sector cohorts?
Look, none of this is to deny that there are public worker pension/salary horror stories. But it takes a pretty shameless media to imply that extravagantly compensated public workers are the norm. Is it too much to ask that some honest journalists call Romney out on it?

Devin Dwyer reports at ABC News that Romney’s gaffe, “He says we need more firemen, more policemen, more teachers. Did he not get the message in Wisconsin?,” in response to Obama’s gaffe about the private sector doing fine, is getting some attention.
At The New Yorker, Ryan Lizza addresses a rather important topic the horse-race obsessed media seems to be ignoring: “The Second Term: What would Obama do if reëlected?”
You’ve probably seen several different analyses of how the electoral vote is shaping up, particularly in the “swing states.” Micah Cohen pulls them together, crunches the numbers and measures the consensus against FiveThirty Eight.com’s model:, Which “distinguishes between states that are true tossups and states that are merely competitive. While the term tossup is usually applied to about 12 states, the model sees a true coin-flip in only Ohio and Colorado, and a near coin-flip in Iowa, Virginia and Nevada. States like New Hampshire, Florida, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, meanwhile, are certainly in play, but one candidate has a clearer advantage.”
President Obama had a rough week, but at least his address to Netroots Nation 2012 provides a good reality check.
Turns out Romney’s “blind trust” isn’t so blind, after all, reports Brian Montopoli at CBS News. “There has to be some reason for the preferential tax treatment that he is receiving,” Obama for America General Counsel Robert Bauer said on a conference call with reporters. Bauer said the fact that Romney is paying a 15 percent tax rate on the income, the tax rate for carried interest, suggests Romney is performing services for the company despite claims that he is no longer tied to it…University of Colorado law professor Victor Fleischer told CBS News that continued payments from the company to the candidate create a potential conflict of interest.”
Hotline staff reports that there is a bummer in the Wisconsin recall silver lining for Dems — taking control of the state Senate: “…It turns out that victory is meaningless: the legislature is not due to convene again before the fall election and Republican lawmakers gerrymandered the state Senate districts well enough to their advantage during redistricting that they should recapture it afterward.”
The AP’s Charles Babington reports that 7 out of 10 “battleground states” have better-than-the-national-average unemployment rates.
Democratic women outnumber Republican women by better than 2-1 in both the house and senate, according the the Center for American Women in Politics. But Dems are still not doing enough to recruit, train and elect women candidates.
Next time some ignoramus starts popping off about how unions are no longer needed, send them this post from Daily Kos, “Thank a Union: 36 Ways Unions Have Improved Your Life.”
Excellent speech delivery is President Obama’s strongest card. But as Leslie Savan argues in The Nation, a more combative style, a la Chris Matthews, would serve him well. Savon quotes Matthews in a recent talk show appearance: “He’s got to be aggressive. He’s got to be big time,” Matthews said. “Stop this nickel and dime, ‘a couple bucks for the teachers, a couple bucks for the firefighters. I’m going to reduce the payroll tax.’ This is piss-ant. You can’t get re-elected with tactics. He needs a strategy. Which is, ‘we’re different from the Republicans.’ ” And when former George W. Bush deputy press secretary Tony Fratto said, “This Republican obstruction story is fantasy,” Savan reports that “Matthews drove a bulldozer over him: “You’re the roadblock party, the other party is the highway party.” (A possible slogan?)