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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: August 2012

Abramowitz: TV Ads and Especially Field Offices Do Matter

At Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball, Alan I Abramowitz mines some relevant data to ask and answer a question of consequence: “Do Presidential Campaigns Matter? Evidence From the 2008 Election.” His method:

In order to answer the question of whether presidential campaigns matter, I analyzed evidence from the 2008 election. In 2008, just as in 2012, the presidential campaigns focused their efforts overwhelmingly on voters in a relatively small number of swing states. According to spending data compiled by CNN, 15 states accounted for almost 90% of total spending on television advertising by the Obama and McCain campaigns. These same 15 states were also heavily targeted for grassroots voter registration and get-out-the-vote drives by the campaigns. According to data compiled by Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com, as of early August, more than 80% of Obama field offices and more than 90% of McCain field offices were located in these states.

For openers, Abramowitz notes,

…Altogether, the Obama campaign and its allies spent about $258 million on television ads in these 15 states, compared with about $164 million by the McCain campaign and its allies, a better than three-to-two advantage.
Perhaps reflecting its greater emphasis on grassroots campaigning and ability to capitalize on the enthusiasm of its supporters, the Obama campaign had an even bigger advantage when it came to field organization in the battleground states. As of early August, according to Nate Silver, the Obama campaign had opened 281 field offices in these 15 states, compared with only 94 for the McCain campaign, almost a three-to-one advantage.

Noting that “the size of these advantages varied considerably from state to state,” Abramowitz performs a regression analysis and adds ‘…According to the results of the regression analysis, every 1% increase in Obama’s share of advertising spending in a state increased his share of the vote by about .08 percentage points, and every 1% increase in Obama’s share of field offices in a state increased his share of the vote by .06 percentage points.” Further,

Based on these results, it is likely that both advertising spending and field organization affected the election results in these 15 swing states. And the size of these effects appears to be large enough to have tipped two states that would otherwise have voted for John McCain into the Obama column: Indiana and North Carolina. We can estimate that the combined effects of Obama’s advantages in advertising spending and field organization increased his share of the vote by almost six points in Indiana and by almost five points in North Carolina. And a massive 27-7 advantage in field offices almost put Obama over the top in Missouri: adding almost two points to Obama’s share of the vote and left him just short of victory.

It’s an impressive case for the power of campaigns, as Abramowitz concludes:

It is far from certain whether we can expect the same sorts of campaign effects in 2012. It is probably unusual for one candidate to enjoy substantial advantages in both advertising spending and field organization in a presidential election as Obama did in 2008. Neither the Obama campaign nor the Romney campaign is likely to enjoy a decisive advantage in ad spending this year. And an election with an incumbent running for a second term may be different from one without an incumbent. Nevertheless, the findings presented here suggest that under some conditions, presidential campaigns can affect election outcomes in swing states.
These results also suggest that the impact of field organization can be just as great as that of spending on TV ads. The Obama campaign enjoyed an even larger advantage in field organization than in advertising dollars in 2008, and the findings presented here indicate that this advantage played a major role in Obama’s victories in Indiana and North Carolina and almost turned Missouri blue for the first time since 1996. Given the relative costs of field offices and TV ads, investing in field organization in the battleground states may be a more efficient use of campaign resources than spending on television advertising.

Take note Democrats. Contribute what you can, and, perhaps more importantly — get involved in GOTV.


The Impact of the Texas Purge on the GOP

This item is crossposted from The New Republic.

The holy crusade that movement conservatives undertook against Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst concluded with Tuesday’s Senate runoff, producing his once-unlikely defeat at the hands of his much-celebrated Tea Party challenger, former state solicitor general Ted Cruz. What makes the election so interesting is that Dewhurst, who has been denounced from one end of the conservative blogosphere to the other as a “RINO” and as “Dewcrist,” can’t really be accused of any specific ideological heresies. Unlike Indiana’s Dick Lugar, he hasn’t supported any arms control treaties or gun control measures or “earmarks.” Unlike many of 2010’s Tea Party targets, he can’t be accused of social-issues moderation; he was staunchly supported by Texas’ main anti-abortion groups. And unlike Orrin Hatch of Utah, he hasn’t thumbed his nose at ultra-conservatives; he calls himself a “constitutional conservative,” says he supported Tea Party policies before there was a Tea Party, and heavily identifies himself with his most important backer, Gov. Rick Perry, who can snarl and rant at godless liberals with the best of them.
This did not keep Cruz’s backers from calling Dewhurst names, of course. But when challenged, they always seemed to find some objection to Dewhurst that did not involve any actual issues. RedState’s Erick Erickson scoffed at the very idea that Dewhurst was a real conservative, but relied mainly on the two candidates’ lists of supporters to establish some distinction between them. National Review‘s editors focused on Dewhurst’s negative ads against Cruz, another non-ideological factor.
In explaining this odd “purge,” Slate‘s David Weigel believes it’s all pretty simple: Texas is a safe state for an intra-party bloodbath (the Democratic Senate nominee is virtually unknown and penniless) and Cruz is young and Hispanic at a time when conservatives are battening down the hatches for a long-term struggle against demographic tides that doom any party relying on today’s old-white-people GOP “base.” They’re naturally very interested in building a bench of younger minority pols who show not an ounce of ideological moderation. Cruz quite possibly represents a Hispanic insurance policy in case his better-established fellow Cuban-American conservative, Marco Rubio, falters (as he well might thanks to his questionable associations in South Florida and his own shaky personal financial history.) Just as importantly, the uprising against Dewhurst became something of an end in itself: a test of the power of movement-conservative elements of the GOP that failed to unite behind a presidential candidate, and are determined to surround Mitt Romney–if he is elected president–with as many ideological commissars as possible.
But regardless of the inner motives of the vast array of right-wing groups and celebrities backing Cruz (and he’s got just about all of them, from Palin and DeMint to the Club for Growth to Eagle Forum to the major Tea Party organizations), a Cruz victory will have an independent impact on perceptions of the future direction of the GOP and the conservative movement. And since the closest thing to “moderation” Dewhurst can be accused of is the occasional willingness to negotiate with Democrats in the Texas legislature, a Cruz win, particularly if it’s big, will be widely interpreted as a warning to congressional Republicans against anything other than hard-core, no-compromise, let-the-economy-go-to-hell positioning on all the upcoming fiscal battles–and, in the event Barack Obama is re-elected, a continuation or even intensification of the war to end all partisan wars in Washington.
It’s true that Cruz (like Rubio, a Florida House speaker and protégé of Jeb Bush before he was adopted by the Tea Party and deposed Charlie Crist) has his own “Washington Establishment” background, as a Justice Department attorney during the Bush administration. But it’s hard to imagine him defying the powerful ideologues that validated him as a viable challenger (with some inadvertent assistance from the Texas legislature’s decision–driven by uncertainty over judicial review of its redistricting plan–to create an unusually long runoff campaign between the May primary and the July runoff) and kept him financially competitive with Dewhurst’s deep pockets. The Club for Growth alone poured more than five million dollars into Cruz’s campaign. He is very unlikely to bite the hands that fed him, and those hands have been significantly strengthened by his victory.


Political Strategy Notes

If you’re a Democratic candidate or campaign worker, please read Bill Cotterell’s “Early voting: It’s not just rides to the polls any more” at The Florida Current for useful tips and insights about GOTV under today’s electoral parameters.
Joshua Holland has an interesting Alternet interview with Atlantic columnist and former Carter speechwriter James Fallows on the topic of false equivalency enabling in the MSM, the so-called ‘fact-checkers” and the now-routine abuse of the filibuster. Fallows observes “You have stories in responsible papers saying the measure lost 51-47, when the 51 were for it. You see offhand references that it takes 60 votes to pass the bill. So it’s the biggest recent amendment to the Constitution that’s happened just de-facto. We act as if it requires a super-majority to do anything…When this is described in the newspaper as being a “dysfunctional Senate,” it leads to the sense that there’s a coming-from-nowhere failure of government — as opposed to an actual strategy by one side to hamstring the other, and slow down the process of government.”
At The Nation Eric Alterman cuts through the fog in his post, “Let’s Just Say It: The Republicans AND the Media Are the Problem.” and his punch line resonates: “If you want the truth about today’s Republican Party, I suggest you watch HBO’s The Newsroom. You won’t find it on the news.”
Nate Cohn’s TNR blog “Why Romney’s Numbers Aren’t Dropping” provides some reassurance that Romney’s high “floor” in the 45 percent ballpark in most recent opinion polls is not worth worrying about — unless he starts showing numbers a few points higher on a consistent basis.
In his New York Times column, Charles M.Blow makes a cogent argument that “This year, we may have to take the polls with an even larger grain of salt than usual,” as a result of widespread voter suppression of “poll respondents who think that they will able to vote for President Obama in November, but may not be allowed to do so.”
Howell Raines wonders at CNN.com “When did the GOP become the whiners?” It’s been that way for a while, but it does seem to have gotten worse in the last year or two. Says Raines: “For the rest of this election season, if Democrats are smart, they’ll keep reaching into the Lee Atwater bad-boy trick bag and let the season’s reigning choir of complaint blend its many voices: the charismatic duo of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, the tea party, the anchors and panelists of Fox News and now the hapless Rich Gorka.”
Please Romney, do this. Visit lots of Staples stores. That’ll shore up your ‘regular guy’ cred and lock up the middle class vote, big time.
It’s just a snapshot, but it’s a good one. Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight forecasting model gives Obama a 2.1 percent bump up, thanks to improved personal income growth.
You go, Dubya. Americans are eagerly awaiting your economic advice. As Democratic consultant Paul Begala says of the new ‘Bush Institute’ book being peddled by Dubya, “The book is titled The Four Percent Solution: Unleashing the Economic Growth America Needs. You gotta hand it to Bush. Either he was born without the moral compass that engenders humility or he has one sick sense of humor. To start with, let the record show that George W. Bush was in fact president of the United States for eight years. And for those eight years economic growth averaged not four percent, but 2.04 percent. For Bush to attach his name to a book claiming to be a recipe for economic growth is what we Texans call chutzpah.”


Creamer: Romney’s ‘Bush League’ Foreign Policy Won’t Win Many Voters

The following article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Romney’s trip abroad has demonstrated that his foreign policy operation is “bush league” in more ways than one.
By now the entire world has gotten a chance to see that Mitt Romney is no foreign policy or diplomatic genius.
He went to Britain and insulted his host’s preparation for the Olympic Games — leading major British papers to run banner headlines like: “Mitt the Twitt” and “Nowhere Man.”
He massively damaged whatever ability he might have had to broker Middle East peace were he elected president by theorizing that the economic difficulties of Palestinians stemmed from their inferior “culture.”
On his visit to Poland, Romney received the endorsement of former Polish President and Solidarity leader Lech Walesa. The Polish Solidarity union itself — with which Walesa is no longer associated — responded by issuing a statement attacking Romney as an enemy of working people.
Romney’s debut on the foreign policy stage opened to horrible reviews.
He seems to insult people wherever he travels. He has demonstrated that he is completely tone-deaf — that he has no ability to understand what other people hear when he speaks. That’s bad enough in domestic politics — but it disqualifies a leader from effectively representing the interests of the United States in dealings with other countries.
America simply can’t afford to have a president who is a bull in a china closest careening around the world insulting people and making enemies. As Obama campaign spokesperson Jennifer Psaki put it, “he’s been fumbling the foreign policy football from country to country.”
And he has fumbled not just in failing to show diplomatic skill — but also when he has tried to demonstrate policy expertise. In explaining his theory that Palestinian economic difficulties resulted from their “culture,” Romney cited the difference between the per capital Gross Domestic Product of Israel and the Palestinian territories. “….for instance,” he said, ” in Israel, which is about $21,000, and compare that with the GDP per capital just across the areas managed by the Palestinian Authority, which is more like $10,000.”
But he didn’t even get that right. Not even close. In fact, according to the World Bank, Israeli per capita GDP is $31,282 compared to only $1,600 for the Palestinian areas.
All of this led the Washington Post to conclude that:
Romney has distinguished himself from Obama, but perhaps in ways he did not intend.
From a tactical point of view, Romney has faltered at times in trying to prove he has the policy expertise, personal skills and cultural intelligence to represent the country abroad.
Pretty bush league, right? But Romney has demonstrated his foreign policy operation is “Bush league” in another way as well.
Twelve years ago another Republican was running for president with very little foreign policy skill or experience. He made benign noises — sounded almost like an isolationist — during the campaign. But when George W. Bush took office he surrounded himself with a cadre of foreign policy Neo-Cons who left the country unprepared for 9/11 and then sent the country careening into the worst foreign policy disaster in half a century: the War in Iraq.
The worst part about Romney’s audition on the foreign policy stage is that it made it crystal clear that the Neo-Cons are back.
All you need to do is have a look at the Romney foreign policy team:
John Bolton — Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security and Ambassador to the United Nations under George W. Bush. Bolton cherry-picked intelligence reports in the rush to war in Iraq.
Elliot Cohen — Defense Policy Advisory Board and Counselor of the Department of State during the Bush administration. Cohen pushed false claims that there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11.
Robert Joseph — Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security under George W. Bush. Insisted on including the false claim that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union Address.
Dov Zakheim — Comptroller for the Secretary of Defense under George W. Bush. He predicted that Iraq War spending would be billions less than it was.
Cofer Black — Department of State Coordinator for Counter Terrorism under George W. Bush. Black played a key roll in the CIA’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
Dan Senor — Senior Advisor and Chief Spokesman for the Coalition Provision Authority in Iraq under George W. Bush. The New York Times wrote that, ” As Iraq was entering its bloodiest days, Mr. Senor was a prophet and cheerleader for the Bush administration.”
All of these people were on the Bush foreign policy team. Now they are all on the Romney foreign policy team.
In fact, Dan Senor, who was one of the most ardent apologists for the disastrous War in Iraq, has emerged as Romney’s chief foreign policy spokesman.
This same group — together with people like Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney — surrounded the inexperienced George W. Bush and led him around by a ring in his nose. They will do exactly the same thing to the utterly spineless Mitt Romney if he is elected president.
This week’s Newsweek magazine has a cover story about Romney’s “Wimp factor” — the fact that he has no core values and as a result would, if he were elected, be a puppet for the far right of the Republican Party.
The same would be true when it comes to foreign affairs.
Bottom line: if you liked the War in Iraq, you’ll love the Bush foreign policy.


Lakoff: Obama’s Vision of ‘the Public’ Should be Front and Center in Messaging

George Lakoff and Elisabeth Wehling, authors of “The Little Blue Book: The Essential Guide to Thinking and Talking Democratic,” offer Dems some messaging points in their HuffPo post on “Obama’s and Romney’s Opposed Visions for a Free America.” Among the authors more salient observations:

…President Obama recently reminded us that private life, private enterprise, and personal freedom depend on what the public provides…”The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet. (…) when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own… there are some things we do better together. That’s how we funded the GI Bill. That’s how we created the middle class. That’s how we built the Golden Gate Bridge or the Hoover Dam…That’s how we sent a man to the moon. We rise or fall together as one nation and as one people…”
Obama is acknowledging an important truth about American private life and enterprise: It builds on the public. From the beginning, the American public jointly created the means for knowledge, health, commerce, and recreation: Schools and libraries, hospitals, public roads, bridges, clean water and sewers; a federal banking system, a system of interstate commerce, public buildings and records, a court system mostly for commercial disputes, an army and a navy, police and firemen, public playgrounds and parks. The American public has always provided such things to promote private business and individual freedom.
More recently, the public has added funding for food safety and public health, university research, telecommunications, urban development, and subsidies for corporate profit in corporate-run industries like energy, agribusiness, and military contracting. There are thousands of ways, large and small, in which the public, all of us acting together, provides the essentials for individual freedom and opportunity and thriving businesses.
…The President states a simple truth here. Business owners across America do not build their own roads and bridges, sewers and water systems; they do not single-handedly maintain the health of their employees; they do not finance their own court system; and they did not build their own Internet to market and sell their products. The public provides these things, together. The government manages our shared financial resources to make these things happen. That’s the government’s job.

The authors concede that that “Obama could have communicated this fact better,” and argue that, “In the conservative worldview, the public’s role for personal success is largely hidden or ignored. Instead, conservatives have a different vision of what America should be: everyone ought to look out for him- or herself…”
Going forward, Wehling and Lakoff call on progressives to hone their messaging about the proper role of government: and the Republican ‘alternative’:

What the conservatives are missing, and what Obama and progressives and Democrats across the country should communicate clearly, is this: Maintaining a robust public provides the conditions for a decent life and for individual success. This is about giving citizens the freedom to succeed. And the contributions of individuals to the public are a way to show commitment to both their own continuous success and to the American nation as a whole.
This is a central issue, not a minor one. It underlies the political division in our country. Obama and the Democrats want to continue the public provisions upon which freedom and material success has been built in our nation. Romney and conservative Republicans want to dismantle the public, and would thereby end the freedoms, the opportunities, and the conditions for success that the public provides.
…The future of our nation is at stake. We must openly and regularly talk about the function of the public. And we must repeat the fact that the public constitutes the people working together to better their lives. The public is, and has always been, requisite for our freedom, our success, and our humanity as a nation. Every candidate for office and every patriotic American should be saying this out loud, over and over. The role of the public is the central issue in this election. It is the issue that will determine our future.
We dare not be intimidated by conservative misrepresentations. Our message is clear. It is obvious if you think about it. But it has to be repeated clearly and effectively. The president and all who believe in the promise of America need to go on the offensive on this issue. We cannot afford to be defensive about what is required for our freedom, our prosperity, and our sense of humanity.

It’s a bold shift in Dems’ messaging strategy, emphasizing a positive vision and role for government over negative attacks against the opponent. But if Lakoff and Wehling are right, voters will respond in a way that increases the Democratic party’s credibility — and influence.


Why ‘Republican War Against Women’ Is No Exaggeration

Ahh, If only every American voter would watch this extraordinary clip from MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show. Republicans would not only fail to take the white house and U.S. Senate; they would likely lose control of the House. Maddow, helped by Sens. Harkin, Mikulski and Boxer, and Rep. Jan Schakowsky, explains (a.) Why Obamacare is a tremendous advancement that benefits millions of Americans and (b.) why the often-heard term “Republican war on women” is not all that much of a stretch.

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When Republicans threaten to repeal life-saving reforms and replace them with the status quo ante the Affordable Care Act, and then go even further in restricting the rights of women to make decisions about their own health, lives will be lost and the health of millions will certainly be threatened. It’s hard to blame those at risk for likening it to a “war.”