Thomas Stackpole has a TNR post, “How NARAL is Hoping to Win the Election for Obama,” which shows an innovative approach to voter turnout. As Stackpole explains:

Wednesday morning, in a small conference room in its Washington, D.C. office, NARAL Pro-Choice America rolled out a plan to clinch the election for President Obama. That’s an ambitious goal for an organization pushing a niche issue in a contest dominated by the economy, but they’re hoping to win big by thinking small. Their plan is to target what they’ve termed “Obama Defectors”–pro-choice women who supported Obama in 2008, but are now poised to vote for Mitt Romney–and win them back. Nationally, they’ve identified 5.1 million across the country, 1.2 million of whom live in swing states.
But their real focus is actually on a much smaller number: a mere 338,020 women who live in swing counties in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio, Virginia, and Wisconsin. By their math, targeting this highly prized–and potentially persuadable–demographic in the right places could be enough to push Obama over the edge.
This micro-targeting strategy isn’t anything new, but it’s the first time it’s being employed by a group with such narrow interests and with such a small target group. “I don’t know if anything like this has been done–at least not this election,” boasted Drew Lieberman, the pollster behind the model…

Stackpole goes on to explain that the technique was adapted from an earlier data mining approach pioneered by Republican operatives, including Karl Rove and Alex Gage and tweaked for pro-Democratic constituencies. Stackpole adds that “Team Obama brought their data analysis to a new level, and, using a database called Catalist, applied behavioral science to identify and communicate with voters at a level of specificity that would have seemed like science fiction a generation ago.” Stackpole adds,

NARAL is basing its strategy on a 20,000-interview survey conducted by former Clinton pollster Stan Greenberg’s firm (Greenberg, Quinlan, Rosner), which used roughly 500 data points–like whether they’re cable subscribers, what publications they read, even what products they like–to identify their target voters. While Obama leads among women, they found that he’s polling eight points lower than he finished in 2008, creating a seemingly up-for-grabs voting bloc that both sides are pursuing aggressively. From there, NARAL narrowed the group down even more by dividing their so-called “Obama Defectors” into persuasion voters, who were likely to show up on election day, and Obama supporters, who were less likely to head to the polls, and focusing on the former. This segment, it turns out, tends to be white, independent female voters younger than 40.

In addition, ” the GQR survey found that 40 percent of its target group would vote for a candidate that was pro-choice, even if they disagreed with the candidate on every other issue. They also found that Obama was able to pick up six points when his position on abortion rights was explained and compared to the Republican platform.”
It’s an excellent example of how creative, data-driven political research is increasingly important in modern campaigns.

Here’s a good excerpt from a Salon.com post by Jonathan Bernstein:

The truth is that Romney is constantly constrained by what conservatives want him to do and by what they believe. Furthermore, what they want is generally unpopular, and what they believe is far too often simply cut off from the reality that the rest of the nation lives in.
So Romney cannot have a coherent foreign policy because what his voters want to hear is that Barack Obama sympathizes with terrorists. Most Americans, meanwhile, think of Obama as the guy who took out bin Laden. Romney cannot have a sensible tax policy because conservatives insist that he promote large, self-funding tax cuts for the rich. Most of the nation, however, supports raising taxes on the rich, and reality insists that cutting taxes also reduces revenues. Also, Romney didn’t invent the 47 percent nonsense; whether he truly believes it or not, he was simply parroting back what his voters have been hearing for years from Rush Limbaugh and others like him…
Sure, we’ve had some campaign goofs that appear to be about Romney and not the GOP. But for the most part, what’s been happening hasn’t been a series of gaffes; it’s been the very predictable consequence of the triumph of Tea Party conservatives in the Republican Party.

Read the rest of it right here.

Commenting on Thomas Edsall’s New York Times post, “What’s Wrong With Pennsylvania?,” TDS managing editor Ed Kilgore notes at Washington Monthly that,

A New York Times post by Tom Edsall late last night makes an essential point about swing voter categories, and particularly the non-college educated “white working-class vote” that is supposedly the target of both parties this year: it varies significantly by region. National numbers for this demographic are distorted by the disproportionate GOP direction of southern white voters. Elsewhere, Democrats are not doing as poorly as the stereotypes suggest…

Kilgore quotes from Edsall’s post, adding:

Among southern working class whites, Romney leads by 40 points, 62-22, an extraordinary gap…The story in the rest of the country is different. In the West, where Colorado and Nevada are battleground states, Romney leads by a modest 5 points, 46-41. In the Northeast, which Obama is expected to sweep, except perhaps for New Hampshire, Romney holds a 4-point advantage among working class whites, 42-38. In the Midwest, where Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin are in play, Obama actually leads among working class whites by 8 points (44-36).

At philly.com, Nathan P. Shrader, a Republican Committeeman from Philly’s Kensington community, has written what deserves to be considered a classic op-ed, entitled “Disappointed Republican talks about why he’s dumping Mitt.” Do read the whole thing, which concludes: “Einstein once said that “character is doing what’s right when nobody’s looking.” When nobody but a group of wealthy donors was looking, Romney took the opportunity to assail the patriotism, work ethic, decency and moral fiber of the people he seeks to lead. This isn’t character. This is despicable. My fellow Republicans, and all voters with a sense of right and wrong, should ditch Romney. He just isn’t worth it.”
Associated Press’s Jennifer Agiesta reports on the campaign to win ‘likely voters,” noting: “With six hard-fought weeks left in the campaign, just 7 percent of likely voters have yet to pick a candidate, according to an Associated Press-GfK poll. When combined with those who are leaning toward one candidate or the other but far from firm in their choice, about 17 percent of likely voters are what pollsters consider “persuadable.”…That includes 6 percent who give soft support to Obama and 4 percent for Romney…Persuadables look a lot like other likely voters, and they’re similarly distributed around the country, which makes it tricky for the campaigns to specifically target them. About 52 percent are male and 48 percent female. They do skew slightly Democratic.”
Via Ed Kilgore at Washington Monthly: ” Lyin’ Ryan is at it again, this time telling an audience of senior citizens that Obamacare includes death panels. Maybe he’s taking Sarah Palin’s advice that Romney/Ryan need to “go rogue.”
The New York Times editorial, ‘Voter Harassment, 2012,” describes how a tea party offshoot connected to the Koch brothers, “True the Vote” is expected to interfere with voting rights in minority precincts: “In 2009 and 2010, for example, the group focused on the Houston Congressional district represented by Sheila Jackson Lee, a black Democrat. After poring over the records for five months, True the Vote came up with a list of 500 names it considered suspicious and challenged them with election authorities. Officials put these voters on “suspense,” requiring additional proof of address, but in most cases voters had simply changed addresses. That didn’t stop the group from sending dozens of white “poll watchers” to precincts in the district during the 2010 elections, deliberately creating friction with black voters.”
Despite the ‘war on early voting,’ Bill Turque reports at the Washington Post that “Early votes are expected to make up the majority of ballots cast in battlegrounds such as Florida, North Carolina, Nevada and Colorado, where as many as 80 percent of all voters may be early. Two states, Oregon and Washington, conduct elections exclusively by mail, sending ballots to all registered voters about three weeks before the election…The volume of pre-Election Day activity is expected to surpass 2008, when about 33 percent of 131 million votes cast in the presidential contest were early.”
At Bloomberg Businessweek, John McCormick adds: “All of the key battleground states except New Hampshire and Virginia allow early, in-person voting, while all provide absentee ballots before Election Day…Voters in Ohio similarly can begin casting ballots on Oct. 2, in North Carolina on Oct. 18 and Nevada on Oct. 20. In total, six of the nine top battleground states will have early, in- person voting under way by the third debate between Romney and President Barack Obama on Oct. 22…More than half voted early in North Carolina and Florida, and 45 percent did so in Nevada, records show. Obama carried all four states.”
Ari Shapiro’s “Ads Slice Up Swing States With Growing Precision” at npr.org, the first of a two-part series, illuminates political ad strategy in the final six weeks of campaign 2012. Among Shapiro’s nuggets: “Jon Bross is the media director for Vladimir Jones. He says election season is always a test of his patience, and his flexibility. With TV rates skyrocketing, he has to look elsewhere…”Digital, cable television are excellent alternatives. Print media only sees, for example, 5 percent of the political ad dollars, so that market is a little bit more open for us,” he says. “You simply have to be more creative when the circus comes to town.”
At The Daily Beast, Michael Tomasky’s says of Romney’s campaign collapse: “…it isn’t happening because of Mitt Romney alone, or even the now-hated Stuart Stevens. It’s happening because of the factions and their guns. It’s happening because of a party and movement that are out of control and out of touch…Face it, Republicans: he was and is your best candidate, and he’s tanking now more because of you than because of him.” If Tomasky is right, a ‘wave election’ may be in the making.
Roger Bybee has an Alternet post, “Take a Look at What Paul Ryan Did to His Own Congressional District, and Be Very Scared for Your Country,” the teaser of which notes: “Child abuse and suicide is skyrocketing, the number of battered women has tripled, foreclosures have tripled, wages plummeting, and more.”
The ‘Lipstick on a Pig’ Award for the last week goes to…

The following article, by U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL9), is cross-posted from, HuffPo:
Over the last few days, I’ve gotten a real life view of what a Romney-Ryan world would actually look like — and it’s not a pretty picture.
On Tuesday night, I went to a fundraiser for a local community leader whose kidneys have failed. He lost his good job and now he could lose his life because he can’t afford to continue his insurance. Oh, and he may lose his house, as well.
Even as I wrote my check at the crowded bar, I was shaking my head in sadness that in 2012 in the United States of America, Dave has to rely on the financial ability and generosity of his friends in order to get the life-saving care he needs. I thought about the donation cans one sees at convenience stores that carry the sad story of a child with cancer and encourage shoppers to drop in their change. And I realized that this is Romney-Ryan World.
Last Saturday, a glorious fall-like day in Chicago, I went to a suburban Farmer’s Market to meet voters and buy tomatoes. I met a woman named Darryl whose first words to me were, “I’m in a bad mood.” Why? Because, despite endless applications and many interviews, despite a burning desire to work, Darryl has been unemployed for four years. Her home is in foreclosure, her furnace is broken and, though she has nine more months to keep her home, she said she will move to her car when it gets cold if the furnace isn’t fixed. This once solidly middle-class woman spent her 401(k), never imagining she wouldn’t find another job. She has no family; there aren’t going to be any fundraisers for her. She looked at me with frustration and some amazement at her circumstances and said, “I just can’t take more rejection.” But what really animated her was her fury at “politicians who look at me as someone who doesn’t want to work!” This was before the Romney video, but she anticipated his words. Welcome to Romney-Ryan World.
Friends helping friends is a good thing. But it is no substitute for public institutions that keep people, in this richest country in the world, from dying from treatable illnesses or living in their cars.
Of course, my office is determined to find them the help they need, but in Romney-Ryan World that obviously makes me an enabler of “freeloaders” like Darryl and Dave. And if Dave had simply waited until 2014 to get sick, ObamaCare would have been in place so he (and everyone else) could afford needed health services. Unless, of course, the Republicans are successful in repealing ObamaCare, which Romney promised to do on his first day.
By now most everyone has heard Mitt Romney at a $50,000 per plate fundraiser (about the amount an average American household makes in a year), answering a rich man’s question: “How are you going… to convince everybody you’ve got to take care of yourself.”
Mitt was ready with the answer, part of which is worth repeating. “There are 47 percent of the people… who are dependent on government, who believe they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it… These are people who pay no income tax. I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”
Shame on all those “moochers” — minimum wage workers, children, old people, unemployed — who get an average food stamp benefit of $4.50 per day. All those homeless Veterans should get off their lazy, and maybe injured, butts, get a lucrative job and pay some income taxes. Mitt Romney wants those greedy students who need a Pell Grant to complete their education to “shop around” for an affordable school or break down and “ask your parents for a loan.” Or maybe they should do what he did — sell some stock. Great advice, Mitt.
Lucky Dave. Now that he’s so sick, he won’t have to pay income taxes. Darryl is one of the 47 percent. She took early Social Security and on top of her $16 in food stamps, she gets $1,600 every month — a benefit she earned but one that doesn’t cover her bills. She and all the others have also earned Mitt Romney’s contempt. He said, “My job is not to worry about those people.” Romney-Ryan World is a comfortable place for him.
Let’s be clear. You don’t have to be poor to earn Romney’s disdain. The 47 percent includes millions of middle class Americans who benefit from public programs including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid to pay for nursing home care, Pell grants and student loans, Veteran’s health care, the GI bill, and unemployment compensation — successful programs that make our country better and stronger.
There are other Americans who paid no income taxes that Mitt Romney failed to mention, maybe because some of them were in the room with him, and maybe because he is likely one of them. According to the Tax Policy Center, there were 7,000 individuals with income of one million dollar or more in 2011 who paid $5 or less in taxes. In Romney-Ryan World, these are not “entitled” people; they are the smart ones who most definitely “care for their lives.”
I simply refuse to believe that Mitt Romney’s cold, selfish, self-satisfied vision represents the views of most Americans, and not simply because so many of our brother and sisters, friends and neighbors today are looking to government for just a little help.
Lt. Colonel Tammy Duckworth, a true American hero now running for Congress in Illinois, told me a story that exemplifies the best of American values.
Tammy was piloting a helicopter when it was shot down in Iraq. A young, injured gunner in the unit she was commanding, rather than running to the evacuation helicopter, further risked his life by guarding the perimeter in the ongoing firefight until Tammy was evacuated. She later asked him why he didn’t run. He said simply, “Because we don’t leave anyone behind.” Tammy, who lost both her legs that day, adds, “That’s the America I love.”
And that’s the America I believe most of us love — the one that doesn’t leave the frail senior, the veteran suffering from traumatic brain injury, the child who goes to sleep hungry, the aspiring student, the single mom with cancer — behind. We don’t leave them behind, because it would just be wrong. It’s not what we do on the battlefield or in our neighborhoods.
I am repulsed by Mitt Romney’s words, but they inspire me to work even harder to make sure that after November 6, no one in this great nation is forced to live in Romney-Ryan World.

From an e-blast by Stan Greenberg, entitled “A Real Turning Point: Voter Contempt For The GOP Is Driving Democrats Upward”:

Having looked at a lot of polling data over the past few days, it is now clear to me that this election has reached a real turning point. The telltale factor many analysts haven’t noticed is that the Republican Party has lost five points in voter identification over the past month. Contempt for the Republicans is pushing Democrats into the lead at almost every level, not only in the presidential race but across Senate races too — and let’s watch the House races now. The voters have watched the primaries and the conventions, and Romney’s “47 percent” remark is going to seal it.
I don’t think they’re waiting for the presidential debates…

Greenberg explains more in his video right here

In his National Journal column, “Heartland Monitor Poll: Obama Leads 50 Percent to 43 Percent,” Ronald Brownstein reports on the new Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor Poll, and sees President Obama holding a “tangible advantage” over Romney. In addition to his overall edge in the poll, Brownstein adds”

Race remains a jagged dividing line in attitudes about Obama’s performance. Just 40 percent of white likely voters give him positive job-approval marks, unchanged since May. But fully 77 percent of nonwhites say they approve of Obama’s work, up sharply from 64 percent in May.
The same stark racial divide runs through preferences in the November election. For Obama, the formula for success in 2012 can be reduced to a single equation: 80-40. If he can hold the combined 80 percent he won among all minorities in 2008, and they represent at least the 26 percent of ballots they cast last time, then he can assemble a national majority with support from merely about 40 percent of whites.
On both fronts, the survey shows the president almost exactly hitting that mark. He leads Romney among all nonwhite voters by 78 percent to 18 percent, drawing over nine in 10 African-Americans and slightly more than the two-thirds of Hispanics he carried last time.
Among whites, Obama wins 41 percent compared to Romney’s 51 percent. Obama’s showing is down slightly from the 43 percent among whites he attracted in 2008 but still enough for the president to prevail in both sides’ calculations. With more whites than non-whites either undecided or saying they intend to support another candidate, Romney is not nearly approaching the roughly three-in-five support among them he’ll likely need to win.

In terms of the white working-class demographic, Brownstein notes,

In the new survey, Romney leads Obama among non-college whites by 54 percent to 37 percent, almost exactly the same margin as McCain’s 18-percentage-point advantage over the president with those voters in 2008 (when they backed the Republican by 58 percent to 40 percent). The new poll shows Obama winning only 39 percent of non-college white men and 35 percent of non-college white women; but to overcome Obama’s other strengths, Romney will need to generate even larger margins with those voters. In fact, Obama’s performance with those working-class whites has slightly improved since the May survey.

Brownstein adds that Romney still leads with seniors, holding close to 60 percent of them — about the same as McCain’s tally, and Obama is nearly matching his ’08 support among college-educated white and “millennial generation” (ages 18-29) LVs. Brownstein concludes, “Taken together, all of these small movements toward Obama have produced, at least for now, a tangible advantage for the president over Romney as the race hurtles toward its final weeks.” Not a bad position for the President less than 7 weeks from E-Day.

The following article, by democratic strategist Mike Lux, author of “The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be,” is cross-posted from HuffPo:
I am the first person to say Democrats should be taking nothing for granted in the presidential election. Things remain relatively close; the economy continues to weigh the president down to an extent; outside Republican groups have more money than God; the terrible campaign of Republican voter suppression will take its toll; surprising new developments and/or the debates could change the dynamics before we are done. Democrats are going to have to stay focused and on message, and our field ops are going to have to do a great job of turning out the vote. But we are incredibly blessed with one of the worst Republican presidential candidates and campaigns in modern history, and this election is getting tougher and tougher for us to lose. If this videotape turns what was looking like a fairly steady 3-4 point race into a rock hard 6 point or more lead, it could have bigger implications: a wave election. Because this is a nationalized election, and because we are winning the core debates of this race.
If you are like me and checking the new polling numbers every day in races around the country, you no doubt have noticed that in the last couple of weeks, most Democratic candidates have had a significant upswing in their polling. The trendlines in most of the competitive Senate races and a wide variety of House races are moving toward the Democrats. The numbers in most of the presidential swing states are moving in Obama’s direction. Elizabeth Warren is up after being down a little against Scott Brown. Tammy Baldwin is up after being behind Tommy Thompson for most of the race. Tim Kaine has opened up after being a dead heat the entire race until now. Sherrod Brown’s modest lead has gotten bigger. Bill Nelson has moved substantially ahead. Only in Conn., where WWE co-founder Linda McMahon is spending unbelievable amounts of cash and has thus cut the margin in her race against progressive leader Chris Murphy, and in Missouri, where Todd Akin is sadly back within range after being down 10 at the height of the “legitimate rape” story, has the Democratic trend not materialized in big Senate races.
The reason things are looking this good can’t be explained by the convention bounce, because the convention ended two weeks ago. Prior to the Romney videotape, Obama’s lead had faded 2-3 points from the post-convention high. And Romney’s mishaps over the last several days wouldn’t explain solid number shifts in races down the ballot. The reason Democrats are trending up nationwide is that we are winning the fundamental debate both in philosophy and in values.
The Republican argument is that our economic pain comes from three sources: Obama, his big government philosophy, and deficits. We would be in a lot better shape, they say, if we just let business be completely free to do what business does best- if we just lower their taxes and unburden them from regulation and let the free market have its way, the American economy will come roaring back. And sure, we want to help people in economic distress, too, but not by giving them government assistance that makes them more dependent, but by encouraging the private sector give them jobs.
The Democratic argument is that we are all in this together, that we all built the middle class together by investing in it and that we need to go back to that philosophy to rebuild this economy. They say that it was the Republican philosophy of letting big business have its way and failing to invest that got us into this mess in the first place, and if we go back to that bad idea, things will get worse. They argue that most Americans work hard and play by the rules, and deserve to have a fair shot, a level playing field, and the chance at a decent life for them and their families.
The Democratic argument is winning. It is winning both because it makes more logical sense, but because it resonates with American values of a community and family where we help each other make it. It is winning because most Americans remember both the Bush years and the Clinton years, and they know the latter were a whole lot better. And it is winning because people know that the wealthy and big business already gets huge advantages over everyone else, they know that the deck is stacked against regular people, and they don’t want a government that goes even more in that direction.
At the end of the day, this whole Ayn Rand idea of rewarding the strong since they do such great things for society, and doing nothing for anyone else because we don’t want them to become “dependent”, is not very appealing to a majority of the American people. Americans by and large know that selfishness is not a virtue, and that we should help take care of the elderly, those who are ill or have disabilities, and children who need food, medicine, and decent schools.
Since we Democrats are winning the argument, and since Romney and Ryan have given us such a great opportunity to have an open debate our values and philosophy, let’s drive our advantage home. We shouldn’t let up in making our case. We should reinforce the narrative and help lift the entire party up.
Anything can still happen and we should take nothing for granted, but there is a real chance if we keep pressing our advantage of making this a wave election. In that kind of election, in spite of the money arrayed against us, we can not only win the presidency and most of these big Senate elections, but there is a real chance at retaking the House. As I am looking at both the individual race dynamics and the way this election has been nationalized, it is clearer and clearer that we are far closer to winning the House than conventional wisdom believes. At this point the only thing holding up the Republicans is the unbelievable amount of money the wealthy special interests like the ones hanging out with Romney at that Wall Street fat cat’s house on the video.
We have a narrative, a philosophy, and a set of values that are winning this election debate. Let’s stay on message and drive this home to a big victory.

In his Washington Monthly post, ‘”Makers:” The Tiny Band of Heroes,’ TDS managing editor Ed Kilgore explores some of the smug, twisted psychology behind Romney’s ‘47%’ rant, and paints a grim picture of what life under his leadership would be like. Kilgore quotes NYT columnist Paul Krugman’s insight that Republicans have all but embraced the John Galt thing as some sort of lodestar. Kilgore adds,

…If you don’t fall into the charmed circle of “job creators;” if you don’t own your own business, or have enough wealth to make significant capital investments; then your job, it appears, is to bear down, shut up, and do what you can to make life easier for your bosses. Abandon that union; stop asking for pay increases; gracefully accept that shift from defined benefit to defined contribution pensions, or from any pension to none; pay your taxes and stop worrying about the tax rates paid by your superiors–you’re lucky they pay them at all, given the fact you already owe them your daily bread, everything you own, and your very life.
…So whatever else it represents, the Boca Moment provides a glimpse into the unsavory world view of people who look at their own employees, not to mention other folks with few capital assets, with what can only be described as contempt–as cannon fodder for the great competitive struggle in which they, the “job creators,” are the only fully human figures.

When you think about it, one would have to go back to the 19th century to find an equally-arrogant viewpoint at the helm of a major American political party. You can read the rest of Kilgore’s post here.