The following is cross-posted from a Democracy Corps e-blast:
With the election campaign reaching the eve of the last debate, President Obama has talked extensively about his future plans in the very successful second debate, and has aired an ad narrated by Morgan Freeman, talking about progress made in the last four years and concluding, “The last thing we should do is turn back now.” On the stump, the president has posed the choice between enriching the top again and finishing the job: “We can choose to go back to the same top-down policies that got us into this mess, or you can choose to move us forward with the policies that have been getting us out of this mess.”
Our fear was that the progress message would sound out of touch and fail to give those voters who are on the edge financially hope that life would be better in a second term, particularly when Mitt Romney was on the air with his plans to create 12 million jobs. Fortunately, the survey confirms the utility of both the progress/don’t go back and future policy messages.
We conducted a special web survey this week where we tested the actual Morgan Freeman ad aired against the Romney 30-second plan spot with 500 respondents. In a parallel sample of 500, we tested an Obama future plans spot (cut down to 1 minute, 25 seconds) against the Romney 60-second spot on his economic plans. We looked at agreement, credibility, and memorability, and most important, looked at the impact on the key question, who would do a better job handling the economy.
Most importantly, in video form and content both Obama ads scored more strongly than the Romney spot. Bottom line, Obama is closing in ways where he can make gains on the economy and in the race.
Read the full memo at Democracy Corps.

The following article by Alan I. Abramowitz, author of “The Polarized Public,” is cross-posted from HuffPo.
Based on the latest results from the HuffPost Pollster poll tracking model, with less than three weeks left until Election Day, the presidential race between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney is extremely close with both candidates estimated to have the support of about 47 percent of the electorate. The realclearpolitics.com average of national polls released over the past 10 days shows an identical result, a 47-47 tie. And the results of recent polls in the key swing states appear to be consistent with this picture of an extremely close presidential race.
There is, of course, some variation in the results of national polls that have been released in the past week or two but all of them show the margin between Romney and Obama to be within two or three points one way or the other. All of them with one exception, that is — the Gallup tracking poll. The Gallup tracking poll alone among national polls, including the usually Republican-leaning Rasmussen poll, shows Mitt Romney with a large lead over Barack Obama among likely voters — a seven point lead in the results released on October 18 and a six point lead in the results released on October 19.
Gallup is, without question, the biggest outlier among all of the national polls on the 2012 presidential election. But this is not the first time that Gallup has found itself in that position. Two years ago, Gallup was by far the biggest outlier in its forecast of the Republican margin in the 2010 midterm congressional elections. Gallup’s final estimate of the Republican lead among likely voters in 2010 was 15 points. Only Rasmussen at 12 points was even close to Gallup. The average GOP lead across all of the national polls was about seven points, which was very close to the actual Republican margin in the national popular vote.
So what’s going on with the Gallup tracking poll and why is it such a big outlier? Part of the explanation, as Mark Blumenthal pointed out in a recent post , is almost certainly Gallup’s complicated likely voter screen which gives considerable weight to voter attention and enthusiasm. As a result of this screen, the Gallup tracking poll has been showing a very wide gap between the preferences of all registered voters and likely voters — a 5-6 point difference in margin. In recent days, Gallup has been showing a very close race among registered voters but a big Romney lead among likely voters.
In 2010, the same large gap was evident in Gallup’s polling and in the end the actual Republican margin in the House elections was considerably closer to Gallup’s results for registered voters than to its results for its likely voters. It is entirely possible that the same thing is happening this year.
But beyond just the impact of Gallup’s likely voter screen, there is another factor that may explain why Gallup is once again a big outlier. Despite some recent changes in its sampling procedures designed to make its initial sample of adults more representative of the U.S. adult population, Gallup’s likely voter sample appears to be substantially under-representing non-white voters. Although Gallup does not report the racial composition of its likely voter sample (or any of its other samples), based on the results presented in their October 16 report on the standing of the presidential candidates among whites and non-whites, one can use interpolation to estimate the racial composition of the likely voter sample. The results show that about 80 percent of Gallup’s likely voter sample consisted of non-Hispanic whites while about 20 percent consisted of non-whites.
Gallup’s estimate that only 20 percent of this year’s likely voters are non-white is far lower than the 26 percent non-white share of voters found in the 2008 exit poll or even the 23 percent share found in the 2004 exit poll. It is actually very close to the 19 percent share found in the 2000 exit poll. So according to the Gallup tracking poll, the racial composition of the 2012 electorate will be similar to that of the 2000 electorate despite the dramatic increase in the nonwhite share of the voting age population that has occurred in the past 12 years.
The fact that the Gallup tracking poll is a big outlier when it comes to estimating the standing of the presidential candidates this year is, by itself, a very good reason to view their findings right now with deep skepticism. The apparent under-representation of non-whites in their likely voter sample only reinforces that conclusion. The next two-plus weeks will tell whether the Gallup tracking poll continues to produce results that are far outside of the range of other national polls or whether its results move closer to the polling mainstream.

Those who were wondering how low Republicans are willing to go in suppressing Latino and African American votes should read Brad Friedman’s “GOP voter registration scandal widens: A Virginia official is busted for tossing voter forms. Turns out he works for the national party, too” at Slate.com. Here’s an excerpt, beginning with the lede:

A man originally reported to have been working for the Republican Party of Virginia was arrested by the Rockingham County, Va., Sheriff’s Office on Thursday and charged with attempting to destroy voter registration forms by tossing them into a dumpster behind a shopping center in Harrisonburg, Va.
“Prosecutors charged him with four counts of destruction of voter registration applications, eight counts of failing to disclose voter registration applications and one count of obstruction of justice,” according to a report late Thursday afternoon from TPM’s Ryan Reilly. More charges could be forthcoming, according to officials.
But there is more to the story, as evidence emerges to document that it ties into a still-expanding nationwide GOP Voter Registration Fraud Scandal that the BRAD BLOG first began reporting in late September, after we’d learned that the Republican Party of Florida had turned in more than 100 allegedly fraudulent and otherwise suspect voter registration forms in Palm Beach County. The story has continued to widen ever since, to a dozen Florida counties and several other states, now including Virginia, and even to the upper-echelons of the Republican Party itself.
The man arrested today was 23-year-old Colin Small of Phoenixville, Pa. As it turns out, he does not only work for the Virginia Republican Party. According to an online profile, he appears to be working for the Republican National Committee and, prior to that, served as an Intern for Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Pa., in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Read more…

A report two weeks ago on the effect of the Drone strikes in Pakistan has stimulated a range of quite fierce criticisms of Obama – criticisms that have appeared in publications other than the traditionally anti-war and anti-militarist progressive press.
An article in the New Republic summarized the study’s conclusions:

A new study released this week by researchers at Stanford and NYU has found that American drone strikes in Pakistan are killing far more civilians than advertised, taking out few high value targets, and have become the primary recruiting tool for the terrorist groups the policy is aimed at combating. The report, “Living Under Drones: Death, Injury, and Trauma to Civilians From US Drone Practices in Pakistan,” is based on “more than 130 interviews with victims, witnesses, and experts, and review of thousands of pages of documentation and media reporting” conducted over nine months.

The article minces no words in criticizing Obama:

Indeed, Obama has shrewdly–some might say cynically–positioned himself to the right on foreign policy, thereby insulating himself from the “weak on defense” canard that has plagued his party going back to the days of George McGovern. He doubled down on Afghanistan, at the expense of more than a thousand dead American soldiers and marines, at a point when it was obvious the war was unwinnable on the timetable he set. He ignored the hectoring over damaged relations with Pakistan that would result from the bin Laden raid, betting that success would ensure his re-election. And his use of drone strikes makes George W. Bush look like a cautious man

This conclusion, however, is a model of restraint compared to a commentary by Conner Friedersdorf in the Atlantic:

Obama terrorizes innocent Pakistanis on an almost daily basis. The drone war he is waging in North Waziristan isn’t “precise” or “surgical” as he would have Americans believe. It kills hundreds of innocents, including children. And for thousands of more innocents who live in the targeted communities, the drone war makes their lives into a nightmare worthy of dystopian novels. People are always afraid. Women cower in their homes. Children are kept out of school. The stress they endure gives them psychiatric disorders. Men are driven crazy by an inability to sleep as drones buzz overhead 24 hours a day, a deadly strike possible at any moment.
At worst, this policy creates more terrorists than it kills; at best, America is ruining the lives of thousands of innocent people and killing hundreds of innocents for a small increase in safety from terrorists. It is a cowardly, immoral, and illegal policy, deliberately cloaked in opportunistic secrecy.

Writing in The American Prospect, Jamelle Bouie rejects Friedersdorf’s angry call for progressives to refuse to vote for Obama because of his policies but is pretty harsh himself on Obama failings:

Obama campaigned as someone who push back against the civil liberties abuses of the Bush era. As president, he has doubled-down on them. The drone war in Pakistan, expanded by the Obama administration, has claimed hundreds of innocent lives, and is conducted under a veil of secrecy. The “militants” targeted by the United States are often just military-aged men who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Obama’s kill list-his program of extrajudicial killings, directed at American citizens suspected of terrorism–is an affront to the values of the Constitution, and a huge blemish on his record.

It is easy to understand and in varying degrees to sympathize with many of the criticisms and the moral outrage expressed in these articles. From within the particular framework of facts and assumptions that they use, the moral conclusions follow logically.
But when one steps back for a moment and examines the arguments in these articles from a broader perspective, it quickly becomes clear that they leave out a great deal. In fact, in all three, the discussion ultimately seems be about some quite unfamiliar, alternative America.
Consider the fact that in all three of these articles – articles that are entirely concerned with military strategy and policy:

• The Pentagon is not mentioned once.
• The Joint Chiefs of Staff are not mentioned once.
• The Joint Special Operations Command is not mentioned once.
• General Petraeus and counterinsurgency doctrine are not mentioned once.
• The military and national security decision-making hierarchy in the Obama White House and the decision-making process they employ are not mentioned once.

In short, in these commentaries the discussion of Obama’s moral choices regarding the use of drones is conducted as if Obama lives in some alternative universe where the president sits behind his desk in the oval office, listens to briefings from his honest, loyal, hand-picked advisors and then issues inescapable and irrevocable orders and commands. In this alternative universe Obama has an absolutely unrestricted, indeed Olympian degree of power. He can therefore be validly held directly morally responsible for every single nuance of policy that emanates from his administration.
For anyone who has observed the evolution of military strategy and policy since the late 1990’s and the tremendous conflicts between the military establishment and the Obama presidency since his election, this image is – to be frank — so utterly detached from reality and indeed patently absurd that it essentially invalidates any conclusions that might be deduced on its basis. Whatever possible moral or political culpability Obama might hypothetically have for actions he might hypothetically take in some simple alternative universe, they are simply not relevant to the real choices he has faced and now faces in the real world of his administration.
To take a more realistic perspective it is necessary to look at the broader military and strategic context out of which the use of drone strikes emerged:

Read more…

In a Plum Line post today, Greg Sargent notes what he calls “an under-appreciated dynamic of the cycle — The surprising unity we’ve seen on the Democratic side between the base and what can be broadly called the Democratic establishment.”
He continues:

If you think about some of the leading Dem candidates — Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts, Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, Martin Heinrich in New Mexico, and Sherrod Brown in Ohio — they are not just considered acceptable to the base and to the establishment. Both see them as exceptional, outstanding candidates, for political and substantive reasons alike. These candidates are considered progressive heroes by the base and its institutions, and they are considered excellent general election candidates by party leaders in Washington.
Meanwhile, the more moderate candidates — such as Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota and Richard Carmona in Arizona — are also liked by the Dem base. Liberals like Heidi Heitkamp because she’s aggressively defending Obamacare. They like Carmona partly because he has an impressive set of qualifications as a former Surgeon General and Vietnam vet, and because he’ll help make the party more attractive to Latinos long term. The result is that the leading liberal institutions — labor, the League of Conservation Voters, Emily’s List, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, the liberal blogosphere — are playing heavily in the Senate races in a way that puts them, to a surprising degree, on the same page with Beltway Dems.
It wasn’t always thus. Labor and the left fought a bitter, divisive war with the Dem party committees in Arkansas in 2010, pitting their candidate Bill Halter against incumbent Blanche Lincoln. And back in previous cycles, as Politico details, the Dem party leadership pushed its chosen candidates past the base with a much heavier hand. But this time around, there’s relative peace and unity.
Dems still could very well lose the Senate if a few races break against them and if Romney wins the presidency and pulls along GOP candidates with him. But if Dems do hold the Upper Chamber, this surprising degree of unity may be a key reason why. And by the way, this also bodes well for liberals: If Dems hang on to it, the next Senate will likely gain a handful of new, high profile progressive warriors, who will pull the institution in a more liberal direction.

Sargent is right that this is an underappreciated dynamic of this election. But it’s also possibly the most important dynamic as well.

At The Nation, Ari Berman has an update on the preparations to resist Republican-driven voter suppression at the polls on November 6, specifically the efforts of the Election Protection coalition to insure a fair election. Berman explains:

The Election Protection coalition plans to recruit 10,000 volunteers to assist at the polls during early voting and on election day in twenty states, particularly in high-turnout minority voting areas and historically disenfranchised communities. It will staff thirty-two call centers in English and Spanish through its 866-Our-Vote hotline. This conference room will be one of them.
The Election Protection coalition, spearheaded by the Lawyers’ Committee and including groups like the NAACP and Common Cause, was launched after the 2000 election fiasco in Florida. “A lot of folks in the voting rights and civil rights community realized you couldn’t wait until election day to solve issues,” says Eric Marshall, co-leader of Election Protection.

In Virginia, for example, draconian voter i.d. laws designed to suppress pro-Democratic constituencies could actually influence the election. As Berman reports:

In the past, a Virginia voter lacking ID could sign an affidavit attesting to his or her identity and cast a regular ballot. Now that voter must cast a provisional ballot, which will count only if the voter presents proof of ID to the board of elections by noon on the Friday after election day. This change could disenfranchise the 15,000 Virginians who cast a ballot without ID in 2008– which could affect the outcome in one of the nation’s most hotly contested swing states. The proliferation of provisional ballots could also delay the election results. “Can you imagine the presidential election not being called until Friday because of some hang-up in Virginia?” asks Tram Nguyen, associate director of Virginia New Majority, a progressive advocacy group.
“I can pretty much guarantee on the morning of election day we’re going to have numerous poll workers in Virginia giving out the wrong information on identification,” says Dara Lindenbaum, an associate counsel for the Lawyers’ Committee. The average American poll worker is 72, often receives minimal training and is not always up to speed on last-minute election law changes. Lindenbaum was in Hampton Roads on election day 2008, where voters encountered four-hour lines because of broken voting machines and record turnout.

The coalition expects to see plenty of Republican advocates creating confusion at the polls:

n addition to voter suppression laws, this year Election Protection organizers will face another threat: the Tea Party group True the Vote and its local affiliates, which claim to be recruiting a million “poll watchers” to challenge voters they believe are ineligible to vote. In practice, that’s going to mean a lot of conservative white activists stationed outside the polls in heavily Democratic minority neighborhoods, a sure-fire recipe for voter intimidation and harassment. That dynamic is especially troubling in a state like Virginia, where minorities make up 30 percent of the electorate and three out of four new residents are people of color.
Challenger laws date back to the 1870s in states like Virginia, when segregationists challenged the right to cast a ballot of newly emancipated African-Americans. They are still on the books in at least eight battleground states. “Of the 39 states that allow polling place challenges, only 15 require poll challengers to provide some documentation to support their claim that the challenged voter is ineligible,” reports the Brennan Center for Justice. In Florida, for example, any challenged voter must cast a provisional ballot (in 2008, 2.1 million provisional ballots were cast nationally; 69 percent were counted). In Virginia, the challenge must be in writing, and challenged voters may cast a regular ballot if they sign an affidavit affirming their identity.
Outside groups are not allowed in polling places, but representatives of the parties are, so True the Vote is urging its members to become GOP poll watchers, which could increase the likelihood of voter challenges. Often these challenges are based on little more than racial profiling. Videos have recently surfaced of True the Vote activists giving inaccurate training to prospective poll workers falsely claiming, in states like New Mexico, for example, that voters must show ID. “They’re enforcing the law of their gut rather than the law on the books,” says Levitt. “That’s what vigilante squads do, and their hit rates are pretty bad.”

Despite the most extensive voter suppression campaign in history, Berman notes that the Obama campaign “has more than thirty paid staffers working on voter protection in a dozen battleground states,” along with thousands of legal volunteers. It appears that their efforts may determine, not only the election outcome, but the future of America.

Give it up for tireless Obama campaigners Bill Clinton and Bruce Springsteen, who just took their road show to Parma, a largely white working-class suburb of Cleveland. It would be hard to identify a better couple to take the message to Ohio’s blue collar workers, and, with Springsteen’s music and Clinton’s message, they did not disappoint. Here’s some of Clinton’s magic, from Peter Hamby’s CNN post on their rally:

“This is the first time in my life I got to be the warm up act for Bruce Springsteen,” Clinton joked to a crowd of roughly 3,000 supporters at Cuyahoga County Community College. “I am qualified because I was born in the U.S.A. And unlike one of the candidates for president I keep all my money here.”
…Clinton said the decline from 8.9% unemployment in October 2011 to the 7.8% jobless rate today is “the biggest one year drop in unemployment in 17 years.”
Clinton noted that Romney once refused to take a position on the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the first bill signed into law by President Obama in 2009. Romney’s advisers have said he would not repeal the law, but have continued to dance around the question of whether Romney would have signed the bill.
“What he wants to do is convince the moderate voters that he’s a new man without explicitly disavowing a single solitary commitment he made in the two years he said he was ‘severe conservative’ Mitt Romney,” he said.
He also attacked Romney’s opposition to the federal bailout of Chrysler and General Motors, a measure overwhelmingly backed by voters in Ohio, where one out of eight jobs are linked to the auto industry.
“I love Ohio,” Clinton said. “It’s an old school place. We like our families, we like our communities, we value our personal loyalty … The president had your back. You got to have his back now.”

Then Springsteen came on, said it was like “going on after Elvis.” He sang “Allentown,” “We Take Care of Our Own, “This Land is Your Land,” “No Surrender” and and a new song, “Forward And Away We Go,” written for President Obama, which goes like this:

At The Washington Monthly TDS managing editor Ed Kilgore provides the definitive answer to questions about why wingnuts are putting up with Etch-a-sketch’s cosmetic ‘move-toward-the-center’: Kilgore quotes, via WaPo’s Dana Milbank, Grover ‘the pledge’ Norquist on the topic:

I hear all this as tonal…You’re now in the general election and you’ve already convinced conservatives why they should vote for you…You’re now talking to undecided voters, who have a completely different set of issues.

In other words, it’s a big Republican wink. As Kilgore translates Grover from the GOP-speak, “”I hear all this as tonal” means “it doesn’t mean a damn thing.” Kilgore also quotes Alec McGillis from his TNR post, saying that “the leash” will be “snapped tight again” if Romney actually wins, while the impression of Romney’s moderation could prove useful as an excuse if he loses.” Kilgore concludes that “movement conservatives may be playing a game as devious as Mitt himself.”

Bob Hotakainen of McCatchey newspapers relays some good news for Dems: “Jennifer Duffy, who analyzes Senate races for the Cook Political Report, says there’s a 60 percent to 65 percent chance that Democrats – who now have 53 of the 100 seats – will keep control of the Senate in 2013.”
I guess Romney won’t have to explain his secrecy on his personal taxes in the final debate, since the topic is foreign policy. It’s a shame, literally, that he gets a free ride on this issue in all three debates. Dems should slam his tax secrecy hard in ads in the swing states.
Dave Nyczepir & Shane D’Aprile have a post on “A roadmap for the final 72: How your campaign can make the most of the run-up to Election Day” up at Campaigns & Elections. One tip: “Among the toughest decisions the campaign has to make is how to spend late cash. While it’s easy to get sucked in by the low cost and speed of robocalls, Democrat Marty Stone says there are much better ways to use phones…”Don’t just think about 30-second blasts of messages, but think about where the voters are,” Stone says. “Do push-button auto calls, getting their opinions back.””
From the L.A. Times article by Christi Parsons and Seema Mehta, “Obama and Romney campaigns battle to mobilize voters” : “By the numbers, Obama would appear to have an advantage. He has more than double the paid staffers on the ground as Romney, and many are veterans of his earlier operation. In Ohio, which is seen as a must-win state for Romney, the Obama operation has opened 120 outposts, 45 more than it had in the state in 2008. Romney has 40.”
This is why campaigns need smart optics analysts.
What’s the matter with Tennessee? Put another way, why can’t Democrats get much traction in the Volunteer State? This, despite a long heritage of producing distinguished Democratic leaders like Andrew Jackson, Kefauver, the Gores and Fords, to name a few, and a history of reaping tremendous benefits from Democratic leaders, like FDR. Today, incumbent Republican Scott DesJarlais, embroiled in a particularly ugly scandal, still leads his Democratic adversary Eric Stewart in their 4th district race. Greg Johnson addresses the race and TN Dems frustrations in general in his Knoxnews.com post, “Is Democratic brand irretrievably and permanently damaged in Tennessee?”
Meanwhile, The Economist has a good update, “New South, Blue South?” on the purpling of TN’s neighbor, NC.
Do read Jason Easley’s PoliticusUSA post,”Audio Reveals Mitt Romney is Behind Employer Layoff Threats if Obama Wins ” and listen to the audio clip embedded in his post. Easeley reports: “According to the Working blog at In These Times, Romney said, “I hope you make it very clear to your employees what you believe is in the best interest of your enterprise and therefore their job and their future in the upcoming elections. And whether you agree with me or you agree with President Obama, or whatever your political view, I hope, I hope you pass those along to your employees.”
ProPublica’s latest rap video “Money is Speech: A Musical History of Campaign Finance” is a hoot.
Just saw a sneak preview of Speilberg’s “Lincoln,” which is all about the politicking to get the 13th amendment to the Constitution passed in the House of Reps, along with a character study of Lincoln, ably played by Daniel Day Lewis. It struck me as sad that a party once lead by giants like Lincoln and the abolitionists has now been totally taken over by moral midgets who suppress the citizenship rights of people because of the color of their skin. Sadder still that some of the most respected conservative journalists betray the GOP’s once proud heritage with their unconscionable silence about voter suppression.

We recommend that you read all of Ed Kilgore’s excellent Washington Monthly posts on last night’s debate, including his live-blogging. For now, we’ll just flag Kilgore’s “Tripping Over the Threshold Of an Actual Issue” with these graphs about Romney’s Benghazi Blunder:

Conservatives have now had over a month to tie their endless finger-pointing over the events in Benghazi to some larger theme, and have basically failed. If I were them, I’d probably argue the whole series of incidents shows that the administration (and Democrats generally) think the Global War on Terror–which they never much believed in to begin with–ended with the killing of Osama bin Laden, and have been proven very dangerously wrong. But instead, some conservative have gotten distracted by their Islamophobia into going nuts over the administration’s “apologies” for an obnoxious video, and others have gotten distracted by their lust for war with Iran into making this all about “signals” of America’s “lack of resolve.” And Mitt Romney’s done a little of everything without much clarity.
Last night he stumbled on the threshold of another opportunity to make the Libya killings a major issue by getting an important fact wrong. Had he not done so, he would have still probably devolved into incoherent non sequiturs about the killings somehow emboldening Iran or upsetting the Only Ally In the Whole Wide World Who Matters, Bibi Netanyahu. I suppose he’ll have another few days to get his argument together before the final debate. But the idea that he got “hosed by the ref” at Hofstra is absurd. He planned a hit on Obama, and just screwed it up.

Expect the Republican whining about Crowley calling Romney out for his ill-considered b.s to continue ad infinitum. Meanwhile, read Kilgore’s full post right here.