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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Political Strategy Notes

Brian Bennett and Joseph Tanfani explain how “Immigration reform creates odd political alliances” at the L.A. Times. As the authors observe, “An unprecedented collection of political bedfellows has coalesced this year on the reform side of the immigration debate: liberal Latino organizations and Republican operatives, the Chamber of Commerce and labor unions, faith groups and high-tech companies. And as with the Sharry contribution, some left-leaning groups are financing Republican pro-immigration groups…During the first half of the year, reform backers outspent opponents in advertising by more than 3 to 1: $2.4 million to $700,000, according to Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group.”
At Bloomberg.com Ezra Klein asks and answers the question of the hour: “How Dumb Is Immigration Debate? This Dumb.”
Jacquellina Carrero’s NBC Latino post “Florida voter suppression is a disgrace” says it plain: “Why is Scott revisiting the idea of a voter purge? Because he is up for re-election in 2014, and his numbers are shaky. Many of his Tea Party supporters are unhappy about his decision to allow the expansion of Medicaid as part of the Affordable Care Act. A June poll found Scott trailing former Florida Governor Charlie Crist in a hypothetical matchup (Crist is expected to challenge Scott next year). Only 35 percent of Florida voters say Scott deserves a second term. So in order to re-energize his conservative base, Scott is throwing Hispanics under the bus and taking on the mythical problem of non-citizen voting.”
True enough. But where in this era of widening economic inequality is the literature of class conflict?
In his PoliticusUSA post, “Republicans Are In a Full Blown Panic as the Affordable Care Act Grows More Successful,” RMuse writes, “…In New York, premiums are set to fall by roughly 50%, and in California, this author’s premiums fell by about 40% after 17 years of perpetual increases and that does not include rebate checks that began rolling in last year according to the 80/20 rule. It is the health law’s success stories like these that have Republicans in a panic and it is the third reason they are going all in to sabotage the ACA; it is successful.”
Nonetheless,, I hope this is true. One day a happier generation will look back on the pre-single-payer era policy of predicating the health security of millions on the quality of individual employers’ consciences as madness.
In his New York Times Opinion post, “How Twitter can help predict an election,” Fabio Rojas writes, “In a paper to be presented Monday, co-authors Joseph DiGrazia, Karissa McKelvey, Johan Bollen and I show that Twitter discussions are an unusually good predictor of U.S. House elections. Using a massive archive of billions of randomly sampled tweets stored at Indiana University, we extracted 542,969 tweets that mention a Democratic or Republican candidate for Congress in 2010. For each congressional district, we computed the percentage of tweets that mentioned these candidates. We found a strong correlation between a candidate’s “tweet share” and the final two-party vote share, especially when we account for a district’s economic, racial and gender profile. In the 2010 data, our Twitter data predicted the winner in 404 out of 406 competitive races.”
Leading minimum wage hike opponent Walmart is definitely not a mighty job-creator, as Kathleen Geier shows at Washington Monthly.
At The Atlantic, Molly Ball addresses the question that has Republicans very worried: “Are Seniors Souring on the Republican Party? The GOP has lost more support among voters over 65 than any other demographic group in recent months, according to a new poll“. As Ball notes, quoting DCorps’ Erica Seifert: “The economy is the biggest underlying factor in the shift, Seifert said. In November 2010, 49 percent of seniors said Republicans were the better party on the economy; just 34 percent said Democrats were. In the July 2013 poll, the parties were essentially tied on this metric, with 43 percent saying Democrats and 42 percent saying Republicans.”
Not a bad analogy, actually.

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