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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: February 2014

Political Strategy Notes

An interesting tidbit from a New York Times story, “G.O.P., Though Deeply Split, Has Election Edge, Poll Shows” by Megan Thee-Brenan and Jonathan Martin, about an otherwise ho-hum NYT/CBS News poll showing the GOP having a less-than-m.o.e. lead over Dems: “At least one Republican leader is faring far worse in the public mind than Mr. Obama. Speaker John A. Boehner had an approval rating in the poll of just 26 percent. More notable, perhaps, was that it was just a bit higher, 33, percent, among Republicans.” The report also notes that “most Americans agree more with Democratic policy positions.”
According to Andy Sullivan’s Reuters post “Insight: How Obama alums aim to turn Texas toward the Democrats,”: “Turnout analysts say that Hispanics made up a disproportionate share of those who stayed home that year. Democrats also see opportunities to win over suburban white women who may feel alienated by the Republican Party’s rightward drift and support of cuts in education.”
Republicans kill another veterans benefits bill.
At the Rachel Maddow Show web page, Steve Benen (via Zachary Roth) notes the key statistic that explains Republican voter suppression in Ohio: “In 2008, black voters were 56% of all weekend voters in Cuyahoga County, Ohio’s largest, even though they made up just 28% of the county’s population.” Further, adds Benen, “Mike Brickner, a spokesperson for the Ohio American Civil Liberties Union, told msnbc, “By completely eliminating Sundays from the early voting schedule, Secretary Husted has effectively quashed successful Souls to the Polls programs that brought voters directly from church to early voting sites.”
According to Anna M. Phillips’s Tampa Bay Times Post , “Early voters may hold key in U.S. House District 13 election,” early voting is even more pivotal in parts of Florida: “Of those who have voted in this election, nearly 80 percent are age 55 and up. And though voters over the age of 65 make up about a third of the district’s electorate, they account for more than half of the people who have sent in mail ballots thus far…Two years ago, absentee voters in this district surpassed Election Day voters by more than 60,000 people.”
Now Canadian right-wingers are trying to copy Republican voter suppression policies.
Dems looking for some good messaging points challenging GOP economic policy should check out WaPo’s The Monkey Cage, where Larry Bartels pulverizes the Ryan-Rubio cliches about the free market being the most potent antidote to poverty: “…One of the clearest lessons of the past 50 years is that, in the modern American economy, we do not “rise or fall together…Virtually none of the gains of economic growth have gone to the bottom 40 percent of American households. Their real incomes, before taxes and transfers, are no higher than they were 40 years ago. Our “best anti-poverty program,” the free market, has done nothing at all to improve their lot…Republicans held the White House for most of the past 50 years, and they presided over even slower growth for poor and middle-class families than Democrats have…Far from being “incapable” of alleviating poverty, federal programs are responsible for much or all of our progress on that score since the 1960s.”
Meanwhile, the GOP war on labor unions in PA is gathering steam, with Republican Gov. Tom Corbett pledging to sign legislation designed to severely restrict organizing rights. Democratic U.S. Sen Bob Casey explains the stakes, “I think we have to be cognizant in states where this kind of threat was underestimated, it didn’t turn out very well for workers,” Casey said, citing the cases of Michigan and Wisconsin, where GOP-controlled legislatures passed similar right-to-work laws. “The real goal here is political and ideological, to weaken workers’ right to fight for better wages and benefits.”
Clearly, America needs a lot more of this.


February 26: A Conservative Strategy Blows Up

There has been a fascinating change of circumstances occurring this last week, revolving around cookie-cutter state legislation sponsored by Republicans aimed at implementing the widely-deployed conservative rhetoric about “religious liberty.” Beginning in 2012, Republicans nationally and across the country adopted the mantra of “religious liberty” to take advantage of conservative Catholic and evangelical hostility to the Affordable Care Act’s contraception coverage mandate. It did not produce the hoped-for defection of Catholics to the Romney-Ryan ticket (the Catholic vote, as had been the case recently, closely reflected the overall national vote), but did provide a rubric for talking about Republican opposition to legalized abortion and marriage equality that avoided messy and unpopular specifics and gave a positive cast to essentially reactionary positions.
What’s happening now, though, is that efforts to provide “religious liberty” exemptions to normal law-abiding expectations is moving the debate in the opposite direction, drawing attention to the extremism of conservative culture-issue positions. Here’s how I summed up this development at TPMCafe:

This began happening first on the contraception coverage front, where the religious objection to the Obamacare mandate had to be justified (in the Hobby Lobby litigation most notably) by the claim that highly effective contraceptive devices (the IUD) and treatments (Plan B and hormonal “patches”) used by millions of women were in fact “abortifacients.”
This is not a terribly common view outside the Right-to-Life movement and the conservative Catholic and evangelical Protestant clergy; it certainly is not in accord with mainstream medical opinion. But the very discussion of angels-dancing-on-a-pin disputes over fertilization versus uterine implantation as the beginning of pregnancy shifted the debate over reproductive policy away from the strongest ground for anti-choicers — rare but controversial late-term abortions and the conditions under which they should be allowed — to the very weakest: “abortions” so early that most Americans don’t consider them abortions at all. So a gambit designed to broaden support for faith-based objections to reproductive rights policies is pulling the discussion in a direction that threatens to isolate anti-choicers and their Republican allies in a small ghetto of extremist opinion.
Similarly, the effort to “protect” religious believers from the consequences of a sudden shift in policies on same-sex marriage began as a reasonable-sounding request for two-way tolerance that might unite the near-majority of Americans who are not presently “comfortable” towards marriage equality with those whose views had recently “evolved.”
But the more the demands for religious “exemptions” from compliance with new marriage laws have become concrete, the less reasonable they have seemed. Nobody’s talking about requiring that religious communities perform same-sex marriages (or for that matter, ordain gay ministers, the most heated issue within many U.S. Christian communities). So the martyr’s cross of the “persecuted” must be found among the small ranks of marriage professionals who refuse to bake wedding cakes with two plastic men on top, or offer to offer planning services to two women.
Perhaps some non-sectarian Americans instinctively identify with “bakers of conscience” or wedding planners who consider themselves in danger of hellfire for booking hotel ballrooms for Sodomites. But like the fight for the freedom to treat IUDs as death machines, the fight to provide the conservative Christian elements of the wedding industry with plenary indulgences from obedience to the law tends to elicit less sympathy than ridicule from the non-aligned.
And that matters a great deal politically. On many fronts in the culture wars, the momentum has usually been possessed by those who can best identify themselves with the ambivalent attitudes of a mushy middle “swing vote”–favorable to contraceptives and early-term abortions but not late-term abortions; increasingly accepting of LGBT folk but indulgent of their parents’ and grandparents’ “ick factor.”
After years of shedding crocodile tears for the victims of late-term abortions, anti-choicers are now finding themselves defending businesses who in open court argue that the dividing line between acceptable contraception and murderous abortion occurs moments after sexual intercourse — when women instantly transition from autonomous individuals to “hosts” for a state-protected zygote. And after years of arguing against marriage equality on behalf of the positive “rights” of men and women in “traditional marriage,” those who actually think gay people in love are abominations unto the Lord are being exposed for who they really are.

So a “religious liberty” statute that breezed through the Kansas House was halted in the Senate by Republicans who feared it went too far. And just tonight, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer vetoed even broader legislation that actually passed both houses of her state’s legislature, with both GOP U.S. Senators and even some bill sponsors urging her to do so.
Right now, the once powerful “religious liberty” strategy for dealing with cultural issues is in shambles, with Republicans divided. It goes to show that deception and indirection can only work for so long.


A Conservative Strategy Blows Up

There has been a fascinating change of circumstances occurring this last week, revolving around cookie-cutter state legislation sponsored by Republicans aimed at implementing the widely-deployed conservative rhetoric about “religious liberty.” Beginning in 2012, Republicans nationally and across the country adopted the mantra of “religious liberty” to take advantage of conservative Catholic and evangelical hostility to the Affordable Care Act’s contraception coverage mandate. It did not produce the hoped-for defection of Catholics to the Romney-Ryan ticket (the Catholic vote, as had been the case recently, closely reflected the overall national vote), but did provide a rubric for talking about Republican opposition to legalized abortion and marriage equality that avoided messy and unpopular specifics and gave a positive cast to essentially reactionary positions.
What’s happening now, though, is that efforts to provide “religious liberty” exemptions to normal law-abiding expectations is moving the debate in the opposite direction, drawing attention to the extremism of conservative culture-issue positions. Here’s how I summed up this development at TPMCafe:

This began happening first on the contraception coverage front, where the religious objection to the Obamacare mandate had to be justified (in the Hobby Lobby litigation most notably) by the claim that highly effective contraceptive devices (the IUD) and treatments (Plan B and hormonal “patches”) used by millions of women were in fact “abortifacients.”
This is not a terribly common view outside the Right-to-Life movement and the conservative Catholic and evangelical Protestant clergy; it certainly is not in accord with mainstream medical opinion. But the very discussion of angels-dancing-on-a-pin disputes over fertilization versus uterine implantation as the beginning of pregnancy shifted the debate over reproductive policy away from the strongest ground for anti-choicers — rare but controversial late-term abortions and the conditions under which they should be allowed — to the very weakest: “abortions” so early that most Americans don’t consider them abortions at all. So a gambit designed to broaden support for faith-based objections to reproductive rights policies is pulling the discussion in a direction that threatens to isolate anti-choicers and their Republican allies in a small ghetto of extremist opinion.
Similarly, the effort to “protect” religious believers from the consequences of a sudden shift in policies on same-sex marriage began as a reasonable-sounding request for two-way tolerance that might unite the near-majority of Americans who are not presently “comfortable” towards marriage equality with those whose views had recently “evolved.”
But the more the demands for religious “exemptions” from compliance with new marriage laws have become concrete, the less reasonable they have seemed. Nobody’s talking about requiring that religious communities perform same-sex marriages (or for that matter, ordain gay ministers, the most heated issue within many U.S. Christian communities). So the martyr’s cross of the “persecuted” must be found among the small ranks of marriage professionals who refuse to bake wedding cakes with two plastic men on top, or offer to offer planning services to two women.
Perhaps some non-sectarian Americans instinctively identify with “bakers of conscience” or wedding planners who consider themselves in danger of hellfire for booking hotel ballrooms for Sodomites. But like the fight for the freedom to treat IUDs as death machines, the fight to provide the conservative Christian elements of the wedding industry with plenary indulgences from obedience to the law tends to elicit less sympathy than ridicule from the non-aligned.
And that matters a great deal politically. On many fronts in the culture wars, the momentum has usually been possessed by those who can best identify themselves with the ambivalent attitudes of a mushy middle “swing vote”–favorable to contraceptives and early-term abortions but not late-term abortions; increasingly accepting of LGBT folk but indulgent of their parents’ and grandparents’ “ick factor.”
After years of shedding crocodile tears for the victims of late-term abortions, anti-choicers are now finding themselves defending businesses who in open court argue that the dividing line between acceptable contraception and murderous abortion occurs moments after sexual intercourse — when women instantly transition from autonomous individuals to “hosts” for a state-protected zygote. And after years of arguing against marriage equality on behalf of the positive “rights” of men and women in “traditional marriage,” those who actually think gay people in love are abominations unto the Lord are being exposed for who they really are.

So a “religious liberty” statute that breezed through the Kansas House was halted in the Senate by Republicans who feared it went too far. And just tonight, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer vetoed even broader legislation that actually passed both houses of her state’s legislature, with both GOP U.S. Senators and even some bill sponsors urging her to do so.
Right now, the once powerful “religious liberty” strategy for dealing with cultural issues is in shambles, with Republicans divided. It goes to show that deception and indirection can only work for so long.


Gans: Dems May Pull Off Upset in 2014

Curtis Gans, director of the non-partisan Center for the Study of the American Electorate has an article entitled “Why 2014 Could Be a Very Democratic Election” up at HuffPo. That’s very bad news for Republicans, who up till now have been enjoying pundit predictions of November doom for Democrats. Gans, a respected political analyst, who has studied turnout and voting patterns for more than three decades, writes:

The record will show that the Democratic Party sustained no net losses in the U.S. Senate and gained five seats in the House in the 1998 mid-term during President Clinton’s second term and after Monica Lewinsky and impeachment dominated the news for the majority of the year. The record will also show that January polls tend to be irrelevant to November results or President Muskie would have been elected in 1972 and Hillary Clinton would have been the Democratic nominee and probable president in 2008. Foibles from a year earlier will only be remembered around election time if nothing has changed to render them obsolete. All of these are noise.
What could be either signal or noise in the Republican election scenario are two factors: 1) The mid-term electorate is substantially smaller (by as much as 20 percentage points) than the presidential year electorate, and it tends to include fewer young voters and minorities; and 2) There are twice as many Democratic Senate seats up for election in this cycle as there are Republican and, according to the Cook Political Report, there are only 77 House districts that were won by a 55-45 margin or less in 2012, only 33 by 52-48 or less — and those nearly evenly divided between Democratic and Republican winners.
Elections are not decided by how many turn out, but rather who turns out, and it is not at all clear at this juncture whether the deep divisions within the Republican Party will reduce GOP turnout by a greater amount than the likely lower turnout of some key Democratic constituencies.

Regarding prospects for a “blue wave” election, Gans writes:

Despite current conventional wisdom, such an election is not only possible but probable but only if three signals occur: If September polls, the polls taken when people are paying attention to the upcoming election, show a substantial improvement in Obama’s approval rating and an equally substantial increase in public support of the Affordable Care Act, and if the economy does not relapse into recession.

Gans then discusses a major problems for Republicans, including their being blamed for the “do-nothing congress,” demographic change and, internal divisions. If Obama and the Democrats have a little good luck, on the other hand, and the economy improves, the prospects for an upset improve considerably. It looks highly unlikely, however, that the Republicans will finally decide to address the issues of concern to the middle class, such as unemployment and reducing economic inequality. As Gans concludes,

But public opinion on a person or an issue is usually formed on a compared-to-what basis. And in that context, it hard to believe that a party whose leader in the Senate would see in 2011 his single most important goal as “to make Obama a one-term president,” and whose leader in the House would say, “We should not be judged on how many laws we create. We ought to be judged on how many laws we repeal,” would be given a 2014 mandate to continue on its present path.

All in all, Gans makes a good case that Dems have some reasons to hope for an upset.


Political Strategy Notes

At The Fix Chris Cilliizza explains why “Obama is right: Democrats’ ‘meh’ attitude toward midterms is a major problem“: “Obama is exactly right. His party — from the donor community to the activists — gets very excited about presidential elections but tends to lose interest (at least when compared with Republicans) in midterm elections…Republican gains in 2010 led to a redistricting process nationwide in 2011 that entrenched the Republican House majority, making it very difficult — though not impossible — for Democrats to recapture the chamber any time soon…And the impact of the 2010 midterm elections at the gubernatorial and state legislative level also had considerable policy consequences…More abortion restrictions were passed in state legislatures between 2011 and 2013 than in the entire previous decade. In the first six months of 2011 alone, six states passed stricter voter ID laws.”
Sen John McCain further damages his foreign policy cred.
Paul Krugman outs the GOP’s “Health Care Horror Hooey,” the phony ads and examples used to attack Obamacare. “Even supporters of health reform are somewhat surprised by the right’s apparent inability to come up with real cases of hardship…the true losers from Obamacare generally aren’t very sympathetic. For the most part, they’re either very affluent people affected by the special taxes that help finance reform, or at least moderately well-off young men in very good health who can no longer buy cheap, minimalist plans. Neither group would play well in tear-jerker ads.
At The National Journal Daniel Libit reports on “Democrats’ Southern Money-Suck Strategy: Someday they’d like to retake the South. For now they’re happy to make Republicans pay to keep it.” Libit notes the role of the Southern Progress Fund, which “seeks to build up the forgotten political infrastructure for Democrats below the Mason-Dixon Line…The group has committed itself to small-ball politics, deciding, for now, to concentrate on state and local races, while beefing up the technological capabilities of state Democratic parties.”
Also at The National Journal, Dems still have an edge in ground game strategy, and apparently the staff needed to implement it, as Alex Roarty reports in his article “The GOP’s Talent Gap: The party doesn’t have enough smart people working on its campaigns, and those who do are playing out of position.”
Don’t pay too much attention to reports on the latest University of Texas poll showing Democrat Wendy Davis lagging 11 points behind Republican Greg Abbott in the race for governor of Texas. It was conducted Feb. 7-17, and news reports that Abbott was campaigning with virulent hater Ted Nugent began appearing on the 18th.
At The New York Times Jeremy W. Peters “G.O.P. Leaders Draw Re-election Challenges From the Right” provides an insightful update on the GOP’s internecine strife.
Hofstra Proff Alan Singer’s HuffPo post “Only Aggressive Action Will Save the American Labor Movement” discusses the trade union movement’s current predicament — and how to get out of it. One of his observations: “Aggressive, illegal, actions may be the only way to save the labor movement in the United States. As Martin Luther King Jr. advised social activists in a “Letter from Birmingham Jail”: “One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”…Unions need to have muscle, they need to be willing to strike, they need to be willing to defy unjust laws, they need to welcome new members and not just represent those who hold onto relatively privileged better-paying jobs, and to they need to be more responsive to their members and potential members.”
Big mistake.


Arceneaux: Dems Can Win South by Affirming Racial Equality and Economic Populism

Scott Arceneaux, executive director of the Florida Democratic Party and a former director of the Louisiana Democratic Party has a post up at Politico, “Painting Dixie Blue: Can Democrats retake the South? Yes, and here’s how,” which is undoubtedly getting a read by strategists in both parties. Arceneaux begins with a bleak profile of the current political reality:

Often you need to hit bottom before you can start working your way back up. We Southern Democrats are basically at that point. With control of only two of 22 legislative bodies, three of 11 governors’ mansions and precious few other statewide offices, Southern Democrats are an endangered species indeed…Between 1992 and 2012 Republicans won the governorships and legislatures of all but two Southern states…And this year, Democrats aren’t even fielding a candidate for Alabama’s U.S. Senate race.

Arceneaux acknowledges the centrality of racial justice as an ongoing issue of concern in the region. He urges Dems to more vigorously embrace racial equality as a widely-held value most southerners can support, if put in a context of fairness and equal opportunity, two concepts that Republicans can’t even discuss with much credibility. Coupled with state-of-the-art voter targeting and turnout, such an approach could help Dems pick up a few percentage points in some statewide elections and well-chosen congressional and state legislative districts. Arceneaux adds:

This is something the Republicans–trapped by their base and their history–simply cannot do. And it is the core not only of their utter lack of support within the black community but also of their problem with Hispanic voters, the South’s fastest-growing demographic. Of the 10 states with the fastest-growing Hispanic populations from 2000 to 2011, all but two are in the South, with Alabama, South Carolina and Tennessee topping the list, and Hispanics are more than twice as likely to identify as Democrats than Republicans. To win over these new voters, Republicans must change their understanding of their own history. The past year has shown just how hard that is. All Democrats must do is embrace our history.

Arceneaux argues that Dems can get a bigger bite of the votes of white southerners by tapping the region’s tradition of economic populism.

The crux of the problem for Southern Democrats comes down to this: While voters are moving beyond race, they still do not trust us with their money. For close to 30 years, we haven’t consistently told Southern voters why they should. Voters in the South trust Democrats on education, racial equality, health care and the environment, but we frankly can’t get swing voters to listen to us until they first trust us with their tax dollars. Republicans have run a relentless campaign to connect Southern Democrats with all things taboo to fiscally conservative white swing voters: higher taxes, welfare, government handouts and bigger government overall. All buttressed by racial overtones, mostly covertly, sometimes overtly.
Democrats can get this right. Populism runs deep in the South. And Southern voters, like those nationally, are becoming more sensitive to the battle of Wall Street vs. Main Street, of income inequality and expanding opportunity. Swing voters in places like Florida’s I-4 corridor and the suburbs of Atlanta and Charlotte are getting it. Democrats need to stop talking about the difference between big government and smaller government, higher or lower taxes, more or fewer programs…Democrats need to be talking instead about effective and efficient government that works for people, not against them. We need to stop being afraid to talk about money, and start talking about money in terms of helping the most people at the least cost…

Best of all, argues Arceneaux, this is precisely where Republicans are weakest: “They no longer talk about less government; they are talking about no government. That is not where voters are.” He cites Clinton as an excellent role model for Democratic candidates in the south, and further,

To win, Southern Democrats must seize the true populist message: Government must work, it must work for you, not the special interests, and it should work in the most effective and efficient way. Voters can trust us with their tax dollars, and we need to tell them why. James Carville, another Louisiana native son, said it best more than 20 years ago: It’s the economy, stupid. In other words, it’s the money. If you can’t talk about it in a way that makes voters comfortable, you can’t win.

Perhaps the biggest hurdle for Dems, Arceneaux believes, is the failure to invest in building the Democraic party in the south. He notes that the Mississippi Democratic party has about $3,000 banked, “barely enough to keep the lights on.” That’s a sorry cash position, especially in a state that has the largest percentage of African Americans. Virginia, on the other hand, is ‘exhibit A’ for what can happen when Dems make an adequate investment in a southern state:

Add to this a strong state party built in the early 2000s by Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine when they were governors, and the recipe for success is clear. Cutting-edge technology and modeling, one of the best voter files in the country and well-nurtured grass roots, coupled with messaging centered on fiscal responsibility (pioneered by Warner in 2001), produced a Democratic sweep in 2013 for the first time since the 1960s.

Arceneaux points to other states like FL, NC, GA and even TX as states where Dems could benefit from similar strategic messaging and resource investment. Arceneaux’s post is accompanied by an informative sidebar on 2014 Dem prospects in particular states, “Dixie Blues,” by Margaret Slattery.


Tomasky: Dems Should Make 2014 the Vampire-Slayer Election

From Michael Tomasky’s “Democrats’ Best Weapon for Midterms: Fear of a Red Senate Control of the Senate depends on turnout in November. Democrats need to tap what scares their base most: fear of an unrestrained GOP.”:

You’ll read a lot about Obamacare and the minimum wage and the War on Women and everything else, and all those things will matter. But only one thing really, really, really matters: turnout. You know the lament: The most loyal Democratic groups–young people, black people, single women, etc.–don’t come out to vote in midterms in big numbers. You may dismiss this as lazy stereotyping, but sometimes lazy stereotyping is true, and this is one of those times.
So how to get these groups energized? Because if core Democratic voting groups turn out to vote in decent numbers, the Democrats will hold the Senate. Two or three of the six will hold on, the Democrats will prevail in the end in Michigan and Iowa, and either Alison Lundergan Grimes in Kentucky or Michelle Nunn in Georgia will eke out a win. Or maybe both–if Democratic voters vote. And if not? Republicans could net seven, eight.
The other side will be motivated: They’re older, white, angry that Obama continues to have the temerity to stand up there and be president, as if somebody elected him. This will be their last chance to push the rage button (well, the Obama-rage button; soon they’ll just start pushing the Hillary-rage button). But what will motivate the liberal side?
I call this the vampire-slayer election…

Tomasky explains that Democratic strategists are embracing Michael Bennett’s 2010 victory in Colorado, along with the wins of Heidi Heitkamp in ND and John Tester in MT in 2012 as a rough template for beating tea party surges in tough states. He adds that every voter in 10 targeted states “will be given two scores on a scale of 1 to 100: a support score and a turnout score. So if Molly Jones in Paducah is a 58 likely to support the Democrat and 38 likely to turnout, she can expect a lot of contacts from field operatives this fall.”
Tomasky applauds the strategy and the impressive investment in money and manpower Dems are planning for those ten states. But he argues that the time is ripe for a fear-driven campaign — one that reminds potential Democratic voters of how bad the Supreme Court could get if Republicans take over the senate and force Obama or the next president to nominate timid moderates or worse for upcoming vacancies. Ditto for other federal judgeships.
If that doesn’t shiver your timbers,

Picture the mad Darrell Issa having a counterpart in the Senate to launch baseless investigations. It’s one thing for the House to be banging on about phony IRS and Benghazi scandals, but the Senate doing it is another matter entirely–far more serious. You really think a Republican Senate won’t? And I haven’t even gotten to regular policy. You think a GOP House and Senate combined won’t try every trick in the book to pressure Obama to fold on Social Security and Medicare?

It is a scary scenario. some pundits have commented that a GOP senate takeover wouldn’t be so bad because Obama and/or the next Democratic president would still have the veto, and the Republicans are not going to get enough wins to override. But the Supreme Court is a pivotal factor for any Democratic strategy, especially checking the power of a highly-politicized conservative court majority. Letting it get worse would be a prescription for disaster, especially for African Americans, Latinos, women, unions and low-income workers.
Sure, Democratic candidates need a positive message. But the vampires smell blood, and their funders are already spending lavishly in support of the GOP senate campaign. Dems should have zero tolerance for the argument that a Republican senate takeover wouldn’t be so bad. As Tomasky concludes, “Democrats need to make their base voters see vividly the potential consequences of a GOP Senate majority and live in mortal fear of it. That and $60 million just may stem the tide.”


Political Strategy Notes

Sean Trende has a wonky post up at RCP, “How Likely Are Democrats to Lose the Senate?” concluding: “…This is a very, very challenging map for Democrats. As things presently stand, the map probably makes them underdogs to hold the Senate. Barring some sort of change in the national environment or meltdown in the Republican nominations process — neither of which is impossible — Democrats are likely in for a very long night on Nov. 4.”
Alan I Abramowitz argues at the Crystal Ball that “The results of a simple but extremely accurate midterm election forecasting model indicate that the 2014 U.S. House elections are likely to result in minimal change in the party balance of power…Right now, the most likely outcome of the House elections would appear to be a near standoff.”
At Post Politics Aaron Blake flags a much-trumpeted YouGov poll alleging that “71 percent of people who supported President Obama in 2012 now said that they regret their vote.” Blake points out that the sample asked was 36 people, or “closer to 6 percent” of the larger poll respondents, and therefore…quite lame.
At The Fix Chris Cillizza makes the case that the Dems need new blood at the top of the ticket in 2016, and Hillary doesn’t have it. But he doesn’t adequately address Clinton’s potential for mobilizing women voters on an unprecedented scale, nor the positive feelings millions of Americans have about the Clinton era’s economic prosperity.
At the Wall St. journal (where else?), Karl Rove explains how he intends to counter Democrats ‘ObamaCare Strategy.”
Wolf Blitzer called out Ted Nugent for calling President Obama a “subhuman mongrel”: — “That’s what the Nazis called Jews to justify the genocide of the Jewish community,” Blitzer said in a Feb. 18, 2014, interview. “They called them untermenschen, subhuman mongrels. If you read some of the literature that the Nazis put out there, there is a long history of that specific phrase he used involving the president of the United States.” Nugent cancelled his appearance, and then Blitzer made Newt Gingrich own his defense of Nugent: “Hold on a second, Newt. In this particular case, the man who wants to be the next governor of Texas is willing to go out there and embrace someone who refers to our president as a subhuman mongrel.”
Do read Ashley Alman’s HuffPo post, “Turns Out Anti-Union Volkswagen Workers May Have Screwed Themselves And The South,” which notes: “”I can imagine fairly well that another VW factory in the United States, provided that one more should still be set up there, does not necessarily have to be assigned to the South again,” said works council leader Bernd Osterloh…”If co-determination isn’t guaranteed in the first place, we as workers will hardly be able to vote in favor” of building another plant in the right-to-work South, Osterloh added.”
The slogan that should have been plastered all over Chattanooga:

UNITED WE BARGAIN
DIVIDED WE BEG


Meddle on, Dems.


Can ‘Leftward Shift’ in U.S. Bust GOP Blockade?

Bill Schneider’s Reuters post “What America’s leftward shift means for elections” provides a dollop of hope for progressive Democrats. As Schneider explains:

With each new poll, it’s becoming clear that the United States is shifting to the left. A majority of Americans now supports same-sex marriage. And legalization of marijuana. And normalization of relations with Cuba.
Gallup reports that, in 2013, the percentage of Americans identifying themselves as liberals reached its highest level since 1992. True, it’s only 23 percent. Conservatives, at 38 percent, still outnumber liberals. But the trend has been slowly and steadily upward for liberals since 1996, when it was 16 percent.
This shift is due entirely to Democrats becoming more liberal — 29 percent of Democrats in 2000, 43 percent in 2013. At the same time, Democrats have won the national popular vote in five out of the six presidential elections since 1992 (all but 2004). Barack Obama won a majority of the popular vote twice — something Bill Clinton couldn’t do.

Schneider adds that “a coalition of 10 Democratic constituencies that united to elect and re-elect Obama: young voters, working women, single mothers, African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans, Jews, gays, educated professionals and the “unchurched” is growing. But he concedes that the Republicans still have an edge in manipulating redistricting, House incumbency and geographic clustering.
Schneider believes that the GOP blockade will hold until 2022, when post-census redistricting will kick in. Let’s hope that he is underestimating the pro-Democratic demographic transformation of the Americn electorate now underway and the Dems’ improving voter targeting and turnout.


A Gift for Wendy Davis

I could be wrong. But I think Democratic candidate for Governor of Texas Wendy Davis just got a huge gift in the form of GOP front-runner Greg Abbott’s decision to campaign with Ted Nugent. Here’s how Manny Fernandez reports it at the New York Times:

Attorney General Greg Abbott of Texas, the leading candidate for the Republican nomination for governor, on Tuesday defended his decision to campaign with the pro-gun musician and conservative commentator Ted Nugent a month after Mr. Nugent called President Obama a “communist-nurtured subhuman mongrel.”
The campaign events and Mr. Nugent’s long history of inflammatory speech stirred outrage among Democrats in the state, including Mr. Abbott’s main Democratic rival, State Senator Wendy Davis, who called the decision to campaign with Mr. Nugent “an insult to every Texan.”

The tone-deaf Abbott responded by calling The Nuge “a fighter for freedom” and The Nuge gushed that Abbott is “my friend” and “my blood brother.” Fernandez quotes the Texas Democratic Chairman’s take:

“He spews hate against our first African-American president and in return, Attorney General Greg Abbott welcomes him to the campaign trail,” Gilberto Hinojosa, the chairman of the Texas Democratic Party, said of Mr. Nugent in a statement. “Is this how Abbott celebrates Black History Month?”

There are some other problems Nugent brings to the GOP campaign, as Fernandez explains:

Democrats had no shortage of comments or behavior from Mr. Nugent’s past at which to take offense. They called him a “sexual predator,” citing an episode of VH1’s “Behind the Music” that stated he had admitted to liaisons with underage girls and had persuaded one girl’s mother to sign papers making him the girl’s legal guardian.
In April 2012, Mr. Nugent was interviewed by the Secret Service after he appeared to threaten Mr. Obama at the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting by saying that if the president was re-elected, “I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year.”

It’s hard to understand why Abbott would want to creep out his campaign with the likes of Nugent, who has called feminists “fat pigs” and “dirty whores,” according to Shelley Kofler’s report at KERA News. Where is the value added? He already had the right-wing nut vote.
But it’s not hard to understand how Abbott’s blood brother could help energize African American voters to turn out in impressive numbers. Abbott may have also given military veterans a reason to vote against him, if this report on Nugent’s bragging about his repulsive draft-dodging strategy is accurate.
The wild card here is the Texas media, specifically whether or not they give Abbott a free ride on his blundering decision to campaign with Nugent. If they do their job, Davis should pick up a few points on Abbott.