The following article is by Stan Greenberg of DCorps:
James Carville called me early this morning to talk about the new ABC News/Washington Post poll, reported under the banner, “Poll: Democrats’ advantage on key issues is not translating to a midterm-election edge.”
The headline writers must have worked overtime to get to the interpretation that Democrats cannot translate the current mood into election gains.
This is probably the worst example yet of the official narrative requiring great contortions to get to the conclusion that this will be a Republican year.
Their whole interpretation of the 2014 midterms and trends is based on the U.S. Senate preference of about half the sampled respondents who will choose senators in this off year. They show the Democrats trailing by 8 points, but that is less interesting or surprising when you note — as Kyle Kondik did for Sabato’s Crystal Ball — that the Republican presidential candidates won these states by 7 points on average since 2000.
With that digression, the Washington Post minimized the following results:
Two-thirds of respondents said they will not re-elect their member of Congress — up 5 points in a month. And as we know, the majority of voters think Republicans are in control of the whole business.
On how issues will affect their vote, let’s start with the new health care law — the centerpiece of the GOP strategy. On the question of whether a candidate’s position on the Affordable Care Act would affect the vote of those surveyed, the Republicans have only a 2-point advantage (36 percent say they are less likely to vote for a member who supports the ACA, and 34 percent say they are more likely to vote for someone who supports the law). Just four months ago this same poll showed Republicans with a 16-point advantage on a slightly different ABC News/Washington Post question. Furthermore, by 44 to 36 percent, voters favor Democrats to handle health care in general.
By the way, if you want to see an issue that matters, check out their results on the minimum wage. That issue helps Democrats by 50 to 19 percent — respondents are a net 31 points more likely to vote for a candidate who supports raising the minimum wage.
The Republicans have lost ground in particular on handling the economy, budget deficits, and immigration. Would that be every issue getting public attention?
Their poll is most stunning on the question they ask about each of the players: Are they “in touch with the concerns of most people in the United States today or out of touch”? Nearly half, 48 percent, say both the president and the Democrats are in touch — an astonishing 20 points higher than the number saying that about the Republicans.
The pundits insist this is a Republican year. We doubt it.
Look at the Virginia gubernatorial election and the two state senate elections. And let’s see what happens in Florida on Tuesday.

By all accounts Tuesday’s special election in congressional district FL-13 will be bellwether close, as Democrat Alex Sink tries to take the district from Republicans. According to Jennifer Leigh Oprihory’s Al.com post “Democrats, GOP test fall strategy in Florida House race,”: “…In an effort to deflect Republican attacks on the health care law and rollout problems, Democrats also plan to prominently feature proposed Republican curbs on Social Security and Medicare in competitive races across the country…”Those issues are paramount,” said Rep. Steve Israel of New York, who chairs the House Democrats’ campaign operation. “Having Republicans say that they want to cut Medicare but continue to fund massive subsidies to big oil companies … that will be a defining theme.” Those who want to help out with some last-minute calls on Sink’s behalf should click here.
Abby Rapoport explores “Why Does the National Media Get Texas so Wrong?” at The American Prospect and notes, “Arguing that the right is getting beat back because incumbents largely escaped unscathed misses the whole point. Many incumbents are Tea Party already.”
If you are looking for an apt description of Sarah Palin’s CPAC speech, Charles Pierce’s Esquire post “CPAC BONUS SATURDAY — THE PRINCESS IN EXCELSIS” should serve the purpose: “It was as singularly embarrassing a public address as any allegedly sentient primate ever has delivered. It was a disgrace to politics, to rhetoric, to the English language, and to seventh-grade slam books everywhere…She is the living representation of the infantilization of American politics, a poisonous Grimm Sister telling toxic fairy tales to audiences drunk on fear, and hate and nonsense…”
But Paul Begala explains why Ted Cruz’s bashing of war heroes Sens Dole and McCain as lacking in principles may be nearly as nauseating.
Those manly Republicans can’t stop gushing about Putin’s decisiveness. But former Secretary of Defense Gates sees it a little differently: “My own view is, after all, Putin invaded Georgia when George W. Bush was president. Nobody ever accused George W. Bush of being weak or unwilling to use military force…In the middle of a major international crisis, that some of the criticism, domestic criticism of the president ought to be toned down, while he’s trying to handle this crisis.”
Michael Tomasky reviews Lane Kenworthy’s “Social Democratic America” at The New York Review of Books and mulls over the possibilities for “A New Populism,” even under Hillary Clinton.
Sen. Sanders might contribute to elevating a new populism — if he runs as a Democrat.
Chris Cillizza doesn’t get into it in his post about the new Pew Research Center study, “Republicans’ young-people problem” at The Fix. But I suspect one of the most likely reasons why young people are turning off to the GOP in larger numbers than the Gen Xers is who they are blaming for the rapidly diminishing educational and career opportunities their generation faces.
The short answer would be ‘No.’

There’s a big and fascinating new study of the Millennial Generation out today from Pew, drawing from its recent polling, that poses some interesting questions for Democrats. Here’s how I characterized the strategic issues at Washington Monthly today:

The biggest dichotomy involves the political allegiances of Millennials: fully half self-identify as independents, but the cohort is significantly more likely than older generations to vote Democratic, identify itself as “liberal” (more Millennials self-identify as “liberal” than “conservative,” the first cohort to do so in a very long time), favor government activism, and agree with Democratic issue positions on both cultural and economic topics (there’s a slight divergence on abortion policy, where Millenials are marginally less likely than GenXers to support generally legalized abortion). Yet less than a third of Millenials agree there is a “great deal of difference” between the party they agree with and the party that tends to characterize Millennial views as secular-socialist.
There’s a particularly interesting finding on health care policy:

Millennials are as skeptical as older generations of the 2010 health care law. In December 2013–the most recent Pew Research Center survey on the Affordable Care Act–there were no significant differences across generations in views of the law. About four-in-ten in each cohort approved of the law.
Yet by 54% to 42%, Millennials think it is the federal government’s responsibility to make sure all Americans have health care coverage. There is less support among older age cohorts for the government insuring health coverage for all.

Aside from the fact that Millennials are for obvious reasons less inclined to worry about health coverage than older cohorts, this finding suggests that Millennials may be disproportionately represented in the ranks of those who object to Obamacare from the left.
In any event, the study can be read in two very different ways by progressive political folk. Nothing about their views indicates much of an openness to Republican political appeals, at least so long as the GOP is in its current hyper-reactionary and old-white-folks-dependent phase. That would argue for a Democratic strategy of largely taking them for granted and focusing appeals on older generations more likely to “swing.” But insofar as low voting levels (particularly in midterms) among Millennials are a serious problem for the Donkey Party, and in view of their relatively strong feeling that the two parties aren’t greatly different, a more left-bent message might boost turnout and bond Millenials more durably to the party that actually seems to share its values. One much-discussed dilemma in Democratic strategy actually may be an illusion: while Millennials have huge doubts about Social Security’s solvency, and as an abstract manner favor greater emphasis on program benefiting young folks as compared to old folks, a pretty large majority (61%) oppose cutting Social Security benefits as a solution to the program’s solvency issues.
All in all, the study is worth a close look, particularly by those who like to make breezy assertions about “the kids” without much empirical grounding.

If nothing else, bookmark the study for future reference.

On Thursday, Small Business Majority released the results of a national web survey of 500 small business owners. This poll, conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, reveals that a 57 percent majority of small business owners supports increasing the federal minimum wage to $10.10 per hour. They cite enhancing consumer spending and strengthening the economy as reasons to boost pay. A majority also agrees that raising the minimum wage would decrease pressure on taxpayer-financed government assistance to make up for low wages.
Click here to read the Small Business Majority press release, and here to view the full report.

One of the more annoying habits of the MSM (and some progressive media) is the tendency to greet virtually every political development within the Republican Party as signaling the demise of the Tea Party and the renewed ascendence of the Great Big Adults of the Republican Establishment. It echoes earlier efforts to prematurely bury the Christian Right, which, of course, overlaps extensively with the Tea Folk.
We heard the trumpets of doom for the Tea Party blow yet again the morning after this week’s Texas Primaries, where a couple of bad right-wing congressional campaigns against fairly right-wing incumbents got a lot of attention. This is from my post-mortem at TPMCafe:

[T]he story we are hearing from most national observers (such as this headline from the New York Times today: “Texas GOP Beats Back Challengers From Right”) was about the dog that did not bark: tea party challengers to Sen. John Cornyn and Rep. Pete Sessions failed miserably, a result that will undoubtedly be used to reinforce an ongoing national meme that the Tea Party is dead or dying and the GOP establishment is riding high.
But if you look beyond the congressional races, that’s not necessarily the right conclusion to derive from the Texas GOP primary results.
In the Lieutenant Governor’s race, incumbent David Dewhurst — the same guy Ted Cruz upset in the 2012 U.S. Senate primary — ran a poor second last night, and will face fiery right-wing state senator Dan Patrick in a May runoff Dewhurst seems doomed to lose. In the primary to replace Attorney General Greg Abbott, the GOP gubernatorial candidate, the first place finisher was state senator Ken Paxton, whose main campaign credential was his coziness with Cruz. In the Ag Commissioner’s primary, the top finisher was former state legislator Sid Miller, whose campaign co-chairman and treasurer is (even after the neanderthal rocker’s “Obama is a subhuman mongrel” comment) none other than Ted Nugent. On a night when for the first time in memory, all but one Texas statewide office was open, the tea folk did quite well, and could do just as well in what should be an extremely low turnout runoff in May.
But beyond the tea party-versus-establishment dynamics, this primary reflected the full absorption of “constitutional conservative” rhetoric by candidates previously associated with country-club Republicanism. John Cornyn has spent much of the last year snuggling up to his junior colleague Cruz seeking cover. Greg Abbott (“typically described as a more conservative version of [Rick] Perry,” says one Texas observer) is running a campaign that has been teetering on the edge of a vengeful culture-war assault on Democratic rival Wendy Davis. And most interesting at all, the scion of that great weathervane of Republican ideological change, the Bush family, is tacking hard right as well: George P. Bush, the half-Hispanic son of Jeb, is running for the statewide position of Land Commissioner after an extended effort to court the tea folk and identify himself with Cruz (notably endorsing the “defund Obamacare” stunt that led to last year’s government shutdown).
The situation in Texas reflects a more general dynamic in the GOP, dating back at least to the concessions Mitt Romney made to “constitutional conservative” orthodoxy (from signing onto the radical “Cut, Cap, Balance” budget pledge, to taking a hard line on immigration, to promising a full repeal of the Affordable Care Act) in order to secure the Republican presidential nomination over weak and divided “true conservative” opposition. The more the tea party movement (itself mainly a continuation of the “movement conservative” faction that has been struggling for preeminence since its breakthrough in the Goldwater campaign of 1964) influences mainstream GOP policy positions and rhetoric, the less it may succeed in intraparty contests with an “establishment” that has largely coopted it, and whose differences are mainly over strategy and tactics rather than core ideology.

Since the Texas primary was the first major primary of this cycle, it offers a good opportunity to discard this habit of wishing away the ideological “fever” in the GOP before it does real damage to our understanding of conservative politics.

In her NYT article “New Democratic Strategy Goes After Koch Brothers,” Ashley Parker quotes Democratic pollster Geoff Garin: “In 2012, Mr. Garin produced a research project for Patriot Majority PAC, an outside Democratic group, looking at the public awareness that swing voters and traditionally Democratic constituencies have of the Koch brothers. He found that his focus group respondents had an “overwhelmingly negative” reaction to the Kochs’ political involvement, with their top concern being that “the Koch brothers’ agenda will hurt average people and the undermine the middle class….Our research has shown pretty clearly that once voters recognize the source of the attacks, they tend to discount them substantially.”
Democratic message fact for the day: “According to the Commerce Dept. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Obamacare accounted for about three quarters of the overall rise in Americans’ incomes in January.” — from Tara Culp-Ressler’s ThinkProgress post, “Obamacare Is Already Helping Boost Americans’ Personal Incomes.”
Call me crazy, but I’m more encouraged than discouraged by this headline and the story behind it by Dan Balz and Scott Clement: “Poll: Democrats’ advantage on key issues is not translating to a midterm-election edge,” since most voters don’t start paying attention until the last month or so before the election.
Scott Bland has a National Journal update on the Democrats’ difficult “red to blue” campaign targeting 16 House seats.
Given Hillary’s impressive polling numbers, even with Republicans, might it be a good idea to send her out on the trail now to help a few competitive Democratic congressional candidates, since her lead will likely diminish later? The idea is to leverage popularity of Democratic leaders while we have it.
At The Hill Jessica Taylor explains new developments in the battle for control of the U.S. Senate, and sees Democrats’ best hope for pick-ups in GA and MS, with a tough map to overcome elsewhere.
in his WaMo post, “Limits of the Republican Senate Wave,” however, Ed Kilgore flushes GOP fantasies about picking up Senate seats in the double digit range.
Quite an opportunity for the Arizona Democratic Party in this ArizonaCentral.com report by Daniel Gonzalez and Erin Kelley “From 2008 to 2012, the number of eligible Latino voters in Arizona increased 24 percent, to 989,000, up from 796,000, according to the report. But only 52 percent of eligible Latinos were registered in 2012, and only 40 percent of those eligible actually voted, according to the report…By comparison, 71 percent of eligible White voters were registered in 2012, and 62 percent voted.”
Looking ahead, Chris Cillizza’s “The one chart you need to understand why Republicans should be worried about 2016” merits a peek.

The following article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of “Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win,” is cross-posted from HuffPo:
From all indications the GOP has gambled all the marbles on the proposition that Obamacare will sink Democratic candidates this fall. But the odds are good, they have made a losing bet.
In fact, it’s looking more and more like Obamacare may even be a net positive for Democrats this November.
Of course one reason why Republicans are banking so heavily on the toxicity of Obamacare is that they really don’t have much else to fall back on. The popularity of Republicans in Congress is at an all time low. And Democrats have the high political ground on just about every other major issue.
Raising the minimum wage is enormously popular with a public that is sick of stagnant wages while Republican Wall Street bankers continue to rake in record bonuses. Republicans say no.
Large majorities favor continuing federal unemployment benefits in an economy where there are still three job seekers for every job. But the Republican leadership has blocked continued unemployment benefits.
The GOP’s anti-woman, anti-gay outbursts make them look like an artifact of another era to young people and swing voters. As the New York Times reported last Friday:
In the past few months, Republicans have called Wendy Davis, a Democratic candidate for Texas governor “Abortion Barbie,” likened Allison Lundergan Grimes, a Senate candidate from Kentucky, to an “empty dress,” criticized Hillary Rodham Clinton’s thighs, and referred to a pregnant woman as a “host”.
Their seminars on “how to talk to women” don’t seem to be working.
Overwhelming majorities favor immigration reform that the Republican leadership has single-handedly blocked in the House.
Americans completely disagree with GOP “climate deniers” who don’t believe in science and are tied at the hip to Big Oil.
Over 90 percent of the population agrees with Democrats that it’s time to perform background checks on 100 percent of gun sales in the United States — but the GOP put up a stonewall to commonsense gun violence legislation after the massacre at Sandy Hook.
Most Americans reacted with revulsion to the GOP shutdown of government last fall.
So it’s no wonder that Republicans have pinned all of their hopes for the mid-terms on the proposition that the botched Obamacare roll-out would sour the public on the signal accomplishment of President Obama’s first term.
But once again, the Republicans are on the wrong side of history.

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