As Democrats (quite appropriately) focus on ways to boost turnout this November, there’s often, in my opinion, an excessive emphasis on “voter enthusiasm” as opposed to more mechanical ways of getting out the vote. But some analysts go even further, as I discussed today at Washington Monthly.

[A]t the Daily Beast today, comedian/activist Dean Obeidallah, in what I assume was not a comedic take, offers an even more dubious variation on the “enthusiasm” theory: the “anger” theory. Angry voters, he asserts, win midterms, and since Republican voters are really angry right now, Democrats are going to get waxed if they don’t get angry, too.
Obeidallah’s data set for his “angry voters win midterms” hypothesis is limited to the last to midterms. In 2006, voters angry at Bush turned out; in 2010, voters angry at Obama turned out. Trouble is, there’s not a big difference in the kind of voters who voted in this two midterms with such different results. The most important difference I can see is that in 2006 over-65 votes preferred Democrats by a 50-48 margin; in 2010 they preferred Republicans by 59-38, reflecting a sharp trend that first manifested itself in 2008. The partisan composition of the electorate in 2010 was marginally more pro-Republican than in 2006, but at some point these sorts of comparison become almost entirely circular: if the voters who turn out tilt Republican, then “Republican turnout” is up. That’s not to say a different electorate is appearing.
More to the point, even if Obeidallah is right in arguing that “anger” is key to midterm turnout and/or victory, there’s an especially germane difference between ’16 and ’10: the party in control of the White House, and thus (invariably) the primary object of voter unhappiness. This, and not some sort of mathematical law, is why parties controlling the White House, particularly when the economy isn’t doing well, tend to lose ground in midterms, and especially second midterms.
So what Obeidallah is really arguing for isn’t a sudden realization among Democrats that anger is powerful, but a very difficult strategy of convincing voters to be angry at the party that does not control the White House, while presumably remaining non-angry at the White House itself. That is an extremely roundabout way of describing what is often called a “two futures” election, where voters resist the natural tendency to make their vote a “referendum” on the status quo, and instead vote on their future policy preferences.
There are exactly two precedents for this sort of appeal actually succeeding. One, the most relevant, is unfortunately pretty distant in time: Harry Truman’s 1948 “Do-Nothing Congress” attack on the GOP, which (a) wasn’t a midterm, and (b) was nestled between two really bad midterms for Democrats. The second, in 1998, is relevant insofar as voters appeared to have been interested in rebuffing congressional GOP overreach mostly attributable to the Clinton impeachment effort. But it’s less relevant because the economy was booming and Clinton’s job approval ratings were over 60%.
So there’s not much evidence Democrats will win any anger-fest in 2014. That’s not to say, of course, that they should not spend a great deal of time and money reaching out to their “base” and encouraging them to vote via a combination of “happy” messages about Obama’s accomplishments and “unhappy” messages about the damage a Republican Congress might do to them. Perhaps even more importantly, Democrats need to let voters who lean their way know where and when and how to vote, and that sitting this one out isn’t acceptable.

In truth, there’s no simple Democratic strategy for ’14. Yes, swing voters will be relatively sparse, but they matter. Yes, “base” turnout efforts will have both a technological and a message component. Yes, “populist” issues like the minimum wage and Medicaid expansion will be useful both with swing and base voters. And yes, different strokes will work with different folks in some parts of the country. But the search for a single bullet is probably a waste of time.

In Chris Cillizza’s “Bob Dole says the GOP is way more conservative than it was even 20 years ago. He’s right.” at The Fix, he analyses a VoteView study of roll call votes in the U.S. House and Senate to show that the Republican Party has indeed become more ideologically-extreme.

…What VoteView did is analyze every roll call vote in the House and Senate and then use that data to map how liberal or conservative the average Republican and Democrat was over time…If you start in the early 1990s, you begin to see the Republican and Democratic lines heading in opposite directions — with Republicans growing more conservative and Democrats more liberal. (This is true in both houses of Congress although more stark in the House.) But, the charts also show that Republicans have moved closer to the 1.0 pure conservative score than Democrats have to the -1.0 pure liberal score. That movement has been even more pronounced in the last decade in the House.

He quotes from the landmark Brookings study by Norm Orntstein and Thomas Mann, “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism“:

We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party…The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise;unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition…When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal

Speaker Boehner, who bosts top ratings from conservative organization groups is often dissed by his GOP colleagues as inadequately conservative. Further, adds Cillizza:

Republican politicians who were once considered solid conservatives two decades ago are now routinely dismissed as Republicans In Name Only (RINOS). The defeat of Bob Bennett in Utah in 2010 and the primary challenges to the likes of Sens. John Cornyn (Texas) and Mitch McConnell (Ky.) are evidence of this trend. Conservatism tinged with pragmatism is no longer considered conservatism by many within the party’s base. Sen. Ted Cruz, the most visible figure of the ‘pure’ conservative movement, typified the change within the Republican party in Congress when he recently dismissed Dole, John McCain and Mitt Romney as evidence that when Republicans don’t stand on principle, they lose. (Dole’s response? “I was one of the top supporters of President Reagan and had a pretty conservative record when I was in the Senate. But he [Cruz] didn’t know any of that.”)

Cillizza quotes from the VotewView study:

Though Democrats have not moved nearly as much to the left as the Republicans have to the right, they have also contributed to polarization, in our opinion, by embracing identity politics as a strategic tool. In Roosevelt’s New Deal, the Democrats advocated redistribution and regulation of business. These issues remain active to some extent, but with time emphasis has shifted to issues centered on race, gender, ethnicity, or sexual preference. As this issue evolved, it mapped onto the existing liberal-conservative dimension. The mapping is marked by members of the Black Caucus anchoring the liberal end of the dimension. What our roll call analysis shows is that Democrats did not vote much further to the left on the new issues than on New Deal issues. The comparison works because some New Deal issues, such as minimum wages and regulation of the financial sector, continue to lead to roll call votes.

Well, it’s not so easy to avoid “identity politics” when your group is targeted for discrimination based on “identity.” Cillizza concludes with a shrug, acknowledging that the attack on 1-percenters’ worked pretty well in 2012, and we should expect more of that going forward.
Another way of saying it is that Democrats have reconnected with grass-roots populism, and it seems to be working well, while the Republicans have drifted even farther toward the hard, unbending right.

In the midst of a sudden effusion of stories about the likely fate of southern Democratic Senate candidates this fall, I noted at Washington Monthly that one thing to keep in mind is that the African-Americans who form so important a part of southern Democratic turnout sometimes defy the “falloff” pattern:

[A]s everyone has noted who writes extensively about the “midterm falloff” problem for Democrats, in the past the pro-Democratic demographic group least prone to “falloff” has been African-Americans. On occasion (e.g., the Deep South in 1998, and Virginia just last year), black voters have bucked the trend almost entirely. There’s sort of an assumption that black turnout is driven by the presence or absence of Barack Obama on the ballot, but the trend-lines are deeper than that, particularly in the South where Republicans are more feral and race is never completely absent from politics.

There’s another positive factor southern Democrats would generally note:

In any event, I would by no means write off the whole region for Senate Democrats. There’s this tendency to think of them as soft touches because they are not typically loud-and-proud progressives. But as southerners know, politics is a blood sport in the region, in part because partisan fights are often over very basic things like the existence of progressive taxes and public schools, not to mention crazy conservative memes like land-use planning being a UN plot. So while 2014 will be difficult for southern Democrats, they’re not going to lose by default.

Norm Ornstein’s National Journal article “The Most Enduring Myth About the Presidency: The Green Lantern theory just won’t go away” provides a timely reminder about the folly of attributing unlimited powers to the President. Referencing the recent 50th anniversary celebration of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 at the LBJ Library, Ornstein writes in his set-up:

The meme is what Matthew Yglesias, writing in 2006, referred to as “the Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics,” and has been refined by Greg Sargent and Brendan Nyhan into the Green Lantern Theory of the presidency. In a nutshell, it attributes heroic powers to a president–if only he would use them. And the holders of this theory have turned it into the meme that if only Obama used his power of persuasion, he could have the kind of success that LBJ enjoyed with the Great Society, that Bill Clinton enjoyed in his alliance with Newt Gingrich that gave us welfare reform and fiscal success, that Ronald Reagan had with Dan Rostenkowski and Bill Bradley to get tax reform, and so on.
If only Obama had dealt with Congress the way LBJ did–persuading, cajoling, threatening, and sweet-talking members to attain his goals–his presidency would not be on the ropes and he would be a hero. If only Obama would schmooze with lawmakers the way Bill Clinton did, he would have much greater success. If only Obama would work with Republicans and not try to steamroll them, he could be a hero and have a fiscal deal that would solve the long-term debt problem.

Ornstein acknowleges that “It is tempting to believe that a president could overcome the tribalism, polarization, and challenges of the permanent campaign, by doing what other presidents did to overcome their challenges.” Grownups, however, should give all of the cliches about the LBJ strong presidency a rest and look at the actual historical record. As Ornstein writes,

LBJ had a lot to do with the agenda, and the accomplishments. But his drive for civil rights was aided in 1964 by having the momentum following John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and the partnership of Republicans Everett Dirksen and Bill McCullough, detailed beautifully in new books by Clay Risen and Todd Purdum. And Johnson was aided substantially in 1965-66 by having swollen majorities of his own party in both chambers of Congress–68 of 100 senators, and 295 House members, more than 2-to-1 margins. While Johnson needed, and got, substantial Republican support on civil rights and voting rights to overcome Southern Democrats’ opposition, he did not get a lot of Republicans supporting the rest of his domestic agenda. He had enough Democrats supporting those policies to ensure passage, and he got enough GOP votes on final passage of key bills to ensure the legitimacy of the actions.
Johnson deserves credit for horse-trading (for example, finding concessions to give to Democrat Wilbur Mills, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, to get his support for Medicare), but it was the numbers that made the difference. Consider what happened in the next two years, after the 1966 midterm elections depleted Democratic ranks and enlarged Republican ones. LBJ was still the great master of Congress–but without the votes, the record was anything but robust. All the cajoling and persuading and horse-trading in the world did not matter.

Ornstein goes on the document that even Reagan’s transformative accomplishments were made possible buy a spirit of cooperation in the opposition party. Polarization began to kick in during the Clinton Administration, when Newt Gingrich threw his tantrums, and only let up when Gingrich was disgraced and congressional Republicans tried a more pragmatic approach to the country’s benefit.
Contray to the current GOP meme, writes Ornstein, “When Obama had the numbers, not as robust as LBJ’s but robust enough, he had a terrific record of legislative accomplishments. The 111th Congress ranks just below the 89th in terms of significant and far-reaching enactments, from the components of the economic stimulus plan to the health care bill to Dodd/Frank and credit-card reform.” Further, “all were done with either no or minimal Republican support. LBJ and Reagan had willing partners from the opposite party; Obama has had none.”
Sure Obama could have done a little better here and there, concedes Ornstein. “But the brutal reality,” concludes Ornstein, is that “in today’s politics…LBJ, if he were here now, could not be the LBJ of the Great Society years in this environment. Nobody can, and to demand otherwise is both futile and foolish.”

If you had to pick the Democratic Party’s most harmful blind spot, a good choice would be its general indifference to retirement policy. We’re so busy chasing after young voters and other constituencies that we have apparently ceded the senior vote to the conservatives, who gleefully accept it as a freebie, offering seniors nothing but fear-mongering about government spending and tax cuts for the wealthy in return.
Yes, I know senior voters tend to cast their ballots for the GOP, at least the ones who show up. And show up they do in the midterm elections in more impressive numbers than any other constituency, providing a major reason why Dems usually get creamed in non-presidential election years.
Into the 2014 midterm fray writes Jane White, author of America, Welcome to the Poor House. in her HuffPo post, “Why Are Many Members of Congress Among the Few Americans That Can Retire?,” White observes:

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) deserves praise for attempting to tackle our retirement crisis — one of the few politicians to do so. However, rather than mandate that all employers offer a retirement plan and contribute the equivalent of at least 3 percent of pay, as is the case with the U.K. starting in 2018, Harkin’s legislation would simply allow employees who aren’t covered by a plan to contribute 6 percent of their own paycheck to a retirement account. Except that individuals can already do this if they invest in a mutual fund on their own!
The lack of mandates for an adequate retirement plan is ironic given that most long-serving members of Congress look forward to more generous pensions than the vast majority of their constituents. A member of Congress retiring with 20 years of service under Federal Employees’ Retirement System and a high three-year average salary of $174,000 will get an initial annual FERS pension of more than $59,000 — on top of Social Security.
Compare that pension paycheck to the typical American worker. According to the Federal Reserve Board, the median amount saved in 401(k) accounts and other savings for those age 55 to 64 was $100,000 in 2010. Observing the 4 percent withdrawal rule, a nest egg of $100,000 turns into a measly annual income of $4,000, or about $77 a week. Even those Americans covered by a regular pension are likely facing pension poverty, as the New York Times recently reported as a result of the stock market crash and benefit cutbacks. The U.S. has one of the least generous pension systems in the advanced world; only six member countries of the OECD have lower pension wealth.

It’s not hard to understand why there is a hell of a lot of anger among senior voters, especially when you take into account all of the pension rip-offs that have occurred over the last two decades. What is harder to understand is why Democrats are not raising more hell about it. Can it be that seniors expect the GOP to be indifferent to their retirement living standards, while reserving most of their anger for Democrats, who they feel have betrayed them with inaction? I have to wonder.
White cites a media blackout as part of the problem, and she is correct that there are not many thoughtful articles that explore the politics of retirement in America, other than the usual screeds about Social Security privatization. She adds:

Unfortunately, outside of the SEIU, the brains behind the advocacy group Retirement USA, there has been no hue and cry on Capitol Hill regarding the retirement crisis. Here’s a link to their report on our $6.6 trillion retirement deficit. As I’ve said before, we’re looking at a perfect storm of economic catastrophe. If the vast majority of baby boomers can’t afford to retire, that bodes ill for the next generations’ ability to find work. If you agree, please contact your Congressperson to ask Sen. Harkin to hold hearings on this topic. If we can’t reform our system, we at least need to communicate to boomers that they need to stay at their decently-paying jobs at least another decade, rather than “retiring” and ending up taking part-time, benefit-less minimum-wage jobs to try to make ends meet.

Credit Harkin with having the mettle to at least address the problem head-on, even if you agree that his reform proposals don’t go far enough. But, is it too much of a stretch to envision some sharp Democratic candidates with large senior constituencies pulling off a few 2014 upsets with a bold, visionary palette of retirement reforms? Really?

The following article by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, author of The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Conventional wisdom is congealing. Too many Democrats are becoming locked in a defensive crouch, fearing that a 2010-style monsoon season is upon us because Obamacare is unpopular, Republicans will be fired up to vote and Democrats won’t. And they could be right, although if they are, it will mainly be because of their own fears. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
There is still plenty of time to change the dynamics in the 2014 race, to make this election exciting for Democratic base voters and to put the Republicans on the defensive. It’s been done before — in fact it was done the last time a Democratic president was in the sixth year of his presidency, and all the pundits said it was impossible then. We will have a number of chances to change the 2014 dynamics, and one of our very biggest is happening this week with the release of Elizabeth Warren’s new book, A Fighting Chance. This week, and in the next few weeks to come, progressives can help make Warren’s book a central part of the political and economic conversation in this country. The book’s populist progressive economic message — about how the economic game is rigged for most Americans, and how wealthy and powerful special interests have taken over our government and are squeezing the middle class and the working poor — is exactly the kind of message Democrats need to be pushing in the 2014 elections, and if her book’s narrative becomes a major part of the year’s political dialogue, that will help most Democrats.
But before I tell you more about this golden opportunity, let me take a trip down memory lane to that sixth year of the Clinton presidency. Although there are certainly some important differences (including the fact that 2014 is a far more populist moment politically because of how tough things have been for most people economically over the last decade), this cycle reminds me a great deal of 1998 in terms of the fearful way most Democrats are approaching the election. In 1998, the Lewinsky scandal was dominating the headlines, and Clinton’s personal popularity was dropping sharply. Most Democratic strategists for the fall Senate, House, and governors’ races were sure that the Republican base would be fired up to vote; that Democrats would not be motivated; and that swing voters would move the Republicans’ way because they didn’t like Clinton. Fearing another 1994-level disaster, many party leaders were advising Democratic candidates across the nation to distance themselves from the president; avoid mentioning him or how they would vote on impeachment; and run on local issues or modest-sized popular parts of the Democratic agenda. The pundits were predicting that the Democrats would lose at least 30 seats in the House, several in the Senate, and be swept in the competitive statehouse races.
But cautious, reactive strategies that avoid mentioning the elephant in the room, especially one that was featured in the paper every day and that Republicans were talking about every day — in other words, strategies that keep your candidates in a defensive crouch — are destined to lose. If the conventional wisdom had been followed, 1998 might well have been another 1994 sort of Republican landslide. But a coalition of people and groups willing to go against the conventional wisdom was willing to create a different, more aggressive strategy that was built around the idea of punching back on the impeachment issue and pivoting to the broader economic issues that really mattered to people. Our case was that, rather than obsessing about Clinton’s sex scandal and rehashing it over and over, the country needed to move on and talk about the economic issues that mattered to voters’ lives. Stan Greenberg and James Carville did polling to shape that message; People For the American Way (where I worked) did TV ads and grassroots organizing to push the idea; Wes Boyd and Joan Blades started an online petition for the country to move on that garnered 500,000 signatures in a matter of a couple of weeks (a stunning number in those early days of email), and got thousands of those people to volunteer to go to meetings with members of Congress and volunteer for candidates. By the fall it became clearer and clearer that where candidates and organizations were using our message, Democrats were doing better. More and more candidates started running ads focusing on the ‘let’s move on’ idea. We changed the political conversation, changed the dynamics in that election, and we shattered the conventional wisdom in the elections that year, picking up 5 Democratic seats in the House rather than losing the 30 that had been predicted by the pundits, and winning many of the competitive Governor and Senate races.

Read more…

“House Democrats, battered by Koch brothers ads and facing a grim outlook for the midterms, are providing the clearest indication yet of how they plan to respond: By shoring up imperiled incumbents and only the most promising challengers, but most likely leaving some of the party’s upstart hopefuls to fend for themselves…House Majority PAC, a leading Democratic super PAC and one of the biggest players in congressional races, will begin placing its first round of TV ad reservations, according to an outline first shared with POLITICO. Of the 24 districts the group is reserving commercial time in, 18 of them are occupied by party incumbents. The ads will begin running around Labor Day, when the midterm sprint begins in earnest,” writes Alex Isenstadt in “Dems’ midterm strategy: Triage” at Politico.
The Fix’s Sean Sullivan offers some one-graph summaries of “The top 11 Senate races of 2014.”
Christopher Ingraham’s Wonkblog article about a new Pew Research report, “How Democratic and Republican morals compare to the rest of the world” contains few surprises. But the observation of one of the article commenters is instructive: “What I don’t understand is why this poll ONLY focused on the “morality” of so-called “social issues.” I find it morally unacceptable that there are people in the US who are still without adequate health care. I find it morally unacceptable that the District of Columbia in the alleged “greatest democracy in the world” is still without representation in our Congress. What about the consistently growing chasm between the very rich and the working class in this country? What about capital punishment? What about war? THESE are the real moral questions we shold be asking.”
Also at Politico, Andrew Rustuccia illuminates the difficulties facing Dem candidates who haven’t yet taken a position on the Keystone pipeline.
At The Pittsburgh Courier Zenitha Prince explains voter suppression, Ohio-style: “This year, alone, the Ohio General Assembly has passed and Gov. John Kasich (R) has signed bills that shave days off the early voting period and completely eliminates “Golden Week,” a brief window when voters could register and vote early on the same day; prohibits anyone but Secretary of State Jon Husted from mailing unsolicited absentee ballots to voters and makes it more difficult to count provisional ballots…Husted has also set statewide, uniform early voting hours that contain no evening or Sunday hours, making it more difficult for working Ohioans to vote early and negating “Souls to the Polls,” an initiative of the faith community to mobilize their congregations to the polls on Sundays…One study showed that African-Americans in Cuyahoga County voted early at 26 times the rate of White voters, accounting for ¼ of overall voter turnout but ¾ of early in person voter turnout.”
But the Charlotte Observer’s Jim Morrill notes how Democrats are fighting early voting restrictions in N.C.: “Early voting starts across North Carolina on Thursday, and nowhere will voters have more opportunities to take advantage of it than in Mecklenburg County [which includes Charlotte]…County election officials have expanded the number of early voting sites beyond what is required by the state’s new voting law. No county in the state will have as many hours in which to cast an early ballot…Mecklenburg will offer more than six times as many early voting hours as it did in the 2010 primary. But under the new law, those hours will come over fewer days…At the same time, 38 mostly rural counties have asked for and received permission to reduce the number of early voting hours.
At The Boston Globe, however, Derrick Z. Jackson writes, “In Wisconsin, won twice by Obama, conservative Governor Scott Walker signed one law ending weekend early voting and another that allows election observers to come as close as three feet to registration and check-in tables…Such proximity could easily intimidate voters and encourage poll workers to slow down the processing of voters.”
Tom Skubick shows how midterm turnout politics plays out in the race for Governor of Michigan: “Gov. Rick Snyder holds a 50%-37% edge with those over 65. Factor in those between the ages of 45 and 65, his advantage is 45%-38%…Democratic challenger Mark Schauer wins the 18-44 vote, but if most of them don’t vote, so what…The same ominous situation exists with minority voting. Mr. Schauer wins the African-American vote 57%-12%. But again, Mr. Schauer must motivate those voters to show up on November 4th.”
Simon Maloy’s Salon.com post “GOP’s purple-state problem: How a Virginia Medicaid battle augurs huge risks for the party” encapsulates the challenge facing Republians — and the edge smart Democrats are tapping: “Right now it’s hard to see how the GOP comes out on top here. Either they stick to their guns and explain over and over why they’re denying coverage to the uninsured poor, or they cave and risk the ire of deep-pocketed small government zealots.”