AP’s survey “Where House Democrats Are Spending Campaign Cash” is more about ad media choices than geographic location — but interesting nonetheless.
A scary stat from the Lone Star state: “In the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate, the 145,000 voters who nominated David Alameel of Dallas represented just 1 percent of the people who can vote in Texas.”
Some of the wisdom of this article by Rick Perlstein in The Nation can be found in the subtitle: “The mainstream and liberal press’s quixotic search for a ‘good’ conservative merely reinforces the soft bigotry of low expectations.”
Digby has an interesting Salon.com post on WI Gov. Scott Walker’s dimming hopes for exoneration from the “little corruption problem he just can’t shake.”
At ThinkProgress, Matt Browne’s “Why Europe’s Progressives Shouldn’t Mourn The EU’s Latest Election” explains why we shouldn’t get all chicken little about the hard right turn in the European Parliament elections.
PA union sets new standard for political myopia.
Joan McCarter reports at Daily Kos that “Arkansas’ version of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, its “private option,” has been a rousing success, having signed up 75 percent of the state’s eligible population so far, and still going strong.”
“Over 60 percent of Americans in Deep South states, including Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi, support expanding Medicaid, according to a recent poll by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies…Nonetheless, these states’ GOP-controlled legislatures and Republican governors — Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant — each oppose the expansion,” reports Shadee Ashtari at HuffPo.
Mark Blumenthal and Ariel Edwards-Levy discuss “How Accurate are Most Robopolls?” at HuffPollster.com.

Thomas E. Mann calls out his profession in his Atlantic article, “Admit It, Political Scientists: Politics Really Is More Broken Than Ever: Scholars restrain themselves out of fear of being seen as partisans, but what’s happening now is different, and false equivalence is no virtue.” Mann, Brookings Institution senior fellow and co-author with Norman J. Ornstein of the much-buzzed “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism,” makes a compelling argument that his profession bears some responsibility for the political gridlock that has stalled needed efporms. As Mann explains:

The widespread public belief that our political system is dangerously broken is often met with skepticism among longtime students of American politics. “We’ve seen it all before,” “this too will pass,” “nothing can do done about it anyway” say the scholars…There are, in theory, good reasons to be skeptical of doom saying. Other democracies struggle trying to deal with similar problems; the United States has overcome similar periods of subpar performance and political dysfunction throughout our history; and our political system has adapted to new circumstances and self-corrected. There’s something else going on here, too: How would political scientists justify ourselves if we didn’t contest the conventional wisdom of mere pundits and journalists? We have a positive political science to conduct and are properly critical of half-baked diagnoses and ungrounded normative speculations on how to cure our governing maladies.
But I believe these times are strikingly different from the past, and the health and well-being of our democracy is properly a matter of great concern. We owe it to ourselves and our country to reconsider our priors and at least entertain the possibility that these concerns are justified–even if it’s uncomfortable to admit it.

Noting that “the 2012 electorate was the most polarized ever,” Mann continues,

…the polarization is asymmetric. Republicans have become a radical insurgency–ideologically extreme, contemptuous of the inherited policy regime, scornful of compromise, unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of their political opposition. The evidence of this asymmetry is overwhelming.
Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole, and Howard Rosenthal provide the strongest evidence for this asymmetry among members of Congress. They find that the ideological distance between the parties grew dramatically since the 1970s, but that it would be a mistake to equate the two parties’ roles in contemporary political polarization. The Tea Party has moved the GOP even further from the political center…
Evidence for asymmetry goes well beyond roll-call voting. Changing Republican Party positions on taxes, Keynesian economics, immigration, climate change and the environment, healthcare, science policy, and a host of cultural policies are consistent with the pattern. So too are the embrace of hardball strategies and tactics involving parliamentary-style opposition, the rise of the 60-vote Senate, government shutdowns, debt-ceiling hostage-taking, and nullification efforts not seen since the antebellum South. Historian Gregory Kabaservice in Rule and Ruin traces the key intellectual and political developments in the transformation of the GOP from Eisenhower to the Tea Party. In The Party Is Over, former Republican congressional staffer Mike Lofgren provides a rich and colorful insider’s perspective on the radicalization of the Republican party in Congress. And Norm Ornstein and I in It’s Even Worse Than It Looks document how the asymmetry developed from Newt Gingrich in the 1980s to the present. Asymmetric polarization has found its way to the public: Republican Party voters are more skewed to their ideological pole than Democratic Party voters are to theirs.

Then Mann lays a fair share of the responsibility for the political paralysis at the doorstep of his poly sci colleagues:

Yet many political scientists, like most mainstream journalists and political reformers, refuse to even acknowledge or take seriously the case for asymmetric polarization. It makes us uncomfortable because some people will characterize the idea as partisan, even if it accurately captures reality. We do the public a disservice to say less than we believe to be true and avoid research directions that might produce “unbalanced” results. Insisting on false equivalence in the media or the academy is no virtue.

Mann reviews the most frequently cited systemic “solutions” discussed by both academics and media and finds them inadequate or unrealistic for meeting the challenge of breaking the gridlock. He argues that the most plausible approaches are: 1. “One-party government seems an essential first step, one that can sustain itself in office long enough to put in place and begin to implement a credible governing program…Perhaps a more reliable way of bringing the Republican Party back into the mainstream is a few more decisive presidential defeats. That might create the conditions for the emergence of new Republican ideas less detached from reality and new efforts among some coalition partners to challenge extremist forces in primary elections.”, and 2. “The second is nudging the Republican Party back into being a genuinely conservative, not radical, party …” Mann’s third recommendation, ” dampening the intense and unrelenting competition for control of Congress and the White House, which is itself an historical anomaly,” seems to contradict his first recommendation.
For those of more partisan proclivities, Mann’s suggestions translate roughly into Democratic landslides and a campaign to shame the Republicans back into sanity. President Obama has bent over backwards to secure bipartisan cooperation and has been rebuffed at every juncture. Democrats, along with moderates who just want to see some forward progress, don’t have many other options. It’s hard to see how anything short of a shellacking of historic proportions will persuade the GOP to stop groveling at the feet of the tea party, reject extremism and negotiate in good faith.

It’s just a snapshot, but it is a Rasmussen poll, which Nate Silver and other poll analysts believe have tended to favor GOP candidates. From Rasmussen Reports:

Monday, May 26, 2014
Incumbent Republican Nathan Deal trails Democratic challenger Jason Carter by seven points in Rasmussen Reports’ first look at the Georgia gubernatorial race problems and Governor Deal’s ethical violations.
A new statewide telephone survey of Likely Georgia Voters finds Carter with 48% support to Deal’s 41%. Three percent (3%) like another candidate in the race, while seven percent (7%) are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

This is very good news for Carter’s campaign, accompanied as it should be by the usual caveats about snapshot polls, lots of time left, low midterm turnouts etc. But Carter also has some potent issues to leverage in the campaign ahead, including Medicaid expansion, fading educational opportunities and Deal’s ethical messes. Along with Democrat Michelle Nunn enjoying a modest lead in the Senate race, Carter’s lead should encourage a more substantial investment from the national party in turning out pro-Democratic constituencies in Georgia.

For a more thoughtful take on the problems at the Veterans Administration, try John Nichols’s post, “Instead of Austerity and Slogans, the VA Needs Full Funding and Accountability” at The Nation.
Sam Stein reports that NC Republican Senator Richard Burr has stepped in it just in time for Memorial Day. “In their own letter, Veterans of Foreign Wars responded to Burr by calling his letter a “monumental cheap-shot” and labeling it “one of the most dishonorable and grossly inappropriate acts that we’ve witnessed in more than forty years of involvement with the veteran community.” If the tone wasn’t clear, the group added that Burr’s conduct and allegations were “ugly and mean-spirited in every sense of the words and profoundly wrong, both logically and morally,” in addition to breaching “the standards of the United States Senate.”
At Mother Jones David Corn explains “This Is How the Right Milks Benghazi for Cash: And more proof it’s all about Hillary Clinton.”
At the NYT Upshot Lynn Vavreck illuminates the ticket-spliiters, those who vote for candidates from different parties on the same ballot. She notes, “In 2012, nationwide, only 7 percent of voters who cast ballots for both the presidency and the Senate split their votes across the two major parties, according to the Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project run by YouGov. Vavreck tested a large, representative sample and concludes “While you’re more likely to be a ticket-splitter if you are a moderate or independent, the single best predictor of cross-party voting is still how much you know about politics: the less you know, the more you vote for two parties.”
In his column “GOP’s right turn opens door for Democrats,” Eugene Robinson offers some well-stated observations: “Anyone who hopes the party has finally come to its senses will be disappointed. Republicans have pragmatically decided not to concede Senate elections by nominating eccentrics and crackpots. But in convincing the party’s activist base to come along, establishment leaders have pledged fealty to eccentric, crackpot ideas…As for the “government’s too big” part, this traditional GOP mantra has become — thanks to the Tea Party — a weapon of spite, not a statement of policy…The victories by establishment-backed Republicans in Senate primaries hold no promise that the party is ready to stop throwing tantrums and begin governing. They do ensure, however, that Democrats will have few, if any, “gimme” races this fall…Republican candidates simply cannot risk being called “moderate”…Democrats can, though. The Republican Party’s move to the right opens political space for Democratic incumbents and challengers trying to win in red states.”
Ashley Parker’s “Political Ad Man Finds the Personal in Democratic Hopefuls” profiles Democratic “image guru” Mark Putnam, who has worked on campaigns for President Obama, Alison Lundergan Grimes, Mary Landrieu, Mark Begich, Ben Cardin and Heidi Heitkamp. Putnam advises “I do try to find an emotional hook to every ad — sometimes it’s humor, sometimes it’s a poignant story, sometimes it’s just passion.” Parker notes further, “During the 2012 cycle, campaigns, parties and outside groups poured record amounts into television ads — roughly $3.8 billion, according to Kantar Media/CMAG, which monitors political advertising. Kantar has projected that as much as $2.8 billion will be spent on local broadcast ads by the end the 2014 cycle; local cable representatives anticipating as much as $800 million more than that.”
Just because NC’s Moral Monday movement hasn’t got much MSM coverage lately, don’t assume it is winding down. The demonstrations resume big time on Tuesday, with a strong focus on fighting NC’s outrageous voter suppression laws. As Facing South’s Sue Sturgis describes the voter suppression laws that will be addressed: “Besides requiring photo ID to vote by the 2016 election, the law also has provisions that are set to take effect this year. They include ending same-day registration, repealing out-of-precinct provisional voting, shortening the early voting period, ending pre-registration for 16- and 17-year-olds, and expanding the power of poll observers and ballot challengers.”
Paul Rosenberg’s Salon.com post “GOP’s trifecta of doom: How candidates, issues and culture are building a 2016 calamity” makes an interesting case that cultural side-shows, like the Sterling mess do matter in shaping party preference on election day.
At Slate.com Jamelle Bouie probes an MTV poll of young people and addresses a provocative question, “Why Do Millennials Not Understand Racism?.” Bouie also wonders about “the irony of this survey: A generation that hates racism but chooses colorblindness is a generation that, through its neglect, comes to perpetuate it.”

Many progressives hear red-state Democratic candidates distancing themselves from this or that policy of the Obama administration or the national Democratic Party and immediately blame it on cowardice or some sort of sellout to donors. But there’s a fundamental reality about what it takes for a blue candidate to win in a red states that needs to be taken into account. Here’s how I summed it up yesterday at Washington Monthly:

The realities that make this Democratic approach necessary are starkly illustrated by an important Alan Abramowitz article at Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball, showing that the once-abundant share of the electorate willing to vote for a Senate candidate of the same party as a president whose performance they don’t like has steadily dropped since 1980:

[O]ver this time period, voting decisions in these contests have become increasingly influenced by opinions of the incumbent president’s performance. This relationship set a new record in 2012. Ninety percent of voters who approved of President Obama’s job performance voted for a Democratic Senate candidate while 82% of voters who disapproved of the president’s performance voted for a Republican Senate candidate.
This trend portends problems for Democratic candidates in Red states like Georgia and Kentucky. Recent polls put Obama’s approval rating at 44% in Georgia and 34% in Kentucky. Moreover, in midterm elections like 2014, voters who disapprove of the president’s performance tend to turn out at a higher rate than those who approve of his performance.

Now just because the trend is towards a functional “referendum” on the president’s performance in Senate midterms doesn’t mean it’s reached some sort of all-consuming omega point, and there can obviously be circumstances where negative feelings towards non-presidential-party Senate candidates matter more than negative feelings towards the president. It just means the odds of success for candidates like Allison Lundergan Grimes and Michelle Nunn are lower than they would have been in the relatively recent past. Add in the racial dynamics that especially matter in the Deep South–as discussed by Nate Cohn at The Upshot yesterday–and you’ve got what he accurately calls “a narrow path” to victory for Democrats:

In the racially polarized South, where white voters have been trending Republican for more than a generation, the Democratic route to 50 percent is mainly a matter of racial demographics. Democrats must wait for more nonwhite voters to overcome their disadvantage with white voters.
That wait might end soon in Georgia, but not in this November’s election. In the midterm balloting, the share of whites will be around 64 percent of registered voters, down from 72 percent in 2002, when the Democratic senator Max Cleland lost re-election by 7 points. Ms. Nunn will need nearly 30 percent of white voters to prevail. If Mr. Cleland were running today, his 30 or 31 percent of white voters would probably be enough to squeak out a win.
But most Democrats running for federal office in Georgia fall well short of that 30 percent. The next-highest tally was Jim Martin’s 26 percent in 2008, when he lost a close Senate race to Saxby Chambliss, a first-term incumbent Republican running in a disastrous year for the G.O.P.

Now the “narrow path” for both Nunn and Grimes could be widened and smoothed by a rise in the president’s approval ratings, by Republican mistakes, and less visibly by the DSCC’s well-financed efforts to change midterm turnout patterns and thus refute the kind of calculations Cohn is making. But Democrats would be foolish to dismiss the tough terrain, just as Republicans would be foolish to imagine a Senate takeover in 2014 won’t be exceptionally vulnerable to reversal just two years hence.

There are legitimate arguments to be made about how red-state Democrats negotiate that “narrow path,” but the increasingly large role of presidential approval in determining downballot voting behavior means just fighting for the Obama agenda is not likely to be a viable option.

In his/her post “Scott Walker Caught in Another Big, Fat Lie” at Daily Kos, Puddytat gives the Republican Governor of Wisconsin a richly-deserved skewering. It goes like this:

He’s running for President re-election as Wisconsins Governor, donchaknow, so the propaganda he spews is becoming even more ridiculous as he scrambles to avoid talking about the 250,000 jobs he didn’t create (move along, nothing to see here, peasants).
At first he tried to backtrack on his one promise in 2010: that he, if elected Governor, would create 250,000 jobs in his first term. That, in his own words, was “the floor and not the ceiling” since he expected to “create” many more in his first term. He’s not quite halfway there because of the austerity economy that he and his Republican Legislative majorities has put in place. He failed miserably trying to walk it back (scrubbing it from his web site and other places as well as trying hard to change the subject every time “the jobs question” comes up).
His latest failure is trying to pivot from “jobs” to “business creation”. At campaign events he’s patting himself on the back for “creating” 17,000 new businesses in Wisconsin. So shameless is this assertion that even his pals at PolitiFact and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel have called him out on it…The problem they’ve exposed is how the numbers have been extensively padded solely to benefit Walker. They’ve been exaggerated to the point that Walkers numbers are simply a lie.

The post goes on to quote Politifact nailing Walker for his penchant for exaggeration, to put it charitably — counting Boy Scouts, Fire Department and other volunteer gigs as “jobs,” along with out-of-state investors who registered in Wiscoinsin, but did most of their hiring in their own states. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel also exposes Walkers lies, adding “Stretching the truth, as the governor is doing in this case, serves no one but himself” — a harsh diss coming from the state’s most widely-read rag.
Walker is also called out for his job-killing policies, including:

…One of Walkers very first actions (cancelling the high speed rail line between Milwaukee and Madison) sent Wisconsins economy back. Gone were the jobs to build the rail line which was completely funded by the Federal Government. Also gone was the new factory (and the hundreds of high paying jobs) that Talgo was preparing to build in Milwaukee to manufacture high speed rail cars. Not only do we not have those jobs, but Talgos facilities in Milwaukee were also recently shut down for good with the loss of existing high paying jobs.

In most states, job loss and economic stagnation can usually be attributed to several causes. Not so much in Wisconsin, where Walker’s extremist economic policies are laser-focused on enriching his fat-cat supporters at the expense of everyone else. As the post concludes, Walker’s “failure to “create” 250,000 new jobs is entirely his fault.”

Harry Enten’s FiveThirtyEight.com post “Midterm Election Turnout Isn’t So Different From Presidential Year Turnout” crunches the numbers and favors the case for investing more in persuasion. “…if the two voting pools somehow magically switched places, 2012′s demographics wouldn’t have swung control of the House in the 2010 election. I transposed the 2012 demographics onto the 2010 vote tallies and Republicans still won the national vote by about 3.3 percentage points in the midterms.”
But Tom Bonier notes at The New Republic, “The bottom line is, Enten’s theory doesn’t hold up under the scrutiny of individual vote history. For example, Enten looks at the variation in turnout among younger voters between 2010 and 2012, and then considers the partisan vote share of that demographic in order to assign some sense of partisan impact of these turnout changes. But what he’s missing is an understanding of which younger voters cast a ballot in each year. By using vote history and partisan models, we can gain a better sense of this dynamic. For example, in Ohio in 2012, the average modeled partisanship of registered voters under the age of 30 who cast a ballot was 57.3%. The same statistic for that group for 2010 voters was 50.5%. So while the overall share of the electorate that younger voters comprised in each election could be largely unchanged, that would mask the sub-demographic dynamic that is truly impactful, from a partisan vote perspective.”
Patrick Ruffini’s “to Persuade, Or Not to Persuade”, on the other hand, provides an invaluable discussion of the relative importance of persuasion vs. turnout, with particular reference to midterm elections. Among his interesting observations: Calling for “balance and for sophisticated execution on all fronts,” Ruffini adds, “Right now, the budgetary balance in elections is tilted in one direction – towards paid persuasion. An approach that diversifies risk by investing more evenly in all both persuasion and turnout must be tested against more one-dimensional approaches.”
Meanwhile, Carl Hulse’s New York Times article “Democrats Seek Issues to Lure Midterm Votes After Races Buoy G.O.P.” reports at that “…House Democrats are reassessing their electoral strategy based on a major internal research project that shows their candidates stand a better chance when they portray Republicans as uncaring toward working-class Americans while they continue to back policies favoring the wealthy and corporate America…Democrats could build on this distrust, the research showed, by emphasizing support for policies such as equal pay for men and women, ensuring that corporations pay a fair share of taxes, and increased job opportunities in the United States…The research also found that an effort to increase the minimum wage — a recent top priority of congressional Democrats and the White House — is not by itself enough to motivate swing voters to go to the polls and back Democrats in the fall…”It concerns voters but doesn’t necessarily motivate them to vote in the midterms,” said Representative Steve Israel of New York, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.”
Greg Sargent’s Plum Line post “The next big freakout over red state Democrats” probes the political ramifications of environmental protection regulations re carbon emissions, energy development and power plants.
Jean Bonner of Georgia PBS addresses “Which way will young voters go in Georgia?” Dems hope that their younger marquee candidates Jason Carter (Governor) and Michelle Nunn (U.S. Senate) will attract a larger than usual turnout of younger voters, helped by ad optics showing their young families.
Alan I. Abramowitz’s warns at Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball that “Nationalization of Senate Elections Poses Challenge to Democrats in 2014.” Abramowitz explains: “Between 2000 and 2012, almost 90% of seat switches in Senate elections were in a consistent partisan direction. Moreover, in the four federal elections between 2006 and 2012, this trend has become even stronger. Nearly all of the seat switches in this quartet of elections — 23 of 24, or 96% — have been in a consistent partisan direction. In 2006 and 2008, there were a total of 14 party-seat switches, and all of them involved Republican seats switching to Democratic control. In contrast, all six switches in 2010 involved Democratic seats switching to Republican control. Finally, in 2012, three of the four switches involved Republican seats switching to Democratic control.”
Elections are never a done deal until the last ballot has been counted, but Democratic nominee for Governor of Pennsylvania Tom Wolf’s huge lead (52-33 in the latex Quinippiac poll) over Republican Governor Corbett in the polls is great news for Dems.
Please, former Democratic politicians holding on to “leftover” campaign funds, do the right thing and donate to local democratic campaign committees.

As the earlier staff post notes, the facile MSM take on the May 20 primaries is that the Republican Establishment rode to victory again. But when you look closely at the Senate contest in one key state, Georgia, it’s obvious that no “movement to the center” is underway. Here’s how I analyzed the results and trajectory at TPMCafe today:

One of the two “Establishment” candidates, Jack Kingston, ran a savagely ideological campaign that was on nearly every issue indistinguishable from a Tea Party crusade. He engaged in welfare demagoguery, embraced that hardy grassroots conservative pet rock, the Fair Tax, and bit the Chamber of Commerce hand that was feeding him by assaulting the Common Core education initiative as “Obamacare for Education.” And no one would have been surprised had he painted the National Journal “most conservative record in the race” emblem that was featured in all his ads across the shabby station wagon that this career appropriator and quite wealthy man used to signify his skinflintedness.
He narrowly defeated former Secretary of State Karen Handel — another former “Establishment” figure who was transformed into a fiery ideologue after narrowly losing the 2010 governor’s race — on a sea of money and via the pull of geography. He outspent Handel roughly 5-to-1 — not counting the million or so the Chamber spent on his behalf. Just as importantly, he banked a huge advantage over Handel in and just beyond his southeast Georgia congressional district, and she couldn’t make it up in her metro Atlanta stronghold while competing with three other North Georgia candidates.
One of those, of course, was first-place finisher David Perdue, who spent nearly as much (and also had significant out-of-state Super PAC help) as Kingston, while espousing a stern but generic “hard-core conservative” message, to use his term. If his performance in the primary on Tuesday was especially pleasing to Mitch McConnell, it would have to be tempered by the fact that the Romneyesque former corporate turnaround specialist vowed not to vote for another McConnell term as Majority Leader.
Will Perdue and Kingston now join hands in a genial “Establishment” runoff, sure not to give ammunition to Democrat Michelle Nunn, who has run ahead of both of them in some recent polls? I doubt it. Kingston has already gone after Perdue for alleged support of Common Core (which, of course, Perdue, whose cousin Sonny was a national leader in the initiative, denies) and joined Handel and the rest of the field in blasting the front-runner for a recent reference to the need for more federal revenues (which Perdue did not, amazingly, follow up by immediately intoning an anti-tax-increase oath). And Perdue fans have to worry a bit that their man does have a tin ear and a tendency to unforced errors (he single-handedly lifted Handel into contention by casually disrespecting her — and countless Georgia voters — for failing to go to college).
It will be interesting to see how Georgia Tea Folk line up for the runoff. Herman Cain is already in Perdue’s corner. Late in the night, major Handel backer Erick Erickson said he’d support Kingston. In an unusually long runoff campaign (nine weeks), with both candidates having access to plenty of money, the steady drift-to-the-right that characterized the entire primary field could continue.

So the idea that Republican extremism was taken off the table in this race because Paul Broun and Phil Gingrey lost is not only premature, but flatly inaccurate. The “Tea” label isn’t the exclusive brand of the far right, despite Republican and MSM efforts to claim the GOP is a chastened and disciplined “Establishment” party again.