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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: May 2014

Assessing White Southerners’ Votes for Democratic Candidates

Nate Cohn has an interesting post at NYT’s Upshot, “No, Obama Didn’t Win One-Third of White Voters in Deep South.” Cohn responds to Larry Bartels Washington Post (Monkey Cage) post on the topic, arguing that in 2012:

Reputable surveys such as the American National Election Study and the Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project suggest that Barack Obama won 30 to 35 percent of Southern white votes in 2012.

That estimate overstates the reality. As Cohn explains,

But the exit polls, conducted on Election Day of actual voters rather than post-election, show that Mr. Obama received only 28 percent of the Southern white vote. And the definition of the South in those polls is much larger than the region about which I was writing. The polls include states like Maryland, Florida, Delaware and Virginia — states that were separate from my argument. Without those more Democratic states, Mr. Obama’s share of the white vote in the remainder of the South drops significantly.

But Cohn uses a different calculation:

How did we calculate Mr. Obama’s support among white Southerners? First, we estimated the composition of the electorate in every county by race, using data from the American Community Survey and Current Population Survey. Then we estimated the number of nonwhite voters won by Mr. Obama using exit poll data, combining national exit-poll data with local demographic data. We then subtracted the number of nonwhite Obama voters from his overall support, leaving us with his support among white voters.
Is this method perfect? No. It would not work well when a racial group’s voting patterns vary greatly by region. But that’s not the case here. Most nonwhite voters in the South are black, and they all but uniformly supported the president (based on a variety of evidence, including returns in overwhelmingly black precincts). If there’s a county that’s 50 percent black where Mr. Obama won 50 percent of the vote, it’s not hard to figure out that Mr. Obama won very few white votes.
In the aggregate, we estimate that Mr. Obama won 16 percent of white voters in a broadly defined Deep South, including Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas and Texas. In the countryside, Mr. Obama tended to run behind these figures — often winning less than 10 percent of the white vote.
The estimates closely resemble the exit polls, where available. Our method also suggests that Mr. Obama won about 28 percent of the white vote in the broader South.

But I have to wonder if generalizations about “the south” and “the deep south” have much meaning anymore, particularly when talking about presidential elections. It’s really more about the individual states.
In Georgia, for example, President Obama won 45.48 percent of the vote in 2012. About 31 percent of Georgia voters were African Americans, who went about 9-1 for Democrats. Latinos were about 2 percent of GA voters, and they break about 2-1 Democratic. Asian-Americans are also increasing rapidly in GA. So a guestimate would be that about 15 of Obama’s 2012 GA percentage were white voters. So, approximately 24 percent of Georgia’s white voters cast their ballots for Obama in 2012. When that figure reaches 30+ percent, GA will be a blue state. It could happen sooner, as the percentage of white voters decreases.
Using a race-focused analysis, it seems likely that Dems are going to have a tough time in 2016 matching the African American turnout Obama received in GA in 2012. Conversely, a white Democratic Presidential candidate might do a little better with GA white voters. The “race factor” looks like a washout. Looking ahead, however, the effect of voter suppression measures could be pivotal in close races.
Virginia and Florida are already purple states in terms of statewide and presidential candidates, North Carolina is closing in on earning that designation and Georgia is headed that way at a good clip. There’s not much point in lumping these states together with the likes of smaller southern states like MS, AL, SC, AR or TN just to make some grand generalization about the region.
Democratic presidential candidates are going to have to work the hell out of VA, FL and NC and going forward, they probably should spend some time in GA. These states are as purple as WI, NH, MO and OH. Generalizations about the attitudes of white southerners are losing relevance for presidential and state-wide elections every day.


Political Strategy Notes

According to a new CNN/ORC poll, “61% want Congress to leave the Affordable Care Act alone (12%) or make some changes to the law in an attempt to make it work better (49%),” reports Paul Steinhauser of CNN Politics.
E. J. Dionne, Jr.’s “The Democrats’ strategic ambiguity” discusses the importance and difficulty of finding a positive tone in Democratic messaging, even while holding Republicans accountable for the political paralysis that prevents economic recovery and progress.
From Chris Cillizza’s “In midterm elections, Democrats can have some hope of retaining control of Senate” at The Fix : “Senate races — featuring better-known candidates and lots more money — can buck national trends (although they don’t always). Senate races have become, in effect, mini presidential races and, like presidentials, can create their own gravitational pull . . .”The recent generic ballot numbers showing the GOP ahead add very little to the debate over whether Republicans will take over the Senate,” said Neil Newhouse, a prominent Republican pollster and partner at Public Opinion Strategies. “No one, repeat, no one on our side is measuring the drapes for GOP control of the Senate. Campaigns matter, and this one has only just begun.”
One take from Kyle Kondik’s post “The Surprisingly Unrepresentative 2014 Senate Map” at the Crystal Ball would be “a very small number of voters in some fairly conservative states could flip control of the Senate this year,” as the editors put it. Sounds like a downer — until you insert the word “progressive” in front of “voters,” which opens up a range of upset possibilities with some precision GOTV targeting.
Steve Singiser inaugurates a new feature, “The Daily Kos Elections gubernatorial power rankings.” Florida is the biggest deal on Singiser’s list, with the following states considered done deals: AL; NV; ID; OK; SD; TN; VT; and WY.
At HuffPollster Mark Blumenthal and Ariel Edwards-Levy address “Will Turnout Or Swing Voters Sway The 2014 Election?” and conclude “…As a campaign decides how to allocate its resources, other factors also need to be considered, including the costs and conversion rates of persuasion vs. mobilization in their locale and in their race. In sum, it’s not all about swing voters and it’s not all about base mobilization — it’s about both.” The thing about genuine swing voters is that they are few and hard to identify and target — which is why base turnout is most often a more cost-ecctive investment.
Re Mike Lux’s “Going Out of Our Way to Uniquely Screw People With Student Debt” at HuffPo, there has to be a way to awaken some righteous rage on the campuses of America and among young people saddled with these loans and turn it into a force that votes in the midterms.
Dems are cranking up their ‘Red to Blue’ House campaign with strong participation of women, as Donna Cassatta reports at Talking Points Memo: “Sixty-three of the 199 Democrats in the House are women, compared with just 19 of the 233 Republicans. Democrats have recruited 102 women to run for open seats and challenge incumbents this election, compared with 66 Republicans, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.”
Josh Harkinson’s Mother Jones post “Why the FCC Is Ditching Net Neutrality” provides a primer on the motivation behind a dangerous idea that apparently has a chance.


GOP Kangaroo Court Latest Wallow in Politics of Distraction

Some choice nuggets from the New York Times Editorial, “Center Ring at the Republican Circus“:

The hottest competition in Washington this week is among House Republicans vying for a seat on the Benghazi kangaroo court, also known as the Select House Committee to Inflate a Tragedy Into a Scandal. Half the House has asked to “serve” on the committee, which is understandable since it’s the perfect opportunity to avoid any real work while waving frantically to right-wing voters stomping their feet in the grandstand…They won’t pass a serious jobs bill, or raise the minimum wage, or reform immigration, but House Republicans think they can earn their pay for the rest of the year by exposing nonexistent malfeasance on the part of the Obama administration.

Pretty good summation there of Gridlock Party’s descent into irrelevance. The editorial goes on to note that the Obamacare boogeyman seems to have been exhausted, as ACA success stories keep rolling in from unexpected sources. As the editorial puts it, “Republicans ran into a problem when the country began to realize that it was not destroying American civilization but in fact helping millions of people.” Hence the need for a new distraction.
The editorial goes on to add “Four Americans, including the United States ambassador, died in Benghazi, and their deaths have been crassly used by Republicans as a political cudgel, wildly swung in the dark.” Anything to distract the public from the Republicans’ inability to address the compelling economic concerns of millions of Americans and also the substantial drop in the unemployment rate last month.
For Democrats, there is only one response that serves both reason and morality. As the Times editorial puts it, “Democrats who are now debating whether to participate in the committee shouldn’t hesitate to skip it. Their presence would only lend legitimacy to a farce.”


May 8: Triumph of the Republican Establishment: Don’t Believe the Hype

This week North Carolina kicked off the series of Republican primaries that have been so heavily billed as a death struggle between the Republican Establishment and the Tea Party. Predictably, Thom Tillis’ plurality win got heavy billing as a huge Establishment triumph that augered well for GOP prospects this November. I dissented from this lazy CW in a column at TPMCafe:

For “Establishment” Republicans, the good news is that their Senate candidate in North Carolina, House Speaker Thom Tillis, won yesterday’s GOP primary without a runoff, easing comfortably past the 40% victory threshold. Fiery “constitutional conservative” Greg Brannon was second with 29% of the vote, and Christian Right candidate Rev. Mark Harris trailing with 16%.
The bad news is that the victor emerges from the contest hard to distinguish from the extremists he defeated.
It’s not as though there was ever a great ideological distance between the candidates. Yes, Brannon is one of those conservatives who thinks the federal government should be confined to its original minimalist role; he was supported by Senators Mike Lee (R-UT) and Rand Paul (R-KY), both of whom campaigned for him in North Carolina. But Tillis boasted of his support for Jim DeMint’s “Cut, Cap, Balance” constitutional amendment that would permanently pare back federal spending and tie it to a fixed percentage of GDP.
Tillis was also able to parry Harris’ social conservative street cred (the Southern Baptist preacher was a leader in the successful drive to ban same-sex marriage in the state, and was endorsed by Mike Huckabee) with incessant statements of his own opposition to same-sex marriage, and boasted of achieving a restriction in abortion rights in North Carolina. He also came out for a “Personhood” Amendment (the linchpin for efforts to outlaw Plan B contraception and IUD devices as “abortifacients”) and was endorsed by the National Right to Life Committee.
All this positioning seemed prudent; even with his large financial advantage and high name ID, he won about the same percentage of the primary vote as did Texas “Establishment” icon David Dewhurst in his first Senate primary in 2012, before Ted Cruz dispatched him in a runoff. Tillis can thank his lucky stars his state’s primary victory threshold is 10 points lower. Looking forward to November, it’s worth emphasizing that at a time when the behavior of the Republican-controlled state government remains controversial, Tillis has branded himself as the leader of a “conservative revolution” aimed at turning back the clock on many years of moderate leadership and policies in the state. This messaging may have ruled out any “move to the center” maneuvering by the new Republican nominee.
The punctuation mark for the Speaker’s radicalized image may have come the day before the primary, when Kay Hagan’s campaign drew renewed attention to a 2011 video in which Tillis cooly lectured a Republican group on how to pit people with disabilities against people receiving other forms of public assistance, in what he called a “divide and conquer” strategy.
The video, which is sort of a nastier version of the Mitt Romney “47 percent” video, has the air of an instant classic, thanks to its unmistakable class and racial undertones. Unless some other conservative politician outdoes Tillis, the video will remain nationally and locally notorious for a long time to come, thanks to the especially devilish, manipulative nature of Tillis’ analysis of how to demonize public assistance recipients, a strategy he said he would pursue even if it killed him politically.
The New Republic‘s Brian Beutler, calling it a “Bond-villainesque soliloquy,” explains:

Class warfare? Check. Racist dog whistle? Check. A belabored explication of the political utility of racist dog whistling? Check. An acknowledgment that this strategy must be deployed at strategic moments, because it can backfire? Check. A further acknowledgment that admitting to the strategy can be career ending? Check.

All in all, the assumption that Tillis won’t have the general election handicaps to overcome that Brannon or Harris might have suffered from is not as strong as it was when the primary contest began, particularly now that Tillis has attracted so much national attention for his own hammerheaded ideological stances.


Triumph of the Republican Establishment: Don’t Believe the Hype

This week North Carolina kicked off the series of Republican primaries that have been so heavily billed as a death struggle between the Republican Establishment and the Tea Party. Predictably, Thom Tillis’ plurality win got heavy billing as a huge Establishment triumph that augered well for GOP prospects this November. I dissented from this lazy CW in a column at TPMCafe:

For “Establishment” Republicans, the good news is that their Senate candidate in North Carolina, House Speaker Thom Tillis, won yesterday’s GOP primary without a runoff, easing comfortably past the 40% victory threshold. Fiery “constitutional conservative” Greg Brannon was second with 29% of the vote, and Christian Right candidate Rev. Mark Harris trailing with 16%.
The bad news is that the victor emerges from the contest hard to distinguish from the extremists he defeated.
It’s not as though there was ever a great ideological distance between the candidates. Yes, Brannon is one of those conservatives who thinks the federal government should be confined to its original minimalist role; he was supported by Senators Mike Lee (R-UT) and Rand Paul (R-KY), both of whom campaigned for him in North Carolina. But Tillis boasted of his support for Jim DeMint’s “Cut, Cap, Balance” constitutional amendment that would permanently pare back federal spending and tie it to a fixed percentage of GDP.
Tillis was also able to parry Harris’ social conservative street cred (the Southern Baptist preacher was a leader in the successful drive to ban same-sex marriage in the state, and was endorsed by Mike Huckabee) with incessant statements of his own opposition to same-sex marriage, and boasted of achieving a restriction in abortion rights in North Carolina. He also came out for a “Personhood” Amendment (the linchpin for efforts to outlaw Plan B contraception and IUD devices as “abortifacients”) and was endorsed by the National Right to Life Committee.
All this positioning seemed prudent; even with his large financial advantage and high name ID, he won about the same percentage of the primary vote as did Texas “Establishment” icon David Dewhurst in his first Senate primary in 2012, before Ted Cruz dispatched him in a runoff. Tillis can thank his lucky stars his state’s primary victory threshold is 10 points lower. Looking forward to November, it’s worth emphasizing that at a time when the behavior of the Republican-controlled state government remains controversial, Tillis has branded himself as the leader of a “conservative revolution” aimed at turning back the clock on many years of moderate leadership and policies in the state. This messaging may have ruled out any “move to the center” maneuvering by the new Republican nominee.
The punctuation mark for the Speaker’s radicalized image may have come the day before the primary, when Kay Hagan’s campaign drew renewed attention to a 2011 video in which Tillis cooly lectured a Republican group on how to pit people with disabilities against people receiving other forms of public assistance, in what he called a “divide and conquer” strategy.
The video, which is sort of a nastier version of the Mitt Romney “47 percent” video, has the air of an instant classic, thanks to its unmistakable class and racial undertones. Unless some other conservative politician outdoes Tillis, the video will remain nationally and locally notorious for a long time to come, thanks to the especially devilish, manipulative nature of Tillis’ analysis of how to demonize public assistance recipients, a strategy he said he would pursue even if it killed him politically.
The New Republic‘s Brian Beutler, calling it a “Bond-villainesque soliloquy,” explains:

Class warfare? Check. Racist dog whistle? Check. A belabored explication of the political utility of racist dog whistling? Check. An acknowledgment that this strategy must be deployed at strategic moments, because it can backfire? Check. A further acknowledgment that admitting to the strategy can be career ending? Check.

All in all, the assumption that Tillis won’t have the general election handicaps to overcome that Brannon or Harris might have suffered from is not as strong as it was when the primary contest began, particularly now that Tillis has attracted so much national attention for his own hammerheaded ideological stances.


Political Strategy Notes

Democratic Senator Kay Hagan has a few strong cards to play in her campaign to keep her seat from GOP challenger Thom Tillis, as Jason Husser points out at the Monkey Cage: “The GOP quickly moved to pass many controversial measures — including restrictions on abortion facilities, requirements of voter photo identification, elimination of teacher tenure and implementation of a less progressive tax code. Tillis presided over the NC House of Representative when these measures passed.” Then there is the recent coal ash spill into the Dan River from a Duke Energy facility. “Knowing about the coal ash spill doubles the chance that voters will feel unfavorably toward Tillis and significantly reduces their chance of feeling favorably toward him,” notes Husser, citing an Elon University poll of rv’s.
And among the comments following Reid Wilson’s WaPo post on Tillis: WJdad2 says “Tillis and McCrory are going to saddle ratepayers with the Duke cleanup costs,” notes Tillis’s other “accomplishments” include: Voter suppression legislation; 500,000 poor without insurance to spite Obama; 46th in teacher pay. . . Lower than Mississippi; Teacher pay plan proposal to pit new-hires against veteran teachers to bust morale; ALEC Board member; Bought and paid for with Koch and Rove support; Tax plan that yields lower taxes for the rich and net higher for the rest of us; The shortest unemployment compensation duration in the country “. . . Another commenter, bobnpvine1 adds “he pushed thru the dumbest legislation in the country that allows college kids to carry concealed guns and allows the same for bar patrons…”
As for the voter suppression legislation that Tillis engineered as NC’s speaker, Al Hunt writes in his column “Voter Suppression Is the Real Racist Rage” that “In addition to the photo ID requirement, North Carolina also curbed registration drives for young voters and cut back early voting, disproportionately exercised by minorities, by one week…The Americans Civil Liberties Union, which opposes these laws, asked two professors to gauge the impact; they concluded that 900,000 North Carolinians voted in that now-eliminated early week and estimated that the compressed voting schedule could drive at least 18,000 potential voters to give up in frustration. In 2008, Barack Obama carried North Carolina by 14,000 votes…Some Democrats think these restrictions could cause a backlash, energizing black voters in North Carolina and other states.”
And at Daily Kos Jed Lewison chronicles’ Tillis’s opposition to the minimium wage increase, followed by his evasive walkbacks on the topic. Lewison suggests “Instead of giving him a chance to dodge the issue by asking about raising the minimum wage, reporters should ask Tillis whether he supports it in the first place. If he doesn’t support it, that’s information voters deserve to have, and if he does support it, then the logic of his arguments against raising it fall apart.”
Maya Rhodan reports at Time that “About 25 percent fewer Latino voters will turn out to vote in the 2014 midterm elections than did in the 2012 presidential race, according to new projections released by the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO)…But the total Latino vote is still projected to be higher than it was in the last midterm election in 2010, not because a greater share of Latino voters will be voting, but rather because the total Latino population has grown in the last four years…That would be 18.8% higher than the turnout during the 2010 midterm election…”
From President Obama’s speech at a L.A. fund-raiser for Democratic candidates: “We believe in pay equity; they say, no. We believe in a higher minimum wage; they say, no. We believe in making sure that we’re investing in our infrastructure and putting people back to work, and investing in innovation and basic research that can unlock cures for things like Alzheimer’s; their budget takes us in the opposite direction. We believe in early childhood education to make sure that opportunity for all actually means something, that it’s not just a slogan; they say, no. We think climate change is real. Some of them say it’s a hoax, that we’re fabricating it. And the biggest challenge we have is not just that there’s a fundamental difference in vision and where we want to take the country, not just the fact that they continue to subscribe to a top-down approach to economic growth and opportunity and we believe that the economy works better when it works for everybody and that real growth happens from the bottom up and the middle out.”
Michael Tomasky makes a tight case that Dems should boycott the Benghazi circus.
At CQ Politics Kyle Trygstad’s “How a Democrat Could Win a Senate Seat in Georgia” frames the challenge Dems face in Georgia this year: “Behind the scenes, a coordinated effort between Nunn and gubernatorial candidate Jason Carter, the grandson of President Jimmy Carter, is based in a growing number of offices in the state, where senior field operatives are building the groundwork for a voter registration and contact operation…As Senate Democrats work to make the midterm electorate in battleground states more closely resemble a presidential cycle, they have to do better than that in Georgia, where President Barack Obama lost by 7 points without putting up much of a fight.”
Here’s a fun question for Republicans who support making voting harder in the U.S., and express their admiration for Putin.


New DCorps Memo: Next phase in battle for the House battleground

The following stub to an important new DCorps memo, “Making progress in the House battleground Recommendations based on April survey,” is cross-posted from a DCorps e-blast:
Next phase in battle for the House battleground
Last week, we released a new survey of the 50 most competitive Republican House seats and the 36 most competitive Democratic House seats and found anti-incumbent sentiment is high and cuts across both parties. Democrats have made important gains on implementing the Affordable Care Act, but the vote remains evenly split in the Democratic battleground. Republican incumbents have edged up in the most competitive districts this year, but they are below 50 percent, tethered to their unpopular party brand and still vulnerable.
The data tells us that Democratic incumbents and challengers get to their most competitive position by turning to “Speaker John Boehner and his policies that have hurt the economy and done nothing about jobs” and then putting the spotlight on Democrats’ economic agenda, which includes education and the women’s economic agenda. Such a shift, along with an aggressive effort targeted toward unmarried women, is Democrats’ best strategy for exploiting Republican vulnerabilities and establishing a persuasive dynamic in 2014.
Read our strategy memo here.


Creamer: GOP Benghazi Obsession — You Guys Really Wanna Debate Mideast Policy?

The following article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
House Speaker John Boehner has made what appears to be the remarkably stupid decision to set up a “select” committee of the House to once again “investigate” the 2012 Benghazi incident in which U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stephens was killed.
He apparently believes that another “investigation” of this tragedy will be politically advantageous to Republicans in the mid-term elections — and somehow tarnish the reputation of the former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as she prepares a potential run for the White House in 2016.
Already the GOP has bet heavily that its obsession with Obamacare will bolster its political position — a bet that increasingly looks like a loser. Now, in its never-ending attempts to mollify the tea party fringe, the GOP leadership has turned down another political blind alley.
There are at least three reasons why their renewed obsession with “Benghazi” is politically stupid for the GOP.
Reason #1: There is no “there,” there. The Benghazi attack has been investigated over and over and there is simply no evidence that there is any scandal to be had at all.
The latest “revelation” is that Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes wrote an email aimed at helping former ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice frame her description of what happened in Benghazi before she went on various talk shows. Problem is that his suggestions were entirely in line with the talking points produced by the intelligence community — which believed early on that the attack was mainly the result of reaction to an anti-Muslim videotape and demonstrations that had erupted in Cairo in protest.
Of course, it turned out later that there was more to the story — though both The New York Times and the Senate Intelligence Committee investigation of the event did in fact confirm that the response to the video tape did play a role — and Al Qaeda did not.
David Corn of Mother Jones pointed out that The New York Times, after a comprehensive investigation, reached this conclusion:

Months of investigation…centered on extensive interviews with Libyans in Benghazi who had direct knowledge of the attack there and its context, turned up no evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault. The attack was led, instead, by fighters who had benefited directly from NATO’s extensive air power and logistics support during the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi. And contrary to claims by some members of Congress, it was fueled in large part by anger at an American-made video denigrating Islam.

The Times continued:

Benghazi was not infiltrated by Al Qaeda, but nonetheless contained grave local threats to American interests. The attack does not appear to have been meticulously planned, but neither was it spontaneous or without warning signs…
The violence, though, also had spontaneous elements. Anger at the video motivated the initial attack. Dozens of people joined in, some of them provoked by the video and others responding to fast-spreading false rumors that guards inside the American compound had shot Libyan protesters. Looters and arsonists, without any sign of a plan, were the ones who ravaged the compound after the initial attack, according to more than a dozen Libyan witnesses as well as many American officials who have viewed the footage from security cameras.

The Senate intelligence committee report released in January concluded that the attack was, “not a highly coordinated plot, but was opportunistic.”
It went on to say:

It remains unclear if any group or person exercised overall command and control of the attacks or whether extremist group leaders directed their members to participate. Some intelligence suggests the attacks were likely put together in short order, following that day’s violent protests in Cairo against an inflammatory video.

And is anyone really surprised that the actual circumstances surrounding the attack were unclear at the outset? The same was true of the circumstances surrounding the Boston bombing and the Newtown shootings that took place right here in the United States — events involving our own law enforcement. That is the nature of chaotic violent events.
The right wing has done everything in its power to turn “Benghazi” into a politically salient scandal without success. CBS’ Sixty Minutes even bought into the right wing narrative when correspondent Lara Logan based an entire story on a tale about Benghazi that turned out to be entirely fictional. The story was fabricated by contractor Dylan Davies in order to sell his book. Ultimately CBS suspended Logan as a result.


Political Strategy Notes

Conflicting polls: A USA Today/Pew poll conducted April 23-7 indicates that Republicans have a 4-point edge (47-43 percent) over Dems, when asked “If the election were held today, would you vote/lean toward the Republican candidate or the Democratic candidate for congress in your district?” But a Washington Post/ABC News poll conducted April 24-7, has Dems with a 1-point edge (45-44 percent) when asked “If the election for the U.S. House of Representatives were being held today, would you vote for (the Democratic candidate) or (the Republican candidate) in your congressional district?” Both polls were conducted a few days before the Bureau of Labor statistics announced that the unemployment rate dropped .4 percent in one month.
The key to making 2014 a good year for Democratic candidates, according to former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, quoted in the NYT’s “Democrats Struggle to Turn Economic Gains Into Political Ones” by Robert D. Shear: “One number, good or bad, won’t change everything… A sustained pattern of good numbers, from unemployment to wages to consumer confidence, could make a real difference come November. But for that to happen, it has to feel real to them.”
Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, quoted in the Fix by Chris Cillizza, sees it this way: “It won’t be an improving economy, it will be the perception of an improving economy…That would change the president’s job performance, help incumbents, and most important, make it easier for Democrats to increase turnout of young people and unmarried women who feel hardest hit and often forgotten.”
But, regardless of the President’s performance, Salon’s Simon Maloy explains why Republicans are courting trouble when they talk about the economy.
At The Upshot Nate Cohn warns: “Even Democratic operatives know the limits of the ground game. In a New Republic cover article that otherwise suggested that a strong turnout operation could solve Democratic problems, Guy Cecil, executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, conceded that field operations would “only solve our problem if the election is a close one…To hold the Senate, Democrats will need to overcome their turnout problem the old-fashioned way: win older, white voters at far greater rates than Mr. Obama did.”
Paul Steinhauser discuses “6 factors that will influence the midterms” at CNN Politics.
Political analyst Fernando Espuelas explains how “Latinos Hold the Key to Democrats’ Victory (or Defeat) in 2014” at HuffPo: “While there is little risk to the Democrats that Latinos will wake up November 4 and vote en masse for the party of “self-deportation,” the very real risk is that they will stay home. Disgusted, disenchanted and predisposed not to vote any way, Latino voters may hand Democrats a bleak November indeed…It was in 2010 when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) was singled out as one of the most vulnerable incumbents in the nation — he would undoubtedly be torched in the Tea Party forest fire…Of course, Reid went on to buck the cycle’s trend and defeat his Republican opponent. Post-election analysis showed that Reid was not just able to win a huge majority of Latinos — his campaign actually increased Hispanic turnout by focusing on Republican candidate Sharron Angle’s anti-immigrant virulence…The 2010 Reid formula shows a clear path for Democrats…Should the Democratic Party decide to actively campaign for Latino votes, as Reid did in 2010, a November “Latino Surprise” will save the Democrats.”
At The Plum Line Greg Sargent reveals “Why Dems are running against plutocracy.” Says Sargent: “The strategy is premised on the idea that swing voters view the economy as rigged against them, and in favor of the very wealthy, whose interests will be zealously protected by a GOP-controlled Senate…A new polling memo from Stan Greenberg’s Democracy Corps sheds some more light on this approach. Conducted with the Public Campaign Action Fund, it finds that in the 86 most competitive House districts, there is strong opposition across party lines to the McCutcheon decision — and strong support for efforts to reduce the influence over money in politics…The poll found that even in contested Republican districts, 70 percent oppose the McCutcheon ruling when it’s described to them, 56 percent strongly, and in Dem battleground districts, 74 percent oppose it, 62 percent strongly. An overwhelming 71 percent of independents in the 86 battleground districts oppose the decision.”
Aaron Blake notes at The Fix that “…The unemployment picture in the states holding key Senate races is actually quite a bit better for Democrats than the national picture…According to the most recent state figures available, from March, the unemployment rate in 11 of the top 13 states Democrats are defending was below the national average, and the rate was actually at or below 5 percent in six of those 11 states.” However, adds Blake, “Meanwhile, in the two states Republicans are defending — Georgia and Kentucky — the unemployment rate was above the national average.”


May 2: Defining “The South”

There’s always a lot of ongoing talk about the South as a political region, whether it’s as the dreaded source of Republican extremism or the land of hope for a future Democratic comeback. But definitions of “the South” vary, as I discussed at Washington Monthly in the context of a FiveThirtyEight survey on the geographical contours of the region:

“[T]he South” is a politically potent concept in which precision and context are often rather important. The general hazy historical perception is that “the South” during the Civil Rights Era transitioned from being solidly Democratic to being solidly Republican. Actually, as Sean Trende likes to point out, the Republican share of the regional presidential vote was 48% in 1952, 50% in 1956, 46% in 1960 and 49% in 1964–remarkably stable and competitive, though masking some pretty large subregional swings–even before the enactment of the Voting Rights Act. But after that Act, as late as 1976, Jimmy Carter (a southern Democrat, of course) was carrying the region by ten points. In 2000 and 2004, Republicans did indeed carry (if you credit the 2000 Florida results) every state in the former Confederacy. But then in 2008 Barack Obama muddied the waters again by winning Virginia, Florida and North Carolina and won the first two again in 2012.
I’ve gone through this brief history because an awful lot of rhetorical weight has been placed on the impact of the “Republican South” on the GOP, on the conservative movement, on non-southern voters, and on the general tone and character of U.S. politics–and quite rightly so.
Still, subregional variations in the South should by no means be ignored. Last week the New York Times‘ Nate Cohn created a bit of a sensation with a column suggesting (a bit more indiscriminately in the headline that he would have liked) that “southern whites” had now become nearly as overwhelmingly Republican as African-Americans were Democratic. Careful readers noted that Cohn was actually only describing white voters in a band of counties “from the high plains of West Texas to the Atlantic Coast of Georgia.” 2012 exit polls showed Obama winning 37% of the white vote in VA and 31% in NC. Upon my own inquiry, Nate noted on Twitter that the statewide Democratic share of the southern white vote in 2012 varied as follows: Kentucky 33%, Arkansas 26%, Tennessee 25%, South Carolina 22%, Texas 22%, Georgia 19%, Alabama 17%, Louisiana 12% and Mississippi 11%.
So in 2012, a white voter in Kentucky was three times as likely to vote for Obama as a white voter in Mississippi. I’d say that’s a variation worth noting when making generalizations about “the South”–not by Nate Cohn, who was careful, but by the very many people who are going to mis-characterize his work.