For perspective on the difference between Democratic and Republican midterm strategy, you really have to read Derek Willis’s NYT Upshot post “Democrats Are Spending More on the Ground in Key Senate Races.” The centerpiece in his post, quite a jaw-dropper really, is a chart, “A Democratic Edge in Key Senate Races,” which graphically depicts how much of the midterm outcome is riding on Dem’s GOTV spending.
In Alaska, for example, Dems are spending $1.9 million for “local staffers; get-out-the-vote efforts and other field operations.” to re-elect Mark Begich, vs. less than $225K for the Repubican candidate. In Colorado the difference is even greater, with Dems spending $4.4 million on staff and voter contact operations, compared the the Republicans’ spending a paltry $556K for their candidate. In North Carolina Democrats are spending $3.2 million on ground game efforts to re-elect Sen. Kay Hagan, compared to less than $836K for her GOP opponent. In Iowa it’s $1.3 mill for Democrat Rep. Bruce Braley against $105K for his adversary.
Willis adds that outside groups, such as super PACs, environmental and reproductive rights groups “working on behalf of Democratic candidates have extended the advantage.” Republicans, lacking the ground troops, have for the most part opted for investments in more traditional methods, such as media and postal ads.
Much depends on how good Democratic high-tech voter targeting efforts like the Bannock Street Project really are, vs. the GOP’s ad saturation strategy. But Dems are not withdrawing from the ad wars in any sense, explains Willis:

In Alaska, Colorado, Iowa and North Carolina, the number of network television spots is split roughly evenly between the two sides, according to data compiled by Echelon Insights, a Republican digital consulting firm…Spending on field operations is still a fraction of the amount that goes to television and other forms of advertising, and campaigns are reluctant to take money away from trying to reach mass audiences, even if it’s unclear in many cases how many persuadable voters broadcast advertisements reach.

Democrats clearly recognize that they have to remain competitive in fronting strong television ads, matching the Republican investment. But they also believe they can target swing voters better than can the Republicans, and they can put more trained canvassers on their front porches– and with a better message.
It’s a big gamble. But credit Democrats with the realization that getting different midterm results requires a different GOTV strategy. So far, dozens of better-than-expected snapshot polls suggest they may be right.

This video deserves to ride another day:

Shane Goldmacher reports at The National Journal that “Democratic House Candidates Are Walloping Republicans in the Small-Money Game.”
Also at The National Journal, Alex Roarty asks “GOP strategists fret they aren’t scheduled to spend enough in a handful of battlegrounds. Are they lowering expectations or setting up the blame game?”
At Salon.com Thomas Frank has a good interview with Bernie Sanders entitled, “Bernie Sanders: Longterm Democratic strategy is “pathetic.”” Among Sanders’s insights is this one, which might make a pretty good meme for Dems in some campaigns: “I’m not one who says there’s no difference between the two parties. There are significant differences. The Republican Party is right-wing extremists. The Democratic Party is centrist. That is a big difference.”
Nate Silver makes his case that Republicans are still favored to win a Senate majority. But he answers “not quite” to the chicken little question in his headline.
Jacqueline Klimas argues at The Washington Times that “Online campaign ads may prove decisive in midterm elections“. Says Klimas “Even at just 3 percent of ad spending, online buys are much higher this year than they were in the 2012 campaigns. And analysts expect another big boost heading into the 2016 campaign cycle. Online campaign spending is expected to reach almost $1 billion, or 7.7 percent of total ad spending, in 2016, according to the Borrell report.”
Alexis Levinson reveals at CQ Politics what is “The Big Issue in the North Carolina Senate Race“: “The Tar Heel State is also uniquely suited for political messaging on education. The state’s public university system and the Research Triangle Park are considered local gems. North Carolina is the only state with a state constitution mandating the legislature provide funding for public institutions of higher learning…”Education motivates Hagan’s base, and that’s an urban corridor base,” said Morgan Jackson, a North Carolina Democratic operative. “Not only is it an issue that is a good issue for all of North Carolina, it is one that is off the charts on the people that she needs to motivate.””
A damn good question — and a good retort to ACA-bashers, as well as anti-choicers.
Ronald Brownstein explains at The Atlantic how the U.S. Senate got so “fickle”: “With each party consolidating Senate seats in its presidential strongholds, the prognosis is for narrow Senate majorities tipped by a few swing states and the handful of senators who win on the other side’s natural terrain. Looking forward, the Senate’s “natural division … is very close to 50-50,” says Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz.”

Georgia’s Republican Governor Nathan Deal is in big trouble, as a result of the latest ranking of states by unemployment rates —placing Georgia dead last. With polls showing the Governor’s race in a stat tie, Democratic candidate Sen. Jason Carter wasted no time getting out a powerful new ad (above) calling Deal out. The script goes like this:

Gov. Deal: “Now my focus on job creation is paying off.”
Narrator: “Really? Then why is Georgia ranked 51st, worst in the nation for unemployment? Middle class incomes are falling. We have 9,000 fewer teachers in Georgia’s classrooms, 80,000 fewer HOPE recipients in Georgia’s colleges, 380,000 Georgians looking for work.”
Gov. Deal: “Now my focus on job creation is paying off.”
Narrator: “Governor Deal, we can’t go any lower.”

Short. direct and to the point, the ad has Republican Governor Deal and the state GOP squirming with lame rebuttals.

Though it doesn’t provide a unified field theory suggested by the title, Matthew Cooper’s Newsweek cover story “Why Working-Class White Men Make Democrats Nervous” provides a number of insights about Democratic hopes for getting a larger share of the votes of white working-class males.
Much of Cooper’s article is historical review — the emergence and staying power of the Reagan Democrats. Mining the theme of “painful estrangement between working-class white men and the Democratic Party, Cooper notes,

…The white working-class percentage of the electorate may be on the decline, but white working-class men remain a voting bloc neither party can afford to ignore…Since 2000, white working-class men have become so estranged from the party of the New Deal that in some states Obama won only 10 percent of their vote. (Overall, about a third of white working-class men gave Obama their support.)
In the 2012 election, Obama attracted fewer white voters than any Democratic candidate since the 1960s. And in the subset of working-class white men, he lost by a 31-point margin. But because noncollege whites have become an ever smaller part of the pie, Obama was able to win the election. Noncollege whites of both sexes constituted half of Clinton’s electoral strength in 1992, but made up only a quarter of Obama’s support in 2012.

More often, however, it is in the non-presidental election years that white working-class males exert disproportionate influence at the polls:

…This year the impact of white working-class voters looks likely to be amplified. In presidential voting years, minority voters come out in bigger numbers, diluting the impact of white working-class voters who may constitute a third of the electorate in an off year but only a quarter in a presidential election year.
…If the prospect of higher white-working-class turnout wasn’t bad enough for Democrats this fall, the Senate battleground states–Louisiana, Montana, Kentucky, Arkansas, West Virginia, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Iowa, and Michigan–are thick with working-class whites…in some states, especially in the upper Midwest and Northeast, Democrats have reduced their losses to the point where they can win states like Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania because they lose noncollege white voters by a smaller margin.

Citing an unspecified poll which indicates that 56 percent of “noncollege white men” say that the poor have an easy life, Cooper notes that 62 percent of them believe the government should do less for the poor. He quotes Ronald Brownstein’s observation that “once their income started declining, they became very receptive to Republican arguments that [the government was] taking your money and giving it to others…”
Cooper cites regional differences influencing white working-class votes:

Working-class whites in the South are much more estranged from the Democratic Party. In Alabama, Obama got only 11 percent of the noncollege white vote and 10 percent in Mississippi. In Ohio, less fundamentalist and more unionized, Obama was able to pull about 42 percent of the vote of noncollege whites and 43 percent in Pennsylvania, which isn’t ideal for Democrats but is enough–combined with their other loyal groups–to win elections. An even closer parsing of data shows how the collapse of Democratic support among white working-class voters extends beyond the South to the mountain West and Plains States. The president garnered a majority in Maine and Vermont. (If only white men could vote nationwide, Obama would have won just Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, Oregon and Washington.)

Democrats are holding their own at levels better than expected in recent polling on midterm battleground state-wide races. But it’s unclear whether they are gaining any ground with white working-class males.
Hillary Clinton did better than Obama with working-class whites in her 2008 presidential campaign. However, “a new Quinnipiac University poll…shows her with only 27 percent of the white noncollege male vote–behind even Obama’s 31 percent.” In addition, “Hillary wouldn’t need to win these voters; she would only have to stop the hemorrhaging of them to the Republicans. “She’s not going to carry [white] noncollege voters. It’s not like they have to get these voters to love them,” says Ruy Teixeira, author of several books on how the white working-class votes. “You still need to do better than a catastrophic loss. There’s a group in the middle that’s willing to listen.”
Looking toward the future, Cooper suggests:

The greatest opportunities for Democrats to regain the initiative with white working-class men will probably come with a more full-throated economic message–one less about fairness, which working-class white men are more likely to see as a giveaway to the poor, and more about helping them recover their dignity, whether it’s through defending old-school entitlements like Social Security and Medicare or taking a tougher stance on the wolves of Wall Street.

He could have added affordable higher education for their kids, enhanced protection from medical catastrophes, restoring unions, and raising taxes on the rich, all of which are extremely weak spots for Republican candidates. Further, notes Cooper,

Andrew Levison, author of The White Working Class Today: Who They Are, How They Think, and How Progressives Can Regain Their Support, shares Greenberg’s view about how many persuadable working-class voters remain. But he thinks a populist appeal isn’t enough. He also notes that Democrats, let alone unions, are few and far between in many towns and a Fox News cocoon fills the void, while the Republican Party is a living presence. “It goes back to the loss of Democratic machines and institutions,” he says.

The quickening demographic transformation now underway all across America is a huge asset for Democrats. But rebuilding and recrafting the ‘machines and institutions’ that help restore dignity and opportunity to white working-class males is a pivotal commitment that will enable Democrats to get a larger share of their votes — and secure a stable majority coalition that can move America forward.

Like everyone else in political journalism, I’ve spent months obsessing about the struggle for control of the Senate, and without question it matters a lot. But it’s becoming more and more apparent that if there was just one contest you could choose that might send the right message to the GOP, it’s the Kansas governor’s race, where incumbent Sam Brownback is in big trouble. Here’s how I put it today at the Washington Monthly.

If the Republican governor of a very Republican state loses for undertaking a conservative political and policy revolution, complete with a purge of party “moderates” and reactionary legislation on just about every front imaginable, it may remind Republicans everywhere that there are limits to a meta-strategy of moving to the right, polarizing the electorate, and then winning on money and pure dumb luck. As a huge bonus, among the injured in a Brownback loss would be the Koch Brothers, right there in their Wichita lair….
Brownback has very publicly made his state a conservative “experiment station” and sought to stamp out any dissent in his party, all in the pursuit of a sort of intellectual rogue’s gallery of bad ideas, from supply-side economics to the harshest attacks in the country on reproductive rights. He not only deserve to lose, but his regime needs to be remembered with fear and trembling by Republicans everywhere.

If this sounds like a prayer as much as political analysis, so be it.

From “House Dems: Focus on ‘all the single ladies‘” by Deirdre Walsh, CNN Senior Congressional Producer:

The results of the 2012 election show why Democrats believe they have an opening if they concentrate on single women.
According to CNN’s exit polls, unmarried women were about one quarter of the electorate in 2012, which was a record high. In that election, single women voted 68%-31% for Democrats over Republicans in congressional contests.
Democrats admit they can’t replicate that level in a non-presidential year, but they believe boosting turnout in several dozen districts can overtake the advantage Republicans traditionally have among married women…A poll released last month by Democracy Corps, a Democratic leaning group, projects a 20-point drop off in unmarried female voters from 2012 to 2014…
The House Democratic campaign arm is using the playbook developed by Virginia’s Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe in his victorious 2013 campaign.
McAuliffe lost among men, but won the election because women supported him over the then-Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli by 9 points. Among unmarried women, the margin was more dramatic — McAuliffe prevailed 67% -25%.
The campaign committee created “ROSIE,” a voter modeling program named after the iconic World War II “Rosie the Riveter,” which they say stands for “Reengaging Our Sisters in Elections.” This program culls data to identify unmarried voters, and then targets messages using email, paid mail and social media to motivate them to vote in November.
The task to get these women motivated enough to go to the polls will be tough.

Nearly everyone agrees that Democrats are not going to win back a House majority in November. But if ‘Rosie’ and other Dem GOTV projects are good enough to reduce the projected 20 percent drop-off in single women voters by, say, a fourth, Democrats can cut the GOP’s House margin significantly and set the stage for a 2016 takeover.

Polls show stat ties in U.S. Senator and Governor’s races in GA, despite Republican voter suppression. Dems also competitive in state-wide races for Lt. Gov and Secretary of State.
Jennifer De Pinto has an update on early voting at CBS News, which notes “Thirty-six states plus the District of Columbia have some form of early voting, that is, allowing many people to vote before Election Day without needing an excuse to do so. Eight of these states feature races for the U.S. Senate that CBS News is calling competitive…The portion of voters who cast their ballots early has been on the rise. Ten years ago, fewer than a quarter of ballots were cast early nationwide for president, but that figure climbed to 35 percent in 2012 (representing about 45 million votes) and 30 percent in the 2010 midterm elections…Among the eight Senate battleground states, Iowa is the first to kick off early voting on Thursday. Next up, Georgia begins early voting on Oct. 13; Kansas on Oct. 15; Alaska, Arkansas and Colorado on Oct. 20 (although mail ballots may be sent out earlier); Louisiana on Oct. 21; and North Carolina on Oct. 23.”
RCP hosts a freewheeling chat with Joe Trippi and Karl Rove, and both of them seem to agree that the battle for majority control of the U.S. Senate is in toss-up territory.
At The Upshot, Nate Cohn notes, “It does help to have an advantage in advertising, but the Democratic edge is extremely modest in most states. The Democratic share of television advertisements exceeds 60 percent only in Georgia, and it is not large enough to account for any meaningful disparity between the state and national polls.”
Whoopsie-Daisy slip-up at the Republican Governor’s Association reveals which corporations are giving their candidates the secret big bucks. As Jonathan Weisman reports at The New York Times, “The most elite group, known as the Statesmen, whose members donated $250,000, included Aetna; Coca-Cola; Exxon Mobil; Koch Companies Public Sector, the lobbying arm of the highly political Koch Industries; Microsoft; Pfizer; UnitedHealth Group; and Walmart. The $100,000 Cabinet level included Aflac, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Comcast, Hewlett-Packard, Novartis, Shell Oil, Verizon Communications and Walgreen.”
The New York Times editorial board opines on the ‘long lines’ technique of voter suppression favored by Republicans: “In South Carolina, the 10 precincts with the longest waits had more than twice the percentage of black registered voters, on average, than the rest of the state…Florida has no standards for machines or poll workers, but the study found far fewer poll workers in heavily Hispanic areas. That contributed to an average delay in the most populous counties of 53 minutes — a wait that encouraged people to walk away and discouraged them from returning in the future… an outcry that the move would disenfranchise low-income and black voters…Several counties in North Carolina have moved or closed minority election stations…These changes are in addition to the cutbacks on early voting and burdensome ID requirements that have been imposed by Republican lawmakers to reduce the turnout of people who are likely to vote Democratic, including minorities and the poor. Many state and local officials see voting as a partisan game they can manipulate and will continue to do so unless challenged in court, or until Congress steps in and makes voting a universal right that cannot be infringed.”
The massive climate change march notwithstanding, Gail Collins notes, also at The Times that “Only 3 percent of current Republican members of Congress have been willing to go on record as accepting the fact that people are causing global warming. That, at least, was the calculation by PolitiFact, which found a grand total of eight Republican nondeniers in the House and Senate. That includes Representative Michael Grimm of New York, who while laudably open-minded on this subject, is also under indictment for perjury and tax fraud. So we may be pushing 2 percent in January.”
Re the mass climate change march, Mark Hertsgaard’s post at The Nation asks a great question. But the best answer may be that big demonstrations alone won’t do it, unless they are followed up with voter registration and GOTV campaigns, specifically targeting young voters in midterm elections.
Michael Tomasky gets two thumbs up (the list and the order) for his well-reasoned short list at The Daily Beast, “Five Awful GOP Governors Who Need to Go.” Lots of quotable zingers here.

Sometimes you read some overseas news and it seems exceptionally relevant to U.S. politics, if not now then in the near future. That’s how I reacted to news from Spain about a sudden about-face on abortion policy, as I discussed today at TPMCafe:

A political party with close ties to religious conservatives wins a national election thanks to unhappiness with the ruling center-left party’s economic and financial performance. Challenged to redeem its platform promising a major reversal of landmark laws making abortion generally legal, the conservative party promulgates a law banning the procedure, with exceptions for rape, incest, and threats to the physical and mental health of the mother. Protests appear and spread as women object to the turning back of the clock. Public opinion surveys show 70 to 80 percent opposition to the new law. And finally, the conservative party’s prime minister relents, puts off implementation of the abortion ban on grounds that it would be reversed at the next change of party control, and instead proposes a face-saving measure providing for parental approval of abortions by minors. Anti-choicers and religious officials are very, very displeased and the governing party could be heading toward disarray.
In case you missed it, that’s what just happened in Spain. And it’s an omen for what might happen if U.S. Republicans regain power in 2016 thanks to general unhappiness with the Obama administration and the results of its economic policies. A long-overdue debt — sort of a balloon payment on an old mortgage — would reach maturity, and the GOP would be hard-pressed not to take some dramatic action on hot-button cultural issues, especially abortion. And the required gesture could be politically toxic. The Spanish law is significantly more liberal than what the national GOP has long been committed to; aside from the significant number of Republicans who oppose rape and incest exceptions to a hypothetical abortion ban, a health exception has long been anathema, and a mental health exception even more so (recall the sarcastic air quotes John McCain used for “health exceptions” in the 2008 presidential debate at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church).

Even if Republicans dodge a confrontation between public opinion and their longstanding commitments to the antichoice movement, the same dynamic applies to other hot-button issues:

The bottom line is that a Republican Party — which like the anti-choice movement itself has long been Janus-faced, publicly focusing on rare and unpopular late-term abortions while never moving an inch from support from a total abortion ban with rare exceptions — would be forced by actual power to choose between a final betrayal of its “base” and an implicit mandate to ignore all that cultural stuff. Even if it’s abundantly clear to all the pundits that a triumphal GOP has gained control of the federal government for reasons that have zero to do with rolling back abortion rights — or GLBT rights, or a “path to citizenship” for undocumented immigrants — there’s also zero reason to assume that President Christie or Bush or Paul or Cruz might not find himself in exactly the position of Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy this week: admitting a big chunk of the party platform is quite simply too hot to handle. If it comes to that, a lot of conservative activists may lose their final illusions.

It’s another way of saying you can’t have it both ways forever.