From Derek Willis’s “Online Political Ads Have Been Slow to Catch On as TV Reigns” at NYT’s The Upshot:

For all of the advances in the use of data and digital tools, broadcast advertising still claims the largest share of campaign budgets. Digital advertising is still a work in progress, especially at the level of House races and further down the ballot. Targeting voters with online ads is difficult, messy work, even under ideal circumstances. It can be easier to accomplish in statewide or national campaigns, where building a large enough audience is less of a problem.
“It’s never quite as smooth or seamless as it sounds,” said Zac Moffatt, a co-founder of Targeted Victory. But like a lot of other data-intensive campaign tasks, such as matching absentee ballots to a campaign’s email list, it has improved over time. That message is echoed by other digital advertising professionals: The technology to make it happen is available, but the process is not perfect.
…A look at campaign spending data reveals that most competitive House races are not emphasizing that kind of spending.
It is hard to find evidence of a shift from broadcast spending to digital in the 10 most highly contested House races in 2014. Spending that clearly went toward digital efforts (sometimes it is hard to tell) accounted for a small portion of the money spent by candidates…Candidates in those 10 most competitive races spent more than $34 million on television and radio advertisements and production, according to Federal Election Commission data. They spent less on digital efforts (about $1.1 million) than they did on direct mail or polling.
This shows a reluctance on the part of campaigns and consultants to move away from television, and uncertainty about the effectiveness and accuracy of online targeting.

As for the future, digital media may gain some leverage in the years ahead with a few tweaks. Digital is getting better at targeting users by neighborhood, instead of just cookies. Willis notes also that “the consumption of media on phones, tablets and other devices is increasing.” In addition, high-turnout seniors who are still digital-averse will slowly be replaced by more digitally-hip oldsters. For now, however, data indicates that digital technology is better for political fund-raising than for ads which win hearts and minds.

The possibility of another Mitt Romney run has generated a new round of speculation about the relevance of presidential candidates’ religious views, particularly since Mitt’s boosters say he will not hide that particular light under a bushel in 2016. But I’d say that in the Republican field, there are quite a few other candidates whose opinions on how their faith affects their politics could use some more scrutiny. I went down that perilous road today at the Washington Monthly:

[T]here are proto-candidates who say with some credibility that their religion has a big impact on their political views and/or their sense of mission, including Jeb Bush, Rand Paul, Chris Christie and John Kasich. Ben Carson, like Mitt Romney, belongs to a church most Americans would consider exotic, the Seventh Day Adventists, and he talks a lot about faith. Carly Fiorina doesn’t go to church a lot, but says she used to read a lot of St. Thomas Aquinas. John Bolton, a member of the mainline Evangelical Lutheran Church, doesn’t much mention it. And I’d say it’s pretty clear Hillary Clinton is a reasonably serious Methodist.
But then you have some other candidates who have more or less made it clear they view themselves (sincerely or not) as spiritual warriors who are in politics in no small part to vindicate a faith threatened by unbelievers and false believers. They would include Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz. Scott Walker, a conservative evangelical who’s said on occasion that he’s on a divine mission, is a borderline case; we’ll see how he behaves among the very explicitly theocratic conservative clergy and laity of Iowa in the months just ahead. And then there’s Bobby Jindal, the self-described “evangelical Catholic” who seems to want to make his campaign a religious crusade, but doesn’t appear to know the words or the music to that particular hymn.
The point here is that the instinctive antipathy towards talking about the religion of political candidates goes from being a small to a big mistake when said candidates are explicitly making religious appeals, not just in the generic “God Bless America” sense but by telling certain kinds of believers they’d better get on board the bandwagon or they’ll wind up nailed to a cross, which is more or less what Mike Huckabee’s been saying lately. Personally, Mitt Romney’s religion is pretty far down my list of concerns.

As a matter of fact, it bugs me that some of the same candidates we are talking about here–Huckabee, Perry, Cruz and Jindal–have an especially close relationship with the Christian Right group the American Family Association, which today sought to disassociate itself from its longtime mouthpiece Bryan Fischer because his long history of racist and homophobic commentary was endangering an AFA-financed trip to Israel for a large number of RNC members. No, this is not a good time to declare discussion of presidential candidates’ religious opinions off-limits–unless they’re willing to stop invoking divine favor themselves.

From Rev. Jesse Jackson’s op-ed “Voter Suppression Did Not End in Selma” in the Chicago Sun-Times: “In North Carolina’s tight Senate race in 2014, Republican Tom Tillis beat incumbent Kay Hagen by about 43,000 votes (1.7 percent of the vote). Tillis had ushered through the state legislature one of the harshest voter-suppression laws, eliminating seven days of early voting (and at least one Sunday of “get your souls to the polls” rallies at African-American churches), eliminating same-day registration, forcing voters to vote in their own precinct and more. 700,000 voters had voted in the now eliminated early seven-day window in 2012, 200,000 in the 2012 by-election. Some 100,000 voters, largely African-American, took advantage of same-day registration in 2012. The voters eliminated may well have exceeded the vote margin.”
In his post “How to Protect the Vote,” The Nation’s Ari Berman writes: “One reason it’s so easy to restrict voting rights is that, although there are constitutional amendments protecting the right to vote free of racial discrimination (Fifteenth), granting women suffrage (Nineteenth), banning the poll tax (Twenty-fourth) and raising the voting age to 18 (Twenty-sixth), there is no provision guaranteeing the basic right to cast a ballot. House Democrats Mark Pocan and Keith Ellison have proposed changing that with a simple amendment stating: “Every citizen of the United States, who is of legal voting age, shall have the fundamental right to vote in any public election held in the jurisdiction in which the citizen resides.” Yet, “With federal legislation unlikely, the best prospects for election reform are in the states, primarily blue states controlled by Democrats. According to the Brennan Center, twelve states quietly passed measures expanding voter access in 2014–including Illinois, which adopted election-day voter registration and expanded early voting.”
At ThinkProgress Ian Milhiser observes: “According to a new poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation, only 27 percent of the public agrees with the Republican leaders’ strategy to take health care away from millions of Americans if they get an assist from the Supreme Court…The same poll determined that “[m]ost see lawmakers’ proposals to change the ACA as an attempt to gain political advantage (63%) rather than to improve the law itself (29%).”
Julian E. Zelizer has a retrospective article, “When Liberals Were Organized,” about the Democratic Study Group at The American Prospect, in which he notes, “Since 1994, congressional liberals have failed to replicate a powerful, independent organization like the Democratic Study Group. They have been dependent on a House leadership that is sometimes but not always sympathetic to their goals. The closest thing to a DSG, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, has been a pale imitation of its predecessor, a fragile informal coalition that has lacked the same kind of leadership, money, publications, communications strategy, or clout…The history of the DSG demonstrates that their organizational prowess was hugely important in moving forward a liberal agenda and in making sure that liberal electoral gains were institutionalized in the operation of the House. Enthusiasts of the DSG believe Democrats, continuing in the minority after 2014, could use something like the DSG to gain momentum before the next elections.”
“Can Moral Mondays Produce Victorious Tuesdays?” Barry Yeoman provides an update on the grass roots uprising that began — and continues — in NC, also at The American Prospect.
If the Koch brothers’ nearly $900 million in projected spending on the 2016 campaign wasn’t enough of a headache, read Shane Goldmacher’s National Journal post “Buying a Nominee: The secret fundraising scheme forming for this contest will make super PACs look quaint.”
Ed O’Keefe’s “House Democrats retake the House? It’s a long shot, but they’re getting ready to try” at The Washington Post offers some perceptive observations, including: “Getting the 30 they need will be a very steep climb,” said Nathan L. Gonzales, editor and publisher of the nonpartisan Rothenberg & Gonzales Political Report. “If the president’s numbers continue to climb and people feel good about the economy, that’ll be good for Democrats, but they’ll still have to convince voters to throw out Republicans. A good economy usually benefits all incumbents, no matter their party.” Also, “There’s no conventional wisdom in politics anymore,” said Rep. Linda T. Sánchez (D-Calif.). “Would anyone have predicted that [Republican former House majority leader Eric Cantor] would lose his seat? We’re in an environment where anything can happen.”
At The Upshot Brendan Nyhan urges his readers to “Fight the Temptation to Pay Attention to Polls.” Nyhan has convincing data to back up his advice, and notes “For now, you should ignore surveys testing potential Democrat/Republican matchups for the 2016 presidential election…We know head-to-head polls won’t be useful for more than a year. Until then, your time is better spent following the direction of the economy — the most important predictor of presidential election outcomes…” The real value of such early polls is for campaigns to monitor how their candidate is doing with specific demographic groups.
Morris P. Fiorina’s “If I Could Hold a Seminar for Political Journalists…” at The Forum asserts that many political journalists conflate “polarization” with “party sorting.” As Fiorina explains, “Rather than polarization in the distribution of public opinion, what has happened in the US is that the parties have become better sorted since the 1970s…in common usage, polarization tends to connote a process of individual conversion – individuals move from moderate to more extreme positions as they listen to Rush Limbaugh or watch Rachel Maddow, for example. In contrast, sorting is more often a compositional phenomenon – rather than change their views, the categories to which people belong change…While the two processes are not mutually exclusive, the evidence at the level of mass public opinion indicates that sorting is the dominant process in producing today’s historically high partisan conflict…”

As you probably know, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker was the star of the Iowa Freedom Summit in Iowa last weekend, the first “cattle call” of the 2016 Republican presidential contest. A lot of accounts focused on his speaking style, or his recitation of “accomplishments” in Wisconsin. But at TPMCafe I pointed to something else that was going on:

For my money, what most makes Scott Walker attractive to the kind of people who attended the Iowa Freedom Summit is his perceived electability: As he mentioned in his speech, and nearly every commenter duly repeated, he’s won three elections in four years in a state carried twice by Barack Obama and governed by a Democrat right before him. Yes, two of those elections were in relatively-low-turnout midterms, and his defeat of a recall effort in 2012 was a special election where he also benefited from the reluctance of some swing voters to remove a duly elected governor from office in the middle of a term. But it’s a better record of electability than other candidates can boast of, unless John Kasich or Rick Snyder run. (Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney won in competitive states, but not since 2002).
There’s a bonus, though, that may make Walker’s pitch especially seductive: He won over and over again in Wisconsin without compromising with conservatism’s enemies. Indeed, he behaved almost like a liberal caricature of a conservative villain. And it was deliberate. In 2013, after his recall victory, Walker published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal offering the novel theory that his aggressive conservatism gave him a leg up with swing voters:

Polls show that about 11% of the people in Wisconsin today support both me and the president. There are probably no two people in public life who are more philosophically opposite–yet more than one in 10 approve of us both.
To make a conservative comeback, Republicans need to win these Obama-Walker voters and their equivalents across the country. In the Wisconsin recall election, we mobilized conservative voters by standing up for conservative principles against enormous pressure. But we also persuaded at least some of President Obama’s supporters to support us, too…
The way Republicans can win those in the middle is not by abandoning their principles. To the contrary, the courage to stand on principle is what these voters respect. The way to win the center is to lead.
That’s why those arguing that conservatives have to “moderate” their views if they want to appeal to the country are so wrong.

This is catnip to conservatives. They’re being endlessly lectured by mainstream media pundits and political professionals in their own camp that they need to “compromise” with Democrats or “reach out” to new constituencies beyond their base if they are to win presidential elections. That’s almost exactly what Jeb Bush is saying in announcing he’s willing to take some hits in the primaries if it enables him to win a general election. But conservatives naturally resist this kind of tradeoff, which they believe they’ve been asked to make far too often with far too little payoff. Walker tells them they do not have to choose. They can win by confrontation, not compromise or outreach, and his three victories are the proof.

Keep that in mind next time you hear Walker’s rationale for candidacy is some sort of relatively moderate ideological positioning. He’s found a sweet spot where electability doesn’t mean “moving to the center.”

No one should be surprised by reports that the Koch brothers are ramping up to spend nearly $900 million on the 2016 elections, nor that the amount could top $1 billion when all accounts are settled after the election. The figure does represent a substantial increase over their huge outlays for 2012 and 2014. But energy-related profits are soaring and that is their primary source of revenue. They’ve got the money, and there is little to stop them, thanks to the Citizens United decision.
Of course Democrats and really anyone who cares about the integrity of our political system, such as it is, should raise hell about it and blast the Koch brothers’ buy-out as unAmerican. Democrats will have a lot to say about it, as Sean Sullivan and Anne Gearan explain at the Washington Post,

The announcement this week that the vast political network backed by the wealthy industrialist Koch brothers aims to spend nearly $1 billion on the 2016 elections has reignited Democratic hopes of casting the brothers as electoral villains and linking them closely to Republican candidates.
It’s a campaign strategy that yielded little success for the party in 2014, a banner year for the GOP. But Democratic officials and operatives say they are hopeful that their anti-Koch message will have more potency in a presidential election year.
Groups supporting potential Democratic candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, as well as the House and Senate Democratic campaign arms, plan to single out the Kochs in their advertising and fundraising efforts.
…David Brock, founder of the pro-Clinton American Bridge political action committee, said his group will be retooling a 2014 war-room operation called “Real Koch Facts,” which he acknowledged did not achieve big results. The project aims to educate potential voters about what Democrats say is the Kochs’ largely hidden agenda and to attempt to shame recipients of Koch money.

But it would be folly for Democrats to expect that vilification alone will offset the harm done by the Koch’s spending. As Gearan and Sullivan explain,

Most voters don’t know who the Kochs are. Sixty-four percent of voters said they had no opinion or a neutral impression of them, according to an NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll conducted about a month before the November midterms. But among those who did, attitudes were overwhelmingly negative.

There are those who say, with some evidence, that campaign spending is overrated, less important than fronting good candidates. And certainly Democrats can always do more to recruit and develop better candidates. A boycott of the Koch industries, such as Georgia Pacific products, can’t hurt. But let’s not expect it to do much to stop them, since most of Koch revenues come from energy-related industries.
Democrats have little choice but to keep speaking out and organizing to overturn Citizens United, hoping that the public will begin paying more attention as the national discussion progresses to the point where more voters are going to take it into consideration on election day. That and contributing to Democratic candidates still offers the best hope for stopping the Koch Democracy takeover.

The following article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
The New York Times reported last week that in the closed-door Republican Senate Caucus retreat, Republican Leader Senator Mitch McConnell “encouraged the Republican troops to refocus policy on the stagnant middle class.”
That would be like asking the wolves of the world to stop hunting and refocus on cultivating asparagus.
But, of course, McConnell didn’t really mean he wanted his fellow Republicans to do something about the wealth gap. He wanted them to look like they were doing something about the wealth gap while they actually deliver the goods for the owners of the Republican Party.
The Republican Party, after all, is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of the .01% and doing something meaningful about the gap in wealth and income in America – revitalizing the middle class — requires taking wealth and income that is now being siphoned off by the .01% and giving it to the people who earned and created it – the vast majority of ordinary Americans.
Of course Republicans and apologists for Wall Street dispute that assumption. They argue that the economy is not a so called “zero sum game” – that the best way to improve the standard of living or ordinary Americans is to grow the economy. And they say that the best way to do that is to allow the wealthy to control more and more of the nation’s wealth, since they invest that wealth in new productive enterprises that create more and more new jobs.
That premise, of course, is the essence of “trickle-down economics.” The problem is that we know empirically that “trickle-down economics” doesn’t work. Economic growth does not necessarily increase the incomes of ordinary Americans.
In fact, over the last 35 years we’ve had lots of economic growth. Over that period per capita income has increased by a whopping 77% and made America wealthier per capita that any society in the history of the world. That should mean the average American is 77% better off today then he or she was three and a half decades ago. Problem is, we aren’t. Instead, the real buying power of the wages of ordinary Americans has barely increased at all. Instead, all of that growth had been siphoned off to the top one percent – and most to the top .01%. That is not a theory. It is a documented fact.
Don’t get me wrong. Economic growth – growth in productivity – is a very good thing. It is the foundation of a better life. But growth by itself doesn’t guarantee that the growing economic bounty will be widely shared.
In fact, today the stock market is at record heights, corporate profits are at record highs and the percentage of national income going to wages is at a record low.
Fixing these things requires that we change the rules of the economic game so they require that those who do the work to create the new wealth can share its benefits.
Rules like:

• Minimum wage laws that guarantee that everyone who works 40 hours a week must be paid a living wage – a wage that allows them to support a family;
• Laws guaranteeing that workers in every workplace can bargain through their unions and demand middle class wages and good working conditions –since union wages are consistently higher than non-union wages;
• Laws that require that women who do similar work are paid just as much as men;
• Rules that require employers to pay overtime to all employees except well-paid executives and professionals;
• Financial regulation that prevents big Wall Street banks from siphoning off and then risking billions of dollars on speculative gambling schemes;
• Laws preventing the sons and daughters of multi-millionaires from using the Trust Fund loophole to avoid paying billions in taxes – thereby forcing the rest of us to pay the difference if we want decent public services.

In his State of the Union Speech, President Obama outlined a program for Middle Class Economics that does just that. Not surprisingly, it was met with a resounding NO from the GOP – all the while they feigned increased interest in addressing the problem of stagnating middle class wages.
In fact, in his State of the Union speech, President Obama outlined the terms of the debate that will define the political dialogue over the next decade in American politics.

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