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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Democratic Strategist

GOP’s Great White Hopes–Now and Later

Like a lot of folks, I’ve expressed worries about the likelihood that older white voters will represent a disproportionate share of the electorate in the 2010 midterm elections, creating an unearned GOP advantage. In his latest column, Ron Brownstein meditates on that possibility, but also points out that a Republican message tailored to older white voters could come back to haunt the GOP in 2012.

In midterm elections, the electorate tends to be whiter and older than in presidential elections. ABC polling director Gary Langer has calculated that since 1992 seniors have cast 19 percent of the vote in midterm elections, compared with just 15 percent in presidential years. That difference contributed to the 1994 landslide that swept the GOP into control of both the House and Senate. Seniors had cast just 13 percent of the vote in Bill Clinton’s 1992 victory, but that figure spiked to nearly 19 percent two years later, with voting by the young people who had bolstered Clinton falling off sharply….
In 2008, Obama won the votes of just 40 percent of whites over age 65 (compared with 54 percent of whites under 30). All surveys show that white seniors remain the most resistant to Obama’s health care agenda and the most skeptical of him overall. In the nonpartisan Pew Research Center’s most recent poll, Obama’s approval rating among elderly whites stood at just 39 percent. Surveying all of these numbers, veteran GOP pollster Whit Ayres says that the Republican margin among white seniors could “easily expand to 25 points” in 2010.

Brownstein also notes, however, that the general assumption of low voting in midterms by minorities is based on mixed evidence. Minority voters actually represented a higher share of the electorate in 1994 and 1998 than in the presidential years of 1992 and 1996. These voters did, however, decline slightly as a percentage of the electorate in 2002 and 2006 as compared to 2000 and 2004. Moreover, the bar is higher in 2010 given the strong minority turnout in 2008. A lot will depend on what happens between now and then, and perhaps on the extent to which Republicans are perceived as playing on white racial or cultural fears.
After 2010, though, any Republican focus on older white voters isn’t likely to pay dividends:

In the 2012 presidential election, the young and minority voters central to Obama’s coalition are likely to return in large numbers. The risk to the GOP is that a strong 2010 showing based on a conservative appeal to apprehensive older whites will discourage it from reconsidering whether its message is too narrow to attract those rapidly growing groups.

Even if, says Brownstein, the share of the electorate for minority voters drops from 2008’s twenty-five percent to twenty percent in 2010, it’s like to rise to near thirty percent in 2012. It’s at that point that any Great White Hopes for the GOP could really begin to backfire.


Watch out Dems — the Town Hall protesters are not accurately described as “racists”. They are xenophobic “nativists” and Dems will shoot themselves in the foot – and screw themselves in 2010 – if they don’t see the difference

In recent weeks, and particularly since the September 12th protests in Washington, a significant number of national commentators have advanced the notion that behind the stated objections raised against Obama by the Tea Bag/Town Hall/ September 12th protesters (and the much larger group that opinion polls indicate sympathize with them) there actually lies a deep undercurrent of racism.
The main evidence that is offered for this view is the deep underlying “us versus them” cognitive framework in which many of the protesters’ objections are expressed – “I want my country back”, “Obama hates white people”, “We are the real America.” It seems almost self-evident that when a group of white people pose issues in stark “us versus them” terms and when the person they are opposing is Black, then racism must somehow be intimately involved.
At the same time, it is also a very easy task to find examples of just about every imaginable form of anti-Black racial prejudice expressed somewhere or other in the vast number of broadcasts of various conservative talk radio commentators or in the comment threads of conservative discussion sites or in the texts of anonymous viral e-mails.
Combine item A with item B and op-ed commentaries accusing the protesters and their sympathizers of racism seem to literally jump out of the keyboard and write themselves.
But before concluding that anti-Black racism is actually a major source of the Tea Party/Town Hall protesters attitudes toward Obama, there are two additional steps that have to be taken: (1) to try to seriously gauge the extent (and not just the presence or absence) of racist attitudes among the protesters and (2) to consider possible alternative sources of deep “us versus them” polarization that might be behind the protesters’ attitudes.
To do this, it is necessary to look specifically at the stereotypes that exist about different social groups. It is group-specific stereotypes that distinguish one kind of prejudice from another — racial prejudice against African-Americans, for example, from prejudice against Mexicans, Moslems, radicals, homosexuals or drug users. These groups all experience hostility, prejudice and discrimination, but the specific stereotypes that define them are entirely different.
In America, there are two main categories of anti-Black racist stereotyping:
The first is older, segregation- era stereotypes of African Americans as “lazy”, “stupid” and/or violent sexual brutes. These segregation-era stereotypes are still widespread in overtly racist web sites like those of the Christian Identity, White Power and Neo-Nazi movements. They occasionally show up in more mainstream conservative sites and have sometimes appeared in e-mails sent by staff members of conservative political candidates and officials – particularly among staffers of the political dynasties in the South that have deep roots in the segregation era. Interestingly however none of these “old fashioned” racist slurs have gone massively viral and gained widespread popularity among conservatives and Republicans in the way that other attacks on Obama have done.
Overlaying the traditional racist images are four new and distinct post-civil rights era negative stereotypes of Blacks – (1) the angry and anti-white “black militant”, based on 1960’s figures like Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X and Huey Newton (2) the “Welfare Queens” of the 1970’s and 1980’s , Black people supposedly “ too lazy to work” but driving Cadillacs while living off welfare (3) the “racial guilt hustler” (symbolized by African-American leaders like Al Sharpton) and (4) gangbangers and crack cocaine dealers, symbolized by swaggering “gangstas” with 9-millimeter pistols and gold teeth.
These new negative images are more widely disseminated than the segregation-era racist stereotypes. They frequently appear in discussions on the larger conservative web sites and are a staple of commentators like Rush Limbaugh, Mike Savage and others. While it is possible to criticize groups like gangbangers without intending to invoke any racist stereotypes, the context of the remarks usually gives the game away. When former civil rights leader Congressman John Lewis criticizes gangbangers, you know he’s not being racist; when former KKK leader David Duke calls their behavior “typical”, you know that he is.
But when one looks at the roughly 200-300 photos of the hand-made signs attacking Obama at the tea parties and Washington march that have been published on the major news and commentary sites, the striking fact is that attacks on Obama based on these racial stereotypes represent only a minor percentage of the total. Let’s quickly look at the main categories:


Political Murder-Suicide?

In the ongoing debate over what’s likely to happen in the 2010 elections, a point that I’ve tried to make repeatedly is that the Republican Party is exceptionally weak, and thus not in a great position to harvest discontent with Congress, the Obama administration, or the condition of the economy. A lot of conservatives seem to think the relative unpopularity of the GOP is a temporary “hangover” from the Bush years that will gradually dissipate.
But if you look at the data on party favorability (which can all be found together at PollingReport.com), what’s striking is that the GOP’s bad reputation isn’t getting any better. Pew, which offers respondents a range of options that appears to boost favorability, had the GOP’s total favorables at 40% in August, 40% in April, 40% in January, 39% in May of 2008, and 41% on the eve of the 2006 midterm elections. That’s as flat a line as you will ever see. GOP total unfavorables for that stretch of time oscillated slightly from the high forties to the low fifties; they were at 50% in August. Meanwhile, Fox has Republican favorability actually declining, from a ratio of 45/49 just before the 2008 elections, to 41/50 in April, to 36/53 in July. The same pattern is found by CBS/New York Times, where Republicans had a favorable/unfavorable ratio of 37/54 in October of 2008, then 31-58 in April of this year, and 28/58 in June.
I won’t go through all the polls in terms of Democrats, but unsurprisingly, they show the Democratic Party losing favorability in recent months, but still maintaining significantly more popularity than Republicans. Pew, for example, had the Democratic Party’s total favorables at 49% (versus 41% unfavorable) in August, down from 62% (versus 32% unfavorable) at the beginning of the year.
So you make the case that the recent abrasive behavior of the Republican Party may have helped damage Democrats, but isn’t helping Republicans much, either. Since Republicans have a much tougher climb to make to reach anything like majority status, they are in danger of committing a political murder-suicide.
The current popularity of the GOP, moreover, is low by historical standards, particularly for a party with visions of a big landslide electoral victory just ahead. Both Ezra Klein and Brendan Nyhan have taken a look this week at the favorability ratings of the two parties in 1994, and there’s absolutely no comparison to today’s low ratings for the GOP. As Nyhan summed up the evidence:

Republicans are currently viewed more negatively than any minority party in the previous four midterms in terms of both net favorables and the difference in net favorables between parties:

It’s possible, and perhaps even probable, that the GOP strategy for 2010 is to create a political environment so toxic and voter-alienating that Republicans can win a very low turnout election by whipping their base into a genuine frenzy. That’s obviously not a very good scenario for the country, and it remains to be seen if it’s even good for the GOP.


New Health Reform Wrinkle: The Cantwell Compromise

The reporting about it in the major rags has been sketchy, to put it charitably. But Ryan Grim has a HuffPo post that outlines the basics of Sen. Maria Cantwell’s “quasi-public option” health reform amendment, just passed by the Senate Finance Committee. Grim says the Cantwell amendment (full text here) “moves the conservative panel as close as it will likely get to a public health insurance option” and he provides this synopsis:

The amendment creates a “federally funded, non-Medicaid, state plan which combines the innovation and quality of private sector competition with the purchasing power of the states,” according to an overview.
It would be available to people with incomes above Medicaid eligibility but below 200 percent of the federal poverty level — a very narrow window. However, Republicans fear — and progressives hope — that once the plan becomes law there will be pressure to expand it…The plan would not be free. It is based on Washington state’s Basic Health plan, which costs roughly 60 dollars a month, with the remainder of the premium subsidized by the state.
Private insurers would be eligible to participate in the plan, as would HMOs or other networks of health care providers…Cantwell says that her measure…would assure coverage of 75 percent of people who are currently uninsured.

Cantwell’s amendment did win the support of four of the five Dems who voted against stronger public option amendments, the exception being Arkansas Sen. Blanche Lincoln. Grim notes that Sen. Snowe voted against it, which could be a problem down the road. The 12-11 margin suggests, for better or worse, that it may be a tweakable approach to a consensus.


So WHO should apologize?

Just in case you thought that, gee, maybe the GOP has a point about Rep. Alan Grayson owing them an apology for his remarks (see J.P. Green’s post below) about their bogus health care “plan,” Think Progress has a collection of some of their more intemperate ‘greatest hits’ bashing the Democratic health care reform proposals — none of which they have apologized for. Read the following, and then decide whether you think Rep. Grayson owes the Republicans any kind of apology:

– “Last week Democrats released a health care bill which essentially said to America’s seniors: Drop dead.” [Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite (R-FL), 7/21/09] (video clip here)
– “They’re going to save money by rationing care, getting you in a long line. Places like Canada, United Kingdom, and Europe. People die when they’re in line.” [Rep. Steve King (R-IA), 7/15/09] – “The Republican plan will] make sure we bring down the cost of health care for all Americans and that ensures affordable access for all Americans and is pro-life because it will not put seniors in a position of being put to death by their government.” [Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), 7/28/09] (video clip here)
– “That’s exactly what’s going on in Canada and Great Britain today…and a lot of people are going to die.” [Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA), 7/10/09] – “One in five people have to die because they went to socialized medicine! … I would hate to think that among five women, one of ‘em is gonna die because we go to socialized care.” [Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), 7/15/09]

And hey, we don’t remember Saint Joan of the Tundra apologizing for her drivel about Democratic “death panels,” nor Rep. Michelle Bachman’s apology for calling for renewed witch hunts to ferret out ‘anti-American’ elected officials (video here). If the Republicans want to declare a moritorium on overheated rhetoric, let them set an example. Otherwise Dems should not feel guilty for using every media opportunity to educate the public about the Republicans’ lack of a health plan and the Democrats serious reforms.


On-Paper Tiger

This item was cross-posted at The New Republic.
Chris Orr’s post at TNR about the early assembly work on Tim Pawlenty’s 2012 presidential bid is interesting in that he handicaps the Minnesotan primarily in terms of who he is not: not the flip-flopping, health-care-reforming Mormon Mitt Romney, not the disorganized and “goofy” Mike Huckabee, not the divisive and erratic Sarah Palin, and not the non-candidate David Petraeus.
Thus Chris captures the basic problem with Pawlenty ’12: what, precisely, is his positive appeal? Yes, he’s a bona fide cultural conservative; that checks an essential box, but you can’t throw a rock at any Republican meeting these days without hitting ten people avid to end legalized abortion and stop gay people from getting married. Yes, he coined a nice phrase–“Sam’s Club Republicans”–to illustrate the need for a broader GOP base. But absent any real agenda for appealing to these folks, it’s nothing but a slogan, and when two young conservatives, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam sought to fill out the phrase with actual policies in a recent book, they were generally hooted off the stage by their ideological brethren. Yes, he’s governed a blue state, but has never been terribly popular in Minnesota or had any real national following.
Pawlenty’s rather bland political profile was probably best reflected by the circumstances under which he was passed over for the 2008 vice-presidential nomination. According to Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson’s recently published book on the 2008 campaign, Pawlenty was a finalist along with Palin in the veep sweepstakes after other candidates were eliminated for a variety of reasons (Lieberman and Ridge because they were pro-choice, Romney because McCain forgot how many houses he owned and couldn’t have a rich running-mate). Fully understanding the riskiness of Palin, McCain went with her anyway after his pollsters told him Pawlenty wouldn’t win him any votes.
In other words, Pawlenty was, and remains, a fine “on-paper” candidate who doesn’t have much else going for him. Yes, he seems to be putting together a pretty good campaign team. And yes, he’s made at least one attempt to get into the manic spirit of today’s conservativism by flirting with “tenther” nullification theories. But unless he undergoes both an ideological and personality change of a major nature, he’s never going to be more than a third or fourth choice among the kind of hard-core conservative activists who dominate the Republican presidential nominating process (particularly in Iowa, where familiarity with Pawlenty as the mild-mannered governor of a neighboring state might actually hurt him).
Probably the best case for Pawlenty ’12 is that he’s the kind of candidate you might want to nominate in one of those years where your party can only lose by taking chances. You know, kind of like Bob Dole just after the 1994 elections.


Revolutionary Skepticism

I am flattered that Sean Trende of RealClearPolitics devoted a long column to a point-by-point response to my recent piece on all the predictions that 2010 is shaping up into a reprise of the 1994 “Republican Revolution.” I won’t conduct a point-by-point response to his response, because in many important respects, that misses the whole point I was trying to make.
The meme I was trying to refute was the idea that Democrats are doomed to disaster in 2010 because Barack Obama has “overreached” his barely-existing mandate by trying to implement his campaign platform, inviting a massive rebuke from the electorate that will confirm the country’s enduring “center-right” political character, and retroactively confim that the 2006 and 2008 Democratic victories were an ephemeral response to the incompetence (or according to some Republicans, liberalism) of George W. Bush and his congressional allies. I won’t attribute that pattern of thinking to Sean Trende, but it’s unquestionably at the heart of much of the GOP confidence about 2010, much more so than any close analysis of the PVI of specific House districts.
Given my motives, I should not, in retrospect, have succumbed to the temptation of making my own predictions, suggesting that House losses for Democrats might well come it at about ten. The truth is that I don’t know what’s going to happen in 2010, and nor does anyone else (as Trende admits). And that’s in part because I have no real clue what will happen to the U.S. and global economies between now and then–which, as Trende notes, I didn’t discuss in my own piece–or, of equal importance, the extent to which the Democratic Party will be blamed for bad economic conditions that palpably began during the Bush administration, driven largely by forces closely aligned with the GOP.
But that observation leads to a disconnect between 1994 and 2010 which I did mention, and Trende did not comment on: the exceptional weakness of the Republican Party right now. In 1994, Democrats were the eternal party of the congressional status quo. Anyone seriously desiring “change” in Congress had to seriously hope for a Republican victory, if only to shake things up. Voters today have a very recent experience with GOP rule at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, and it’s doubtful that the corruption, extremism and partisanship of the Republican Party at the height of the Bush-DeLay era will be forgotten very soon. That’s why the declining popularity of the Democratic Party this year has largely translated into dealignment, not realignment. And while you can make a credible case that an energized Republican base will dominate a low-turnout election in which the “dealigned” refuse to participate, it’s by no means certain or even probable at this point.
“Wave” elections, much less “revolutions,” depend heavily on these sort of national dynamics. District-by-district analysis of likely outcomes don’t produce “revolutionary” expectations, which is why most of the serious number-crunchers, from David Wasserman to Michael Barone, aren’t predicting a 1994-type result.
There is one specific point Trende makes that I want to talk about: his argument that the relatively high number of Democratic House members in districts with a pro-Republican PVI means that the “ideological sorting out” of the two parties in the 1980s and 1990s, which I cited as a big and nonrecurring factor in the 1994 results, was temporarily “reversed” in 2006 and 2008 by “pro-life, pro-gun” Democrats beating “corrupt or incompetent” Republican incumbents. These Democrats, argues Trende, are now ripe targets for the GOP.
Keep in mind that PVI measures the presidential performance of each party as compared to national percentages. So of the 66 Democratic House members in districts with a pro-Republican PVI, a significantly lower number, 49, are in districts actually won by John McCain (as compared to 34 Republicans representing districts carried by Barack Obama).
While the comparable 1994 numbers were in the same ballpark, they were in fact higher (79 Democratic incumbents in districts with a pro-Republican PVI, and 52 in districts carried by Bush 41, a number that is probably misleadingly low because of Ross Perot’s third-party candidacy). That matters when you are talking about major losses and “revolutions.” But the bigger factor, particularly in the South, in 1994 was the combination of open seats via retirement and redistricting (Trende dismisses the former factor because it’s too early to know if today’s tiny number of Democratic retirements won’t rise, and doesn’t mention the latter). And the “ideological sorting-out” I discussed refers to the irrefutable fact that 1994 marked the end of a decades-long situation where entrenched conservative Democratic incumbents benefitted from habitual ticket-splitting. That era is long gone, which is why I say that today’s Democrats in pro-Republican PVI districts seem to have gained some advantage that their 1994 predecessors (or at least those who didn’t retire or get gerrymandered out of office) didn’t have.
Consider a perpetually targeted southern Democrat, Jim Marshall of Georgia. Marshall’s district carries a pro-Republican PVI of +10, yet he won with 57% of the vote in 2008, and back in 2004, when there was no pro-Democratic “wave,” won with 63% of the vote (as Bush 43 carried the district with 58%) against a celebrated and lavishly financed Republican opponent making his second race against Marshall. Is he an exceptionally large bet to lose in 2010? I don’t think so. At this point, the Cook Political Report does not list his race as competitive. That could change, but then again, so could everything else that analysts are pointiing to as indicating a big Republican year.
One final point: Trende suggests that my notes on the invulnerability of the Senate Democratic majority is “knocking down a straw man,” since no one is specifically predicting a Republican takeover. That’s true, but that’s also why the 1994 analogies need to be tempered considerably. It was the top-to-bottom landslide nature of the 1994 results that made them constitute a “revolution,” however short-lived. Whatever happens in 2010, it’s not likely to constitute a “revolution,” and all the partisan and ideological freight carried by that term–the “center-right nation” meme, the Clinton analogies, and the constant mockery of Obama’s “over-reaching”–should be put back on the agitprop shelf where it belongs.


Rep. Grayson Dust-Up: Another MSM Exercize in False Equivalency

If you haven’t been following the dust-up over Rep. Alan Grayson’s (D-FL) take-down of the GOP health care “plan,” do check out this clip, posted by Open Left‘s Adam Green. Grayson responds con brio to GOP outrage over his recent remarks saying “the Republican plan is don’t get sick. And if you do get sick, die quickly.”
Natch, the Republicans got all hufty-pufty and bent out of shape about it and are demanding an apology. But rather than cave in and grovel, Rep. Grayson is turning the brouhaha into a teachable moment, shrewdly using the media attention to hammer home the fact that the GOP really doesn’t have much of a plan, other than obstruct and crush all reform. (Also check out Grayson’s earlier refusal to apologize here). Even when CNN Situation Room anchors Gloria Bolger and Wolf Blitzer try to nail him for being uncivil, Grayson refuses to back off, and attacks the GOP’s do-nothing approach to health insurance. They try to make him eat the false equivalency of his remarks with Rep. Wilson calling the president “a liar,” but Rep. Grayson ain’t having it, and uses the opportunity to deliver another broadside against the GOP’s non-existent health care plan.
Grayson’s response to GOP protests against his remarks is instructive. First time I heard Rep. Grayson’s remarks, I winced, thinking it was a tad over the top. Dems who are squeamish about incivility and such may have problems with Grayson’s attacks. But the GOP has been getting a lot of coverage with their incivility. The way Grayson has handled it turns the controversy into a net plus. What he is doing is deploying the GOP’s media manipulation tactics to good effect, using a controversy to make a case for Democratic reform in stark contrast to Republican obstruction. It translates into more coverage for the Dem reform proposals, which have gotten squeezed off TV by various GOP bomb-throwers, like Sarah Palin. Grayson’s media strategy is don’t spend much time defending yourself; Instead, use every opportunity to attack, and that’s a good lesson for Democrats. Well-done, Rep. Grayson.


Robert Creamer: Public Option Still Viable

it’s easy enough to find doomsayers who pronouce the public option a dead issue after the negative votes in the Senate Finance Committee this week. But Robert Creamer, author of Stand up Straight: How Progressive Can Win, has a potent antidote for the faithless in his HuffPo column on “Growing Momentum for Public Option.” According to Creamer:

First and foremost, voters’ support for a public health insurance option is as strong as ever…Last weekend’s New York Times poll showed that 65% of all voters support giving Americans the choice of a public option and only 26% oppose it.
More importantly, the public option is also popular in swing Congressional districts. The firm of Anzeloni Liszt just released the results of a poll it conducted in 91 Blue Dog, Rural Caucus and Frontline districts. The poll found that 54% of the voters in these battleground districts support the choice of a public option.
And the poll also found that the voters in these districts want reform and want it this year. The polling report says: Overall, 58% of voters believe the health care system is in need of major reform or a complete overhaul, and almost 59% are concerned that Congress will not take action on health care reform this year. The risks of inaction to Democrats in swing districts increases if voters perceive opposition stems from ties to the insurance industry, as 74% are concerned that the health insurance industry will have too much influence over reform.
Those kinds of polling results get the attention of Members of Congress.

Creamer goes on to argue that members of congress are beginning to face up to the fact that they have to produce reform that is actually affordable, if they want to get re-elected, and the public option is an essential element of any reform package that accomplishes this central objective. As Creamer concludes, “the odds are better by the day that before the holidays President Obama will sign a health insurance reform bill that for the first time provides Americans universal health insurance coverage — and includes the choice of a robust public option.”


Bad Senate! Recess Canceled!

Washington veterans were probably shocked yesterday when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced he was cancelling the chamber’s traditional Columbus Day Recess in order to make time for action on health care reform.
Pretty much everywhere other than in DC, Columbus Day is a minor holiday mainly beloved of Italian-Americans. But in Washington, it’s generally the occasion for a weeklong congressional recess, and often, in even years, the official excuse for the pre-election break.
To be clear, the Senate will take off two of the five days in the week of October 12, so Columbus’ legacy will not be completely profaned.