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Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: July 2006

Dems Rethinking Redistricting Demographics

by , July 31st, 2006 10:36 PM EST

In the wake of the renewal of the Voting Rights Act, The Boston Globe‘s Joseph Williams has an article discussing the pros and cons of “majority-minority” districts from a progressive point of view. As Williams explains, celebrations of the Act’s renewal are tempered with a growing concern about the dilution of the African American vote:

But the renewal overshadowed a quiet but growing debate among Democrats: whether mostly black voting districts in cities like Petersburg — which helped elect the state’s first African-American House member in more than 100 years — should be diluted to spread around liberal voters and help elect more Democrats get to Congress.
While most black politicians and activists agree with the concept of “majority-minority” districts, others say they’re a mixed blessing: By sweeping a concentrated number of black voters into fewer districts, the Voting Rights Act’s unintended effect may be to increase racial polarization and help preserve Republican congressional power

Williams adds,

Some Democrats, including some African-Americans, believe their party has better odds of retaking Congress if African-American voters are divided among many districts, leaving just enough of a percentage in any one district to elect minority candidates while helping more Democrats run competitively in surrounding districts.

Since African Americans vote about 90 percent Democratic, finding the right balance is a difficult challenge. Democrats squeemish about addressing such raw political calculations should take note that Republicans’ are more than eager to overload districts with African American voters. As Williams notes:

…Republican-dominated legislatures try to design districts with the maximum possible number of minorities — such as the 2d district of Louisiana, which is 63.7 percent black and elected Representative William Jefferson to Congress with 79 percent of the vote.

The point is echoed by University of Virginia elections expert Larry Sabato “The Democrats have an enormous number of excess votes in these majority-minority districts.” Maryland Political Scientist Ron Walters disagrees, pointing out that 60 percent African American voters may not be enough to secure minority representation in some districts.
The debate will continue to intensify at the state level, where congressional districts are redesigned. (For a more in-depth analysis of the issue, see Thomas F. Schaller’s article). If Democrats do as well as expected in the gubernatorial races this fall, and win a few key state legislatures, they will soon be faced with increasingly difficult redistricting decisions to secure the Party’s future.

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Kansas, Duke, and Relative Income

by , July 31st, 2006 10:18 PM EST

by Scott Winship
Apologies for the lack of posts, but I’m realizing that when I have a roundtable discussion to coordinate, posting has to take a backseat. I’ll do better though. Please. Don’t go.
What’s the matter with Kansas? Possibly nothing, according to a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by Duke economist Jacob Vigdor [pdf] (go Blue Devils!). This conclusion isn’t that novel, but rather than pointing to cultural issues as the reason that working class voters vote Republican, Vigdor argues that voters’ well-being depends not only on their standard of living but on their living standards relative to others in their reference groups.
I’ll be honest with you – you don’t want to read this paper unless you love the Greek alphabet. It has a deceptively catchy title – “Fifty Million Voters Can’t Be Wrong” – but a whole lotta math. But here’s the gist. Research indicates that individual evaluations of well-being depend on how others are doing. Vigdor considers two types of “others” you and I might compare ourselves to – people in a similar economic situation as us, and people who are geographically near us. He proposes a mathematical model relating political preferences to income and income relative to a reference group. Theory predicts a number of ways that relative income could affect political preferences, and real-world trends and patterns can be cited that are consistent with these predictions. If the predictions are borne out and accurately reflect reality, then the finding that relative income affects political preferences can explain why the working and middle classes tend to vote Republican and why they have not become more Democratic than they have as inequality has increased in recent decades.
Whew! Got that? OK, let me break it down more slowly.
Vigdor’s theory of relative income predicts that the more income inequality there is in a geographic area, the more support there will be for redistribution among the poor and among the rich who are altruistic. The idea is that when a poor person looks around and sees rich people, she is more inclined to support redistribution than if she looks around and sees only poor people. When an altruistic rich person encounters lots of poor people, she will be more likely to support redistribution than if she only comes across other rich people. Among the working and middle classes, support depends on how many rich people there are, how many poor people, and how altruistic voters are. With more rich people, for instance, the working and middle classes will support redistribution because they will benefit. When Vigdor estimates the key “parameters” in his mathematical model using statistics, he finds that the estimates are consistent with these predictions.
An implication of Vigdor’s findings is that one reason support for the Democratic Party among the working and middle classes failed to increase more as inequality grew is that segregation between the rich and everyone else has been on the rise for several decades. That means that today, the poor and the working and middle classes are less likely to see rich people when they look around than they were in, say, the 1960s.
Additional support for Vigdor’s theory comes in his finding that the relationship between income inequality and support for Al Gore in 2000 is stronger in urban counties than in rural ones. That is, in cities, people can look around and see whether there are many or few rich people, while in rural areas with low population density, it’s more difficult to do so.
Vigdor’s theory also predicts, and his data supports the predicton, that poor, working-class, and middle-class voters should have been less likely to vote for Gore the more poor people there were in their county. Rich individuals should have been – and were – less likely to vote for Gore the more high income people there were.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly for the Kansas question, Vigdor’s theory predicts that if voters compare themselves to people who are in a similar economic situation, then working- and middle-class voters should be less likely than poor or rich voters to support the Democrats. That’s because of the particular way that income is distributed in the U.S.
As income increases from $0 to a working-class income, the number of people at each income level gets larger and larger. That means that more often than not, when people in this income range (“the poor”) compare themselves to other poor people, they will find that there are more poor people doing better than them than worse. They will thus tend to support redistribution.
On the other hand, as income increases from a working-class income to an upper-middle-class income, the number of people at each income level gets smaller and smaller. When people in this income range (“the working and middle classes”) compare themselves to other similarly-situated people, they will find (more often than not) that there are more working- and middle-class people doing worse than them than better. Consequently, they will tend to oppose redistribution.
Finally, as income increases from an upper-middle-class income to an upper-class income, the number of people at each income level continues to get smaller and smaller, but the decline is not very steep. When the rich compare themselves to their peers, they will tend to find that there are nearly as many people doing worse than them as there are doing better. The rich will tend to be indifferent toward redistribution.
These predictions about support for redistribution are also supported by Vigdor’s data. Vigdor notes that since the New Deal, the income distribution in the U.S. has changed so that more people fall in the “working and middle classes” range where comparing oneself to one’s peers will produce opposition to redistribution. He also speculates that if, in the post-Civil-Rights-era South, poor whites began to compare themselves not to other poor whites but to even poorer blacks (who would not have been considered a proper reference group during Jim Crow), then southern whites would have become less redistributionist and would have moved into the Republican column, which is of course what happened.
It’s important to note that – as with all models – the estimates produced are accurate only to the extent that the model accurately depicts reality. The point of Vigdor’s analysis is not that his estimates are the final word or that relative income is the be-all, end-all, but that under fairly basic assumptions about how different factors affect political preferences, a relatively simple model applied to real-world data confirms the predictions made before he began playing around with the data. The evidence implies that Democratic underperformance among working- and middle-class voters is due in part to the tendency of people to compare themselves to others and to a number of social patterns that made this tendency prevent people from becoming more Democratic.
Incidentally, I remain a Blue Devils basketball fan even though a) their engineering school denied my undergraduate admissions application and b) Coach K is allegedly a big conservative. Don’t forget to check out the roundtable discussion on redistricting, electoral competition, and targeting of districts.

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Sorting Out A Few Straw Men

by , July 31st, 2006 7:59 PM EST

By Ed Kilgore
Batting cleanup here, I’d like to note there’s something of a “myth” underlying the “redistricting myth.” It’s that most of the discussion of redistricting reform (a) stipulates redistricting as the primary cause of the decline in competitive legislative contests, and (b) is motivated by the desire to explain away Republican control of the U.S. House, and excuse Democratic timidity in challenging it.
Not being a political scientist, I’m not that familiar with the academic literature on redistricting. But most of us who have promoted redistricting reform as a worthy priority for Democrats don’t deny that factors like ideological realignment, incumbent power, and money have contributed to the decline in competitive districts, and would agree with Krasno and Abramowitz that Democrats have to make their own luck regardless of the districting landscape. In other words, the “myth” Krasno attacks is something of a straw man.
I have read some of Alan Abramowitz’s work on this subject, and have to say that his sole focus on turnover trends in the first election after decennial redistricting makes his argument less convincing than would otherwise be the case; it ignores both extended redistricting incidents and less immediate effects on incumbents (e.g., the wave of endangered Democrats who retired in 1994). I’d also be interested in learning if there’s any significant research on state legislative redistricting, where the technological ability to gerrymander districts is reinforced by the blatant conflict of interest involved in self-mapping. The complete elimination of competitive state legislative races in Florida and California since the last redistricting is pretty hard to blame on any other factor.
More importantly, Thomas Schaller is spot-on in arguing that even if redistricting is not a major cause of uncompetitive districts, it could represent a major solution. Entrenched incumbents can be exposed to greater competition; parties can be encouraged to recruit more salable candidates; the battleground can be expanded simply by reducing the safe behind-the-lines areas.
It’s a separate question, of course, as to whether large-D Democratic interests as well as small-d democratic values would be advanced through a systemic effort to increase competition in any one state or nationally. I would hope there is some residual sentiment that the two ought to coincide.
But I hope discussions like this one do not succeed in squelching the debate over redistricting reform. The next decennial round of map-making is now just ahead, and the U.S. Supreme Court has now ensured that mid-decade re-redistricting will likely become a familiar part of the political landscape. So we Democrats need to make up our minds how we feel about redistricting as a positive strategic exercise-not as an excuse for past defeats. Lord knows Republicans will continue to use redistricting as a partisan tool as ruthlessly as they have in this decade.
In any event, it would be helpful to disentangle redistricting from the very different issue of national targeting of congressional districts. I don’t doubt the DCCC has been too pessimistic in targeting in the recent past. But let’s not forget objective reality as a factor. To read some bloggers, you’d think the reason we are having a debate over targeting 70 or 100 or 200 enemy districts is simply because energized activists have the courage to take the fight to the opponent, and the DC establishment is reluctantly going along. Actually, the expanded battlefield represents little more than the political consequences of Republican misgovernment, making relatively safe GOP seats vulnerable. There are always limits to what activists, party committees, candidates or strategists can accomplish. The relative ability of Democrats to produce results in the real world of governing will have more to do with our future success than all the other factors combined.

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Dems Rethinking Redistricting Demographics

by , July 31st, 2006 4:44 PM EST

In the wake of the renewal of the Voting Rights Act, The Boston Globe‘s Joseph Williams has an article discussing the pros and cons of “majority-minority” districts from a progressive point of view. As Williams explains, celebrations of the Act’s renewal are tempered with a growing concern about the dilution of the African American vote:

But the renewal overshadowed a quiet but growing debate among Democrats: whether mostly black voting districts in cities like Petersburg — which helped elect the state’s first African-American House member in more than 100 years — should be diluted to spread around liberal voters and help elect more Democrats get to Congress.
While most black politicians and activists agree with the concept of “majority-minority” districts, others say they’re a mixed blessing: By sweeping a concentrated number of black voters into fewer districts, the Voting Rights Act’s unintended effect may be to increase racial polarization and help preserve Republican congressional power

Williams adds,

Some Democrats, including some African-Americans, believe their party has better odds of retaking Congress if African-American voters are divided among many districts, leaving just enough of a percentage in any one district to elect minority candidates while helping more Democrats run competitively in surrounding districts.

Since African Americans vote about 90 percent Democratic, finding the right balance is a difficult challenge. Democrats squeemish about addressing such raw political calculations should take note that Republicans’ are more than eager to overload districts with African American voters. As Williams notes:

…Republican-dominated legislatures try to design districts with the maximum possible number of minorities — such as the 2d district of Louisiana, which is 63.7 percent black and elected Representative William Jefferson to Congress with 79 percent of the vote.

The point is echoed by University of Virginia elections expert Larry Sabato “The Democrats have an enormous number of excess votes in these majority-minority districts.” Maryland Political Scientist Ron Walters disagrees, pointing out that 60 percent African American voters may not be enough to secure minority representation in some districts.
The debate will continue to intensify at the state level, where congressional districts are redesigned. If Democrats do as well as expected in the gubernatorial races this fall, and win a few key state legislatures, they will soon be faced with increasingly difficult redistricting decisions to secure the Party’s future.

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Lieberman Through the Looking Glass

by , July 31st, 2006 4:13 PM EST

Over at MyDD, Matt Stoller poses one of the first interesting questions I’ve read in weeks amidst the hourly torrent of abuse towards Joe Lieberman. Prompted by a Josh Marshall post depicting Lieberman’s current political travails as “tragic,” Matt wants to know, basically, why anybody out there ever thought highly of Lieberman:

To me, Lieberman’s vicious and reactionary nature seems quite clear and consistent. Everything from his right-wing culture warring against Hollywood to his sandbagging of Clinton’s health care initiative in 1994 to his fights with Arthur Levitt at the SEC to ensure that accounting loopholes could remain to his preening about Lewinsky to his undermining of Gore in 2000 indicate that he was never the stalwart and principled man his supporters imagine. I hated each of these events separately, though I never put them together until 2001, when I really started paying attention to politics. I just sort of thought, even as a kid, who are those putzes on TV grilling carnival freak Dee Snyder? I hated the culture war nonsense, I always thought it was fake pandering.The thing is, there are too many folks I respect who say he was once a great and likeable man to just discount these opinions. What’s going on here? I’m honestly curious. Why was Lieberman ever considered a good man? Was it just that our moral universe is totally different now because of Bush’s extremism? If you have insight on this, please let me know.

Now I have no particular reason to believe Matt Stoller respects me, so maybe I’m responding to a question posed to others. But the question itself reflects a whole lot of the dialogue of the deaf–not just about Lieberman, but about his record, the nature of progressivism, and the political history of the Democratic Party in the 1990s–surrounding this primary.I will take seriously the claim, reflected in Matt’s post, that hostility to Lieberman is not just about his position on Iraq–which I strongly disagree with myself. So let’s take a look at the broader indictment of Lieberman as a politician who has always embodied the qualities so hated by the netroots.To take the easy stuff first, the caricature of Joe Lieberman as a typical, egomaniacal Washington blowhard is really hard to accept if you’ve ever spent any time around the man. He is routinely self-deprecating in a city, and an institution (the U.S. Senate) where this quality is seen as a sign of weakness. He is notorious within the Senate itself primarily for his civility to colleagues, and his entirely atypical decent treatment of his own staff (he stands at one end of the spectrum that ranges across stern indifference and routine abuse to the ultimate Washington Boss from Hell, Arlen Specter). And while I don’t have any real knowledge about the quality of Lieberman’s constituent services operation, I do know that during the five-plus years he was DLC chairman, he and his staff were vigilant about any DLC pronouncement that compromised Connecticut interests.No, I’m not saying any of this is an important reason for supporting Joe Lieberman in the August 8 primary; but it is germane to Matt’s question about why anyone should like the guy at all, and to the general netroots take on Joe as some sort of avatar of the Washington Establishment.Matt’s recitation of Lieberman’s ancient sins against progressive orthodoxy is almost as easy to swat down. This is the first time I’ve read anywhere that Lieberman was a serious obstacle to the Clinton Health Plan in 1994. Lord a’mighty, much of the Senate Democratic Caucus, most notably the chairman of the committee of jurisdiction, the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, presented a far bigger obstacle. And the Plan itself, and particularly its marketing, were bigger problems than anything any Democratic senator said or did.The slam about Lieberman’s “preening about Lewinsky” reflects another odd anti-Lieberman talking point: the idea that Joe Lieberman stabbed Bill Clinton in the back by making a speech suggesting that the Big He had done something blameworthy. At the time, Joe’s “Lewinsky speech,” while hardly pleasant to the White House, was considered an effort to pave the way to a censure resolution in place of impeachment. And that’s of course what happened. Clinton’s own endorsement of, and campaign appearance with, Lieberman should lay this slur to rest.And the stuff about Lieberman “undermining Gore” is really bizarre. I will never forget watching the Lieberman-Cheney debate, and literally scratching the TV screen in frustration that Joe wasn’t hammering Cheney on this or that point. But I also knew that this approach was totally scripted by the Gore high command, which erroneously expected Cheney to do his Darth Vadar routine instead of playing the avuncular grandfather. Point B in the “Joe undermines Al” case generally revolves around the small incident during the Florida recount saga when Lieberman disclaimed any intention of challenging overseas military ballots. Again, Joe was totally doing what the Gore campaign told him to do; some of Gore’s lawyers dissented from the decision, and later said so, but it wasn’t Lieberman’s fault. And more importantly, Gore clearly would not have been in the position to lose the election in overtime had Lieberman not been on the ballot; Joe’s incredible popularity in South Florida gave the ticket its surprising strength in that state in the first place. Gore’s inability to carry his own home state was a much bigger problem than anything Joe Lieberman did or did not do.The larger point raised by Matt’s post is perhaps the biggest disconnect between Lieberman’s supporters and detractors:

Josh isn’t the only one talking as if Lieberman were once Ghandi; it’s a trend among men I know that are in their thirties or above, and had a strong connection to the political establishment prior to 2001.

The suggestion here is that anyone defending Lieberman’s past, as well as his present, record, is blinded by “a strong connection to the political establishment.” And the planted axiom is that Lieberman has always been the embodiment of “the political establishment.”I don’t know if Matt Stoller can understand or accept this, but Joe’s popularity among Clintonites in the 1990s was precisely a function of the belief that he did not represent “the political establishment.” While he had a strong progressive record dating back decades, he was not a slave to party discipline. He was willing to innovate left and right on policy issues, just like Bill Clinton. He was willing to engage in what Matt calls “culture warring on Hollywood” because he wasn’t willing to give the avaricious multinational corporations of the entertainment industry a pass on accountability for their products, any more than oil companies or HMOs. Joe Lieberman, like Bobby Kennedy, was not afraid to defy the elites in his own party in the pursuit of a broader progressive vision. And putting aside the Lewinsky Speech, Lieberman was without question the most resolute and consistent supporter of Bill Clinton’s vision and agenda in the national party, at a time when “the political establishment” still viewed Clinton as a triangulating heretic.Maybe he was right, and maybe he was wrong, but the idea that Joe Lieberman has always been some sort of lifelong quasi-Republican just isn’t factual. And the contradictory idea that Lieberman is the American Beauty Rose of the DC Democratic Establishment is equally off-target.The moment in the current campaign that most raised this particular issue was the sudden appearance of California Rep. Maxine Waters in Connecticut to stump for Lamont. For anyone with a political memory, this was striking: when Al Gore chose Joe Lieberman as his running-mate, the main trap that had to be run was Maxine Water’s objection to Joe’s mildly expressed view that maybe class-based affirmative action should ultimately replace race-based affirmative action. Lieberman was forced to kowtow to Waters personally and publicly,
and the ultimate sign that Joe was acceptable to the entire party was his widely circulated photo kissing Maxine just before the Convention.That “kiss” has been forgotten in all the furor over Lieberman’s “kiss” from Bush.So who represented the “party establishment” in 2000 and who represents it now? Joe Lieberman or Maxine Waters?I pose this as a real question, not as a rhetorical question. From one point of view, Lieberman represents a DC Democratic establishment that is addicted to bipartisanship, obsessed with power in Washington, and disinterested in progressive policymaking. From another point of view, Lieberman represents a progressive tradition that needs to be modernized, not abandoned–against the perpetual opposition of entrenched Democratic incumbents in Washington like Maxine Waters, who never face electoral opposition and set themselves up as guardians of this program or that. This disconnect represents a broader disagreement between those who think of the Gore and Kerry campaigns as the disastrous denouement of Clintonism, and those who think these campaigns were crippled by the older Democratic orthodoxy of interest-group liberalism.I frankly do not agree with either side of the Lieberman-Lamont fight in their contention that this is some sort of Democratic Gotterdammarung that will perpetually resolve every intraparty dispute. Much as I stubbornly admire Joe Lieberman, it’s clear he is a clumsy politician who lives in the pre-Karl-Rove atmosphere that permitted genuine bipartisanship. The Clinton New Democrat tradition in the party would survive his defeat.But I also think the savaging of Lieberman as “vicious and reactionary” is a terrible sign of the defection of many progressives from reality-based politics. And to respond specifically to Matt Stoller’s questions, the idea that Joe is the epitome of the “Democratic establishment” is a krazy-kat reflection of the false belief that Clintonism completely conquered Washington, and is the source of every D.C. establishment vice. If you took a straw poll of the consultants, the DNC types, and safe-seat House Members who surely represent an important part of the D.C. Democratic Establishment, I doubt you’d find anything like majority support for Joe Lieberman. He’s only the embodiment of the Establishment when viewed through the looking glass of those who view all their friends as brave insurgents, and all their enemies as The Man.UPCATEGORY: Ed Kilgore’s New Donkey

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New Group to Help Chart Dem Victories

by , July 30th, 2006 1:39 PM EST

Democrats interested in longer-range strategy should check out a Sunday WaPo article by Chris Cilliza and Zachary A. Goldfarb, “Atlas Group Strives to Map Out Success for Democrats.” According to the article, three veteran Democratic strategists, Mary Beth Cahill, Steve Rosenthal and Michael Whouley are launching “The Atlas Project” to design a “comprehensive strategy” to win votes in a dozen ‘battleground’ states. The authors say the innovative project will “analyze election data, interview local Democrats, and mount a polling and targeting effort” beginning right after the November elections. Rosenthal, former head of America Coming Together (ACT), says the Atlas Project will provide

a more thorough targeting analysis than has ever been done before…In the heat of an election, it seems we’re always playing catch-up…Our goal with this project is to bring together the best strategic thinkers — the innovators at the state and national level — to learn from what’s been done over the past several elections.

Polling firms Garin Hart Yang Research Group, Penn Schoen & Berland and Brilliant Corners have already been retained, and Copernicus Analytics has been recruited to analyze the data so political messages can more effectively win the support of specific constituencies. The first Atlas Project strategy ‘road maps’ should be available by January ’08.

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New Group to Help Chart Dem Victories

by , July 30th, 2006 7:56 AM EST

Democrats interested in longer-range strategy should check out a Sunday WaPo article by Chris Cilliza and Zachary A. Goldfarb, “Atlas Group Strives to Map Out Success for Democrats.” According to the article, three veteran Democratic strategists, Mary Beth Cahill, Steve Rosenthal and Michael Whouley are launching “The Atlas Project” to design a “comprehensive strategy” to win votes in a dozen ‘battleground’ states. The authors say the innovative project will “analyze election data, interview local Democrats, and mount a polling and targeting effort” beginning right after the November elections. Rosenthal, former head of America Coming Together (ACT), says the Atlas Project will provide

a more thorough targeting analysis than has ever been done before…In the heat of an election, it seems we’re always playing catch-up…Our goal with this project is to bring together the best strategic thinkers — the innovators at the state and national level — to learn from what’s been done over the past several elections.

Polling firms Garin Hart Yang Research Group, Penn Schoen & Berland and Brilliant Corners have already been retained, and Copernicus Analytics has been recruited to analyze the data so political messages can more effectively win specific constituencies. The first Atlas Project strategy ‘road maps’ should be available by January ’08.

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More Cracker Crumbles

by , July 28th, 2006 2:26 PM EST

I’ll try to move on to other topics directly, but wanted to do one more post about politics in my home state of Georgia. There was good news and bad news today for embattled incumbent Rep. Cynthia McKinney, who was surprisingly forced into an August 8 runoff by Dekalb County Commissioner Hank Johnson. The good news was her endorsement by Andrew Young, who remains a Georgia icon, and who cited a national police union contribution to Johnson (presumably motivated by her recent run-in with a Capitol Hill cop) as angering him into supporting McKinney. The bad news was a post-primary poll from Insider Advantage showing Johnson leading McKinney among likely runoff voters by a 46-21 margin.Figuring out who’s actually going to vote in this kind of runoff is obviously very tricky, so the IA poll should be taken with several grains of salt. But you have to wonder how much room for growth in support the highly polarizing incumbent really has. Aside from her national notoriety, she’s been in Congress for twelve of the last fourteen years, most of it representing pretty much the same district.On another front, I received an email from a Georgia observer who suggested the rumor I repeated earlier this week–about Johnson raising a ton of dough, especially from Jewish Democrats–is actually disinformation being circulated by the McKinney camp in an effort to fire up her base and to depict Johnson as a puppet of shadowy outside forces (not a new tactic for her, based on past races). I have no idea who’s right about this; we’ll have to see whether Johnson suddenly starts appearing on Atlanta metro television screens.The 4th congressional district runoff could have a big effect as well on two statewide Democratic runoffs, since turnout every where else is likely to be infinitesimal. In the contest to succeed Secretary of State Cathy Cox (who lost her gubernatorial race to Mark Taylor), the likelihood of a relatively high turnout in the majority-black 4th is giving new hope to second-place finisher Darryl Hicks, who is African-American, against Gail Buckner, who is white.In the other statewide runoff, for Lt. Gov., former state Rep. Jim Martin (who edged former state sen. Greg Hecht 42-38 in the primary) is running radio ads touting his endorsement by Atlanta mayor Shirley Franklin, who is very popular among Democrats of all races. You have to feel a bit sorry for Martin and Hecht; they were able to draw a lot of attention and money on the theory that they would be facing Ralph Reed in a race that would have overshadowed everything else in Georgia politics. Running against Casey Cagle is a whole ‘nother thing, though Cagle’s own right-wing record, and perhaps residual anger over the harsh ads he ran against Reed, could provide some traction for a Democrat. More immediately, you wonder if either Martin or Hecht held some money back for the runoff. If not, Georgians may soon see them selling boiled peanuts on the side of the road to raise enough moolah for that last-minute runoff push.In non-runoff Georgia political news, DKos reports that a new poll for Republican candidate (and former Rep.) Max Burns shows him trailing Democratic incumbent John Barrow by one percentage point (44-43) in the always-tight 12th congressional district which runs from Augusta to Savannah. The district was originally drawn to favor Democrats, but Burns was able to beat ethically challenged Champ Walker in 2002; he then lost to Barrow 52-48 in 2004. The notorious Georgia re-redistricting of 2005 didn’t reduce the Democratic advantage in the 12th, but it did remove Barrow’s home town of Athens, which means he’s having to solidify name ID elsewhere.Barrow’s race is of national import because he is one of just a handful of incumbent Democratic House members considered vulnerable this November. Another is also from Georgia: 3d district Rep. Jim Marshall. After easily dispatching a heavily financed Republican in 2004, Marshall had to deal with a new map that significantly boosted the Republican vote. He also drew a serious challenger in former Rep. Mac Collins, who lost a Senate primary in 2004. But Marshall has had good leads in all the public polling, and like Barrow, is narrowly favored going into the general election.All in all, the politics in my home state will be as hot and sticky as the weather over the next couple of months.

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OK, But Dems Could Benefit from Strategic Redistricting

by , July 27th, 2006 11:57 PM EST

By Thomas F. Schaller
Although I have great confidence in the empirical findings of Jon Krasno and Alan Abramowitz regarding the impact of gerrymandering on U.S. House competitiveness, their conclusions do not preclude Democrats from trying to win as many governorships and state legislative seats between now and 2010 in order to exercise maximum possible influence during the next round of redistricting. At that point, in many states a real opportunity for Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) and Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC) members will present itself: Will they gamble a bit of electoral security in exchange for a promise of greater party or committee power if and when Democrats recapture the House majority?
Regardless of their race or the racial composition of their districts, far too many Democrats in the U.S. House are representing too-safe districts, a reality which prevents the party from maximizing its House seat share. The “unholy alliance” forged between Republicans and minority Democrats led to the election of more CBC and CHC members to Congress, but also more Republicans. As well, many white Democrats enjoy unusual electoral security. A new alliance between white and minority Democrats must be forged, with the goal of redrawing the 2012 maps to enable Democrats to recapture-or, if already recaptured, retain-a House majority.
To understand the extent of the problem, look at the figure below, which depicts the Partisan Voting Index of all 435 House districts, as published by the Cook Political Report. PVI measures the congressional district performance of presidential candidates during the past two presidential cycles: Positive numbers indicate districts Bush carried in 2000 and 2004, and vice versa for the Kerry/Gore districts. For visual clarity, the Democratic districts were signed positively and then all 435 districts were arrayed, left to right, from the most Democratic district (Jose Serrano’s NY16 = -43.4 percent margin for Kerry) to the most Republican (Chris Cannon’s UT3 = +26.2 margin for Bush).
Notice that, including Serrano’s, there were 31 districts with higher Democratic PVIs than Bush’s 26.2 margin in Cannon’s Utah district. This is troubling. Indeed, Democratic voters are distributed so inefficiently than the 199 Democratic-leaning districts on the left side comprise a greater total area than the 236 Republican districts on the right side. Given that Bush’s combined popular vote from 2000 and 2004 exceeds that of Gore and Kerry combined, what explains the apparent paradox of the right side containing less area than the left? The answer is simple: The bars in the figure are percentages, not absolute vote margins, and only if turnout were identical in every district would the Republican side necessarily be larger.1
Turnout is far from identical, however. Consider the accompanying table, which reports the 2004 turnouts from 20 districts: a set of 10 Democratic districts and another 10 Republican districts with almost the same, opposite-signed PVI scores. The average turnout in the 10 Republican districts was 253,837, compared to just 214,121 in the 10 Democratic districts-about 40,000 fewer votes, or 16 percent lower turnout. These differences cannot be explained by the 2004 presidential contest, because the only swing-state district among the 20 is Democrat Gwendolyn Moore’s 5th District in Wisconsin which, not coincidentally, had the highest turnout of the 20. Despite Moore’s total, the 10 Republican-represented districts still had higher turnout. Notice that all but two of the 10 Democrats (New York’s Carolyn Maloney and California’s Howard Berman) are CBC or CHC members.
Because socioeconomic status affects turnout, the majority-minority districts represented by these mostly black and Hispanic members feature some of the lowest turnouts in the country. Can anyone blame their constituents for not showing up? If they live in a non-swing state with a safe Democratic incumbent running literally, if not virtually unopposed, why bother? Many racial minorities also reside in non-competitive state legislative districts. As my colleague Tyson King-Meadows and I report in our new book, Devolution and Black State Legislators, typically about 90 percent of black state legislators win with at least 60 percent of the vote, with 60 percent winning with at least 90 percent! When and where possible Democrats should try to produce a more competitive set of maps in 2012 which, though still ensuring the election or re-election of minority Democrats, also induce higher turnout among Democratic base voters. To accomplish this, in any state where they exert power over the redistricting process Democrats should duplicate what might be called the Cummings-Wynn model from the 2000 round of redistricting in Maryland.
Prior to 2002, in a state that was overwhelming Democratic in both legislative chambers and had not elected a Republican governor since 1966, Maryland’s eight-member U.S. House delegation was split, four seats for each party. The Democratic governor, Parris Glendening, along with the Democratic Senate President and House Speaker created a new map to tip the state’s split delegation in favor of Democrats, six seats to two. How? African American voters from black Congressman Al Wynn’s Prince George’s-based 4th District were moved into Republican Connie Morella’s 8th District, and white suburban voters from Howard County were moved into black Congressman Elijah Cummings’ 7th District to free up extra Democrats for the 2nd District that Robert Ehrlich had vacated to run for governor. Capturing both seats required Cummings and Wynn to run in slightly less favorable and familiar districts. Yet Cummings and Wynn still won re-election easily.
The lesson of the Cummings-Wynn approach is simple: CBC and CHC Democrats have the surplus voters the party can redistribute elsewhere to create a larger set of competitive districts. This is an asset CBC and CHC members should neither horde nor bargain away. If Nancy Pelosi wants to be the first woman Speaker of the House of Representatives, she should broker a deal with black and Hispanic members of her caucus in which they agree to assume a bit more electoral risk in exchange for two promises: (1) that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee will rally behind any black or Hispanic incumbent who faces a serious primary or general election challenge; and (2) that the CBC and CHC will be granted greater leadership or committee roles if the bargain helps produce a new Democratic majority. (Democrats should do the same with state legislative maps, because the identical problem of over-packed majority-minority districts also exists in many states.)
In previous decades, African-American and Hispanic elites could hardly be blamed for doing what was necessary to break through the electoral glass ceiling. But the 2010 redistricting will be the fifth since the Supreme Court ruled malapportionment unconstitutional in the 1960s. Black and Hispanic legislators today are political enterprisers with their own personal constituencies, well-earned reputations, legislative accomplishments, and fundraising abilities. In addition to these advantages, do they really need districts so overwhelmingly packed with Democrats that they either run unopposed or against token opposition? What black and Hispanic Democrats in Congress need is more power. To obtain it, they should collude white Democrats in an effort to apply the Cummings-Wynn model wherever possible.

1Theoretically, it is also possible because populations of districts change during the course of a decade following reapportionment, as well as the complicating matter of at-large districts in the seven states which have only one House seat. But these differences are small; the main contributing factor is lower average turnout in Democratic districts.

Thomas F. Schaller is associate professor of political science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and author of Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South (Simon & Schuster, October 2006).

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Dems Gaining in 50 Most Competitive House Districts

by , July 27th, 2006 4:31 PM EST

A new bipartisan poll of likely voters in 50 of the most competitive districts of the U.S. House of Representatives indicates that Democratic candidates have a significant advantage three months ahead of the November elections. The poll, conducted 7/19-23 by Democrat Stanley Greenberg and Republican Glen Bolger for National Public Radio, indicates that Democrats have a 6-point lead over Republicans in the 50 districts — up 18 points from 2004, when Republicans won these districts by 12 percent.
The 50 districts were selected, according to rankings by leading political analysts, including The Cook Political Report, Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball, the Rothenberg Political Report and National Journal’s Hotline. Of the 50 selected districts, Republican congressmen held 40 of the seats, with 9 for Democrats and 1 Independent. 12 of the 50 seats were open, with 10 held by Republicans, 1 Independent and 1 Democrat. As Bolger says of the 50 districts:

This is where the effort is going to be made. This is where the money’s going to be spent , and this is where the messages are going to be the sharpest…This is where the House hangs in the balance.

Less than a third of the respondents, 29 percent, said they planned to vote for the incumbent. Only 14 percent said they would “definitely” vote for the incumbent, compared to 24 percent who said they would “definitely” vote against the incumbent. The Democrats’ largest — and most surprising — margin of support, +13, came on the so-called “values” issues, including flag-burning, stem-cell research and gay marriage.
However, the poll indicated that values issue ranked 7th among voters priorities in chosing a candidate, behind the war in Iraq; jobs and the economy; taxes and spending; health care; and terrorism and national security.
Two thirds (66 percent) of Democratic respondents said they were “very interested” in the November elections, compared to 56 percent of Republicans saying the same. Among all LVs surveyed, 54 percent said they were “more enthusiastic about voting than usual,” compared to 41 percent who said so during the last mid-term election in 2002. Generic Democratic candidates had a +7 point advantage over Republicans among LV’s “if the election were held today.” Dems had a +31-point advantage in voting for competitive Democrat-held seats and a +4 point advantage in contests for GOP-held seats.
President Bush’s job approval among LVs in the 50 competitive districts was 42 percent, with 55 percent disapproval, slightly better for him than recent figures for the nation as a whole.

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