With three weeks and a day left in this campaign cycle, Barack Obama seems to be expanding his narrow lead into something more substantial. That’s certainly the impression provided by the latest big national survey, the Washington Post-ABC poll, just out today.
The poll shows up Obama up 53%-43% among likely voters. The previous Post-ABC poll at the beginning of the month had Obama up 50%-46%.
The internals of the poll are even more troubling for Team McCain. Obama’s favorability rating is up to 64%, while McCain’s has dropped to 52%. Over half of respondents volunteered the economy as the most important issue, and among them, Obama’s leading by a 62%-33% margin. And Obama now leads McCain as the candidate deemed best able to conduct the right kind of tax policy by 11%; the effort to bash Obama on taxes has, of course, been the centerpiece of McCain’s strategy to deal with the economic crisis.
Is Obama’s lead too big to be overcome? The Post notes that “turning around a late double-digit deficit would be unprecedented in the modern era,” though it offers several examples of leads larger than Obama’s being reduced dramatically in the home stretch.

Conservatives are going to start claiming that the 2008 election will be “stolen by goons and hooligans,” that “Dems caused the financial crisis” and that Obama is a ”secret radical/terrorist sympathizer” — and they are going to throw John McCain right under a bus if he doesn’t play along.
Dedicated movement conservatives can read the poll numbers as well as anyone else and, in the last few days, they have started to see that John McCain may very well lose this election.
They can live with that. They have been in opposition before – like the Clinton years – and they can figure out a political strategy to follow once they are in opposition. But they are also aware that an Obama victory poses a threat of unprecedented dimensions to their brand of conservatism. It is the kind they like to call “existential” – a threat to their very existence.
Coming after an intensely fought election campaign with a compelling — indeed mediagenic, rock- star cultural conservative like Sarah Palin on the Republican ticket, a strong Obama victory would imply:

That most Americans don’t actually share cultural conservative’s vision of themselves as “the real America,” opposed by only a minority of educated elites.
That most Americans don’t share the view that Obama and Democrats are essentially un-American and unpatriotic.
That most Americans do, in fact, believe that it was eight years of Republican pro-free market policies that created the current economic crisis.

This, conservatives simply cannot accept. As a result, in the last few days, we have seen the beginnings of the new conservative narrative start to emerge from Steve Schmidt’s Rovian media operation within the McCain campaign. The key elements of this new narrative are as follows:

1. That Barack Obama is not only actually a secret radical/terrorist sympathizer but that there has been a vast and concerted conspiracy by “the mainstream media filter” to hide this truth from voters.
2. That leading Dems including Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank and Harry Reed are the primary culprits in the current financial crisis
3. That primarily Black “goons and hooligans” are going to steal the election.

Each of these new tropes has been launched by one or more of the major McCain campaign ads in the last few days and each is widely repeated and reinforced by extensive viral e-mail campaigns.
As a result, each of these notions is already being reflected directly back to McCain in the remarks his supporters are making to him at his town meetings – remarks like the woman who insisted that Obama is actually “an Arab” or “a terrorist” or the men who argued that McCain should get “the names of the people responsible for the crisis and punish them” and that “goons and hooligans” are going to steal the election.
When McCain finally felt obligated to speak up and disagree with these distortions last Friday he was roundly booed by his own supporters – and it will only get worse after the election. If McCain does not rigidly stick to the new conservative script that Steve Schmidt has handed him to read and he loses the election, the conservatives – including Sarah – “et tu, Brutus” – Palin – will turn on him like wild hyenas.
If you think Democrats have been mean to McCain this year, just wait until you hear the conservatives rip him apart after the election. They will call him a “weakling,” “a bumbling fool” and a “senile, doddering old man who let an easy victory escape him.” “After all,” they will add knowingly, “he was never really a true conservative to start with.” This “the loss was all McCain’s fault” rationalization will actually provide the fourth and final element of the new conservative narrative.
This may seem cruel, but conservatives really have little choice except to explain the election in this way because a key part of their world view is an unrelenting insistence that politics is a simple morality play of good vs. evil — with themselves invariably in the heroes’ role. In this storyline Conservatives are always basically right and always essentially pure – they do not make fundamental mistakes or display major moral and ethical failings (if an individual conservative does any of these things, it simply proves that he or she was not actually a “real” conservative to begin with).
Thus, the new Steve Schmidt conservative narrative will make it possible for conservatives to continue to claim after the election that the American people don’t really support Barack Obama (they were tricked), that Republican policy did not really cause the current economic crisis (Democrats did) and that true conservatism was not really rejected by the American people (just the overly timid and bumbling John McCain).

Read more…

Ezra Klein’s L.A. Times op-ed provides a sobering assessment of the importance of ‘undecided’ voters two dozen days before the election. Klein, an associate editor of The American Prospect, begins by noting the media attention now being lavished on undecided voters:

It was the Undecided Voter whom Gallup asked to submit the questions. It was the Undecided Voter who filled the audience. It was the Undecided Voter who turned the dials controlling CBS’ squiggly reaction lines and recorded his (or her) responses for CBS’ postelection survey…Undecided voters are believed to be the decisive slice of the American electorate, so they get the debates and the ads and the focus groups (assuming, that is, that they live in a battleground state).

But if Klein is right, the smarter strategists of both campaigns are going along for the ride, but not taking the undecideds too seriously, because

…There are no solid numbers on undecided voters — in part because the numbers change with every election and, within every election, with every successive month and event and every poll…Worse, many of those who claim to be undecided are not. Some don’t want to admit their preference. In their paper, “Swing Voters? Hah!” political scientists Adam Clymer and Ken Winneg amassed substantial data suggesting that very few undecided voters are truly indecisive. Examining the 2004 election, Clymer and Winneg found that even the most hard-core of undecided voters were fairly predictable.
They asked the 4% of their sample that claimed to be undecided to rate the two candidates in early October. When they went back to the same people after the election, more than 80% had in fact voted for whichever candidate they’d rated most highly a month earlier.

Klein also cites a study of nine presidential elections by SUNY Buffalo political scientist James Campbell, who concluded “In only one of the nine elections, the 1976 race between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, did the swing vote majority override an opposite majority among non-swing voters.” To which Klein adds, “in other words, in eight of the last nine elections, the winner could have lost swing voters but won the race.”
Klein also notes that between 5 and 12 percent of voters fit into the ‘undecided’ category in Gallup, Hotline and Rasmussen tracking polls. So just doing a ballpark extrapolation, maybe 2 percent of voters are genuinely undecided. With the stark choice between candidates and the economy going seriously south, there is every reason to expect that they will break more for Obama than McCain.
With 24 days to go, it appears that the battle for hearts and minds is pretty much over. For Dems, it’s all about turnout. McCain and Palin will continue with the fear-mongering and coded hate-messaging politics of distraction, having no credible answers to the economic crisis. But it probably won’t do them much good. The Republican Campaign and Party machinery, as usual, will divide their energies between turnout of their base and suppression of the votes of pro-democratic constituencies.
By all accounts the Obama campaign and progressive groups have done an amazing job of registering new voters. The rest of the campaign should be about energizing Obama supporters, keeping the excitement at a high level and getting all those new registrants to the polls on election day. It’s also critically-important that the Obama campaign and Democratic party groups be better prepared than were the Gore and Kerry campaigns to prevent voter intimidation and vote theft.

Throughout this long presidential campaign, there’s been endless discussion of race as a factor. But until recently, such talk revolved around hard-to-assess white fears about Barack Obama’s racial identity, along with efforts to conjure up the ancient hobgoblin of the Scary Black Man via images of Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright.
Now, in the wake of the ongoing financial crisis, racism has entered the campaign conversation from an unexpected direction. In the fever swamps of conservatism, there’s a growing drumbeat of claims that the entire housing mess, and its financial consequences, are the result of “socialist” schemes to give mortgages to shiftless black people whose irresponsibility is now being paid for by good, decent, white folks.
Some of this talk is in thinly-veiled code, via endless discussions on conservative web sites (though it spilled over into Congress during the bailout debate) attributing the subprime mortgage meltdown to the effects of the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, which was aimed at fighting the common practice of mortgage “redlining” in low-income and/or minority areas (basically, a refusal to make any mortgages, regardless of the creditworthiness of individual applicants, in such areas).
In truth, the CRA didn’t require lending to unqualified applicants (though it did provide that applicants’ credit-worthiness could be established through means more sophisticated that standard credit scores), and in any event, CRA doesn’t even apply to the non-bank lenders responsible for the vast majority of bad mortgages. (Sara Robinson has a very useful primer on CRA at the OurFuture blog).
A closely associated and even more racially tinged element of the conservative narrative on the financial crisis focuses on lurid claims about the vast influence of ACORN, a national non-profit group active in advocacy work for low-income Americans. Among its many activities, ACORN has promoted low-income and minority homeownership, mainly through personal counseling. More to the point, though it’s unrelated to any of the claims about ACORN’s alleged role in the financial crisis, the group worked with Barack Obama back in his community organizing days on the South Side of Chicago.
Now as it happens, I’ve never been a huge fan of ACORN, mainly because its ham-handed voter registration efforts in recent years have supplied Republicans with their only shred of evidence that “voter fraud” is a legitimate concern in this country. But ACORN, a relatively marginal group, had no real influence over toxic mortgage practices, which again, to state the crucial point, had little to do with CRA-enabled loans to low-income and minority homeowners. Google “ACORN financial crisis” and you’ll be treated to an amazingly huge number of articles and blog posts on the subject, virtually all of them from conservatives. None of them, so far as I can tell, establish that the group has had any significant involvement in mortgage decisions, mainly because most subprime loans were made in areas where ACORN activists would never set foot. ACORN is being singled out by conservatives for a leading role in the crisis simply because it’s crucial to the whole CRA/Socialist/Minorities/Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac/Obama narrative about the financial crisis. And that narrative is not simply all over the internet: it’s common on the airwaves as well, from Lou Dobbs to an assortment of “analysts” at Fox.
While some conservatives are careful not to get too explicit about the racial underpinnings of this argument, others aren’t. As usual, we can rely on Ann Coulter to expose the raw id of conservative sentiment, as in a post on the financial crisis with the title: “They Gave Your Mortgage To a Less Qualified Minority,” which deliberately played off the theme of a famous Jesse Helms campaign ad demonizing affirmative action.
Here’s Coulter’s take on the alleged impact of CRA:

Instead of looking at “outdated criteria,” such as the mortgage applicant’s credit history and ability to make a down payment, banks were encouraged to consider nontraditional measures of credit-worthiness, such as having a good jump shot or having a missing child named “Caylee.”

Nice. The coda of Coulter’s “argument” plows some very familar furrows:

Now, at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, middle-class taxpayers are going to be forced to bail out the Democrats’ two most important constituent groups: rich Wall Street bankers and welfare recipients.
Political correctness had already ruined education, sports, science and entertainment. But it took a Democratic president with a Democratic congress for political correctness to wreck the financial industry.

There you have it: once again, rich liberals in league with shiftless minority “welfare recipients” are sticking it to Joe Sixpack.
Coulter’s uninhibited take seems to be closer to what we are now seeing and hearing among grassroots conservatives, whose anger is now visibly spilling onto the campaign trail, than the more circumspect “analysis” of her more “responsible” colleagues.
It shouldn’t be that surprising. Let’s say you are a classic Main Street conservative, a white middle-class man near or past retirement age. You own your home, you pay your bills. Maybe at some point you benefitted from a government-subsidized or underwritten home loan. Maybe you were lucky enough to do your own modest real estate speculation in the mid-80s or mid-90s or early 00’s, when it all worked. Maybe you even have a defined-benefit pension that insulates you from the immediate effects of the stock market collapse. But still, you’ve played by the rules, and are entirely innocent. And now the whole economy is collapsing around you, and worse yet, many hundreds of billions of your taxpayer dollars are being tossed around Washington to “bail out” everybody but you. Two kinds of explanations are being offered to you for what went wrong. One involves an impenetrable haze of financial jargon about the securitization of mortgages and derivative instruments and hedge funds, which only a handful of people in the country can even pretend to understand. The other is Ann Coulter’s. What are you going to believe?
Perhaps it’s an ironic sign of social progress that today’s emerging racist stereotypes involve minorities getting behind on their mortgage payments, rather than “welfare queens” using change from their food stamps to buy vodka (the famous Ronald Reagan anecdote) or black men impregnating their girlfriends to live off those bountiful welfare payments. But it’s still disgusting. As Rick Perlstein has righteously argued, it’s a blood libel on people who exert no real power in this country.
As the foregoing meditation indicates, I’m less inclined to blame those fist-shaking angry Main Street conservatives at McCain’s rallies than the conservative “thinkers” who promote racist stereotypes as part of a broader effort to deflect responsibility anywhere, everywhere, than towards the corruption and ideological manias of their own leaders.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist
Grassroots conservatives have been fed a steady, toxic diet in recent weeks, on talk radio, on Fox, and in the blogs, of a narrative that suggests “Obama’s ACORN” (with the complicity of Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac) created the financial crisis, is benefitting massively from the bailout, and is now trying to steal the election. This is a race-based Unified Field Theory that connects everything these folks fear and hate, and they want John McCain to talk about it, instead of all this bushwa about greedy lobbyists and bipartisanship.
On a broader front, this may represent the ultimate climax in the original and central dilemma of the McCain campaign: how to stay “bipartisan” and mavericky while channeling the passions of the conservative base. The whole contrived balancing act could well be blowing up, at McCain’s own rallies.

Yesterday I posted a brief notice about a “Memo to the next president” under the auspices of the Progressive Policy Institute, arguing for public financing of congressional elections and redistricting reform as first-order priorities after November 4.
Today I did a somewhat different post for The Hill’s Congress Blog that explicitly makes the case for why this sort of agenda makes particular sense for Barack Obama.

As you may have gathered by now, John McCain’s big October Surprise on the policy front, the mortgage buyout proposal that he sprang during the second presidential debate, is not going over well much of anywhere.
While the proposal bears a superficial resemblence to earlier Democratic proposals for homeowner relief, its structure makes it both vastly more expensive for taxpayers, and grossly more generous to the most imprudent–and in some cases predatory–lenders. Conservatives just hate it, as evidenced by an acid-tongued editorial from National Review today, which noted the McCain plan would displace the much more modest Frank-Dodd legislation, which just took effect on October 1:

We never thought we would defend the Frank-Dodd legislation, which we bitterly opposed last summer. But it looks downright prudent compared to what McCain has proposed. McCain’s plan is a full bailout for lenders, and it cannot do much more than the Frank-Dodd bill without letting “ruthless borrowers” and other reckless types off the hook.

Kaboom.
Unsurprisingly, Barack Obama is going after McCain’s proposal with a big sledgehammer. According to Ben Smith’s account at Politico:

On the stump in Dayton, Obama continued to drill McCain’s mortgage plan.
McCain would have “the government — meaning taxpayers, meaning you — buy up bad mortgages,” he said.
“Taxpayers shouldn’t be asked to pick up the tab for the very folks who helped to create this crisis,” Obama said. “That’s the problem with Sen. McCain’s risky idea.”
“Banks wouldn’t take a loss, but taxpayers would take a loss. It’s a plan that would guarantee that you, the American taxpayers, would lose,” he said.
“It’s not just that Sen. McCain’s bailout rewards irresponsible lenders. It’s that this bailout would make it more likely that those lenders would keep up their bad behavior.”
The plan, Obama said, “punishes taxpayers, rewards banks and won’t solve our housing crisis. This is the kind of erratic behavior we’ve been seeing out of Sen. McCain.”

Note the words “risky” and “erratic” and “irresponsible” in Obama’s speech. At a time when McCain, contrary to what his campaign was saying as recently as Tuesday night, is trying to question Obama’s character via a vast inflation of his relationship to William Ayers, Obama’s returing fire on the character front through McCain’s most recent policy proposal.
But hey, there’s a silver lining to McCain’s latest fiasco. According to Ross Douthat, the Republican nominee is so breathtakingly incompetent at developing a compelling message that he’s free to just start pulling stuff out of his posterior:

Frankly, McCain has done such a lousy job selling the domestic policy proposals he’s put forward that he’s more or less free to change them however he wants at this point. It would have been better if he had changed them dramatically and publicly on Monday, after the bailout passed and the market kept tanking, but before the debate itself. But the next time the stock market has a really bad day (i.e., tomorrow), he should “huddle with his advisers” and announce that in light of the epic crisis, he’s going to postpone his entire domestic agenda (such as it is) for, say, two years in favor of a short-term but expensive stimulus package aimed directly at the middle and working class.

Douthat actually refers to his own idea for McCain as “aggressive pandering to the middle class,” which doesn’t sound very mavericky to me. But he may be right that the poor reception accorded the most recent rabbit McCain tried to pull out of his hat shouldn’t keep him from going back to the hutch and looking for another one. If he does, though, he shouldn’t expect much support from most conservatives.

When John McCain conducted a not-very-effective interview with the Editorial Board of the Des Moines Register a couple of weeks ago, the respected Republican strategist (and longtime associate of McCain’s) Mike Murphy had this to say on the Swampland blog, after discussing the interview itself:

What the Hell was McCain even doing there in the first place?….Obama is going to win Iowa.
….So, 35 days left and McCain is in Iowa? Why put McCain in the wrong state, at the wrong place? No surprise the result is the wrong message and the wrong tone.

Now there are 25 days left, and where’s McCain going to be this Sunday? Davenport, Iowa.
Via Chris Orr, here’s an explanation offered by the McCain campaign to the Washington Post’s Dan Balz:

Mike DuHaime, McCain’s political director, said internal campaign polling does not make the electoral map look as bad as some public polls suggest. For example: Asked why, if he has given up on Michigan, McCain has not given up on Iowa, a state that looks strong for Obama in public polls, DuHaime said because the campaign’s polling has Obama’s lead in the low single digits.

Hmmm. Them must be some mighty odd “internal polls.” FiveThirtyEight.com lists nine surveys of IA since the beginning of September. Six showed Obama with a double-digit lead. The only one showing a close race is from the Big Ten outfit three weeks ago, which just started polling last month, and has no track record. In fact, per RealClearPolitics, there hasn’t been a published poll showing McCain ahead in Iowa since the beginning of the year. That’s not the case with a number of other states that McCain seems to have conceded.
Polls aside, there are four big reasons that virtually everyone outside the McCain campaign has been assuming Obama would carry the state this year: (1) Iowa had one of the country’s strongest pro-Democratic trends in 2006, producing a gubernatorial landslide, a Democratic takeover of the state legislature, and pickups of two U.S. House seats (one against the previously invulnerable Jim Leach, who’s now endorsed Obama); (2) Barack Obama built a powerful organization in the state prior to the Caucuses, which is still in place; (3) McCain skipped the Caucuses in both of his presidential campaigns, which Iowans consider a deadly insult; and (4) McCain has also stubbornly opposed federal subsidies for ethanol, an issue so important to Iowans that a long line of presidential candidates in both parties (including George W. Bush) have flip-flopped on it precisely because of its importance in Iowa.
So I’m with Murphy: I don’t know what’s up with McCain and Iowa. Maybe he has a major weakness for corn dogs and potluck dinners.

The Progressive Policy Institute’s putting together a series of “memos to the next president” arguing for this or that initiative as a top priority. They are by design neutral as to the identity of said president.
I’ve contributed a piece arguing that the next president should make reform of congressional elections, through public financing of campaigns, and redistricting reform, a top priority, to build some sense of real momentum about “changing Washington.” Though it’s cast in terms of being applicable to either candidate, I do think this makes particular sense for Obama, who needs to quickly mobilize public opinion for “real change” before or while undertaking tough initiatives like universal health care. That’s all the more appropriate now that there’s so much doubt about the fiscal “room” he will enjoy to do anything big.
Check it out here.

Those of you who read TDS’ Swing Voter roundtable earlier this year will remember that there’s a lot of disagreement about how to define swing voters. But such disagreements tend to shrink in the course of actual campaigns, as, gradually, the universe of potentially persuadable and motivatable voters converges with “undecideds.”
In his Wall Street Journal column today, Karl Rove, casting about for reasons to be optimisitic about John McCain’s campaign, suggests that there are “probably more undecided and persuadable voters open to switching their choice than in any election since 1968.”
At FiveThirtyEight.com, Nate Silver decided to test Rove’s assertion with actual data. Using the “unaccounted for voter” percentage in the last Gallup Poll (chosen because it’s been around forever), Silver compares that to the number at roughly the same date in earlier election cycles, and concludes:

In the Gallup tracking poll that straddled October 1st, 8 percent of voters were unaccounted for. This figure is significantly higher than 2004, an unusually partisan election in which just 2 percent of voters were unaccounted for. But, it was no higher than 2000 or 1976, and lower than in 1988. On average, since 1936, 6.8 percent of voters were unaccounted for in the Gallup poll as of October 1st, as compared this year’s 8 percent; the difference is not statistically significant.

To determine “persuadable” voters, Silver looks to the Pew Research poll’s numbers for people who have “decided against” one or the other candidate, indicating they are not open to further persuasion. The results are pretty much the same as with “undecideds”:

[A]s of Pew’s most recent survey from late last month, 42 percent of voters said they had decided against Senator McCain, and 37 percent said they’d decided against Senator Obama. This leaves 21 percent of voters who are theoretically open to either major party candidate. We can compare these to the Pew numbers released in Early October 1992, Late September 1996, Early October 2000, and Early October 2004….
This year’s numbers are right in line with past elections, again with the mild exception of 2004, when an unusually high fraction of the electorate had ruled out either George Bush or John Kerry. And remember, more voters have decided against McCain than Obama. The candidates to exceed the 42 percent of voters who have thus far said “no how, no way, no McCain” were George Bush, Sr. in 1992 (46 percent), Bob Dole in 1996 (44 percent), and John Kerry in 2004 (45 percent), all of whom lost their elections.

It’s possible, though not likely, that the undecided or persuadable vote could go up or otherwise change at some point between now and election day. But its current size and shape is not, contra Karl Rove, grounds for belief that Obama’s current lead may not be as significant as everyone thought.

All but forgotten amid the excitement of the presidential race, the 11 governorship elections that will also be decided on November 4th are nonetheless important to the future of the Democratic Party. Dems are defending six governorships, Republicans have five. Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball ’08 has the inside skinny on each of the races, and an excerpt from his take follows:

…We think the most likely national outcome ranges from a net Democratic gain of one governorship, to a net Republican gain of one. This is no earth-shattering shift either way, yet one party will get minor bragging rights–unless the highest probability outcome occurs: that is, shifts in two or three states produce no net change in the total of 28 D, 22 R governors (the current net line-up).

Sabato, who has an impressive track record in his election outcome predictions, rates MO as the most likely Dem pick-up, and he sees WA and NC as toss-ups.