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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: June 2009

Virginia’s Gubernatorial Primary: Strange and Interesting

Virginia’s Democrats are holding a primary today, and the headliner event is the contest to see who will face Republican Bob McDonnell in November in an effort to secure a third straight Democratic governorship. As Jonathan Martin of Politico explains this morning, there are scenarios under which each of the three candidates–Creigh Deeds, Terry McAuliffe and Brian Moran–could win, with turnout being a crucial variable. But Deeds has been the surprise leader in all four of the polls released during the last week.
I have a post up at fivethirtyeight.com that explores some of the issues we may be discussing when the returns are in, including the ancient debate between mobilization and persuasion strategies; the role of timely media endorsements; and Virginia’s relatively restrictive early voting rules, which Gov. Kaine unsuccessfully tried to change this year.
The polls in VA close at 7:00 p.m.; the whole state’s in the eastern time zone; and given the expected low turnout, we may have a result pretty early unless it’s very close.


Prevention Now a Top Health Care Reform Priority

Al Quinlan, president of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research has a post up at gqrr.com on their new survey (PDF here), which reveals overwhelming public support for investing in illness prevention as a leading priority of health care reform. Among the findings of the Greenberg Quinlan Rosner/Public Opinion Strategies bi-partisan report, which was commissioned by the Trust for America’s Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation:

When we asked people whether or not we should invest more in prevention , a big majority (76 percent) said yes, against just 16 percent who said no. This is truly an overwhelming level of support for any initiative—it’s rare to get three-quarters of the country to agree on anything these days (much less on something that involves spending more money)—and it underscores the importance Americans place on prevention as part of their health care and their lives.
Now for those of you who would ask if it is just certain parts of the population who support this, our answer would be, “No.” At least 65 percent of every demographic subgroup supports increasing our investment in prevention. From coast to coast (79 percent in the Northeast, 78 percent in the South, 76 percent in the West, and 72 percent in the Midwest) and across the political spectrum (86 percent of Democrats, 71 percent of Republicans, and 70 percent of Independents), people believe we should invest more in prevention. Even two-thirds of the least healthy among us want a greater investment in prevention.
The importance the country places on prevention represents a real change in attitudes toward health in this country over the past couple decades. In 1987, 45 percent of the country believed we should be giving more emphasis to prevention (11 percent wanted more emphasis on treatment). Today, 59 percent say we need more emphasis on prevention, an increase of 14 percentage points in the prevention column (a real shift, albeit occurring over 20 years).

And the public views prevention as a highly cost-effective investment, as Quinlan notes:

No good discussion of any type of program would be complete without discussing the always-burning question—what about the costs? Does the cost associated with investing in prevention dampen support for it? It doesn’t appear to. By a wide margin (77 – 16 percent), Americans believe that prevention will save us money, rather than cost us money. But saving money isn’t the real reason they want more prevention—health is. Seventy-two percent say that “investing in prevention is worth it even if it doesn’t save money, because it will prevent disease and save lives,” while only 20 percent feel that investing in prevention is not worth it if it doesn’t save money. When it comes to prevention, it’s less about cost and more about reducing disease, keeping people healthy, and improving quality of life.

When it comes to building a consensus in support of health care reform, it appears that investing in prevention as a central priority may be the focus that can unite Americans.


Toward Single-Payer Reform–Step by Step

This item by J.P. Green was originally published on June 5, 2009
It’s hard to find anyone inside the D.C. beltway who actually believes single payer health care reform can be achieved in this session of congress. The majority of progressives seem to have settled for the “public option,” which can be seen as a step toward achieving a single-payer system down the road, make that way down the road.
The public option does seem to be the most promising proposal for achieving a progressive consensus for this session of congress. But I do hope the single payer warriors will keep the heat on as the ‘scary left’ that makes the publlic option seem like a moderate alternative.
I applaud incremental reform as generally a more practicable approach than “big package” reform. By providing a smaller target and a simpler policy, precisely defined incremental reforms have a certain edge in winning hearts and minds. Incremental reforms have less baggage than “big package” reforms and they reduce the opposition’s ability to use red herrings to distract voters. Republicans, for example, had an easier time of it trashing ‘Hillarycare’ than they would in fighting a bill that forces insurance companies to do one simple thing — cover pre-existing conditions.
The oft-cited advantage of big package reform is that you can build a broader coalition. Well, that’s true. But it gives a well-organized opponent plenty of targets for mobilizing opposition. The right is very good at distracting voters with specific objections to proposals that offer otherwise beneficial reforms. See our staff post yesterday on William Galston’s New Republic article to get a sense of how complicated are public attitudes toward various health care reforms.
Incremental reforms are often portrayed as a ‘sell-out’ of progressive principles because they invariably leave some constituency out. The pre-existing coverage requirement, for example, still leaves millions without coverage. But if there is an understanding that other specific reforms to broaden coverage will be strongly advocated shortly after pre-existing coverage is enacted as part of a coalition commitment, then it could become possible to achieve something resembling universal coverage in fairly short order. Voting on highly specific health care reforms one by one in rapid succession may be a quicker way of getting to universal, comprehensive reform than having a grand battle over a highly complicated health care reform bill with many moving parts that have to work together in synch.
Incremental reform is not a new idea. Governor Howard Dean proposed insuring all children first, which is a good example of a politically-attractive initial reform. I like the idea of first guaranteeing catastrophic coverage to everyone — codifying the principle that no one loses their home or retirement assets because of an illness. It would be politically-popular by providing a huge sense of relief to millions of voters and it could be financed through a single-payer mechanism, sort of a partial single-payer reform. Let the private insurer reforms and the public option address other coverage issues — for now. A comment by Daniel Bliss in response to an Ezra Klein post on health care reform at The American Prospect made the argument nicely:

The key thing, as I see it, is that a final plan will not be successful in the long run unless it has a single payer component. Note the qualifying word, “component.” It merely has to share the risk and streamline the core of the system, but does not have to be single-payer in its entirety, and indeed probably shouldn’t if we want the best possible system. There is after all a great deal of difference in how applicable a market is to something that people simply won’t do without (e.g. accident and emergency) compared to something that is relatively more discretionary (non-urgent care administered in relatively small and affordable increments, such as chiropractic treatment). It’s worth noting that the top-rated health care systems in the world, according to the World Health Organization, tend to embody this concept of mating single payer for catastrophic coverage with supplemental insurance taking care of more discretionary parts of health care. France is the outstanding example.

If the Obama Administration can say 3 years from now, “We eradicated the fear of ruinous health care costs for all American families,” that’s a hell of an impressive achievement to run on on 2012.
Given the complexity of attitudes toward health care proposals, I’d prefer to see a series of specific health care reforms debated, voted and enacted in succession, each piece standing on its own merits, rather than having them all linked together and inter-dependent on each other. It would bring more clarity — and simplicty — to the debate over health care reform, and my hunch is consumers/voters would welcome it.


2010 Cycle Heating Up Early

This item by Ed Kilgore was originally published on June 4, 2009
The midterm elections of 2010 are still seventeen months away, but in many states, the cycle’s starting early, in part, no doubt, because everyone is expecting a difficult environment for fundraising.
In my home state of Georgia, the 2010 gubernatorial contest has been actively underway for months, and has been enlivened by two big events that have significantly changed the field. Lt. Governor Casey Cagle, the early frontrunner on the GOP side, suddenly withdrew from the governor’s race in April, citing health issues (he is, however, running for re-election). That decision lured U.S. Rep. Nathan Deal, who shares a geographical base with Cagle, into the GOP field, which already featured two statewide elected officials, Secretary of State Karen Handel (a protege of term-limited incumbent Gov. Sonny Perdue) and Insurance Commissioner John Oxendine.
Then just yesterday, former Gov. Roy Barnes, who lost to Perdue in 2002 in a major upset, jumped into the race on the Democratic side. The field already includes Attorney General Thurbert Baker, former Secretary of State and Adjutant General David Poythress, and state House Democratic leader Dubose Porter. Barnes is the Big Dog of Georgia Democratic politics, and was immediately regarded as the front-runner, even getting a big shout-out from the Democratic Governors Association as though he were the putative nominee. It wouldn’t be a big surprise if one or more of Barnes’ rivals decides to give the contest a pass. Early polling by DKos/R2K in April showed Barnes running ahead of Handel and just behind Oxendine.
Though Georgia has leaned decisively Republican in recent cycles, the recession (which has hit the state very hard), infighting among Republicans, and significant cutbacks in state services and investments, have all given Democrats hope that they can stage a comeback in 2010. Indeed, Georgia may become one of many states where there will be an interesting test about which party gets the blame for bad times: the governing party in Washington, or the incumbent party closer to home.
The same could be true of Florida, which at least one recent analysis called the hardest-hit of all the states, thanks to a massive decline in home prices. Though Obama carried the state last year, Republicans have been regularly winning most other elections of late; gubernatorial candidate Alex Sink, the state CFO, is the only Democratic statewide elected official other than U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, and Republicans control both state legislative chambers.
Sink enjoys a cleared field for the gubernatorial nomination, and Florida Democrats are enthusiastic about her candidacy (it doesn’t hurt that her husband is 2002 gubernatorial nominee Bill McBride, a wealthy trial lawyer). Her almost certain opponent, Attorney General Bill McCollum, has lost two Senate bids since 2000, and he will also have to deal with possible fallout from a bitter, ideologically-driven Senate primary between Gov. Charlie Crist and former FL House Speaker Marco Rubio. Crist will likely win that primary, but hard-core conservatives could decide to sit on their hands on General Election Day. And since Republicans now control state government, the perennial state budget crisis will probably be held to their account by many voters.
Georgia and Florida are two states where Democrats often express optimism early in cycles, only to experience the hard realities of minority status when voting draws near. This is one cycle where Democrats have more realistic grounds for an optimism that could extend right through to election day.


Obama’s Republicans

This item by Ed Kilgore was originally published on June 2, 2009
In a move that places yet another dent in conservative claims that Barack Obama is a hyper-partisan extremist who was lying about bipartisanship during the campaign, the President announced today that he was tapping New York Republican congressman John McHugh to serve as Secretary of the Army. With two other GOPers in his Cabinet (Gates and LaHood), and another recently agreeing to become Ambassador to China (Huntsman), you have to start wondering why so many prominent Republicans are agreeing to join the administration of this Democrat Socialist.
Political junkies are already speculating about the special election to fill McHugh’s House seat; his historically Republican district was carried comfortably by Obama last year.
But in the meantime, it is interesting that Obama is outdoing most of his predecessors in reaching out to the opposition party for high appointments, inside and outside the Cabinet.
Bush 43 had his one token Democrat, Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta (he publicly touted Sen. John Breaux as his personal favorite for Energy Secretary, but that’s probably because he wanted to flatter him for his help in the Senate).
Clinton had Defense Secretary Bill Cohen, and another GOPer, David Gergen, served as his chief of staff for a while.
Bush 41 had no prominent Democrats in his administration. Reagan had a very nominal Democrat, arch-conservative Bill Bennett, as Education Secretary, and another, Jeane Kirkpatrick, as UN ambassador. Carter had a sort-of Republican, Energy Secretary Jim Schlesinger. I won’t go through the whole modern list, but Ford had one Democrat in his Cabinet, as did Nixon (the soon-to-be Republican John Connally); Kennedy and Johnson had two, though one, Defense Secretary Robert McNamera was very nominally Republican.
Democrats nervous about Obama’s Republicans at the Pentagon should remember that FDR picked Republicans for both of his military cabinet positions, Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox. And actually, two other famously progressive figures, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes and Agriculture Secretary (and later vice-president) Henry Wallace, were nominally Republican upon joining Roosevelt’s Cabinet, though both endorsed FDR in 1932.
What makes Obama’s GOP appointments significant is that they are occurring in an era of extraordinary partisan and ideological polarization; none of his Republicans have been nominal types or endorsed his candidacy last year; one of them, Jon Huntsman, was reportedly getting ready to run against Obama in 2012.
Nobody knows, of course, whether any of these appointees will come out of the Obama administration as Republicans after listening to their party-mates apply every term of abuse in the English language to their boss and their administration’s policies day in and day out so long as they serve. If any of them do flip, it will serve as a nice symbol of Obama’s efforts to build a majority coalition on the foundation of GOP ruins.


St. Joan of the Tundra: The Official Hagiography

Every martyr needs her hagiography, and according to David Weigel at the Washington Independent, the Governor of Alaska is getting her own, tentatively entitled The Persecution of Sarah Palin. Penned by The Weekly Standard‘s Matthew Continetti, it’s due out in 2010, just in time for the launch of a Palin presidential run.
I don’t know how smart it is to make your first big political biography an extended whine, but then again, there is definitely a persecution-complex faction in the GOP that loves St. Joan of the Tundra not so much for the enemies she has made, but for the mockery she has inspired. The Torquemada of the Palin Passion, Tina Fey, ought to demand a cut of the book’s proceeds. Or if Continetti has a taste for historical puns, he could entitle the chapter on Palin’s Saturday Night Live ordeal: “Auto da Fey.”
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist


“European-Style Socialism” and the EU Elections

Normally American conservatives don’t much care what happens in Europe. But there are already signs that they will interpret this weekend’s European Parliamentary elections, which produced poor results for social democratic parties and an outcropping of far-right victories. The leading indicator was a Drudge Report banner that read: “USA Moves Left, EU Moves Right.”
You know how this will go, of course: Obama is “driving” the US towards “European-style socialism” just as Europe is abandoning it.
There’s only one big problem with this story-line: Europe ain’t abandoning what passes for “socialism” among American conservatives. Indeed, the kind of social policies that largely dwarf anything proposed by Obama in this country are so much a part of the landscape that parties of the Left can’t find traction in hard times, as the Financial Times‘ Tony Barber explains:

[I]n France, Germany and Italy, voters preferred to stick with ruling centre-right parties, even though economic conditions are as severe as anything in living memory.
One reason is that centre-right leaders, alert to the risk of being portrayed as defenders of a heartless or irresponsible capitalist system, have sought to protect citizens against the worst effects of the recession by preserving jobs where possible and letting the welfare state take care of those in need.
Unemployment benefits, access to medical care and other forms of social expenditure, which come into effect automatically during a recession, form a large part of the €400bn fiscal stimulus that EU policymakers claim to have been implementing over the past six months.
This Franco-German model, criticised in the US and UK in the boom years as an unaffordable, bloated welfare system, has turned out to be exactly what most voters want during the recession.

You can understand why conservatives here would want to seize on any evidence from any source to create optimism for their embattled cause and their shrinking party vehicle, the GOP. But unless they want to associate themselves with the relative success of anti-immigrant or neo-fascist parties in the EU elections, they should probably look somewhere else.


Health Care Industry Has Huge Stake in Reform

E.J. Dionne, Jr.’ “Harry and Louise Have Changed” in today’s WaPo explores the strategic implications of the fact that comprehensive health coverage for all Americans means “fifty million new customers” to the industry. It is an important point, and one which gives significant leverage to the reform movement. Not that the insurance companies won’t fight the public option, forced coverage for pre-existing conditions and other specific reforms with a multimillion dollar ad campaign. However, as Dionne explains:

Many have expressed amazement that the interest groups historically opposed to fixing the health system seem ready to work with the reformers. Their public-spiritedness reflects enlightened self-interest: The health system is so unstable that even the drug industry and the insurance companies are worried that it will crash on top of them.
Health-care reform could bail out these interests by adding the currently uninsured — fast approaching 50 million people — to their customer base and by preventing more individuals and employers from dropping insurance altogether…Leaders of the health industry know that unless more government money flows into the system, they will suffer along with everyone else.

It’s a survival issue, and they know they need government help to stay afloat. They will fight the public option, but they know that some form of expanded government health coverage is inevitable. Still every health insurance company, hopes to get a share of the 50 million new customers. Dionne says the real fight in congress will be about cost containment, and he concludes “So by all means, let’s welcome the drug and insurance companies to the health-care bargaining table. But let’s also remember that they are sitting at that table as a matter of urgent necessity.”
Lisa Girion riffed on the same topic in the Sunday L.A. Times, explaining that

The customer base for private insurance has slipped since 2000, when soaring premiums began driving people out. The recession has accelerated the problem. But even after the economy recovers, the downward spiral is expected to continue for years as baby boomers become eligible for Medicare — and stop buying private insurance.
…The industry’s real trouble begins in 2011, when 79 million baby boomers begin turning 65. Health insurers stand to lose a huge slice of their commercially insured enrollment (estimated at 162 million to 172 million people) over the next two decades to Medicare, the government-funded health insurance program for seniors

Meanwhile John Harwood reports in The New York Times “The Caucus” that a new “sense of inevitability” about health care reform has taken root, as key political leaders and interest groups begin an earnest search for consensus. Regarding funding for reforms, Harwood adds:

No one has spelled out how to finance the roughly $1 trillion over 10 years for an overhaul that would provide care to the uninsured. But two recent Obama White House shifts have made that easier.
First, Mr. Obama vowed to find another $200 billion to $300 billion in savings from Medicare and Medicaid, beyond the $300 billion or so already proposed. That would leave lawmakers needing about $500 billion in higher taxes.
Second, Mr. Obama signaled that he could support acquiring part of that money from limiting the existing tax exclusion for employer-provided health benefits — a concept he criticized Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, for proposing in the 2008 presidential campaign. Taxing only the most lavish 10 percent of benefit plans would raise an additional $336 billion in income taxes, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.

Via Consortium News, Alternet leads today with an article by Robert Parry, “119 Million Americans Want a Public Health Option — Why Aren’t Politicians Listening?” Parry discusses Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley’s assertion at Politico that,

“As many as 119 million Americans would shift from private coverage to the government plan,” Grassley wrote in a column for Politico.com. That migration, Grassley said, would “put America on the path toward a completely government-run health care system. … Eventually, the government plan would overtake the entire market.”
Grassley’s logic is that so many Americans would prefer a government-run plan that the private health insurance industry would collapse or become a shadow of its current self. That, in turn, would lead even more Americans entering the government plan, making private insurance even less viable.

Wait a minute. Polls indicate millions are happy with their current insurance, so where does the 119 million figure come from? Are they so happy with their current plan that they would be willing to switch to a public plan just for kicks? Perhaps Grassley’s argument is based on some other factor. In one of the more revealing graphs, Parry also notes,

…Grassley’s various political action committees have collected nearly $1.3 million in donations from the industries related to the health insurance debate, according to OpenSecrets.org. Grassley’s top four donor groups were Health ($411,956); Insurance ($307,348); Pharmaceuticals ($233,850); and Hospitals ($197,137). Eighth on Grassley’s donor list were HMOs at $130,684.

Today’s Wall St. Journal ‘Review and Outlook’ section has a more thougthful critique, “Obama’s Health Cost Illusion,” which notes:

Now the White House — especially budget chief Peter Orszag — claims there is new cause for hope. The magic key is the dramatic variations in per patient health spending among U.S. regions. Often there is no relationship between spending and the quality of care, according to a vast body of academic research, most of it coming out of Dartmouth College. If the highest spending areas could be sanded down to the lowest spending areas, about 30% in “waste,” or $700 billion each year, would be saved. More than enough to pay for ObamaCare. Or so the theory goes.
But — how? Mr. Orszag’s ideas include more health information technology; emphasizing prevention and healthy living; rejiggering reimbursement policies so doctors and hospitals are paid more for quality care; and funding federal research that compares the effectiveness of medical treatments. These are the lovable bromides of all politicians, and some of them may or may not improve health overall. But there’s scant evidence that any of them will ever save real money.

Most worrisome of all, former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich writes in Salon today that “Big Pharma and Big Insurance go on the attack: Lobbyists are working behind the scenes to kill the public option in the healthcare bill. And they’re succeeding.” Says Reich:

So they’re pulling out all the stops — pushing Democrats and a handful of so-called moderate Republicans who say they’re in favor of a public option to support legislation that would include it in name only. One of their proposals is to break up the public option into small pieces under multiple regional third-party administrators that would have little or no bargaining leverage. A second is to give the public option to states where Big Pharma and Big Insurance can easily buy off legislators and officials, as they’ve been doing for years. A third is to bind the public plan to the same rules that private insurers have already wangled, thereby making it impossible for the public plan to put competitive pressure on the insurers.

Reich’s challenge ought to send reform advocates to the barracades:

This is it, folks. The concrete is being mixed and about to be poured. And after it’s poured and hardens, universal healthcare will be with us for years to come in whatever form it now takes. Let your representative and senators know you want a public option without conditions or triggers — one that gives the public insurer bargaining leverage over drug companies and that pushes insurers to do what they’ve promised to do. Don’t wait until the concrete hardens and we’ve lost this battle.


Racing to the Bottom

Yesterday when trolling regional newspaper websites, I ran across an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution with this depressingly familiar intro:

State government incentives offered to lure technology company NCR to Georgia are worth at least $96 million, according to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution analysis. That is $36 million more than the state estimated when the deal was announced last week.
The $96 million tally does not include another part of the incentive package, a state grant. Officials confirmed late last week that Georgia has offered the grant but refused to say how much money is involved.

Everything about those two graphs is typical of the game of mega-project competition among the states, where taxpayer subsidies of corporations always seem to creep ever upward as time goes by, and with state officials happy to boast about the payoff (in this case, 2,120 jobs split between two locations) for their pinstriped safaris, but less forthcoming about the costs.
The NCR deal was significant because it was the first big Georgia corporate giveaway under a new law designed to cut special deals for big projects–the famous “mega-deals” that get headlines and provide rich press conference opportunities for pols (usually a trifecta of investment announcements, ground-breakings and ribbon-cuttings where the same relative handful of jobs gets feted repeatedly). As the AJC story noted::

Georgia offered the incentives at a time when the state is desperately in need of cash as the recession depresses tax revenues. But economic development experts said it would have been virtually impossible to attract a major employer without a lucrative package of incentives.

Anyone familiar with this issue knows, of course, that the kind of “economic development experts” who perpetually justify big corporate subsidies are often the very people who are paid to put them together, working for elected officials who don’t much think corporations should have to pay taxes in the first place.
The sad thing is that Georgia used to be very proud of refusing to engage in race-to-the-bottom competitions to thrown public money at high-visibility corporate relocation projects. When I was working there in the 1980s, state officials scoffed at our neighbors in Alabama, Tennessee and South Carolina for trading years and years of revenues for foreign-owned auto plants whose owners demanded massive concessions in multi-state negotiations. Indeed, the state’s tradition of resisting special-interest tax breaks was symbolized by a sales tax exemption for purchases of crab bait by commercial fishermen–which was famous because it was the only such exemption that had ever gotten through the state fiscal watchdogs in the General Assembly.
Those days are long gone. The NCR deal almost looks efficient compared to the $410 million package put together by Georgia in 2006 to get a 2,500-job plant built along the Alabama border (and probably employing many Alabama taxpayers) by Kia.
Worse yet, you get the sense that economic-development-via-corporate-subsidies–a practice so ancient and notorious in the South that opposing it was a primary impetus for the original Populist movement–is getting less controversial, even, or perhaps especially, at a time when state government officials are cutting essential services to balance their books.
A separate AJC article yesterday on the NCR deal ought to come with a Raiders of the Lost Ark sound-track to illustrate its tale of swashbuckling GA bureaucrats outpandering those in Ohio, NCR’s previous home. Wonder how it would all come across if the actual costs had to be reflected: “Yessir, we’ll ante up 5,000 kids losing health insurance, and raise you a freeze in school construction. And have we mentioned we don’t like unions around here?”
Check out this 2007 article by John Sugg in the libertarian magazine Reason for a good if intermittently nauseating account of the use of corporate subsidies as a development tool in the South. He managed to find a number of “economic development experts” who don’t think these giveaways pay for themselves, or are actually necessary for development, or are really much more than an especially perverse form of public financing for the campaigns of the politicians who sign the deals and take the credit.


DCorps: The Center Holds for Obama

There’s a new Democracy Corps poll out that focuses on the relative success or failure of recent Republican efforts to rough up President Obama. The rough-stuff is going over well with conservative Republicans, but not with much of anybody else:

[T]wo of the most high-profile debates in Washington could damage the GOP further by isolating the party from the vast middle of the electorate as Obama’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court receives better than two-to-one backing, even after the initial onslaught of Republican attacks against the nominee, and former Vice President Dick Cheney’s popularity falls to an all-time low….
Cheney is a deeply divisive figure, popular only with the conservative base of the Republican Party but unpopular with everyone else, including independents (among whom he has net -26 favorability rating) and moderate Republicans. In fact, President Obama (+5) is more popular with moderate Republicans than Cheney (-9). Moreover, by a three-to-one margin (66 to 23 percent) likely voters reject Cheney’s recent statement that he would prefer to see Rush Limbaugh, rather than Colin Powell, set the direction of the GOP. Again, only conservative Republicans side with Cheney, while Democrats, independents and moderate Republicans all strongly prefer Powell….
Sotomayor’s nomination has created a similar dynamic. By a more than two-to-one margin (56 to 27 percent) likely voters approve of the nomination. This level of support is similar to that enjoyed by John Roberts, and exceeds those held by Harriet Miers and Samuel Alito, when they were nominated to the Court in 2005. More important, once again the base of the Republican Party finds itself at odds with the rest of the electorate. While conservative Republicans strongly disapprove of her nomination, Sotomayor earns at least plurality support from moderate Republicans, independents and Democrats.

If you look at the crosstabs for the poll, which break out moderate/conservative Democrats and moderate/liberal Republicans, the risk of self-isolation by conservative Republicans becomes even more apparent. Democrats are largely sticking together with Obama, and the more the GOP adopts attack-dog ideological and personal attacks on the President (and on “RINOs” like Colin Powell), the less Republicans stick together in opposition.