MyDD‘s Jonathan Singer has a very encouraging report on the boffo voter registration numbers Dems are racking up in mega-swing state Florida:
Considering how toxic the political environment supposedly is for the Democrats, it might come as a surprise to find that in the key swing state of Florida — which hosts an open seat Senate election this year — new Democratic voter registration is outpacing new Republican voter registration by 43 percent.
Singer reports that 144,368 new Dems were added to the Sunshine state registration rolls in 2009, vs. a comparatively limp 101,025 for the GOP. (141,621 registered as Independents). He quotes from a recent memo from the FL Democratic Party:
Over the course of 2009, Floridians continued to join the Democratic Party in record numbers, ending the year with Democrats having a nearly 800,000 person voter registration advantage…As Democrats continued to out register Republicans every month since the 2008 election, this voter registration gap will continue to be a major advantage for Florida Democrats in 2010 and beyond.
Great news, given Florida’s pivotal influence in the electoral vote outcome — and possibly for Democratic prospects for a Senate seat pick-up in November.
This year’s big media narrative has been the confirmation saga of Neera Tanden, Biden’s nominee for director of the Office of Management and Budget. At New York I wrote about how over-heated the talk surrounding Tanden has become.
Okay, folks, this is getting ridiculous. When a vote in the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on the nomination of Neera Tanden was postponed earlier this week, you would have thought it presented an existential threat to the Biden presidency. “Scrutiny over Tanden’s selection has continued to build as the story over her uneven reception on Capitol Hill stretched through the week,” said one Washington Post story. Politico Playbook suggested that if Tanden didn’t recover, the brouhaha “has the potential to be what Biden might call a BFD.” There’sbeen all sorts of unintentionally funny speculation about whether the White House is playing some sort of “three-dimensional chess” in its handling of the confirmation, disguising a nefarious plan B or C.
Perhaps it reflects the law of supply and demand, which requires the inflation of any bit of trouble for Biden into a crisis. After all, his Cabinet nominees have been approved by the Senate with a minimum of 56 votes; the second-lowest level of support was 64 votes. One nominee who was the subject of all sorts of initial shrieking, Tom Vilsack, was confirmed with 92 Senate votes. Meanwhile, Congress is on track to approve the largest package of legislation moved by any president since at least the Reagan budget of 1981, with a lot of the work on it being conducted quietly in both chambers. Maybe if the bill hits some sort of roadblock, or if Republican fury at HHS nominee Xavier Becerra (whose confirmation has predictably become the big fundraising and mobilization vehicle for the GOP’s very loud anti-abortion constituency) reaches a certain decibel level, Tanden can get out of the spotlight for a bit.
But what’s really unfair — and beyond that, surreal — is the extent to which this confirmation is being treated as more important than all the others combined, or indeed, as a make-or-break moment for a presidency that has barely begun. It’s not. If Tanden cannot get confirmed, the Biden administration won’t miss a beat, and I am reasonably sure she will still have a distinguished future in public affairs (though perhaps one without much of a social-media presence). And if she is confirmed, we’ll all forget about the brouhaha and begin focusing on how she does the job, which she is, by all accounts, qualified to perform.
