This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
The daily commentary about the Obama era has largely overlooked a trend that is now unmistakable—namely, the growing conservative sentiment in this country that goes well beyond the tea-party rallies and Glenn Beck’s rants.
Gallup offered the first piece of compelling evidence. On January 7, 2010, it reported that self-identified conservatives had increased from an average of 37 percent of the electorate in 2008 to 40 percent in 2009. (By contrast, moderates and liberals each decreased by one percentage point during that period.) Gallup based its conclusion on a synthesis of surveys taken throughout 2009, with a total sample of nearly 22 thousand and a margin of error of less than +/- one percentage point. It found, moreover, that ideological shifts among independents—a three-point drop in moderate identifiers, coupled with a five point-gain in conservative identifiers—accounted for most of the overall change.
The most recent Washington Post-ABC News poll underscores Gallup’s conclusion. The week of Barack Obama’s inauguration, 24 percent of respondents identified themselves as liberal, 42 percent as moderate, and 32 percent as conservative. In the latest survey period (March 23-26, 2010), by contrast, only 32 percent called themselves moderate, while 42 percent now regarded themselves as conservative—a remarkable 10 percentage-point shift. (Liberals remained unchanged at 24 percent.) I have not been able to find another survey in recent decades that gave conservatives that large a share, or moderates that small a share. While it’s easy to question the significance of a single poll, the liberal/moderate/conservative breakdown as measured by the Washington Post and ABC has averaged 22/38/37 during the Obama administration, versus 22/43/34 during George W. Bush’s second term—clear evidence of a shift toward conservatism among moderates.
These results are part of a polarization of the electorate that has been underway for a generation. While comparisons among polls using differing methodologies is dicey, trends within polls are revealing. In 1992, Gallup found that moderates averaged 43 percent, versus 36 percent for conservatives and only 17 points for liberals. By 2009, both conservatives and liberals had picked up 4 percentage points, while moderates had decreased by 7 points. To be sure, there have been twists and turns along the way. But the overall direction of the tectonic shift is clear.
Let’s take an even longer view. In a study published in the first volume of Brookings’ Red and Blue Nation?, the political scientist Alan Abramowitz examined two decades of evidence from the authoritative National Election Studies. In 1984, he found, 41 percent of voters were at or near the ideological midpoint, versus only 10 percent at or near the left and right endpoints of the scale. By 2004, only 28 percent were at or near the midpoint (a decline of 13 percentage points), while respondents at or near the endpoints had risen by 13 points, to 23 percent.
It remains the case that Washington is more polarized than the nation as a whole. The most recent analysis using the standard political science scoring system found zero ideological overlap between Democrats and Republicans in either chamber of Congress. Which means that in both the House and the Senate, the most conservative Democrat is more liberal than is the most liberal Republican. In the electorate, Democrats who consider themselves moderate or conservative still overlap with similar Republican identifiers. But as Republicans have shed liberals and moderates over the past generation, the overlap has diminished.
During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama was obviously aware of these trends, and he understood that Americans were tired of the kind of politics they had engendered. He took office pledging to reverse them. Quite obviously, this has not happened. Historians and political scientists will long debate whether it could have turned out differently, whether a different White House strategy might have weakened the Republicans’ early decision to present a united front in opposition. A plausible case can be made that an achievable bipartisan stimulus bill would have been less effective than the one adopted nearly along party lines—and that there was not enough common ground between Democrats and Republicans to produce significant health insurance reform. Still, it is hard to believe that any political party enjoys a monopoly on wisdom, so a situation in which the minority party gives the majority no incentive to accept the minority’s good ideas is bound to produce sub-optimal results.
Whatever the substantive merits of single-party legislation, there are other reasons to keep working toward more agreement across party lines. Political science research finds a strong inverse relation between the level of combat between the parties and citizens’ trust in their governing institution. While a measure of mistrust is functional in a democracy, excessive mistrust hampers democratic self-government. With trust at historic lows, we have reached that point. And progressives should remember that mistrust hampers those who wish to use government affirmatively more than it does those who seek to limit it.
Regardless, American politics now seems condemned to an extended period of intense polarization, with an expanding army of aroused conservatives fighting to halt and reverse what it sees as the deplorable Europeanization of our economy and society. I doubt that a politics so configured will be able to address our long-term economic problems—until a crisis forces us to. I hope I’m wrong.

The 2012 presidential cycle doesn’t officially begin until November 3, but the Republican field will start being seriously shaped this week down in New Orleans, at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference. Confirmed speakers include no fewer than nine people who have been “mentioned” as possible presidential candidates: Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, Ron Paul, Mike Pence, Rick Santorum, Haley Barbour and Bobby Jindal. Tim Pawlenty will address the event by videotape. Mitt Romney, who may be playing the traditional front-runner’s game of avoiding appearances with his lilliputian rivals, will be missing; he’s off hawking copies of his book in–two guesses where!–New Hampshire.
Other than the usual straw poll of attendees (with the main question being whether Ron Paul’s young supporters will flood the event like they did at the CPAC conference in February), and the usual informal assessments of the speeches, here are some other sources of intrigue: (1) Will any or all of Mitt’s rivals blast him for prevarication on similaries between RomneyCare and ObamaCare? (2) How many of the presidentials will claim close kinship with the Tea Party Movement? (3) Will any of them formally disclaim candidacy? (4) How bloody will the rhetorical red meat get? (5) Who if any of them will try to get media plaudits for a calm, substantive approach? and (6) Will any new “true conservative” limus tests be laid down?
The New Orleans event could represent quite a presidential field hockey match. And in case you think it’s crazy to be talking about the 2012 presidential race, remember this: it’s just twenty-one months til the Iowa Caucuses!

It’s certainly taken a while, but as we head towards the Tea Party Movement’s holy day of April 15, it seems to finally be sinking in among the commentariat that these people did not come out of nowhere or arise spontaneously from an aroused populace, but are instead simply the same old conservative Republicans who used to be so boring back in the day. A new poll of the Tea Folk by Gallup seems to have spurred this realization along, though some gabbers may persist in being baffled by the high number of Tea Partiers who self-identify as independents. The Atlantic‘s Mark Ambinder explains it to them:

[I]t’s true that just half of those Tea Partiers surveyed called themselves Republicans. Yes, the lion’s share of the other half say they’re independent. But they’re not: they’re Republican-oriented conservative voters who are dismayed by the direction of the GOP and who don’t want to identify with the party’s brand. That’s not surprising, given how tarnished that brand is. Only 8% identify as Democratic; 7% identify as liberal; 70% percent identify as conservative; two-thirds are pro-life; nearly 90% were opposed to the health care bill.

This is a very old story, one that arguably goes all the way back to the 1940s. At any given moment, a significant number of conservative Republicans don’t want to call themselves Republicans because their leadership is not, in their view, conservative enough. This is one reason why Republican self-identification numbers have chronically undershot Republican votes in actual elections. At particularly difficult moments, conservative Republicans have even threatened to form a third party–as in the mid-1970s, when National Review publisher William Rusher argued that conservatives should leave the GOP to it’s “elitist” establishment and make common cause with Wallacites and other social conservatives in a “producer’s party.” Such threats today are no more unusual, or credible, but do help encourage Republican office-holders to follow their own inclination to hew to the Right.
As the (apparent) novelty of the Tea Party wears off, its familiar outlines should become apparent, except to those with a strong bias in favor of misunderstanding the phenomenon. In an interesting column today, Mark Schmitt of The American Prospect discusses those left-progressives who persist in helplessly hoping for a “populist” alliance with the Tea Folk. Part of the allure, he suspects, involves some progressive self-loathing:

[F]inding allies among Tea Partiers is the equivalent of what finding a black friend was to liberals in the 1960s. It’s a way to get in touch with the real America, to feel a little superior, a little less elitist or isolated, less wimpy, less conformist.
But the real America is at least as likely to be found in the 205 million voting age adults who aren’t Tea Partiers as the few hundred thousand who are. And the rest of that real America, with its own passions and anger and economic pain, is probably a more fruitful area to look for allies on real liberal goals that include inclusion and fairness.

In any event, I’m with Ambinder: If pollsters want to keep examining the Tea Folk, it’s time for them to drill a little deeper:

Next time, I’d love for Gallup, or any other pollster, really, to ask self-identified Tea Partiers for their vote histories, for their views on immigration and race, for their views on questions about Obama attributes (is he a socialist?), for their specific views on policy matters (do they support a “fair tax?”).

Moreover, instead of asking Republicans and independents over and over if they might be tempted to vote for a hypothetical Tea Third Party candidate, pollsters might want to focus on the actual major-party preferences of Tea Partiers, since in all but a few scattered contests, that’s what they are going to face at the polls. I say that mainly because of all the delusions surrounding the Tea Party Movement, the one that suggests Democrats will be saved by a mass of third-party candidates associated with said Movement is among the most fanciful. The Tea Folk are systematically dragging the GOP to the Right, and that’s the development that Democrats need to think about exploiting in November and beyond.

In his latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot,’ TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira cites new data indicating that “the public is strongly supportive of moving forward” on financial system reform, and “they are likely to view those who try to delay or derail action quite unfavorably.” As Teixeira explains:

Consider these results from an early March survey conducted by Pew’s Financial Reform Project. The poll asked how important it is to take action now to reform big Wall Street banks. The public was overwhelmingly convinced (79 percent) that it was very (47 percent) or somewhat (32 percent) important to take action, compared to just 18 percent who thought it was not too (9 percent) or not at all (10 percent) important.

As for the Democratic plans for financial reform now being considered by congress, Teixeira notes that, when provided “a short description” of the plan, respondents favored it “by a lopsided 69-25 margin.” Even better, adds Teixeira,

The public also said that if their member of Congress voted for the financial reform plan, they’d be far more likely (50 percent) to be more favorable toward their representative than less favorable (18 percent).

As Teixeira concludes, “These data should encourage those in Congress seeking to move forward swiftly on sending a financial reform bill to the president’s desk.” As the screaming about HCR gradually subsides, it appears that Dems are on very solid ground regarding one of the public’s critical priorities — financial reform. Should be fun to watch Republicans squirming their way through this one.

Despite the enduring popularity of the “Democrats In Disarray” meme in certain precincts of the chattering classes, the truth is that the enactment of health reform reflected a degree of Democratic unity, resolution, and yes, accomplishment that is becoming a bit hard to ignore. Ron Brownstein’s latest National Journal column gets it straight:

After Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown’s victory in January’s Senate special election, Democrats appeared shaken to the point of panic. But, from President Obama on down, the party has rapidly regrouped–enacting health care reform, virtually daring Senate Republicans to filibuster tougher regulation of financial institutions, and challenging the GOP with last weekend’s White House announcement of recess appointments for 15 nominees stalled in the Senate. Pundits may be pelting the party with predictions of doom in November, but Democrats have apparently decided that the best defense against a resolute Republican opposition is a good offense.

More importantly, improved Democratic morale has made it easier to get some perspective on the last turbulent year, when Democratic defections in Congress were largely limited to House Members from districts that Barack Obama lost in 2008 (defections that shouldn’t be that surprising).

The governing core of the party’s House majority has been members elected from districts that Obama carried in 2008. House Democrats who represent such districts voted 199-8 for final approval of the Senate health care bill last month. Last year, they voted 201-1 for Obama’s stimulus plan, 194-1 for federal tobacco regulation, 191-8 for financial reform, and 189-15 for climate-change legislation. The Democrats elected in districts that preferred Republican presidential nominee John McCain haven’t supported Obama nearly as reliably, but Pelosi has corralled enough of them each time to pass the president’s priorities.
In the Senate, the governing core is the 33 Democratic senators elected from the 18 “blue wall” states that have supported the party’s presidential nominees in at least the past five elections. In 2009, these senators collectively recorded a stunning 97 percent party unity score on the index calculated by Congressional Quarterly. Around that axis, Democratic leaders have assembled shifting coalitions of Democrats from states that are more closely divided. On the most-momentous votes — the stimulus plan and the initial health care reform package — every Senate Democrat from either camp backed Obama.

Brownstein concludes that for all the strom and stress of the last year, Obama and congressional Democrats have put together the most impressive record of accomplishment by any Democratic administration since Lyndon Johnson’s, and a degree of party unity that rivals that of Republicans in the early years of George W. Bush’s presidency. Interestingly enough, a considerable proportion of Democratic criticism of Obama has been from those arguing that he is too committed to bipartisanship in the face of ever-more-radical Republican opposition to his entire agenda. This was not a criticism made very often of George W. Bush and his political guru Karl Rove.
The problem for Democrats this November is not so much disunity as it is distraction and disinterest among voters who don’t often show up for midterm elections and who in this difficult period of American history understandably have other fish to fry. That’s why upcoming fights like financial reform and a Supreme Court nomination could be especially important: not only adding to this administrations legacy, but providing relatively unmotivated Democratic and swing voters with a graphic illustration of what could happen to the country if the GOP returns to power.

I was very happy yesterday to be able to cross-post Robert Creamer’s HuffPo piece laying out ten “rules” for Democrats in maximizing their performance in the 2010 midterm elections. Creamer is always a good read, and his take on 2010 was both succinct and comprehensive, which is rare.
But he indirectly raises an age-old issue that is important to get right, and that I’d like to comment on: the choice, in strategy, message and resource allocation, between base turnout “mobilization” and undecided
voter “persuasion.” Creamer says, in terms of this particular cycle, that “midterm elections are all about turnout.”
What he’s talking about here is the simple fact that the shape of the electorate is almost always different in midterm and presidential election cycles, with the smaller midterm electorate skewing towards Republicans. That’s a particular problem for Democrats in 2010, because of the especially large difference in midterm turnout between the oldest voters, who tend to make up a much larger percentage of the electorate, and the youngest voters, who tend to disappear in midterms. Obama’s unusually strong 2008 performance among the latter and weak performance among the former means that Democrats probably began the midterm cycle in the hole even when the president’s approval ratings were a whole lot better. Add in the excitement that atavistic conservative tactics have instilled in Republican voters, and the lukewarm attitude many Democrats have towards the White House and Democratic Members of Congress, and you can see why Creamer and other strategists are obsessed with turnout to the virtual exclusion of any other factor.
But in the end, a vote is a vote, and votes obtained by convincing Democrats to turn out count the same as votes obtained by convincing undecideds or even Republicans to flip in your direction. The resources devoted to these tasks depend on a lot of variables, including the votes available through different techniques; you can certainly argue today that partisan polarization has reduced the number of “persaudable” swing voters to a bare minimum, particularly in a low-turnout midterm election. On the other hand, capturing a “persuadable” voter who’s very likely to turn out produces a bonus by denying your opponent a vote. And if your base-mobilization efforts happen to help your opponent turn out his or her own base (as can happen if you deploy particularly abrasive or ideological public appeals), the net value of each “turnout” vote can be relatively small or even in rare cases negative.
All these factors have to be weighed in the mix, and applied in a carefully developed strategy. Ideally, one’s mobilization and persuasion efforts would be complementary, but more often, choices have to be made based on assessments of both opportunities and costs. Creamer is emphatically correct that old-school under-the-radar GOTV efforts to get “your” voters to the polls can be very effective if executed properly, and because they are conducted late in the game and behind the scenes, they rarely help opponents get out their own vote. But the recent massive upsurge in early voting in many parts of the country has complicated GOTV campaigns considerably by stretching out the “end-game.”
In other words, winning elections is rarely “about” any one thing, though if you had to pick one factor this year, maximizing Democratic turnout would be far and away the most important thing. For those interested in this topic, The Democratic Strategist published a roundtable discussion of the whole base-versus-swing, and mobilization-versus-persuasion debate back in early 2008 (Robert Creamer, in fact, was one of the participants) and most of it remains entirely relevant.

This last Wednesday marked the end of the first reporting quarter for the finances of candidates for federal office. As is always the case, the money numbers tend to dribble out slowly into the public realm. At TPM, Eric Kleefield has a summary of the earliest news.
Probably the most interesting item is the $2 million that Lt. Gov. Bill Halter raised just in March in his primary challenge to Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR). It’s also worth knowing that embattled Sen. Harry Reid now has $10 million in cash on hand for his tough campaign for survival.

I’ve been a little wary of Drew Westen’s argument that the failures of Democrats in politics derive from over-reliance on reason-based appeals, while the Republicans win their victories by connecting with voters’ emotions. I felt he may have over-stated his case, since I know lots of people who make elegant rational arguments for or against politicians based on positions on the issues.
But Westen makes a very strong case for the persuasive power of emotion over reason in politics in his CNN commentary “Why Obama won the health care battle.” This time, Westen, author of “The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation,” applies his theory to explain the course of the HCR struggle, and it fits impressively.

Politicians tend to think about how the minds and brains of voters work in one of two ways.
The first is to assume that voters come to decisions on issues like health care reform by carefully examining the data and the arguments and then calculating whether one plan or another better fits their rational self-interest. In this view, a campaign is a debate on the issues.
When you hear (or heard) Democratic strategists dismiss polls showing that the majority of Americans opposed the president’s health care plan but support its component parts, this is the model of the mind of the voter they are assuming.
That’s why Democrats tend to lose ground even on issues with strong popular support, like health care reform, which was extremely popular during the 2008 election but steadily lost backing over the course of the first year of the Obama administration until regaining some momentum over the past few weeks.

Westen argues that HCR got serious traction when President Obama and the Democrats embraced the alternative view of “voters is as people who have to be sold on a policy or candidate. They are consumers, not debaters, and they’ll walk out of a store that doesn’t have attentive salespeople.” The winning strategy, according to Westen:

How do you sell reform? You tell a consistent story about what’s wrong with the system, who broke it and how we can fix it. You evoke not only people’s concerns about their interests but their values: fairness, the ability to choose what’s best for themselves and their family, security.
You try to get people as passionate as you are, concerned about the security of their care, angry at insurance companies that have been calling all the shots and hopeful that you know what to do about it. And you choose your words carefully, because words carry emotional connotations, and people may not know exactly what’s in a bill, but they have a general sense of whether they like it.
This is how Republicans tend to think about politics. And it’s how they managed to leave Americans with a bitter taste in their mouths about efforts to reform a health care system that had left virtually all of us one pre-existing condition — or one cancer requiring treatment that exceeded our annual or lifetime “cap” — away from medical bankruptcy, no matter how good we thought our insurance was.

For too long, argues Westen, Dems were over-using emotionally-constipated phrases such as “universal health care” and “health insurance reform” that “don’t exactly make your spine tingle.” Meanwhile Republicans were tapping the power of emotional appeals, like calling HCR “Obamacare” and “a government takeover” of our health care system that would “put a bureaucrat between you and your doctor.” Further,

For a year, while the Republicans were telling a great story about “death panels” and the president’s “socialist” agenda (though the president wouldn’t even support the “socialist” option of giving Americans the option of buying into Medicare if they preferred it over private insurance), the White House wasn’t offering a coherent story.
Precisely what problem the plan was intended to fix seemed to shift from week to week (Was it cost? Or the 46 million people without insurance? Or middle-class people losing their coverage?). And as for the plot, we didn’t know until a few weeks ago what the president’s plan even was.
Making matters worse, Obama seemed to lack passion about his signature issue. Everything seemed negotiable, as if what mattered was that the bill passed, not what was in it. And the White House used every word in the book you wouldn’t use if you wanted to “sell” reform.
Instead of emphasizing that people who work for a living ought to be able to take their kids to the doctor when they’re sick — a value statement that makes clear who the bill was designed to help (people who work for a living and still can’t get or afford decent health care, or could lose their insurance if they lost or changed jobs or started a small business) — the White House talked about “bending the cost curve,” another linguistic heart-stopper.

But the tide changed, Westen says, when President Obama began “telling a compelling story”:

….This story actually included the villains: Health insurance companies denying life-saving care to people for profits. In speeches journalists described as his most “passionate” since becoming president, he told the story of a woman who lost her life after she lost her health insurance and of a little boy who lost his mother because she couldn’t pay for her illness. He seized on an insurance rate hike of nearly 40 percent in California to mobilize populist anger.
And for the first time, the president decided to answer the attacks of his opponents, not just with well-reasoned arguments (which he did) but with attitude. When John McCain started posturing at the president’s “bipartisan” summit, the president reminded him that the election was over and who had won. When House Minority Leader John Boehner started rattling off talking points, the president responded with the verbal equivalent of eye rolling and asked whether there was someone who actually wanted to get something done…The president looked strong, resolute and passionate.

Looking ahead, Westen sees a critical choice for the white house:

…He can return to the “why can’t we all just get along?” unilateral bipartisanship that tied him up in knots in his first year, as if Republicans are just Democrats in need of rational arguments.

Or, better,

…Obama can damn the torpedoes and go full speed ahead, dare the Republicans to vote no on every effort to fix every problem the country faces and pursue the pragmatic (sometimes partisan, sometimes nonpartisan) leadership the American people want.

And if the President can bring some of the passion he displays so well in his speeches into his press conferences, interviews and televised appeals, he can brighten prospects for the mid-terms, his re-election and the future of his party.

So what might readers of this and other serious sites have missed yesterday while they were being so, well, serious? Fortunately, The Atlantic‘s Niraj Chokshi did a handy-dandy organized summary of April Fool’s Jokes on the web. I kinda like the Starbucks “announcement” of two new coffee sizes: Micra and Plenta.

The following commentary from leading Democratic strategist Robert Creamer is cross-posted from The Huffington Post. Creamer is the author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win.
The political conventional wisdom has already concluded that Democrats will suffer major losses in November midterm elections. Indeed, if the election were held today, that might be true. There have been very few midterms in modern political history where the party that holds the White House has not lost a lot of seats in the first midterm after its President first took office.
But there are six months and a great deal that Democrats can do to succeed this fall.
Rule #1: Keep our eyes on the prize. Democrats have four goals in the coming midterms that should define our allocation of financial and political resources. In descending order of importance they are:

* Maintain control of both houses of Congress. Loss of control of one of the two houses would be a catastrophic blow to achieving a transformative progressive political agenda.
* Assure our ability to actually pass progressive legislation. All Democratic seats are not created equal. We lost 34 Democratic votes on the recently passed health care legislation. Obviously the loss of ten Members who voted yes for the legislation would be a much bigger problem for the health care agenda than the loss of ten “no” votes. That means that all things being equal, our resources should be focused on candidates that support the President’s agenda rather than those who consistently vote no. Let’s face it, from a legislative point of view, nobody noticed when Alabama’s Parker Griffith suddenly became a Republican instead of a Democrat – he always voted like a Republican anyway.
* Use the elections to prove that support for a progressive agenda is good politics. Of course succeeding in the first two goals will go a long way to generate that kind of narrative. But our resources should be focused with special concern to show Members of Congress that the Party as a whole – and Progressives in particular – have the backs of the Members that stood tall for progressive values even though they represented marginal districts.
At the same time, it would be enormously useful if we made examples of several Members who abandoned that agenda – especially those that represent safe Democratic seats. Several come to mind where the filing deadline for the Democratic primary has not yet passed. And as Niccolo Machiavelli noted, you don’t have to punish all of your enemies – just hang one in the public square.
* Take beachheads for Democratic power. As we maximize the goals above, we should remember that it is almost always better to elect any Democrat to any district than to elect a Republican. That’s especially true in areas where we need to build a Democratic presence over the long haul. Two examples come to mind. In Illinois’ 13th Congressional District, Scott Harper is challenging Republican Judy Biggert. The 13th District includes big portions of Illinois’ DuPage County that has a growing Democratic base. Electing a Democratic Congressman there would greatly strengthen the ability of Democrats to win state and local office by strengthening the Party’s infrastructure and presence there.
The other is Florida’s heavily Cuban 25th District that has been dominated by Republicans but is trending more Democratic. Joe Garcia, who did well there last cycle against an incumbent, is considering a run for what is now an open seat. A victory there would help Democrats continue to woo young Cuban Americans away from their traditional Republican roots.

Rule #2: Midterm elections are all about turnout. In 1994 Democrats did not lose control of Congress because of a huge swing among persuadable voters. We lost because Republican voters turned out, and ours stayed at home.
That means two things.

* First, for the next six months we have to be all about inspiring the Democratic base. Of course victory in legislative battles is itself enormously inspiring. The polling shows that the health care reform victory caused the level of “intensity” among Democratic voters to pull even with Republicans. We have to continue winning. And we have to continue to draw clear distinctions between our positions and those of the Republicans – particularly on issues where we have the high political ground, such as holding the big Wall Street Banks accountable. For immigrant voters – and especially Latinos – we have to deliver on fixing the broken immigration system.
* Second, we have to remember that turnout is about execution. Studies show that one knock on the door within 72 hours of the election increases the propensity to turn out by 12.5% — a second knock, almost as much. One of the most powerful messages in the upcoming election is: “I won’t get off your porch until you vote.” Field operations must have a bigger priority this cycle than ever before.

Rule #3: We can’t afford to allow the Republicans to make the midterms a referendum on Democratic performance. It must be framed as a choice between the failed Republican policies of the past and the Democratic program to lay a foundation for sustained, widely-shared economic growth.
Bush and the Republicans created an economic disaster in America. It will take a long time to clean that mess up. We must frame every discussion in terms of the choice between the failed policies that got us here, and our policies for the future.
That means two things:

* First, we have to deliver. Until last week, the Republican hoped their winning narrative would be that Democrats can’t deliver – that Washington is gridlocked. Passage of health care and student loan reform helped closed the book on that story. But we have to continue delivering – not just talking.
* And, of course, by Election Day, people need to see clear evidence — even glimmers — that those policies are working in their own lives and those of their neighbors. Reports and pronouncements from Washington won’t be enough.

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