I’ve found this year’s primaries in my home state of Georgia to be very interesting. Clearly, Georgians do not agree. Despite a host of competitive contests in both parties, total turnout in yesterday’s primaries was about 22%, which is pretty pathetic.
In any event, the consequences wrought by those few voters were pretty interesting. On the Democratic side, former governor Roy Barnes took the next step in his attempted redemption from a huge stumble in 2002, when his grossly overconfident re-election campaign was upset by a party-switching good ol’ boy named Sonny Perdue. This time around Barnes impressively defeated an African-American statewide elected official by a three-to-one margin, doing especially well in heavily African-American urban areas. Two Democratic congressmen, Hank Johnson and John Barrow, survived primary challenges.
Republicans set themselves up for some potentially wild-and-crazy runoffs. Sarah Palin’s candidate, Karen Handel, will face Newt Gingrich’s candidate, Nathan Deal, on August 10. All kinds of nastiness between these two candidate broke out late in the primary contest; Handel has basically called Deal a crook and Deal has basically called Handel a godless liberal. It’s not likely to get more civil in the runoff.
The Republican congressional primaries produced some odd results, too. You have to have some sympathy for 9th district congressman Tom Graves. He won his gig after a special election in May and then a runoff in June, all because Nathan Deal resigned the seat to (take your pick) devote more time to his gubernatorial campaign or short-circuit an ethics investigation. Then he had to run for a full term in yesterday’s primary, and once again, he’s in a runoff against the same candidate, Lee Hawkins. So Graves and Hawkins will be facing each other for the fourth time in three months.
Then you’ve got state Rep. Clay Cox, who was endorsed by a who’s-who of Georgia Republican politics in his bid to succeed the venerable right-winger John Linder in a safe GOP district. Cox dutifully endorsed Linder’s hobby-horse, the “Fair Tax” proposal, and did everything else expected of him. But he finished a poor third, losing not only to Linder’s former chief of staff, Rob Woodall, but also to talk radio host Jody Hice.
In general, the August 10 runoffs will be mostly a Republican affair, and in that rarefied company, we can expect a lot of more-conservative-than-thou one-upsmanship. Looking forward to the general election, Democrats are in reasonably good shape to do relatvely well in this red state, in this bad year.

Granted, the year is only half done, but if they gave an annual award for the most ridiculous, sour grapes attempt to invalidate an election, it would probably be shared by the Minnesota GOP’s Ex-Senator Norm Coleman and Governor Tim Pawlenty. Perhaps the best account of their sorry attempt to unseat Senator Al Franken comes from Jay Weiner’s Salon.com article, “Get over it, Republicans: Al Franken won.” Nobody’s going to explain it any better than Weiner:

…Minnesota Majority, a very conservative “watchdog” group, released a report (PDF) on June 28 that claims a lot of things. But when you get to the bottom line, the group seems to be saying that according to its research, 341 felons in Hennepin and Ramsey counties who should have been ineligible to vote actually cast votes in the Franken-Coleman election.
The report, flawed in the opinion of most legal analysts, got legs and wings and Internet echo chamber reverberations from — who else? — Fox News last week, and then other news organizations chased it, and right-wing blogs jumped on it, and the Minnesota Republican Party called for a statewide investigation and Coleman called Franken “an accidental senator” and Gov. Tim Pawlenty said there was “credible evidence” that the alleged felons who maybe voted possibly could have flipped the election’s final result. Breathless.

Here’s the math:

Franken, if you remember, won by 312 votes….Now, let’s take one key stat that Minnesota Majority focuses on, that 341 alleged felons from heavily Democratic Hennepin and Ramsey counties voted. For the moment, take that at face value.
That would mean, based on voter turnout numbers, about 70 percent of them (240) would be from Hennepin and 30 percent (101) would be from Ramsey. Taking into account the percentages for Franken, Coleman and others in each of those counties, Franken would net 51 votes.
Remember, he won by 312. Let’s take away those 51 in this silly game. That still isn’t enough to switch the result.

Weiner, author of the forthcoming “This Is Not Florida: How Al Franken Won the Minnesota Senate Recount,” dissects the twisted logic of the report:

…What makes anyone think felons would vote only for Franken? Indeed, it was Franken’s legal team during the recount’s election contest trial that raised the prospect that felons voted in the election; Franken’s lawyers found one such voter in a northern Minnesota county who voted for Coleman. Dare I ask: If Franken opened the door on such an avenue, why didn’t Coleman’s lawyers pursue this felon-voting issue then? They had their chance. And why does the Minnesota Majority report focus on the core-city counties?

Three guesses on that one. Weiner has more to say, reflecting unfavorably on the integrity of Governor Pawlenty, who is frequently mentioned as a possible GOP Presidential candidate:

As for the governor, he has spoken three times about the recount, and he’s been a bit fast and loose with his facts. First, in the early days of the recount, he spread — on Fox News — the completely untrue story about Minneapolis ballots that were supposedly being driven around in the alleged trunk of an unknown and nonexistent elections official. He spoke of this days after it was reported that the story was a fable.
Later, in a call with reporters, he overstated by thousands of percentage points the increase of absentee voters in 2008, trying to say that Franken won the election because of that…In fact, Franken won the recount by 49 votes before absentee ballots were counted.
Now, there are his comments — on Fox News — about the Minnesota Majority report and how it’s “quite possible” felon voting tipped the election. The facts aren’t there.

Pawlenty’s transparently blundering partisanship is not likely to sit well with mainstream MN voters, who have already endured an excruciating marathon recount process for the Franken-Coleman race. With his latest wallow in the sour grapes, Coleman may be destroying whatever fading chance he had for a re-run against Franken.
Franken, meanwhile, is doing an exceptional job of establishing himself as an able legislator and a happy warrior with a great sense of humor — a worthy heir to Paul Wellstone.

It’s very clear that the 2010 midterm elections will revolve around turnout patterns, not some big change of public opinion since 2008. Intensifying an already strong tendency in midterm elections, Republicans and Republican-leaning independents at present are looking marginally more likely to vote than Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents. Here’s how Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling expresses it:

There continues to be no doubt this fall’s election will have more to do with whether Democrats can turn out Obama voters than keep them in the fold. Very few voters are shifting their allegiance from the 2008 election- 8% of Obama voters say they’ll vote Republican this time but an almost equal 6% of McCain voters say they’ll vote Democratic this time. When it comes to voters switching sides it’s basically a wash, but Republicans are doing well across the country due to Democratic disengagement.

So voter enthusiasm matters, particularly when it happens to coincide with the longstanding pattern in midterm elections of older, white voters turning out at significantly higher levels than young and minority voters, who were a big part of the Democratic base in 2008. But how’s about all the talk about “excitement,” and the exceptional energy the Tea Party movement is said to have brought to the Republican Party? Here’s Jensen again:

Among voters who are ‘very excited’ about voting this fall Republicans hold a 52-40 advantage. How much that matters is up for debate though. Scott Brown led the Massachusetts Senate race 59-40 with ‘very excited’ voters but won by only 5. Chris Christie led the New Jersey Governor’s race 60-34 with ‘very excited’ voters but his final margin of victory was only 4 points. As I’ve said before unexcited voters count the same as excited ones and our polling so far this cycle has suggested the Democrats who answer our surveys vote, whether they’re excited about it or not. So I’m not sure how much the wide GOP advantage with ‘very excited’ voters really matters.

So to sum it up, enthusiasm matters up to the point that it motivates someone to vote. Beyond that, a vote’s a vote, and you only get to vote once. It’s a simple point, but one often lost on people in both parties who value “energy” and “excitement” a bit too much. Unless their mood is communicable, or translates into campaign activity of some sort, super-psyched voters who snake-dance to the polls as part of some “movement” have no more weight that those who hold their noses and vote unhappily. That’s worth remembering next time you see one of those measurements of voter “excitement.”

Today’s another primary day, this time in my home state of Georgia, and there are a host of contests on tap in both parties, though indications are that turnout will be mediocre at best.
If you are interested in a full rundown, check out my preview over at FiveThirtyEight. I’ve also done an update on the Palin versus Gingrich dimensions of the Republican gubernatorial race for The New Republic.
The very latest news is a poll of that race by Magellan Strategies that shows Karen Handel executing a Nikki Haley-style surge into a dominating first-place position, and longtime front-runner John Oxendine collapsing into a poor fourth place. Magellan also shows Nathan Deal and a rapidly climbing Eric Johnson battling for a runoff spot opposite Handel. What makes the poll seem credible is that it reflects an intensification of trends in the contest that have been apparent for a while. And if Handel does romp in the primary and eventually get the nomination, the hype for Palin will be formidable, since the Alaskan won’t be competing with a trumped-up sounding “sex scandal” for the credit for her candidate’s ascendency, as she had to do in South Carolina.

Here we go again with the talking about ‘independents’ as if they had a coherent, unified ideology. Writing at Dailyfinance.com, Pallavi Gogoi describes independents as “an important, influential and powerful voting bloc,” disregarding the fact that Independents have varied political leanings. Some are too liberal for both major parties, some are too conservative, while others see themselves as right in the middle between them. Still others simply dislike both parties, and many others don’t have a clue about what either party stands for.
Golgoi does, however, cite a useful statistic of particular interest to Democrats, the fact that 59 percent of Independent respondents in an ABC News/Washington Post poll support extending unemployment benefits (compared to 80 percent of Democrats and 43 percent of Republicans). She points out that in March, 12 percent of Independents were unemployed, compared with 11 percent of Democrats and 6.5 percent of Republicans, according to a Gallup poll analysis prepared for DailyFinance.
In other words, Republican leaders bad-mouthing and/or opposing the extension of unemployment benefits may be scoring points with the arch-conservative element of their constituencies. But a healthy majority of the politically-amorphous group self-identified as Independents, and even 43 percent of Republicans, think they are wrong. Democrats would be wise to emphasize the extension of jobless benefits as critically important to the economy, as well as to the jobless, in a series of nation-wide ads.

Like most political junkies, I spend a lot of time staring at polls, and for a complete amateur, I have a reasonably good understanding of what makes for good and bad polls, and also know that (1) averaging lots of comparable poll data is usually how you get a decent handle on reality, and (2) comparing data from the same sources is a relatively good way to identify trends.
But now and then a major poll comes along with a blare of trumpets that raises so many red flags that you generally need to toss back a shaker of salt before you even read the thing.
That’s true of the new “Power and the People” series initiated today by Politico.
Aside from the cheesy title, let me briefly count the ways in which this instrument for weighing public opinion is suspect:
It involves (1) internet-based polling, (2) conducted and (3) analyzed by Mark Penn, with a separate sample of (4) “DC elites;” determined according to (5) arbitrary definitions of “political involvement” and (6) even more arbitrary income and educational levels; with the whole thing getting a (7) huge, Tea Partyish spin of comparing the fat-and-happy liberals of Washington with the despised and suffering masses of Americans, who don’t like Barack Obama or any of that guvmint stuff. I could add Politico‘s own sensation-seeking involvement as suspect factor #8, but they are respectable enough as journalists to give them just one mulligan for running a headline that is sure to thrill Fox News.
On factor number (7), I have to object especially to the neo-Marxist planted axiom in an inflammatory sidebar article that suggests the godless liberal elites don’t understand America because the economy in DC is booming, thanks to the “massive expansion of government under President Barack Obama” that has “basically guaranteed a robust job market for policy professionals, regulators and contractors for years to come.” You woundn’t know from this hammerheaded story that the major battle going on in Washigton recently was over Democratic efforts to maintain unemployment insurance and avoid massive state and local layoffs, in the teeth of Republican resistance; or that the Pentagon budget, which conservatives treat as the ultimate sacred cow, is the single biggest driver of the DC economy; or that the most sizable areas of increased domestic spending do not involve “policy professionals, regulators and contractors” but automatic spending on Social Security and Medicare, which has almost no impact on the bank accounts of “elites.”
I will try to force myself to look at this series more carefully as it unfolds, but at this point, it sure looks like a heavily loaded contribution to an anticipatory zeitgeist keyed to the viewpoint of future Republican “elites” that Politico expects to rule Washington directly.

Now that all possible angles comparing the 2010 mid terms to those in 1994 have been explored, Rebecca Kaplan argues at Slate.com that the more relevant comparison is the 1982 elections. According to Kaplan’s post, “The Lessons of 1982: Why Democrats need not fear the ghosts of 1994“:

…Speculation is running rampant, particularly in the media and especially among Republicans (and White House spokesman Robert Gibbs), that 2010 could be a replay of the Democrats’ lowest political moment in the last half-century: the 1994 midterms, when Republicans seized 52 seats in the House and eight in the Senate, taking control of Congress for the first time in 40 years. But the similarities between 2010 and 1994 are superficial. The more relevant election–the one that gives a better gauge of the magnitude of losses the Democrats may see–is the 1982 midterms. Although some political scientists were predicting that the Democrats would gain as many as 50 seats, on Election Day they took only 26 seats from the Republicans.
…In many respects, today’s economic conditions are identical to those in 1982. The yearly change in real disposable income per capita is a key factor in predicting midterm outcomes: When their wallets are fuller, people are more likely to send their representatives back to Washington. And right now this number is almost the same as it was at this point in 1982. For the third quarter of 2010, Moody’s Economy.com is predicting a 0.4 percent increase in real disposable income per capita from last year–a fairly stagnant number that does not show much economic growth for the average citizen. In the third quarter of 1982, the change in real disposable income per capita was 0.5 percent–also fairly flat. The unemployment rate is also eerily familiar; it’s now pushing 10 percent, while in 1982 it was 9.7 percent. In 1994, meanwhile, the economy was in better shape than it is now or was in 1982, with a 6.1 percent unemployment rate and 2.3 percent increase in personal disposable income from the third quarter of 1993.

This last point regarding joblessness is not so reassuring. Looking at it from a slightly different angle, if the economy was better in ’94, and we still got creamed, how is that encouraging for Dems?
Kaplan points out that Dem and GOP congressional candidates are spending about equally now, as they did in ’82. While in 94, Republicans outspent Dems by an average of $91,383 in each race — or nearly $5 for every $3 spent by Dem candidates. Clearly, Democratic candidates have got to match their GOP adversaries in 2010, if they want to keep running the House and Senate. Kaplan goes out on a bit of a limb, noting “Without outspending the Democrats, it is unlikely the Republicans will be able to achieve all the pickups they are hoping for.”
As Kaplan explains, Republicans, under Gingrich’s “message mastery” did a particularly good job of working existing media in 94, while Democrats have a significant edge with new media in 2010. She adds that Clinton “lost control of the national conversation” and was distracted by non-economic issues, while Republicans hammered away. That is not the case today.
In a sense, however, all comparisons are not as relevant as some would have us believe. The information revolution that has occurred since ’94, and even more so since ’82, is a huge wild card. Political messaging has been transformed by the internet, Fox-TV and now MSNBC. Not to diminish the importance of economic indicators, but it matters a lot that candidates now have more opportunities to communicate with voters, and progresives seem to have an edge over conservatives in tapping this vein — for now.
Kaplan makes another good point in noting the deepening division in the GOP constituency exemplified by the tea party circus, which has produced some dicey candidates, like Rand Paul and Sharron Angle, while Dems have so far eschewed the circular firing squad of earlier years.
Here’s hoping Kaplan’s insights pan out. The key thing for Dems is to learn from electoral history, not to be limited by it. If Kaplan is right, the key challenges for Dems are to keep “control of the national conversation” and invest the bucks needed to fire up the base and win a healthy share of the persuadables.

It’s been obvious for quite some time–dating back at least to the fall of 2008–that the Republican Party is undergoing an ideological transformation that really is historically unusual. Normally political parties that go through two consecutive really bad electoral cycles downplay ideology and conspicuously seek “the center.” Not today’s GOP, in which there are virtually no self-identified “moderates,” and all the internal pressure on politicians–and all is no exaggeration–is from the right.
But as Jonathan Chait notes today, there are two distinct phenomena pulling the GOP to the right this year: there’s ideological radicalism, to be sure, but also what he calls “tactical radicalism:”

Obviously the conservative movement is intoxicated with hubris right now. Part of this hubris is their belief that the American people are truly and deeply on their side and that the last two elections were either a fluke or the product of a GOP that was too centrist. It’s a tactical radicalism, a belief that ideological purity carries no electoral cost whatsoever.

This is what I’ve called the “move right and win” hypothesis, and it’s generally based on some “hidden majority” theory whereby every defeat is the product of a discouraged conservative base or some anti-conservative conspiracy (e.g., the bizarre “ACORN stole the election” interpretation of 2008). As Chait observes, there is a counterpart hypothesis on the left, but is vastly less influential, and anyone watching internal party politics these days will note the major difference in tone between Democratic primaries where moderation is generally a virtue and Republican primaries where it’s always a vice.
While many Democrats (including Chait in the piece I’ve linked to) are interested in the short-term implications of tactical radicalism, such as the possibility that GOP candidates like Sharron Angle or Rand Paul could lose races that should be Republican cakewalks, there’s a long-term factor as well that no one should forget about for a moment. If, as is almost universally expected, Republicans have a very good midterm election year after a highly-self-conscious lurch to the right, will there be any force on earth limiting the tactical radicalism of conservatives going forward? I mean, really, there’s been almost no empirical evidence supporting the “move right and win” hypothesis up until now, and we see how fiercely it’s embraced by Republicans. Will 2010 serve as the eternal validator of the belief that America’s not just a “center-right country” but a country prepared to repudiate every progressive development of the last century or so?
That could well be the conviction some conservatives carry away from this election cycle, and if so, what would normally pass for the political “center” will be wide open for Democrats to occupy for the foreseeable future.

If you really want to understand “polarization” in today’s political climate, you have to understand that Ds and Rs, and conservatives and liberals, live in very different worlds when it comes to facts and relevant information. We’ve seen an unusually graphic illustration of this reality during the last week, when much of the conservative chattering classes have been obsessed not with the financial regulation bill, not with Republican primary battles, but with the premise that there’s a massive effort underway led by the Obama administration to harrass and demonize white people.
The main exhibit in this bizarre narrative is one Malik Zulu Shabazz, the leader of something called the New Black Panther Party. On election day in 2008, Shabazz and a few associates played the fool at a virtually all-black Philadelphia polling place, and yelled about “crackers” voting the wrong way. Despite the lack of evidence that Shabazz had actually intimidated any actual voters, the DOJ initiated a criminal prosecution, which it then downgraded to a civil suit (all of this was under the Bush administration). Shortly after Obama’s inauguration, DOJ dropped the civil suit, and a former DOJ attorney is now claiming that he and others were under instructions not to go after African-Americans for voter intimidation violations.
Now at this juncture it’s important to understand that many conservatives not only deny there are significant efforts to intimidate or otherwise discourage minority voters, but that the real threat to the integrity of U.S. elections comes from the other side of the political and racial lines. These are folks who seem to believe, for example, that the relatively marginal community organizing group (now disbanded after being denied any access to federal funds for non-political activities) ACORN may have stolen the 2008 presidential election for Barack Obama. So a pathetic self-promoting guy like Shabazz is pure political gold.
And sure enough, Shabazz has appeared frequently on Fox News to spout his nonsense, as reported by Dave Weigel:

How often does Fox bring on the Panthers, or talk about them? A Lexis-Nexis search finds 68 mentions of “Malik Zulu Shabazz,” a leader of the NBPP. The majority are appearances on Fox News, where Shabazz is repeatedly brought on to act as a foolish, anti-Semitic punching bag. Among the segment titles: “Professor’s Comments on Whites Stir Controversy” and “Black Panthers Take a Stand on Duke Rape Case.”

This last week, Shabazz’s fifteen minutes of Fox Fame was extended as Fox reporters and conservative bloggers brandished the “scandal” of the NBBP’s escape from civil liability for acting the fool as a response to the NAACP’s resolution calling on the Tea Party movement to repudiate its “racist elements.” RedState’s highly influential Erick Erickson even called on Republicans to make Shabazz the “Willie Horton” of the 2010 campaign.
Unbelievable, eh? But it all makes sense among folks who seem to believe that the only real racism in America is being exhibited by anyone who thinks white racism is a problem, and that in fact, white people are being victimized by minorities, in Philadelphia, in the Department of Justice, and in the White House itself. As Jonathan Chait notes in reference to Fox’s Shabazzaganza:

There has been a great deal of right-wing insanity unleashed over the last year and a half, but this is the first time that the fear has an explicitly racial cast. You now have the largest organ of movement conservatism promoting Limbaugh’s idee fixe that the Obama administration represents black America’s historical revenge against whites.

At a minimum, it’s scary that conservative Americans are being tutored in anti-anti-racism, the idea that what’s called “playing the race card” is always illegitimate, regardless of the facts. But what’s worse is the idea that semi-open race-baiting involving imaginary menaces like the New Black Panther Party is now being promoted as anti-racism. It’s anti-anti-racism with a particularly nasty twist.

There’s been a saga unfolding this week in Colorado which illustrates the fundamental fact that polls, political trends, money, and all the advantages in the world can’t guarantee an electoral victory for any given candidate, if he or she has a skeleton in the old closet that suddenly emerges and starts clanking in front of the cameras.
Republican gubernatorial candidate Scott McInnis, considered an even bet to defeat Denver mayor John Hickenlooper in November, has suffered this fate, leaving the Colorado GOP in a heap of trouble.
Long story short, the Denver papers seem to have done some rudimentary checking into McGinnis’ finances, and discovered that just after his retirement from Congress in 2005, he got paid a cool $300,000 for a two-year stint with a foundation in which his only visible work was a 150-page paper with the gripping title of “Musings on Water.” Somehow or other, suspicions were raised that this might not be the former congressman’s original work, and an out-of-state expert figured out that whole pages were lifted from a twenty-year-old paper written by somebody else. Mcinnis then sought to dime out his “researcher” on the project, confirming, of course, that he didn’t exactly sit down at the computer and pound out the pricey paper himself. Said researcher, an 82-year-old engineer, allowed as how he thought he was doing campaign research for McInnis, and expressed considerable unhappiness that he was only paid a few hundred bucks while the putative gubernatorial candidate was pulling down 300 large.
McInnis should be nicknamed “Digger,” since everything he’s done to “explain” his problem has just widened and deepened the crevice into which his candidacy has now descended.
The problem is, the state party convention has passed, and now McInnis is on the primary ballot with a tea party activist, Dan Maes, who just received a major fine for campaign finance violations (ironic, since the guy can’t seem to raise much money). State party poohbahs would like to find a replacement for McInnis, but can’t do that until the primary, which could well be won by Maes, who ain’t going anywhere. Meanwhile, McInnis is refusing to do anything other than soldier on with his campaign. At this point, with primary ballots already printed and in the mail, Colorado Republicans seem to be hoping that McInnis will beat Maes and then decide to withdraw his nomination, allowing party leaders to find a toothsome replacement (perhaps the loser of the Norton-Buck Senate battle).
Quite a mess, eh? And totally unforeseen so far as we can tell.
The moral of the story is that any candidate for major office should hire a good, vicious oppo research consultant to review his or her own record and show exactly what could be made of this or that “insignificant” fact. Some candidates actually do that. Looks like Scott McInnis didn’t, and in a difficult year, Democrats should have at least one bright spot in Colorado.