This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
The end is near for Rick Santorum. That doesn’t mean, though, that it’s time for Mitt Romney to start celebrating. Yes, Romney won Wisconsin Tuesday night, and has a near-lock on the eventual nomination. But claims that he is beginning to seal the deal with party conservatives are premature. A look at Wisconsin exit polls shows that he is still struggling among right-wing voters. That has clear implications for the type of general election campaign Romney can run–and the kind of vice-presidential candidate he’ll eventually have to pick.
What did we learn from the Wisconsin primary? The first exit poll reports seemed to project a 7-point margin for Romney, and an impressive showing among very right-wing voters. “Evangelicals, tea party supporters, those supporting ‘traditional values’ and people calling themselves ‘very conservative’ went Romney’s way, exit polls showed,” CNN’s Peter Hamby reported in an early analysis. The final exits, though, told a different story, one more consistent with Romney’s narrow margin of victory of only 4 points: Santorum enjoyed his accustomed win among evangelicals, and there was a tie between the two candidates among “very conservative” voters. Santorum also won among the more than half of primary voters who say they attend church weekly, and among rural voters. Yes, Romney made strides among all the traditionally pro-Santorum demographic groups, and won some, but breakthrough is too strong a word.
Romney had better hope Santorum is out of the race or out of money by May, when almost every state voting has demographics significantly less favorable to the frontrunner than Wisconsin’s. The issue isn’t whether Romney will win the nomination–proportional allocation of delegates in the most troublesome May states, along with a decisive group of pro-Romney primaries in June, ensure that he will. But his continuing struggle among the most conservative segments of the GOP may mean he has to spend far more time courting them than he’d prefer.
There are other signs of conservative intransigence on the horizon. Some analysts noted that 28 percent of Wisconsin primary voters thought Rick Santorum was “too conservative.” Less mentioned was that 23 percent said he was “not conservative enough.” It’s unclear exactly how much overlap that group had with the 44 percent of Wisconsin voters who said the same thing of Romney. But it is obvious that much of the GOP base believes the field of primary candidates was never conservative enough to begin with–a belief encouraged by Mitt Romney’s super PACs, which tried to counteract the skepticism towards their candidate by mounting relentless attacks on the conservative credentials of Santorum (and earlier, on Newt Gingrich). In state after state, Romney was winning votes from hardcore conservatives, not because he had persuaded them of his conservative credentials, but because he had persuaded them to train their ideological ire against the competition. Stoking the grievances of the party in this way may have been an instrumentally useful tactic to gain the nomination, but it has also made it that much more difficult to unify and energize the base behind his general election campaign.
In any case, the long-awaited pivot to a general election message, already complicated by his communication director’s “Etch-a-Sketch” gaffe, could be delayed considerably. Once the primaries finally end, conservatives may shift from resisting Mitt by voting for Santorum to making shrill demands on Romney-as-nominee.
And the current conservative focus on Romney’s most vulnerable issue, health care, may not help either. Ironically, if the Supreme Court does overturn the Affordable Care Act this summer–either partially or completely–the problem for Romney could grow worse, as his much-repeated commitment to the “Repeal” part of the GOP “Repeal-and-Replace” message loses value. He’ll have to reassure conservatives once again that he wouldn’t “replace” ObamaCare with any sort of ObamaCare Lite, just as swing voters might want him to endorse national measures to, say, outlaw preexisting condition exclusions.
But the most important conservative demand on Romney will likely involve his running-mate. He might try to thread the needle by choosing someone like Marco Rubio or Paul Ryan, who are already on his “team,” but very popular among hardcore conservatives. But if he feels the need for greater tactical flexibility, he may not find much cooperation.
Sarah Palin’s suggestion this week that Allen West, the truly far-right congressman from Florida, would make Mitt a fine running-mate sounds ludicrous–but it may also signal a tough bargaining position by leaders of the right. After all, in similar circumstances in 2008, John McCain gave them Palin herself. This year, with conservatives feeling more optimistic than they did four years ago, and more in control of the party, they’ll hardly want to settle for less.

You won’t be shocked by Darius Dixon’s Politico report “Poll: GOPers say ‘too much’ media on Trayvon Martin.” Dixon notes a Pew Research survey which found that “Twice as many Republicans [56 percent] as Democrats [25 percent] say there’s been too much media coverage of the death of unarmed Florida teen Trayvon Martin…Among Democrats, 38 percent said they were following Martin’s death more closely than other stories, while 19 percent of Republicans said that they were following the story more closely than other headlines.”
Republicans have an understandable reason to be nervous about the Trayvon Martin case — especially if it leads to a big uptick in African American voter enthusiasm and registration in Florida. Meanwhile, Florida is wasting no time in terms of voter suppression. As Ashley Lopez reports in the Florida Independent, “The Center for American Progress released a report today on voter suppression efforts carried out by Republican-led state legislatures around the country, listing Florida as one of “five worst states for voting rights in 2011″…Florida lawmakers passed a new voting law last year that has drawn fire from federal officials, legislators, advocacy groups and voting rights experts from all over the country. The many critics of the law have said the law is a concerted effort to keep minorities, young people, the elderly and the poor from the polls on Election Day…Florida’s contentious law places prohibitive rules and restrictions on third-party voter registration groups, creates a shortened “shelf life” for signatures collected for ballot initiatives, places new restrictions on voters changing their registered addresses on election day, and reduces the number of early voting days — among many other provisions…A report from the NAACP found that, as of last year, Florida actually has the “most restrictive” felon disenfranchisement “laws in the country.”…Florida is one of only four states in the country that “denies the right to vote permanently to all individuals convicted of any felony offense.”
John Gardner of The Guardian has an update on “Wisconsin: America’s democratic struggle laid bare” charting the forward progress of United Wisconsin’s recall campaign and prospects for the June recall vote. Gardner adds:”Whatever June’s results, United Wisconsin has already won two significant victories. State and federal court decisions have overturned Walker’s ban on workplace dues collection and annual recertification elections…And the recall elections have already created a significant opening for the pivotal 17th, majority vote in the state senate…If Democrats win even one of four contested recall state senate elections, they will recapture a majority, frustrating further legislative initiatives from Governor Walker and Republican representatives.”
At least one veteran pundit thinks Justice Kennedy’s line of questioning in the recent hearings on Obamacare was encouraging from the Administration’s perspective. As Clarence Page put it in his syndicated column, “…as Kennedy’s tough questions persisted, Kennedy sounded increasingly like he was searching less for ammunition than for reassurance…It’s hard to believe Kennedy didn’t know the answers to his questions before he asked them. But if he found good enough reasons to support the law, he could possibly win the support of Chief Justice John Roberts, whose court would sound more credible with a 6-3 decision than a 5-4.”
Robert I. Field, a professor of law at Drexel University’s Earle Mack School of Law and a professor of health management and policy at its School of Public Health, has an op-ed at the Philadelphia Inquirer arguing that an adverse ruling on the Affordable Care Act would make the public option inevitable. Says Field: “If the health-care law is struck down, it’s only a matter of time before Congress finds it has to address the issue again. The system cannot go on indefinitely with more than a sixth of the population uninsured and the number growing every year…And when Congress does revisit the subject, it would be boxed in by a ruling against the current law. It wouldn’t be able to rely on the private market, because that would require a mechanism to force healthy people into the risk pool…The only clearly constitutional large-scale reform would be a direct extension of coverage by the federal government. Is that what the law’s opponents and the conservative justices really want?”
President Obama is under fire for his recent warnings about the ramifications of an adverse Supreme Court ruling on the ACA. In their Bloomberg Businessweek article “Obama Risks Voter Backlash by Warning High Court on Health Law,” Greg Stohr and Seth Ster note that the president’s references to “judicial activism” by “an unelected group of people” are heightening concerns about political partisanship in the Supreme Court: “The case is testing the court’s standing as a nonpolitical body. A decision striking down the law would almost certainly be along party-based lines, with the five Republican-appointed justices joining to invalidate the measure and the four Democratic appointees dissenting…This will mark the first time the court has ruled on a president’s signature legislative accomplishment in the middle of his re-election campaign. The decision will probably come in late June, less than five months before the election.”
Meanwhile the New York Times’ Jackie Calmes discusses the “Court’s Potential to Goad Voters Swings to Democrats.” Calmes quotes Democratic pollster Geoff Garin: “Historically, the court has been a rallying point for the Republican base, and it is now much easier to imagine that it will be a rallying point with the Democratic base just as much if not more, especially if the court overturns the Affordable Care Act…My guess is that more voters will think, ‘If they can do that, they can do just about anything — and that includes overturning Roe v. Wade’ — the landmark 1973 abortion rights decision…In a poll for The Washington Post and the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 32 percent of Democrats said they had a less favorable opinion of the Supreme Court after the hearings, compared with 14 percent of Republicans.”
Ed Kilgore’s “Another Terry Schiavo Moment” a The Washington Monthly shines fresh light on Judge Jerry Smith’s tantrum and GOP leaders’ gleeful reaction as “an incident providing a very public glimpse into a veiled, radical perspective that supposedly mainstream, respectable figures embraced.”
Dem candidates who could use some ammo to fight the onslaught of Big Biz “regulatory reform” should read Rich Robinson’s “Damage Done By Regulatory “Reform” at Demos. Tidbits: “In Pennsylvania alone, for each year the government fails to update the restriction on levels of toxic soot in the air the state will face 3,890 preventable deaths and 84,539 preventable asthma attacks among children…In Ohio, delaying the Affordable Care Act’s ban on health insurance companies discriminating against patients with pre- existing conditions for one year will put 65,060 newly diagnosed cancer patients at risk of being denied health insurance…Allowing food processors to delay one year before using new standards from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for safe handling of produce will cause approximately 200,000 local cases of foodborne illness–more than the entire city of Worcester.”
Richard Kahlenberg and Moshe Z. Marvit have an interesting idea for rebuilding America’s labor movement up at Slate.com, “What MLK Would Do ; How to make labor organizing a civil right.”

John Nichols makes a good point in his post “Who Got the Most Votes in Tuesday’s Primaries? Not Mitt Romney” in The Nation:

…Romney’s actual vote in the super-low turnout District of Columbia GOP primary was just 3,122.
It wasn’t all that much better in Maryland, where, with all the votes counted, Romney was well below the 120,000 vote mark.
And in Wisconsin, with 97 percent counted, Romney was only at 305,000.

As for Obama’s totals on Tuesday:

In the District of Columbia, the president’s Democratic primary total was at 51,289–more than fifteen times Romney’s Republican primary total.
In Maryland, where Romney was struggling to get to the 117,000 mark in the GOP primary, Obama was surpassing 275,000 in the Democratic primary. That way better than a 2-1 margin for the president.
And in Wisconsin, which got the lion’s share of attention on this primary day, Romney’s 305,000 GOP total (with 97 percent of precincts reporting) was barely better than Obama’s 285,000 total on the Democratic side.
Add Obama’s votes up across the three jurisdictions that voted Tuesday and he’s almost 200,000 votes ahead of Romney.

Yes, we know. Obama was unopposed. But think of all the Dems who didn’t bother to vote, since there was no contest. As Nichols, concludes, “The numbers provide a sobering reminder for the Republicans. Turnout, even for their intensely fought contests, remains low. And in most cases, Romney still does not win a majority of the votes.”

A lot has been written recently about the pro-Democratic gender gap, which has increased to a point where it could rank second only behind the economy as the decisive factor in the November elections. Linda Feldman of the Monitor does a good job of explaining why:

…Men and women have diverged in every presidential race since 1980. In 2008, Mr. Obama won 56 percent of the female vote (versus 43 percent for John McCain) and 49 percent of the male vote (to Senator McCain’s 48 percent), for a seven-point gender gap. For now, Obama leads Mr. Romney among women in major polls – by 20 points in the latest Pew Research Center poll, fewer in others – and is tied or trailing Romney among men.
The likely question for Obama, then, isn’t whether he will get more women than men to vote for him, but how big the margin will be. If Obama is to win, he will need a big women’s vote to offset an expected deficit in the men’s vote.
“The reason the gender gap is so important is not just the difference in points between men and women, it’s that there are more women than men overall, more women registered to vote, and a higher female turnout rate,” says Dianne Bystrom, director of the Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics at Iowa State University in Ames.

The Obama campaign is wasting no time in leveraging the trend, and is preparing to expand the gender gap as it relates to the upcoming decision on health care reform:

To mark the second anniversary of the law’s enactment on March 23, the campaign has created phone banks of women calling women voters in battleground states and released videos of women who had benefited from the [health care reform] law. The campaign also launched an effort called “Nurses for Obama.” The Democratic National Committee sent a million pieces of mail to women in battleground states. The Obama campaign’s goal is to inform women on the law’s gender-related benefits – such as a ban on charging women more than men for health insurance and no co-pays for mammograms and other health screenings – and build up a constituency for the law…If all or part of the Affordable Care Act is found unconstitutional, a real possibility, Team Obama hopes to tap into a newly energized base of women who will see their rights under attack.

It’s an interesting angle, and depending on the uproar over the Supreme Court’s ruling, it might prove to be a decisive factor on the election.

It’s been a busy week already over at Washington Monthly‘s Political Animal blog, and here are links and notes on three items that may be of particular interest to TDS readers:
* As Stu Rothenberg notes accurately, Mitt Romney’s lack of credibility extends from conservatives who don’t believe he’s one of them to GOP moderates who think he’s lying to conservatives. All in all, I conclude, Mitt really may be the New Nixon.
* There’s an increasingly apparent gap between poli-sci influenced analysts who stress “fundamentals” and play down individual campaign events, and “granular” reporters revealing “inside” stories. Politico’s latest e-book an extreme example of the latter.
* Conservatives seeking to justify franchise-shrinking Voter ID bills are always on hunt for rare “voter fraud” story. Now they are trying to stretch an obscure Indiana case involving allegedly forged primary ballot petitions into a Big Outrage.

This article, by Al Quinlan and Andrew Baumann, president and vice president, respectively, of the polling firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
This week’s White House announcement of rules that will, for the first time, limit the carbon dioxide emission from new power plants is a big victory for Americans who want to see the U.S. move away from outdated and dirty energy sources like coal and toward clean sources like wind and solar. It also, despite the conventional wisdom, can be a political boon for President Obama and the White House.
We recently conducted a bipartisan survey, along with the Republican firm Perception Insight, for the American Lung Association that explored voters’ attitudes toward environmental regulations generally and on carbon dioxide regulation specifically. We found that voters overwhelmingly support strengthening environmental regulations, including those on carbon emissions.
With the political debate about gas prices raging, we want to be clear that our survey did not touch on that issue and that we are not arguing that gas prices are not a danger for Obama or Democrats. As ads like the one recently released by one oil industry front group demonstrate, this can be an area of vulnerability for the White House. (However, as we have argued in the past, the GOP’s two-armed embrace of Big Oil, reaffirmed by yet another vote in favor of oil company subsidies, leaves them equally vulnerable.) Nonetheless, we believe voters see gas prices and environmental regulations as separate issues; our research shows that they do not connect the two in their minds.
In our survey for the ALA, two-thirds of voters support the EPA setting stricter limits on air pollution. And their support is 70 percent or higher for tighter limits on the emission of mercury, smog, AND carbon dioxide from power plants. In fact, a 72 to 24 percent majority support the EPA’s new rules limiting carbon emissions. After voters hear a balanced debate, including attacks on the new rule similar to those that have come from Republicans (claiming that the new rules are burdensome regulations that will kill jobs and increase energy prices at the worst time), some Republican voters do consolidate against the rules, but a nearly two-to-one majority (63 to 33 percent) continues to favor EPA’s new standards. That includes 65 percent of independents.
The reason there is such robust support for stronger environmental regulations generally — and these new carbon standards in particular — is that voters fundamentally reject the false choice that EPA critics are trying to set up between the economy and the environment. To test that specifically, we asked voters to choose between the following two statements:

Creating more environmental regulations will increase costs, hurt our economic recovery and destroy jobs. We have to prioritize between the environment and the economy.
OR
It is possible to protect our air quality and public health and have a strong economy with good jobs at the same time. We don’t have to choose one over the other.

By a 73 to 21 percent margin — including 78 percent of independents, 69 percent of conservatives and 60 percent of Republicans — voters choose the second statement. Moreover, a 60 to 31 percent majority believes that stronger environmental regulations will CREATE, rather than destroy, jobs by encouraging innovation and investment in new technologies. A study conducted earlier this month by the Economic Policy Institute shows that voters, not EPA critics, have it right: Stronger environmental regulations from the EPA (specifically its Mercury and Air Toxics Standards) will create more than 115,000 net jobs in American by 2015.
Despite the economic reality and the overwhelming public sentiment in favor of stronger environmental regulations, the conventional wisdom held by many on both sides of the aisle, and among many pundits, is that the voters will punish politicians who support stricter regulations. Such thinking led, among other things, to the White House’s mistaken decision to shelve new smog standards (which were overwhelmingly popular) last year. Our research shows that this conventional wisdom is wrong.
We believe that these sentiments are born from basic misunderstandings of three phenomena.
First is the mistaken assumption that the voting public’s general skepticism of regulations extends to regulations specifically addressing the environment. A recent survey from Pew demonstrates how this is incorrect. While a 52 to 40 percent majority says that government regulation of business usually does more harm than good, when Americans are asked about regulations on specific areas, more of them want to strengthen, rather than reduce, regulations (by a 50 to 17 percent margin on the environment). In this, environmental regulation is a lot like spending on Medicare. Voters support less spending or regulation in the abstract, but when asked about reducing spending or regulation on something they strongly support, they are vehemently opposed.
Second is the misread of last cycle’s Cap-and-Trade debate. Few would argue that the debate had a positive impact on Democrats (and we do not). However, the negative impacts have been somewhat overblown, leading many Democrats to be overly skittish about environmental and energy issues. There were certainly some rural, conservative districts where Cap-and-Trade played a role, but two separate academic studies have concluded that while voting for the Health Care reform has a significant negative impact on Democratic incumbents, a vote for Cap-and-Trade had little statistically significant impact on vote choice in most districts.
Third is Solyndra. Our research has found that while Solyndra can open Democrats to an attack about unaccountable spending, the concerted attempts from the right to use it to undermine support for clean energy have mostly failed among voters in the middle of the political spectrum. Recent focus groups among independent and swing voters that we conducted with Third Way found that Solyndra did not undermine these voters’ backing for government support (through incentives and regulation) of clean energy. Pew has shown similar quantitative results — support for alternative energy is down among Republican voters, but not independents or Democrats.
Conservatives and Republicans are already attacking the administration over the new carbon dioxide regulations, but they are doing so at their own peril. When it comes to these new standards, voters are firmly in the White House’s corner.

I hate to admit it, but I’m wondering if conservative Ramesh Ponnuru has a point in his Bloomberg post accusing Dems who believe that the Supreme Court striking down the health care law or the individual mandate would be a good thing of “magical thinking.” Ponnuru’s argument:

Let’s say the court strikes down the entire law. The Democratic fantasy goes something like this: The public will still be upset about the number of Americans without insurance, rising premiums and the difficulty people with pre-existing conditions have getting insurance. Republicans will have no plan for achieving universal coverage. Sooner or later, single payer — which would probably be more popular than a mandate, and thus an easier sell to the public — will prevail
Reality-check time: When Obamacare became law, Democrats had more power in Washington than at any time since the Carter administration in the 1970s. They had the presidency and lopsided majorities in both houses of Congress. Because conservative Democrats have declined in numbers, it was probably the most liberal Congress since 1965-66. They were still barely able to pass the law. And that was with important medical industries either neutralized or in favor of the legislation, which they would not be in the case of single payer.
Democrats attained that degree of power because of an unusual set of circumstances: an unpopular Republican president reaching the end of his second term and a financial crisis hitting at exactly the right time. The odds are that it will be a long, long time until Democrats again hit the jackpot. And without an overwhelming Democratic majority, getting single payer through Congress would be almost impossible: Republicans won’t acquiesce to any steps toward such a system.

If most of the ACA survives, but the individual mandate gets invalidated:

……Or let’s say the court strikes down the mandate, but leaves in place the insurance regulations. The regulations without the mandate would lead healthy people to drop their coverage — the insurance rules mean such people would be able to get it again if they get sick — and with only ill people covered, premiums would soar.
…Democrats would be outraged if the court struck down the mandate, and would presumably blame any resulting problems in the health-care market on its decision. Republicans, meanwhile, would blame the Democrats for enacting a flawed law that couldn’t survive legal scrutiny.
The public is likely to side with the court, for two reasons. Americans express significantly more confidence in the court than in the presidency or Congress. And most Americans dislike the individual mandate and actually want it struck down.

Ponnuru has no happy outcomes for Dems in either case. Another conservative publication, Forbes, has a more encouraging post, “What’s Democrats’ Plan B If the Individual Mandate Goes Down?” by Avik Roy, which merits skeptical consideration.
Roy begins by noting that Dems could have bulletproofed the law in terms of the Commerce Clause by creating a tax to pay for health care, coupled with a credit for those who sign on — “equivalent to the mandate in policy terms, but would have been far sounder from a constitutional standpoint.” Alternatively, Dems could have embraced the “German provision” that allows individuals to opt out, but then wait five years before they can qualify for “guaranteed-issue insurance that doesn’t exclude pre-existing conditions.”
As Paul Starr puts it in The New Republic, the German provision “That deters opportunistic switches in and out of the public funds, and it helps to prevent the private insurers from cherry-picking healthy people and driving up insurance costs in the public sector.” It would likely also compel ‘free market’ purists to put up or shut up.
Roy goes on to discuss grim possible scenarios of chain reactions to the elimination of the individual mandate, including the crumbling of ‘community rating’ and ‘guaranteed issue,’ in a “death spiral” for the act. he then makes his pitch for “A Democratic “Plan B” that could gain Republican support” —“a universal tax credit for the purchase of insurance” with “a stronger cap on the employer tax exclusion.”
In other words, cave to the GOP agenda. No thanks would be my reaction to such a plan. As with all such tax credit/voucher schemes, it’s hard to see any credible cost-containment at work.
The more credible ‘Plan B’s, in Roy’s post would be to amend the act to include the ‘German provision,’ or alternatively converting the mandate into a tax credit rigidly linked to a tax to pay for the coverage. Republicans, of course will fight anything resembling a doable fix, which may be a good argument for building a movement for single payer.
It’s hard to develop any ‘Plan B’ without knowing exactly what the court will do. Whatever they do, however, Dems should have an alternative ready to go, so we don’t look like we are floundering around. Pollsters will likely move quickly to assess where most of the blame is directed, which will help Dems target their strategy.

This item is crossposted from The New Republic.
Last week was a pretty good one for Mitt Romney. He moved ahead of Rick Santorum in the polls in Wisconsin. His lead in national polls of Republicans increased as well. And he continued to get prominent endorsements from star conservatives like Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan, indicating a party moving in his direction. But despite all this encouraging news, there was a cloud on Romney’s horizon: his terrible approval ratings.
How terrible? According to a new ABC News-Washington Post survey, only 34 percent of Americans view Romney favorably (“the lowest for any leading presidential candidate in ABC/Post polls in primary seasons since 1984”). And 50 percent of Americans rate Romney unfavorably–that’s higher than any unfavorability score Obama has received ever.
Needless to say, this is not what you want to hear when you’re still busy courting your party’s most extremist voters in an effort to nail down the nomination. In fact, Romney’s record-low ratings probably have a lot to do with this year’s extended primary. John McCain, for example, was doing much better at this point in 2008, with a 54-40 approval/disapproval rating–but he had already won the nomination. According to ABC/Post, Romney’s unfavorability score has been exceeded “by only one top candidate in 28 years, Hillary Clinton in 2008.” It’s no accident that the past candidate who actually exceeds Romney’s unfavorable is Clinton, who was also still in a highly competitive nomination contest at the end of March.
A big part of Romney’s problem, as ABC’s Gary Langer explains in his analysis of the new poll, is that “core Republican voters” don’t much like him–in sharp contrast to Obama, whose troubles with the Democratic base seem to be over:

Romney’s seen favorably by 62 percent of Republicans and 47 percent of conservatives overall, including 54 percent of strong conservatives. Obama fares much better on the other side of the political spectrum – 86 percent favorable among Democrats, 75 percent among liberals.

The president peaks at 91 percent favorability among liberal Democrats, vs. Romney’s 66 percent among conservative Republicans. These are like-sized groups: Liberal Democrats account for 16 percent of all adults in this poll, conservative Republicans for 18 percent.
Intensity of sentiment is an even sharper point of differentiation. Sixty-one percent of Democrats and half of liberals see Obama “strongly” favorably, the most in nearly a year. Strongly favorable ratings of Romney dive to 15 and 13 percent among Republicans and conservatives.

But Romney’s unfavorability among core Republicans probably won’t cost him that much. There’s plenty of reason to figure Mitt’s most conservative detractors will ultimately support him in the general election, especially against an opponent they dislike far more than Democrats disliked John McCain in 2008.A Public Policy Polling survey a bit earlier in March that showed Romney with an even more dismal approval-disapproval ratio (33-58) also indicated his most avid conservative detractors would back him strongly in the general election. According to PPP, Romney’s approval ratio among “very conservative” voters was 43/48. Yet the same voters preferred him to Obama 76/16. Meanwhile, Obama’s 81/11 approval ratio among “very liberal” voters is almost identical to his support from them against Romney (81/15). In other words, Romney has a hidden cushion of support.
That cushion doesn’t extend, however, to moderate and independent voters. Romney’s poor approval ratios among independents (35-52) and self-identified moderates (35-48) has to be troubling, especially when you consider how much time he will still have to spend articulating very conservative policy positions in the next few months. Aside from the extended GOP primary season, the Republican convention is relatively late this year (August 27-30), and the general election campaign will not fully get underway until after the Democrats complete their convention on September 6. Particularly after his campaign’s “Etch-a-Sketch” gaffe, Team Romney will have to execute any pivot from a primary to a general election message slowly and carefully.
Beyond all these considerations, the deeper fear in RomneyLand must be that their candidate is just not terribly likable once voters get to know him. In early 2008, when he was last running for president, his approval/disapproval ratings were similarly poor (28/43 in NBC/WSJ poll; 34/46 in ABC/WaPo poll; 32/42 in USAT/Gallup poll). Given his famous difficulty in connecting with average voters, and his tendency to commit regular gaffes drawing attention to his wealth and unusual background, perhaps he has the same affliction as his recent rival Newt Gingrich, who for nearly two decades has followed a pattern of momentary popularity (at least among Republicans) followed by a return to gravity.
It’s worth noting that even after his pounding by Romney during the primaries, and his many years of rubbing voters the wrong way, Gingrich’s approval ratio in the most recent PPP poll (28-61) is not that much worse than Romney’s. If people barely like you more than Newt Gingrich, that’s probably a sign to start worrying.

Josh Lederman posts at The Hill on “Siding with Gov. Walker in union fight could cost Romney in Nov.” It would be delicious if Romney lost the November election because of his shameless toadying up to Wisconsin’s anti-union GOP establishment. As Lederman puts it:

Embracing Walker offers major short-term advantages for Romney in Wisconsin, which holds its primary contest Tuesday, as the GOP front-runner looks for the last few wins he needs to lock up the nomination. But it might also risk alienating voters in union-heavy swing states such as Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania — at just the time when Romney and his campaign hope to turn their attention to the general election.
…Campaigning in Michigan in February, Romney blasted “labor stooges” who he said were shilling for Obama. The former Massachusetts governor also backed Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s (R) anti-union law, which voters overturned in November.
Romney’s campaign said he stands with Walker and will continue to address the union issue in the final days of the Wisconsin primary, including by visiting a call center where volunteers are working to keep Walker in office.

Romney’s pandering may not play so well on a national stage. As Lederman notes, “…a USA Today/Gallup poll in February showed that 61 percent of Americans opposed a law in their state similar to the one Walker championed in Wisconsin.” It’s not only Romney’s gaffes that feed the ‘Richie Rich’ image that fits him so well; it’s his beliefs and policies.

The Elizabeth Warren-Scott Brown Senate race in MA is a stat tie in latest Boston Globe/UNH survey, according to CNN Political Ticker.
By now, most Americans with a shred of political awareness know that the voting rights of African Americans, Latinos and students have been undermined across the nation in a very serious assault. Christine Pelosi reports at HuffPo about another group of an estimated 3.2 million voters, which is experiencing obstruction of their voting rights: “Americans with disabilities face voting impediments too. A 2011 op-ed by Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and Mark Perriello, president of the American Association of People with Disabilities, states: “There are more than 30 million Americans with disabilities of voting age, yet the Federal Election Commission (FEC) reports that there are more than 20,000 inaccessible polling places. Some are located in basements or buildings without ramps, and others only offer machines that are outdated and unworkable for a person who is blind, deaf, or physically impaired…”
Cameron Joseph reports at the Hill that the push is on among some GOP strategists for a Latino on their presidential ticket, with Sen. Marco Rubio (FL), NM Gov. Susana Martinez and NV Gov. Brian Sandoval atop the buzz.
In his Daily Beast post “How a Tweet Can Beat a PAC: Social Media Gives Voters Muscle in Politics,” Mark Mckinnon reports “…73 percent of adult Internet users went online to get news or information about the 2010 elections. Some 22 percent used Twitter or social networking sites in the months leading up to the midterms to connect to campaigns or the election itself. And this year, over 1.6 million watched President Obama’s re-election campaign film, “The Road We’ve Traveled,” on YouTube in just five days…Masters of leveraging technology four years ago, Obama for America already has spent more than $11 million on Web ads and text messages this election season.”
Tomasky ponders some interesting ways the high court ruling on the ACA could damage Romney more than Obama. “A ruling against the law, depending on its scope, has three possible effects. It takes a massive campaign weapon out of his hands. It forces him to answer a key question he has so far not had to answer. And finally, and it has the potential to put him on the defensive since he will have to align himself with an obviously political and unaccountable Court majority.”
Jonathan Chait ruminates at New York magazine on the pros and cons of fighting for a single-payer based system if the Supreme Court strikes down Obamacare.
Dems who want to be more savvy about the budget debate should read “The Budget for All: An Analysis of The Congressional Progressive Caucus Budget” by David Callahan and Jack Temple at Demos.
Now, here’s a Republican who gives excellent advice. At an ERA rally, Rep. Richard Hanna (R-NY) said: “…These are very precarious times for women, it seems. So many of your rights are under assault…I’ll tell you this: Contribute your money to people who speak out on your behalf, because the other side — my side — has a lot of it. And you need to send your own message.”
In her U.S. News post “Obama Trouncing GOP Candidates Among Female Voters,” Lauren Fox mines some nuggets about women’s political attitudes from the latest Pew Research Poll: “Younger women prefer Obama by greater margins than older women do. Women under 50 prefer the president to Romney by a 64 percent to 33 percent margin. But among women 65 and older, Romney actually leads Obama by a point…White women are evenly split between Romney and Obama.”
And Susan Page reports at USA Today that “President Obama has opened the first significant lead of the 2012 campaign in the nation’s dozen top battleground states, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds, boosted by a huge shift of women to his side…The biggest change came among women under 50. In mid-February, just under half of those voters supported Obama. Now more than six in 10 do while Romney’s support among them has dropped by 14 points, to 30%. The president leads him 2-1 in this group.”