Yesterday I flagged an AlterNet post by Leo W. Gerard, international president of the United Steelworkers union about a coalition of shareholders, workers and public interest groups mobilizing to address outrageous executive pay, environmental and worker safety concerns. I expressed hope that this coalition would also address corporate contributions to political campaigns.
Having just read a New Republic article, “Reining In Corporate $$, The Back Door Approach,” I can report that such stockholder’s campaigns are already well underway. According to the author, Alec MacGillis, here quoting from a WaPo article by Tom Hamburger and Brady Dennis:

…Reformers have decided that their best hope for trying to rein in secret spending is to straight to corporations. As The Post reports: “One of the most polarizing fights over money in politics has been unfolding this spring at annual corporate meetings, where shareholders are mounting an intensifying effort to push companies to disclose the money they spend on lobbying and political campaigns. The transparency push, playing out at shareholders meetings from coast to coast this spring, has received cheers from campaign finance reformers and some corporate governance experts. It has drawn ridicule from critics such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who see the effort as an attempt by liberal groups to squelch the voice of the business world….

MacGillis adds:

…The Sustainable Investments Institute, a Washington nonprofit that tracks shareholder resolutions, found that 109 — nearly a third of those up for votes at annual meetings in 2012 — sought more disclosures about spending on politics and lobbying….To date, 101 major companies have agreed to disclosure and board oversight of some of their political spending, according to Bruce Freed, president of the Center for Political Accountability, which rates companies on the issue. Freed and others argue that disclosure can help executives and directors avoid reputational risk to their firms.

Naturally big business leaders and their journalistic apologists are in an uproar about the shareholder movements for disclosure of political donations, even though most of the resolutions have been defeated. But some companies, like Microsoft, are beginning to see the upside of transparency of their political donations.
As Dan Bross, Microsoft’s senior director of corporate citizenship, puts it, “As a company, we believe in openness, transparency and accountability…We are doing what we believe is right.”
As MacGillis notes, the shareholder movement does nothing to directly force more transparency among wealthy individuals or privately-held companies. However, he adds that “the momentum toward encouraging disclosure from corporations is as good as any place to start when the other avenues are blocked.” It seems to me that, by setting a higher standard of accountability, the shareholder movement may yet have a positive effect on individuals and privately-held companies.
The shareholder campaigns should not be considered a substitute for legislation and litigation to compel transparency in political donations. But they can contribute to public awareness that transparency of corporate political donations is both desirable and possible.

Leo W. Gerard, international president of the United Steelworkers union, has an article up at AlterNet, “Workers of the World Unite — with Shareholders,” which all 99 percenters should find encouraging. Gerard explains:

At Citigroup, shareholders had their say on CEO pay — and they yelled, “No damn way!”…Concerted action by shareholders, workers and public interest groups compelled corporate change in several other cases this spring as well…At least three CEOs resigned. Executives truncated one shareholder meeting to 12 minutes. And across America and Europe, CEOs lamented the end of automatic approval for excessive executive compensation.
A wave of corporate change is rising because the rabble and the stockholders share an interest: decent corporate governance. To shareholders, decent means more long-term corporate vision providing reasonable returns and fewer risky, quick-profit schemes benefiting only executives. To workers, the unemployed, community and environmental groups, decent means operating corporations in the best interest of the nation, including treating workers with dignity and refraining from polluting. Together, the rabble and the shareholders wield power.

At ExxonMobil’s shareholder meeting next week, Gerard reports, activists will introduce resolutions to establish a climate change/greenhouse gas reductions task force for the company. The coalition will also protest the failure of the company to implement health and safety reforms at one of its major refineries, even though refinery explosions have killed 17 workers during the last 7 years.
They will also try to force CEO and Chairman Rex Tillerson to give up one of his offices at the company, because corporate boards are supposed to oversee executives and their pay, which is how Tillerson helped to leverage himself a big pay hike last year — from $29 million to $34.9 million, while the company denied smaller pay raises for its all-female clerical staff at Baytown. Gerard also notes that shareholder activists have checked exorbitant pay raises at Citigroup and three large British companies. Overall, adds Gerard, U.S. CEO’s make 325 times the pay of a “typical worker.”
The grand strategy of the worker-shareholder coalition going forward, according to Gerard, is “to demonstrate at more shareholder meetings than ever in American history to make corporations more accountable to their communities, workers and shareholders.”
In addition to addressing outrageous executive pay, environmental and worker safety concerns, it’s just possible that the shareholder-worker coalition could have a beneficial impact in checking corporate contributions to political campaigns. Activist shareholders have experienced some impressive success over the years. But it now looks like their future campaigns can do even more to compel accountability in corporate governance, opening up a new and promising strategy for progressive change.

Nate Silver makes a good case for using a new term, “elastic,” rather than “swing state” to describe states that are “…relatively sensitive or responsive to changes in political conditions, such as a change in the national economic mood. (This is in the same way that, in economics, an elastic good is one for which demand is highly sensitive to changes in prices.) According to Silver’s numerical rankings, the five most “elastic” states are, in order: RI; NH; ME; HA and VT. The least ‘elastic’ five (excluding DC) are, in order: MS; AL; SC; LA and GA.
The Democratic Governors Association ponys up $1 million for TV ads and GOTV to defeat Scott Walker in WI.
The Obama Administration and campaign are fighting back against the Romney/GOP meme that the President is a “big spender,” hammering the fact that “the rate of spending growth under President Obama is lower than under any president since Eisenhower…Spending under Mr. Obama (including the stimulus) has grown by about 1.4 percent a year, compared to 7.3 percent in George W. Bush’s first term, 3.2 percent in Bill Clinton’s first term, and 8.7 percent in Ronald Reagan’s first term. When inflation is taken into account, spending is now actually falling, the first decline since Richard Nixon.” as David Firestone reports at the NYT.
An eyebrow-raising Quinnipiac University poll gives Romney a 6-point edge over President Obama, “after trailing Obama by 7 points in late March.” But Palm Beach Post writers George Bennett and John Kennedy report that Dems have about a 40-36 percent registration advantage in FL, while Quinnipiac’s weighted sample is 34 percent Republican and 31 percent Democrat.
Jamell Bouie’s Plum Line post, “Why we should expect Obama to lose Florida in 2012” suggests Obama campaign resources might be more productively deployed elsewhere.
In the U.S. the argument is about the morality of felon disenfranchisement of 5.3 million American citizens, and whether people who have served time in jail should be allowed to vote. Meanwhile, The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that prisoners in the region have the right to vote, and the Brits are all bent out of shape about it, since they have had a ban on prisoner voting for 140 years and the uproar has generated lots of bipartisan jabber in the UK about affirming national sovereignty. Only two states in the U.S., Maine and Vermont, allow prisoners to vote.
At Politico, David Catanese reports that Elizabeth Warren and Scott Brown are in a stat tie in their race for the Senate seat currently held by Brown. But the good news for Warren is that “more than two-thirds of voters — 69 percent — said Warren’s Native American heritage listing is not a significant story, with just 27 percent saying it is.”
Demos has an excellent guide to the Voter Empowerment Act.
At Political Animal, Ed Kilgore has a couple of zingers regarding Romney’s responses in a recent interview with Mark Halperin. On Romney’s explanation why the economy would almost certainly improve in the first year of his term: “Wow, this is a “confidence fairy” that doesn’t even need to see any action; just one look at the manly visage of Mitt Romney, and the money will start flowing again!” On Romney’s explanation for why he is not advocating spending cuts for that first year: “Keynesianism! Keynesianism! Call Jim DeMint! Romney’s not for immediately balancing the budget! Romney thinks public-sector jobs are real! Romney doesn’t think the confidence fairy would offset spending cuts!”

Excellent Mayor that he is, Cory Booker screwed up big time when he criticized the Obama campaign for holding Romney accountable for his record at the helm of Bain Capital. To paraphrase WaPo columnist Gene Robinson’s quip on MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’ show, “…Everybody understands why a democrat in the New York metropolitan area is going to be nice to private equity…but not that nice.”
It wasn’t just that Booker is supposed to be a supportive Democrat etc. And, he has walked his comments back somewhat. Putting politics aside for a half-second, Booker’s critique was wrong from both a strategic and factual perspective. What a presidential candidate did for years and then brags about as indicative of his mighty powers of job-creation, most certainly merits rigorous analysis and a tough critique from his opponent. When Romney so frequently references his private sector experience as proof of his ability to lead America to a nation-wide recovery, he not only deserves scrutiny; he invites it.
Robert Reich makes sure Romney gets some of that scrutiny — and more — in his HuffPo column, “Why Obama Should Be Attacking Casino Capitalism — Both Romney’s Bain and JPMorgan.” Here’s a piece of Reich’s take:

I wish President Obama would draw the obvious connection between Bain Capital and JPMorgan Chase. That way his so-called “attack” on private equity is neither a personal attack on Mitt Romney nor a generalized attack on American business.
It’s an attack on a particular kind of capitalism that Romney and JPMorgan both practice: Using other peoples’ money to make big bets which, if they go wrong, can wreak havoc on the economy…It’s the substitution of casino capitalism for real capitalism, the dominance of the betting parlor over the real business of America, financial innovation rather than product innovation…It’s been terrible for the American economy and for our democracy.

Reich goes on to urge Obama to mount a stronger attack vs. JPMorgan Chase’s recent “reckless bets,” and adds,

As a practical matter, the Volcker Rule is hopeless. It was intended to be Glass-Steagall lite — a more nuanced version of the original Depression-era law that separated commercial from investment banking. But JPMorgan has proven that any nuance — any exception — will be stretched beyond recognition by the big banks…So much money can be made when these bets turn out well that the big banks will stop at nothing to keep the spigot open…There’s no alternative but to resurrect Glass-Steagall as a whole.

Reich also blasts “the “carried interest” loophole that allows private-equity managers like Mitt Romney to treat their incomes as capital gains, taxed at only 15 percent, when they’ve risked no money of their own,” and concludes:

If private equity were good for America it wouldn’t need this or the other tax preference it depends on, elevating debt over equity. But the private equity industry has huge political clout, which is why these tax preferences remain…Get it? Bain Capital and JPMorgan are parts of the same problem. The president should be leading the charge against both.

Steven Rattner also puts it well in his New York Times op-ed:

Mr. Obama struck the right balance, emphasizing that he wasn’t attacking private equity but was questioning Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital credentials to be the job creator in chief.
That’s fair, particularly because Mr. Romney himself has been foolishly reweaving history to claim, as recently as last week, that he helped create 100,000 jobs during his time at Bain…Mr. Romney takes credit for every job ever created at every company Bain Capital invested in during his tenure — while ignoring jobs eliminated after his departure.

Worse, adds Rattner,

And in a further effort to deflect attention from the Bain Capital debate, Mr. Romney last week argued that President Obama was responsible for the loss of 100,000 jobs in the auto industry over the past three years.
That’s both ridiculously false (auto industry and dealership jobs have increased by about 50,000 since January 2009) and a remarkable comment from a man who said that the companies should have been allowed to go bankrupt and that the industry would have been better off without President Obama’s involvement.
Adding jobs was never Mitt Romney’s private sector agenda, and it’s appropriate to question his ability to do so.

Despite all of the above a new NBC/Wall St. Journal poll indicates that nearly 60 percent of respondents believe that Romney’s experience gives him cred for economic leadership. The Obama campaign would be suicidal to let that misperception go unchallenged.
It looks like the President gets it, as indicated by the speech excerpt in the ‘Noteworthy’ box above. Whether you call it ‘casino’ or ‘vulture’ capitalism, this is clearly not the kind of ‘free enterprise’ the majority of Americans want to protect, and the President would be remiss if he gave Romney’s whole-hearted embrace of it a free ride.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
In the two months since Eric Fehrnstrom’s “etch-a-sketch” gaffe, many political observers have waited for the iconic moment when Romney would move to the center or distance himself from the toxic conservative ideological battles of the primary season. But without much notice, that etch-a-sketch moment has already happened.
No, Romney has not shifted positions. Nor has he disrespected the conservative activists whose votes and trust he sought so relentlessly since 2007. What his campaign has done, however, is radically narrow its focus to a single message, one particularly attractive to swing voters: that this election is purely and simply a referendum on Obama’s economy. This focus comes at the expense of the philosophical, social, and cultural topics that dominated the primary season from beginning to end. There’s one problem though: His party’s conservative base may not let him get away with it.
Barely an hour goes by these days without a Romney surrogate staring into a camera and intoning like an incantation that the election is about nothing other than Obama’s responsibility for a poor economy. As Jonathan Chait recently noted, even the much-asked question on Romney’s poor standing with Hispanic voters is routinely answered by citing the economic sufferings of Hispanics and the certainty that they, too, will ignore every other factor and vote for Mr. Fix-It.
The narrow focus of Romney’s campaign makes it easier for him to deal with right-wing efforts to drag the campaign discourse into dangerous areas. This was evident in last week’s brouhaha over reports that billionaire Joe Ricketts and star GOP consultant Fred Davis were discussing a $10 million super PAC ad campaign resurrecting the president’s relationship with Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Romney’s campaign quickly repudiated the proposed ad, but just as quickly, RNC chairman Reince Priebus brought things back on message, accusing the Obama campaign of using criticism of the proposed ads to distract from the only issue that matters: Obama’s responsibility for a poor economy.
So long as his campaign doesn’t look like it’s on the verge of losing–as McCain looked in the fall of 2008 when conservatives began openly protesting his reluctance to bring up Jeremiah Wright–Romney can probably avoid visible conservative criticism for failing to raise a broader, cultural critique of Obama as a secular-socialist elitist whose association with Wright and Bill Ayers shows he hates America.
But there are other, less controversial, issues important to conservative voters that don’t nicely fit into a monomaniacal focus on the unemployment rate or monthly job figures. Romney is fortunate that Republicans agree that debts, deficits, and the size of government are all highly germane to the case for “firing” Obama on purely economic grounds. But many conservatives are concerned about these themes not because they affect the country’s short-term economic prospects, but for more ideological reasons: because they are morally offended by federal programs that “redistribute” wealth, or by the very idea of progressive taxation, or by the religious implications of environmentalism.
And unsurprisingly, many conservatives want their ideological motivations to be reflected in the Romney campaign’s rhetoric. As a result, Romney has been all but forced to endorse Paul Ryan’s budget, which makes explicit the conservative desire to abandon the Great Society safety net and to reverse any public-sector policies that alter the “natural” market-based distribution of wealth. In that way, the Romney campaign has the economic themes of a “centrist” campaign, but, in order to placate the concerns of his base, the details of speeches and other communications sometimes often veer into fringe territory. It is an open question how long the candidate can finesse this tension.
Beyond the cluster of economic-fiscal issues, there are a host of cultural issues which Romney’s campaign is trying to avoid, but which both conservative activists and the Obama campaign may insist he discuss. One of these is “religious liberty”–defined as the right for conservative religious organizations to discriminate against gays and lesbians or against reproductive rights for women. Another is same-sex marriage, an increasingly unavoidable campaign issue that pulls the campaign away from its focus on the economy. Conservative activists will also be eager to campaign against Obamacare, particularly if the Supreme Court forces the issue directly into the center of the presidential contest.
And even if conservative activists–and the Obama campaign–don’t succeed in broadening Romney’s economic focus, another factor may intervene: The economy could improve. more than is currently projected between now and November. Chait’s article on the Romney campaign’s economic monomania suggests it will shift to a “Plan B” argument that the economy is just not improving enough. But instead, they may be forced to refocus on all those broader ideological issues–religious liberty, same-sex marriage, and health care, and perhaps more–that they’re currently trying to avoid. If that happens, then both conservative activists and their enemies in the Obama campaign will get something they want, and the etch-a-sketch will shake up the message yet again.

If you were unaware of the stakes in the upcoming Wisconsin recall election on June 5th, John Nichol’s report in The Nation provides some perspective:

…Wisconsin is witnessing the most ambitious set of recall elections in American history: not just the executive branch but the most powerful legislative chamber could be flipped from Republican to Democratic control. If Walker and his allies are removed from office, the results will be seen across the country as a rejection of the false premise that cutting taxes for the rich while attacking unions and slashing services will somehow spur job growth. Walker promised that his policies would create 250,000 jobs. Instead of growth, the governor’s austerity agenda has brought about what the Bureau of Labor Statistics identifies as the worst pattern of job losses in the nation…

Democrats have a solid, well-experienced alternative to Scott Walker’s polarizing leadership:

…Walker’s Democratic challenger, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, argues that the governor abandoned fiscal common sense and “created an ideological civil war…in the State of Wisconsin….Former Senator Russ Feingold hails Barrett, a former Congressman, as “a lifelong progressive [who]… stood with me in voting against the deregulation that led to the Wall Street crash, opposing the Patriot Act, and reforming our system of campaign finance.” Barrett also broke with Democratic and Republican presidents to oppose NAFTA and champion labor rights. But the Democrat is not just ideologically distinct from Walker. Whereas Walker’s a my-way-or-the-highway pol, Barrett is known for getting people to work together. Though his pragmatic approach to balancing budgets frustrated some local unions in Milwaukee and led to a split in the labor movement over whom to back in the primary, Barrett has now united unions and the party in the campaign to defeat Walker.

In terms of economic resources for Barrett’s campaign, progressives face a tough reality:

…Barrett spent around $1 million to win his primary; Walker has already burned through $21 million, and his billionaire backers have spent millions more on “independent” ads. The unprecedented spending on behalf of Walker and his allies has made these recall elections an example of what campaigning has come to look like in the Citizens United era: Democrats can’t hope to match the staggering level of corporate cash raised by the GOP, so they will have to accelerate grassroots organizing and get-out-the-vote drives. Wisconsin will test the prospect that people power might yet beat money power…

Dems and progressives have a big edge in ‘feet on the ground’ in the WI race, and both sides agree that this election will likely come down to turnout mobilization. But recent polls show Walker surging, so Walker’s money edge could prove decisive. Clearly, Tom Barret could use some help. If your Democratic governor is in good shape politically and/or financially, or if the governor’s race in your state is a done deal, or if there is no governor’s race at all in your state, consider a donation to Tom Barrett’s campaign at his ActBlue page right here.
The important thing for Dems to keep in mind about June 5th is that it’s not just about Wisconsin and public unions. If Walker wins, it will green-light intensified union-bashing by Republicans across the country and ultimately threaten living standards even for unorganized workers. But if Barrett wins, it will help rebuild the labor movement, check big money in politics and energize progressives for the November elections.

The following article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Mitt Romney’s history at the helm of Bain Capital tells us a lot about the kind of leader he would make as president.
First, of course, it demonstrates conclusively that he has absolutely no experience “creating jobs.” Bain Capital was not in business to “create jobs” — it was in business to “create wealth” — for Mitt Romney and his fellow Wall Street investors. When Bain bought businesses that happened to create new jobs, that was entirely incidental. And when Bain-owned businesses laid off workers, cut wages, eliminated pensions or health care benefits — or went bankrupt — that was incidental as well.
Romney and the Bain crew couldn’t have cared less whether their actions created jobs, eliminated jobs, or destroyed entire communities so long as they served their one and only purpose: making themselves and their colleagues very, very rich.
Now I’m not arguing that there is anything wrong with making yourself rich. But it has absolutely nothing to do with “creating jobs” — as the 750 workers at the 100-year-old GST Steel in Kansas City discovered when, after Bain took over their company, Bain loaded it with debt — milked it of cash and bankrupted the company — but still walked away with millions.
Turns out the landscape is strewn with cases like GST — American Pad and Paper (AmPad) in Indiana, Dade Behring in Florida.
And whether or not there are other “success stories” where new jobs were created is completely irrelevant to the central point that Romney has never demonstrated he “knows how to create jobs in the private sector.” Romney was very good at extracting wealth for himself and his friends. He viewed the workers with about as much concern as you might give to a fly you flick off your desk or swat on a hot summers day.
To Romney, workers — and the jobs they filled — were nothing but expendable means to an end.
But that’s not all his experience with Bain can teach us about Willard Mitt Romney. It tells us that he is used to playing by a different set of rules from ordinary Americans. Romney and Bain helped to create a new rulebook for the American economy — one that ultimately helped lead to the economic disaster that came to a head in September 2008.
Most people think it’s great for businesses and investors to make money. The ability to own a business and make money provides one of the major engines that has made the American economy the largest and most innovative in the world.
And we all know that some businesses fail and others succeed.
But in order for the rules of the economic game to send the right signals to incentivize innovation and efficiency, they have to work both ways. Investors win if they create successful, productive, growing businesses. They lose if they invest in businesses that are unsuccessful, inefficient or unproductive.
Romney and Bain played by a different set of rules. Their rules were simple: heads I win, tails you lose.
What ordinary Americans find so outrageous is not that people in American can make money, but rather that the folks on Wall Street make millions on businesses that fail.
Bain often did leveraged buyouts. It used the businesses it intended to buy as collateral to borrow the money to buy them. Then the partners at Bain transferred cash from the companies they bought into their own pockets — in the form of fees and “returns on investment.” If the company ultimately ran out of cash, shut down, laid off its workers, too bad — they still walked away with millions. If they succeeded and stayed in business, so much the better.
Bain structured deals where they couldn’t lose.
The problem is that ordinary Americans don’t play by rules that allow them to make money whether or not they succeed.
If most Americans are fired from their jobs, with the exception of unemployment insurance, their income stops.

Read more…

Ed Kilgore blogs at Political Animal on Mitt Romney’s messaging strategy, which allows him to parrot ad nauseum “the economy is tanking and it’s Obama’s fault” in response to just about any question that pops up, while the base and the GOP echo chamber handle the culture war dirty work. As Kilgore explains:

…Team Mitt wants to talk only about the economy, his party’s conservative activist “base” and its media affiliates keep wanting to talk about everything else. We saw this over and over again during the Republican primaries, and we saw it again yesterday when the Romney campaign had to quash the very idea of a Super-PAC ad campaign raising the culture-and-race-war spectre of Jeremiah Wright.
…Fortunately for Romney, a lot of non-economic itches can be scratched by incessantly claiming that Big Government caused the recession or is impeding the recovery. Maybe you support “entitlement reform” because you are furious at the looters who are living at the expense of the hard-earned tax dollars of the virtuously well-off. Mitt won’t often “go there,” but he’s for “entitlement reform” on ostensibly economic grounds, so you’re on his team. Maybe you hate “ObamaCare” because you think it’s encouraging the Second Holocaust of legalized abortion, or enabling young women to have sex, or robbing seniors of the Medicare benefits they earned to give health care coverage to shiftless minorities. Mitt won’t talk about that, but he’s promised to kill ObamaCare as fast as he can, so that’s enough. Maybe you are upset about environmentalism because you view it as a front for neo-pagan assaults on the God-given dominion over the earth you are supposed to enjoy. Mitt wouldn’t put it that way. But he will argue for scrapping environmental regulations tout court to free up the Great American Job-Creating Machine and bring down gas prices. And maybe you hate public education because you view “government schools” as satanic indoctrination centers for secularism, and colleges as places where elitist professors mock traditional values and let young women have sex. Mitt won’t come right out and talk about any of that, either, but he frowns on federal education programs because we just can’t afford them.

It’s sort of a ‘good cop, bad cop’ routine. As Kilgore concludes, “…in a certain sense, the entire Romney campaign is one big dog whistle aimed at appealing to persuadable voters on the single issue of the economy, while letting the restive “base” hear all sorts of other things involving cultural resentments and the desire to return to the good old days before the New Deal and the 60s began to ruin the Founders’ design and defy the Creator’s moral code.”
It’s probably a sound strategy, given all of the booby traps that come with engaging in cultural warfare. it also helps avoid Romney’s extraordinary proclivity for flip-floppage on controversial topics.

This interview by DemFromCT is cross-posted from the Daily Kos:
William Galston is a noted scholar (formerly the Saul Stern Professor and Dean at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland) and experienced political hand (Bill Clinton’s Deputy Assistant for Domestic Policy in the ’90s) who is currently the Ezra K. Zilkha Chair in Governance Studies and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
This past week, Dr. Galston released a white paper, titled “Six Months to Go: Where the Presidential Contest Stands as the General Election Begins.” It caught my attention since that’s a topic of great interest to us, and I was pleased to see some familiar themes (see Things that matter in the presidential election, and things that don’t) covered in the paper.
Six topics in particular were the focus:
• An examination of polling results and public attitudes toward both candidates and important issues of the day.
It remains to be seen whether the negative perceptions of Romney that resulted from the nominating contest will endure. For the time being, at least, Obama enjoys a sizeable advantage on a host of personal qualities. He has a narrow edge in most of the key swing states. And his path to 270 electoral votes is easier than Romney’s. In short, he begins the general election contest with a modest advantage, which adverse developments at home or abroad could eliminate or even reverse. The 2012 election will be hotly contested, and the victor’s margin is unlikely to approach Obama’s seven-point edge in 2008.
• The mood of the country
Reflecting diminished confidence in government and public life, younger Americans are more likely to view the American dream as resulting from personal achievement. They are also less likely to give priority to ensuring opportunity for all members of society. Because they cannot rely on government for financial security, they experience increased pressure to provide for themselves and their families. But they are not confident that they will be able to do so if current trends continue.
• The issues
Every survey finds that economic issues dominate public concerns. The most recent survey of the Pew Research Center asked respondents to rank eighteen issues on a four-point scale from “very” to “not at all” important. Eighty-six percent said that the economy was very important, with jobs a close second at 84 percent. By contrast, four hot-button social issues–immigration (42 percent), abortion (39 percent), birth control (34 percent), and gay marriage (28 percent)–came in at the bottom.
• Ideology
The election of 2012 takes place against the backdrop of a political system that is more polarized along partisan and ideological lines than it has been for many decades–indeed, if standard political science measures are correct, since the 1890s. This fact has already reshaped the campaigns of both the president and his challenger.
• What kind of election will 2012 be?
It appears that 2012 will be more like 2004–a classic mobilization election–than either 1992 or 1996. Like George W. Bush, Barack Obama has turned out to be a polarizing president who has induced many voters to choose sides very early in the process. So the enthusiasm of core supporters–their motivation to translate their preferences into actual votes–will make a big difference.
• The Electoral College
The focus of this paper thus far has been on the national electorate. But of course we do not have national elections. As the 2000 election painfully reminded us, the structural difference between the national popular vote and state-by-state results can sometimes be consequential.
But it is important to keep 2000 in perspective. The Electoral College comes into play only when the popular vote is narrowly divided. If a candidate wins the popular vote by as little as 2 percent, it is very unlikely that the loser can win a majority of the electoral votes.
Dr. Galston was kind enough to respond to further questions we had about November 2012.
Daily Kos: A variety of sources (economic forecast models, online betting forums, pundits, polls) agree with your assessment of a close election, but one that Obama modestly leads. Short of a change in the economy (i.e assuming we continue with a slow but steady recovery and no euro shock), will this be the way it winds up? Is there any way this will not be a referendum on Obama? Can Obama make it a choice between him and Romney as in 2004?
Bill Galston: In my article, I argue for two basic propositions. (1) Elections involving incumbents are first and foremost referenda on their records. (2) In 2012, it’s Obama record on the economy that matters more than everything else put together. Compared to other recent elections with incumbents running, the economy right now is neither strong enough to guarantee victory nor weak enough to ensure defeat. If it gains momentum, Obama will win with room to spare. If it weakens further in response to the European crisis, the odds are that he’ll lose.
This is not to say that the public’s judgment of Romney is wholly irrelevant. If the people decide that he’s not an acceptable replacement for Obama, the president will be reelected despite widespread disappointment with his performance. But that’s not why Kerry lost in 2004. The right analysis, which I lay out in my paper, is that Bush did just well enough during his first term to earn an approval rating of about 50 percent, which turned out to be his share of the vote.
Daily Kos: Why the discrepancy between the state polls (Obama, e.g., leads in OH and VA) and the (currently close) national indicators (see above)? When do the state and national polls start to be meaningful, given that 2/3 of the electorate say they have made up their mind?
Bill Galston: The state polls are starting to reflect the tight national race. Obama is behind in Florida and North Carolina and is no better than tied in Ohio and even Wisconsin. In the end, the electoral college majority can diverge from the national popular vote majority only when the national margin separating the major party candidates is very thin–say, one percent. If the margin is even two percent, the odds that the popular vote loser will win an electoral college majority are extremely low.
I’d start paying attention to the polls right about now, because they are leading indicators of the kind of election this will be if the underlying conditions don’t change much between now and November.
Daily Kos: Pew’s Center for Excellence in Journalism notes a steady diet of unfavorable news coverage of Obama. Does this matter?
Bill Galston: Not much. When an incumbent is running, the people already have a ton of information, so additional information via the press is less significant than it would be if the candidate were running for the first time. In addition, most people are more inclined to trust the evidence of their own senses than they are the judgments of journalists.
Daily Kos: Why does Obama have so much trouble with the older white vote? Does the recent polling from Stars and Stripes suggesting Obama does well with military voters surprise you?
Bill Galston: There are a number of factors. From the start, Obama’s appeal was strongly generational. Older voters don’t understand him, and vice-versa. In addition, older white voters are less accepting of the new multi-ethnic America that Obama symbolizes. The recent Census Bureau report that a majority of births are now to non-white parents will strike some older white voters as a threat that the country they have known all their lives is slipping out of their grasp.
As for military voters, two points: (1) Obama is getting much higher marks for his conduct of defense and foreign policy than for his stewardship of the economy. Along with other Americans, military people like his aggressive conduct of the war on terrorists. Indeed, it appears that Obama has neutralized–at least for now–longstanding Democratic vulnerabilities in this area. And (2), the Obama administration has worked hard to earn the trust and support of veterans. It has been particularly forceful in areas such as health care and rehabilitation for wounded veterans, and in recent months it has been emphasizing employment opportunities for former military personnel as well. Gen. Shinseki is getting high marks as the VA Secretary.
Daily Kos: What story is the media missing in the early going? What should we be paying more attention to?
Bill Galston: On the substantive front, the performance of the housing market and Obama’s record in dealing with it are sleeper issues. From an electoral standpoint, reporters should be asking some hard questions about key “blue states” such as Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. If Obama can hold them, then Romney’s path to victory remains narrow. If not, the challenger’s options multiply.
Thank you, Dr. Galston.

The Washington Post’s “Want to end partisan politics? Here’s what won’t work — and what will” by Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, provides sound analysis of 9 “solutions,” five bad (3rd party; term limits; balanced budget amendment; public financing of elections; and “stay calm”) and four good (realistic campaign reform; independent redistricting commissions and instant run-off voting; restrict the filibuster; and automatic registration, open primaries and a fine for not voting/lottery prize for winning voter stub).
DemFromCt has an exclusive Daily Kos interview with TDS Co-Editor William Galston on election-related concerns. Among Galston’s observations: “As for military voters…Obama is getting much higher marks for his conduct of defense and foreign policy than for his stewardship of the economy. Along with other Americans, military people like his aggressive conduct of the war on terrorists. Indeed, it appears that Obama has neutralized–at least for now–longstanding Democratic vulnerabilities in this area…the Obama administration has worked hard to earn the trust and support of veterans. It has been particularly forceful in areas such as health care and rehabilitation for wounded veterans, and in recent months it has been emphasizing employment opportunities for former military personnel as well…”
At U.S. News Rebekah Metzler reports on the Obama campaign’s prospects for winning a bigger bite of veterans’ votes. “…Obama has overseen dramatic troop draw-downs in Iraq and Afghanistan, including the official ending of the war in Iraq, as well as his successful efforts to ramp up pressure on al Qaeda, which culminated with the death of Osama bin Laden…Obama has increased funding for veteran healthcare, successfully pushed for tax credits for businesses that hire veterans, and approved a beefed-up GI bill that allows veterans to obtain their undergraduate degrees for free.”
WaPo’s Matt Miller has a whining lament on the demise of Americans Elect (which squandered $35 million and couldn’t produce a candidate) and he takes a bitter pot shot at the ‘false equivalency police.” Somehow he still doesn’t get it that dividing the only serious opposition to the lunatic right by launching a brand new third party with vaporous principles is a really bad idea, the very opposite of what is needed for “rebuilding upward mobility and economic security.”
Linda Killian, whose book, “The Swing Vote: The Untapped Power of Independents,” was shredded in a review by Ruy Teixeira, has a post up at WaPo, in which she sorta kinda backs away from some of her overstated assertions.
Nicholas Confessore’s “‘Super PACs’ Let Strategists Off the Leash” reveals how the Citizens United decision balkanizes campaign strategy-making, as well as upping the ante.
With the Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care Act a few short weeks away, we can only hope that a couple of the conservative justices give thoughtful consideration to a new survey of sick and not sick Americans commissioned and conducted by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health. The poll found that 45 percent of the sick say that the quality of health care is a “very serious problem,” nearly a third say it has gotten worse, 73 percent say the cost of health care is a very serious problem and 70 percent said the cost has gotten worse.
A new poll by Vanderbilt University painfully illustrates the failure to educate the public about the Affordable Care Act’s benefits. While a strong majority favors key provisions of the Act, the poll found that 50 percent of Tennesseans would like to see the bill thrown out. Yet, as Tom Wilemon reports in The Tennessean, “The law has helped 51,684 young adults in the state gain coverage, lowered prescription costs for 86,818 Medicare recipients and made preventive exams free for more than 1 million Tennesseans…it would provide insurance to 466,000 state residents who now are without coverage.”
Thomas B. Edsall has a New York Times rumination on trouble spots looming for the Obama campaign with respect to women, class, race, gay and lesbian and a range of ‘cultural’ issues.
Despite the Democrats’ troubles in NC, Facing South’s Chris Kromm reports that a dramatic increase of Latino voters in NC, as well as Florida, could be pivotal in November. As Kromm notes, “…The change has been fastest in North Carolina, where the percentage of voters who identify as Hispanic doubled between 2008 and 2012. Even more striking, the share of the N.C. electorate falling into the category of “other” — those who don’t identify as white, black, Hispanic or American Indian, which often includes Asian-Americans, Hispanics and multi-racial voters — rose by 252 percent. Overall, the total number of voters in North Carolina not identifying as white has grown by 5.6 percent over the last four years, bringing their share of the electorate to 29 percent.”
MyDD has an interesting post by ‘The Opportunity Agenda’ entitled “What You Just Said Hurts My Head” about ‘cognitive dissonance’ and resistance to “painful” change of political attitudes.