Since President Obama lost Arizona by 8.5 percent in 2008, it’s easy to understand why many commentators are skeptical about buzz that he has a good chance of carrying the state this year. But TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira’s article in the New Republic presents a compelling argument that “a convergence of factors” indicates that Arizona is indeed a good bet for the Obama campaign: As Teixeira explains:

Start with the “McCain effect” on the 2008 result in the state. There are compelling reasons to believe that GOP performance in Arizona would have been far weaker in 2008 had it not been the home state of the Republican nominee, John McCain. Indeed, Arizona was statistically an outlier, especially for its area of the country, when it came to the polls. For example, the overall national margin swing toward Obama was around 9.7 points–he won by 7.3 points and Kerry lost by 2.4 points. If the Arizona swing had matched the national swing, Obama would have lost the state by less than a point. And if Arizona had swung as much as the nearby southwestern states of Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico (all between 14 and 16 points, for an average of 15 points), Obama would have actually won the state by 4 points. So there is a reasonable case to be made that the 2008 election result drastically understates Democratic strength in the state in Presidential elections.
Next, consider the influence of ongoing demographic changes in the state which have been steadily increasing the percentage of minority eligible voters, mostly Hispanics, and reducing the share of relatively conservative white working class voters. According to William Frey’s analysis of census data, these trends have continued and perhaps accelerated in the last four years. The composition of the Arizona electorate in 2012 could be 3 to 4 points more minority (chiefly Hispanic) and 3 to 4 points less white working class than in 2008.

But Teixeira cautions that “This does not mean, of course, that Obama will have an easy time carrying Arizona. On the contrary, it will likely be quite difficult,

…But it can be done, especially if the Obama campaign can change three key elements of 2008’s electoral equation. First, the share of Hispanic voters must grow and their support level for Obama must increase. In 2008, 16 percent of voters were Hispanic; based on eligible voter trends that number should rise to 19 percent given solid work to register and mobilize this population. And in 2008, Hispanics supported Obama by just 56-41 in the state. Given everything that’s happened in the state in the last four years and the absence of McCain, a politician famous for his moderate record on immigration, on the ticket, it should be possible to move that number up to national support levels (67-31 in 2008 and possibly higher this year).
Second, a projected 3 point decrease in the size of the total white vote should come entirely from white working class voters. Based on recent data, this is a highly plausible assumption. Eligible voter trends since 2008 are consistent with such an outcome and, in 2008, the decrease in the white vote (4 points) did in fact come entirely from working class voters, according to the exit polls.
Finally, Obama’s performance among white college graduates needs to improve over 2008 levels, when he lost this group by 17 points. This was unusually weak compared to Kerry’s performance in 2004, when he lost this group by only 4 points, and to Gore’s in 2000, when he lost the group by 7 points. Returning to these earlier levels of white college graduate support will be crucial for Obama.

Teixeira believes that “the locus of these changes would likely be in the Phoenix metropolitan area” (64 percent of the statewide vote), where eligible minority voters are increasing fastest, white working class voters are rapidly declining and Democratic candidates have been increasing their support since 1988.
AZ now looks like Obama’s best prospect for a pick-up. “If there is one state that Obama can plausibly win that he did not in 2008, Arizona is it,” says Teixeira.

Ed Kilgore posts today at The Washington Monthly on the failure of Americans Elect to nominate a presidential candidate via it’s much-trumpeted on-line nominating process by it’s Monday deadline:

…The organization is publicly admitting that under its own rules it won’t have a candidate for president, due to a lack of interest among potential candidates and “delegates” alike…It’s pretty shocking that even with the bait of general-election ballot access in 27 states and counting, AE couldn’t attract a candidate capable of getting 1,000 online votes from 10 states. Kinda makes you wonder about its foundational belief that the only barrier to a victorious presidential ticket embracing a vague if deficit-hawky “bipartisanship” was the entrenched opposition of the major parties.
…Presumably AE could delay its timetable and hope someone (Buddy Roemer?) eventually crosses the bar to become a nominatable candidate. It could lower its already pathetically low threshold for candidate viability. Or it could just make a mockery of the entire bottom-up process that is supposedly the group’s signature and pick a candidate (or candidates) to put forward, assuming anybody even remotely credible out there would accept the damaged goods of a nomination.

Kilgore then suggests tongue-in-cheek that AE go ahead and nominate a “Very Serious Ticket” topped by Thomas Friedman, with another “centrist” pundit veep candidate, such as David Brooks, Richard Cohen or Robert Samuelson.
By now, however, it should be clear to most reality-based observers that AE failed because there are not any credible “centrists” midway between a moderate liberal like Obama and an extremist right-wing party like the Republicans.

Michael Tomasky ruminates at The Daily Beast on the likeability gap between President Obama and Governor Romney. Okay, it’s more like a chasm, as Tomasky points out:

…This is the biggest washout of modern times, folks. Gallup just this week put the likeability ratings at Obama 60, Romney 31. It’s not that Obama’s number is unusually high. Look back at those Kerry-Bush numbers. Americans are an open-hearted lot, at least presumptively, so they want to like the guy who’s going be the president. But they Do. Not. Like. Mitt. Romney.
It would be more interesting for all of us if there were some great mystery here, but there isn’t. He reeks of privilege. Every time he says something off the cuff he says something obnoxious. Corporations are people, pal. I like firing people. Where on earth did you get those Godforsaken cookies?

Then there’s the rich guy thing. Not the charming rich guy like JFK thing. More like the in-yer-face, flaunter-of-great-wealth thing:

…We’re constantly told that Americans don’t have any class envy, and compared to some European nations they don’t. But even Americans have limits. A few million, even $50 million; okay. But a quarter billion dollars? A house with an elevator . . . for the cars? It also matters to people how the money was made. It’s okay to be worth a gajillion dollars if you’re Bill Gates or Steve Jobs and have made everyone’s lives more interesting and cooler. But what’s Mitt Romney done? Helped give us Domino’s Pizza.
Even so, Romney might still pass muster, but he has no grasp of the one crucial reality of class in America: you can be filthy rich as long as you don’t look or act like it. Gates doesn’t comb his hair, much. Jobs wore sneakers. Romney just looks too pressed. Even when he’s wearing those jeans. You can look at Romney on television and practically sense how he smells–of costly ablutions whose brand names the rest of us probably don’t even know. And he acts relentlessly rich.

For Tomasky, Romney’s bully behavior in prep school fits the disturbing pattern. As Tomasky puts it, “Romney’s biggest problem. The likability factor. He ain’t got it. And he ain’t got much of a way to get it.”
Discouraging though it is that Romney is apparently the best the GOP can do at this political moment, there is an upside in all this, as Tomasky concludes: “…The black guy with the weird name who’s been called everything under the sun is twice as likeable as the rich white guy. This is the America that drives the wingers crazy, but that the rest of us–the majority–live in, and love.”

In his latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot,’ TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira reports that environmental protection retains strong public support, despite conservative hopes that it would become a fading concern, as a “conflicting priority to jobs and economic growth.” But it looks like conservatives’ “environment-wrecking agenda” will have to wait, as Teixeira explains:

…The public didn’t get the memo. In the recently released poll from Yale University’s and George Mason University’s climate change communication programs, 58 percent of poll respondents said that protecting the environment improves economic growth and creates new jobs. Just 17 percent thought environmental protection hurts growth and jobs, and 25 percent thought there was no effect.
In the same poll, when asked to choose directly which was more important–environmental protection or economic growth–the public decisively favored protecting the environment 62 percent to 38 percent when there is a conflict between the two goals.

The false choice between jobs and environmental protection is proving to be a tough sell for the GOP — and that’s very good news for President Obama, as well as Democrats.

Steve Kornacki nails a crucial insight about the Republican party’s increasing extremism exceptionally-well in his Salon.com, post, “The neutering of Mitch McConnell.” The most interesting point is not so much about the Senate Minority Leader; Rather it’s that tea party-inspired extremism changes the role of the GOP from constituent representation to a combat organization, which prefers never-ending political paralysis to bipartisan reform. As Kornacki aptly puts it:

The primary challenges of the current Tea Party era are not defined by similarly vast ideological gulfs. Lugar, for instance, was generally a party man in his Senate votes, racking up a fairly conservative record and voting against President Obama’s major domestic initiatives. But he did leave some room for independence and compromise, particularly in his specialty area of foreign policy. His opponent, Mourdock, was to Lugar’s right on some issues, but what really distinguished him is his belief that the Senate is a venue for partisan warfare.
“Bipartisanship,” Mourdock declared last week, “ought to consist of Democrats coming to the Republican point of view.”
This is as concise a distillation of the Tea Party’s governing vision as you’ll find. It’s not really about moving the GOP to the right; the party is already there, and has been for a while. It’s about reflexively opposing the other party on every issue, resisting compromise at all costs, and exploiting every available legislative tool to stymie the other side. This mind-set is already pervasive in the House, and as the Times story shows, it’s now making its way into the Senate.

Along with Kornacki’s insight, it should be added that the ‘politics as warfare’ strategy evolves more from tea party and wingnut “leadership,” than genuine rank and file sentiments, as Vega, Kilgore and Green point out in this TDS Strategy Memo.

David Atkins and Digby have a well-done tag-team take-down of the ‘austerity mavens’ up at Hullabaloo. A couple of teasers to whet your taste-buds…Here’s Atkins, riffing on Justin Lahart’s Wall St. Journal post “Unemployment Rate Without Government Cuts: 7.1%“:

…People who know the first thing about public policy laugh at the bipartisanship fetishists and the people who insist that “both parties have gotten too extreme.” The facts are pretty one-sided here. They suggest that if anything, the President and the mainstream Democratic Party in the United States are too far to the right and too beholden to the austerity mavens, and the Republicans are living on a extremist conservative moon base with Newt Gingrich…

Then Digby, persuasively concluding after presenting several compelling charts demonstrating that state austerity policies (esp. CA) have been a disastrous drag on the economy :

If the federal government continues to refuse to help out the states financially — especially a state as large as California, whose economy is actually bigger than Spain’s, it’s hard to see how it doesn’t drag down the entire country….I realize that Europe and the US face different problems. But one of the problems they have in common is a daft belief among policy makers in austerity during a depression As California goes even further into hardcore austerity mode, I’d expect some unpleasant side effects to the US economy as a whole.

Not a good week for the austerity crowd, what with France, Germany, England and now this Digby-Atkins take-down.

“Merkozy” takes another torpedo square in the belly, as Germany’s Social Democrats smash Angela Merkel’s ruling Christian Democratic Union in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state. That should put an end to the GOP’s denials that Europe is rejecting austerity polices. The Social Democrat-Greens coalition took about 50 percent of the votes — almost twice what Merkel’s party received (26 percent).
If that doesn’t quite convince you that Europe’s austerity binge is tanking, check out Craig Stirling’s Bloomberg report, “Cameron Suffers Setbacks in U.K. Opinion Polls.”
This NYT article by Andrew Martin and Andrew W. Lehren makes it hard to see how any current issue could carry as much freight with young voters as the soaring costs of higher education. Thus should be a strong edge for Dems, since GOP policy gimmicks to get around more substantial federal and state government investments are pretty unconvincing — provided Dems’ can boil their edge down into digestible soundbites.
What’s Rand Paul trying to prove with the gay-bashing?
Speaking of gay-bashing, take a sneak peek at this forthcoming Newsweek cover, and see if you think it is designed to undermine President Obama.
If you want data on how the President’s new position on same-sex marriage is playing out with the base, particularly African Americans, Nate Silver has a clear-eyed take. Silver presents a probability distribution chart indicating that Black voters are highly likely to stick with Obama and “there are other key constituencies within the Democratic Party — like younger voters, coastal whites and, increasingly, Hispanic voters — who are supportive of gay marriage. And gays and lesbians themselves, and their families, are an important constituent group for Democrats. (They are more numerous, for instance, than Jewish voters.)”
Ezra Klein broadsides the false equivalency apologists for trying to spread the blame for polarization. Citing “a polarizing force on the Republican Party that simply doesn’t exist in today’s Democratic Party,” Klein produces recent election data proving that “…there is simply no denying that the Republican Party has gone much further right than the Democratic Party has gone left, and that, from policy pledges to primary challenges, it has done much more to discourage its members from compromising than the Democratic Party has. So if you think polarization is the main problem in Washington today, then Mann and Ornstein are right: Your beef is largely with the Republicans.”
Sara Robinson’s Alternet post, “How Conservative Religion Makes the Right Politically Stronger” provides an interesting theory of conservatives solidarity edge. As Robinson says, “…Regular observance of shared rituals is central to this power. Religious conservatives attend services at least once a week…to affirm their commitment to their shared values, celebrate and mourn the passages of life, and connect with each other not as workers and warriors, but as human beings…Those rituals are social superglue. They build trust that extends outward into everything else these communities do. They inspire and engage people’s hearts, minds, bodies, and spirits, offer incredible healing and solace when things go wrong, and provide a ready-made outlet for celebration and re-commitment to doing even more when things go right.” Robinson argues that progressives should more frequently leverage rituals and gatherings to build fellowship and solidarity.
Seems to me all the Democratic hand-wringing about NC is a waste of time. Even assuming the state is moving to the right, Obama has several plausible paths to 270 e.v.’s without it, and the blue carpet will be rolled out in Charlotte, regardless.
John Nichols, the go-to guy for inside skinny and sharp analysis of the progressive uprising in Wisconsin, has an insightful post, “Will People Power Defeat Scott Walker and His Cronies?” at The Nation. Nichols observes, “The protesters–union members fighting assaults on collective bargaining and the farmers, small-business owners, retirees and students who supported them–are not just forcing new elections. They are forcing their way into the political process as candidates, elbowing aside traditional politicians and old approaches to campaigning. It’s not that the newcomers aren’t raising money, crafting smart messages or buying thirty-second spots. They’re serious contenders. But they are running on the terms of a movement they have built, mounting campaigns that are people-centered, high-spirited and unapologetic in their support of labor rights and economic justice…And they are starting to win.”

I doubt I’m alone in wondering whether my fellow Dems should be pouncing on the Romney bully story with such incautious glee. There’s the usual caveats: it’s a high school story, for Pete’s sake; Did it really happen that way and how solid can the verification be after all those years? (the alleged victim is deceased); Anyway, who wants to be held accountable for every regrettable thing they did as a teenager?; Does it make Dems look petty when they go that far back to expose character failures of political adversaries?; Isn’t this disturbingly reminiscent of the “Aqua Buddha” story that backfired so devastatingly on Jack Conway’s campaign to defeat Rand Paul in the KY Senate race, (and that was college, not high school)? etc. etc.
On the other hand, what makes the story somewhat compelling, regardless of the aforementioned concerns, is Romney’s evasively funky, deer-caught-in-the headlights responses to questions about it, which add to the impression of a guy who is incapable of straight talk. In addition, Romney’s persona is not only that of the archetypical, Ayn Rand-reading boss who fires workers willy-nilly and justifies it as ‘creative destruction’; it’s all too easy to see him as the emblematic preppy prick you hated in high school.
So, I guess it makes sense for Dems to mine the story for a bit, in that it contributes to the mounting evidence that the GOP is nominating an unusually cold-hearted and double-talking presidential candidate — even for them. But I do think such stories, whether true or exaggerated, have a very limited shelf-life, after which they begin to make the accusers look like tiresome moralists.

Jonathan Chait weighs in at New York Magazine about “Liberal Donors’ Ethical Confusion.” The article title refers to the decision of a group of a group of big progressive contributors to donate funds to GOTV, rather than Democratic ads. Chait thinks it’s a bad idea:

This is basically the kind of weenie attitude that periodically afflicts liberalism…The explicit argument for their decision is that the donors believe they can’t match the Republican outside groups in advertising, so why try?
…Let me phrase this way of thinking slightly differently: Obama already has a significant advantage in the ground game, but faces a potentially huge disadvantage in the air wars. Therefore, the donors have concluded, they should invest their money augmenting the ground game.
Does this make any sense at all? No, it does not. It’s backwards. The most effective way to spend money is where your side has the greatest disadvantage. Beefing up the already strong Democratic turnout machine would certainly help, but a marginal dollar spent to narrow the advertising gap would surely help more. The point isn’t to “match” Republicans. It’s not as if declining to compete in the field of advertising will make advertising less relevant.

Chait believes the misguided rationale for the strategy “is that liberal donors feel squeamish about entering the world of huge independent ad expenditures.” But the fund-raising system is not going to change between now and November and “Given the fact of the system’s existence, there’s nothing morally wrong about participating in it.”
Indeed, what may be morally wrong is deploying financial resources away from where they are needed the most. As Chait concludes, “Staying out of the advertising race isn’t going to make the system any more fair.”

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
President Obama’s surprise announcement yesterday that he now supports marriage equality for same-sex couples brought great joy to two very different groups of people. The first were same-sex couples and LGBT folk, as well as Democrats who no longer have to apologize for a president whose position is still “evolving.” The second group is a little less obvious: the cultural crusaders of the Right, who can now make a stronger argument that social issues should be a focus of the Republicans’ campaign strategy.
Mitt Romney’s campaign strategists are caught in between, left with a strategic dilemma. Using the issue of same-sex marriage to try to mess with Obama’s electorate base–blacks and Hispanics–will be incredibly tempting. But a strident anti-gay marriage campaign, while it may excite conservative interest groups, distracts from Romney’s preferred focus on the economy–and poses a major risk of alienating swing voters and independents.
Republicans can’t ignore that the conservative point of view on same-sex marriage is clearly, if slowly, losing ground in the general electorate. Polls have consistently shown support for marriage equality achieving plurality if not majority support during the last couple of years. Typical was a Gallup survey last week that showed 50 percent of Americans supporting legalized gay marriage, with just 48 percent opposing it. Just as important, the shrinking percentage of Americans opposing gay marriage is increasingly concentrated in the GOP, which reduces their value as swing voters. The same Gallup poll showed self-identified independents supporting gay marriage by a 57-40 margin, far closer to the Democrats’ 65-34 division than to the Republicans’ 22-to-74 split.
And voter intensity on this topic has shifted even more dramatically. According to NBC-Wall Street Journal survey data, in 2004–the last presidential year when this topic was thought to have mattered–opponents of gay marriage enjoyed a greater than two-to-one margin over supporters (62-30). But fully 51 percent of Americans strongly opposed gay marriage, while only 18 percent strongly supported it. As of March 2012, strong supporters of marriage equality (32 percent) have caught up and even passed strong opponents (31 percent).
That’s the demographic reality Obama recognized, preempting what was beginning to look like a real problem for him this summer. There was a growing movement–endorsed already by eleven state party chairs–to place support for marriage equality in the 2012 Democratic platform. Given the president’s total control of the platform process, he would eventually have had to embrace it or squelch it; there’s not much of a middle ground any more on the basic proposition of marriage equality.
Despite all the deterrents for waging an anti-gay marriage campaign, Republicans are sure to fixate on how this will affect two crucial factions of the Democratic voting base: African-Americans and Hispanics. The most recent Pew survey on the subject showed African-Americans opposing gay marriage by a 49-39 margin. That’s a considerable improvement in support for marriage equality from the 63-26 margin of opposition Pew found in 2008, but given the increasingly heavy support of white Democrats for marriage equality, still a pretty striking anomaly. And a 2011 Pew poll suggested that Hispanic Catholics remain more likely to oppose gay marriage than white Catholics. Hispanic Protestants tend to be more conservative on nearly all issues, but as (usually) evangelicals, they are especially likely to oppose gay marriage. Given the GOP’s general problem with Hispanics–due to a recent bender on immigration policy, not to mention hostility to a social safety net–it will be tempting for them to try to make this a wedge issue.
Their model may be Ohio in 2004, when an anti-gay marriage ballot initiative and the Bush campaign’s intensive outreach effort to African-American churches may have made a crucial difference in the state that decided the presidential election. But following that strategy is unlikely to pay off as easily this year. That’s because there won’t be as many gay marriage initiatives on state ballots in November this year as in many recent cycles, and they’ll largely be in states that Obama is certain to carry (Maine, Minnesota, Washington, and Maryland).
So any effort to use the issue will have to involve more overt partisan politicking, which some conservative evangelical ministers–and particularly African-American ministers loath to openly oppose the first African-American president–will be reluctant to embrace. Republicans could deploy targeted, under-the-radar appeals on same-sex marriage, but it will be tricky to do so without letting the passions associated with this and other cultural issues get out of hand, creating a distraction at best and a backlash at worst. Perhaps Republicans would have been better off in the end had Obama “evolved” a bit more slowly.