At Politico, Alex Isenstadt explains why he thinks “House Democrats face uphill slog in 2014” with another argument based mostly on historical precedent — the so-called “six-year itch.” But he quotes Democratic pollster Andrew Myers, who advises, “If I’m a member of Congress and I want to beat back the trend, I turn my focus to constituent services and forge a relationship with voters. That way, I’m with the constituents and not Washington.”
You gotta love this title of an article excerpt by Rahm Emanuel at The Root. Read Rahm’s entire WaPo op-ed right here.
WaPo’s Al Kamen has some scuttlebutt on possible cabinet appointees for Obama’s second term, focusing on Latinos.
Two more big name Republicans back away from the Norquist pledge.
Meanwhile, Stephen Moore has a Wall St. Journal interview article on Norquist’s denial that the pledge is in trouble, arguing that a few are having “impure thoughts…but no one is caving.”
Ross Ramsey, executive editor of The Texas Tribune, explains why “Democrats Did Not Do All That Badly on Election Day,” even in the Lone Star state.
Black Friday is over. But here’s a quickie guide to some of the more popular retailers that support Democrats and some that don’t by The Monitor’s Peter Grier.
It’s more like “fiscal phantoms” than a ‘fiscal cliff,’ explains Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, who adds “…We have our own currency — and almost all of our debt, both private and public, is denominated in dollars. So our government, unlike the Greek government, literally can’t run out of money. After all, it can print the stuff. So there’s almost no risk that America will default on its debt — I’d say no risk at all if it weren’t for the possibility that Republicans would once again try to hold the nation hostage over the debt ceiling…But if the U.S. government prints money to pay its bills, won’t that lead to inflation? No, not if the economy is still depressed.”
And in the Sunday New York Times, Warren Buffet updates his case for higher taxes on the wealthy, also explaining that “it’s sickening that a Cayman Islands mail drop can be central to tax maneuvering by wealthy individuals and corporations…We can’t let those who want to protect the privileged get away with insisting that we do nothing until we can do everything.”
Salon.com’s Jonathan Bernstein addresses the issue of the hour in his post, “How to stop GOP obstructionism.”
Month: November 2012
One of the key lessons of the 2012 election is that it is not how much money Super-PACs spend on a campaign; it’s how the money is invested — and Dems did a damn good job of it, explains Rodell Mollineau at The Daily Beast.
…And this is also gratifying.
California may be providing an instructive lesson for advocates of moderation. Anthony York’s “Election loss has Republicans seeking common ground with Democrats” in the L.A. Times notes a new willingness of business leaders to support moderates. York argues “Democrats now hold a two-thirds supermajority in both the Assembly and Senate, meaning they can pass taxes and place proposals on the statewide ballot without any Republican support…”For the business community, there is a recognition that the best path forward for the state from a governance perspective is with moderate Democrats,” said Rob Stutzman, a Republican consultant who advised the California Chamber of Commerce on a number of legislative races this year.” Put another way, the quickest road to more moderate politics lies not in converting Republicans to sweet reason, but in defeating sufficient numbers of them.
And when it comes to big state voter turnout, the west is the best. The formula, according to Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais: “In California, the triple combination of a simple, online registration process, the convenience of voting by mail and the presence on the ballot of issues that directly related to the self-interest of a significant sector of voters brought newcomers to the polls, kept the state’s turnout at a high level (even when California’s electoral vote result was a foregone conclusion) and resulted in no reports of major problems at the polls.”
For revealing critique of the arguments of the economic gurus behind the tea party ideology and perhaps a majority of the Republicans in congress, try Robert M. Solow’s New Republic review article, “Hayek, Friedman, and the Illusions of Conservative Economics” Solow reviews “The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression” by Angus Burgin.
Paul Begala’s “Denialists, Whiners, and Wackjobs” at The Daily Beast provides a useful typology of some GOP leaders.
Mike Lux makes a couple of salient points in his HuffPo post “Can Democrats Retake the House in 2014?,” including: “…Most of the groups, bloggers, money, and talent in the Democratic party and progressive movement was focused elsewhere, on keeping Romney and Republicans in the Senate from running the table and taking over every branch of government. Most people and groups had given up on winning the House months ago and were spending their time, money, and brainpower on the Presidential race and those marquee Senate races like Elizabeth Warren, Tammy Baldwin, and Sherrod Brown. We need to create a Manhattan project for retaking the House with the best thinkers, biggest groups, and most influential donors in the party involved.”
At Time Swampland Michael Scherer’s “Friended: How the Obama Campaign Connected with Young Voters” provides a good overview of a key element of Dem strategy.
At The National Review Michael Barone notes some of the eirie similarities in the ’04 and ’12 presidential elections and tries to put an optimistic spin on the numbers to encourage his fellow Republicans about the future. He adds, however, that “…Democrats have a structural advantage in the Electoral College. An extra 2.47 percent of the popular vote netted Obama 80 more electoral votes than Kerry. Obama won 58 percent or more in eleven states and the District of Columbia, with 163 electoral votes. He needed only 107 more to win.”
Sen. Saxby Chambliss, shrewd GOP pillar in the U.S. Senate, has pointedly trashed Norquist’s ‘The Pledge,’ reports Meghashyam Mali at The Hill.
The Nation’s Ari Berman has done a great job of monitoring voter suppression in the election, and he continues to report as new evidence comes in the days and weeks afterward and also notes the successful resistance effort, as well as the continuing threat. As his post on “The GOP’s Voter Suppression Strategy” explains:
In a little-noticed yet significant development on election day, Minnesota voters defeated a constitutional amendment that would have required them to present a government-issued photo ID to cast a ballot. It was the first time voters had rejected a voter ID ballot initiative in any state.
In May 2011, a poll showed that 80 percent of Minnesotans supported a photo ID law. “Nearly everyone in the state believed a photo ID was the most common-sense solution to the problem of voter fraud,” says Dan McGrath, executive director of Take Action Minnesota, a progressive coalition that led the campaign against the amendment. “We needed to reframe the issue. We decided to never say the word ‘fraud.’ Instead we would only talk about the cost, complications and consequences of the amendment.” According to the coalition, the photo ID law would have disenfranchised eligible voters (including members of the military and seniors) dumped an unfunded mandate on counties and imperiled same-day voter registration. On election day, 52 percent of Minnesotans opposed the amendment.
The amendment’s surprising defeat has ramifications beyond Minnesota. “There’s been an assumption of political will for restricting the right to vote,” says McGrath. “No, there’s not.” The amendment backfired on the GOP. “Voter ID did not drive the conservative base to turn out in the way that Republicans thought it would,” adds McGrath. “Instead, it actually inspired progressive voters, who felt under siege, to fight stronger and turn out in higher numbers.” The minority vote nearly doubled in the state, compared with 2008. Minnesota was a microcosm of the national failure of the GOP’s voter suppression strategy.
Berman adds further,
Ten major restrictive voting laws were blocked in court over the past year, and turnout among young, black and Latino voters increased as a share of the electorate in 2012 compared with 2008. The youth vote rose from 18 to 19 percent, and the minority vote increased from 26 to 28 percent; both went heavily for Obama.
…The black vote rose in Florida, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia, while the Latino vote grew in Florida, Colorado and Nevada. “There were huge organizing efforts in the black, Hispanic and Asian communities, more than there would’ve been, as a direct result of the voter suppression efforts,” says Matt Barreto, co-founder of Latino Decisions, a Latino polling and research firm.
n late September, Project New America, a Denver center-left research group, tested more than thirty messages on “sporadic, less likely voters who lean Democratic” (which included young, black and Hispanic voters) to see what would motivate them to vote. “One of the most powerful messages across many different demographics was reminding people that their votes were important to counter the extremists who are kicking people off of voter rolls,” the group wrote in a post-election memo.
Berman points out that these successful resistance campaigns don’t mean that all voter suppression efforts failed. On the contrary,
A flood of horror stories poured in during early voting and on election day: voters waiting in line for seven hours in Florida, wrongly turned away for lack of photo ID in Pennsylvania, improperly forced to cast provisional ballots in Ohio. The day after the election, 600,000 early votes and provisional ballots remained uncounted in Arizona, most of them in heavily Latino Maricopa County. According to Hart Research Associates, black and Hispanic voters were two to three times more likely than whites to wait more than thirty minutes to cast their ballot.
In-person early voting declined in Florida because of fewer early voting hours, compared with 2008. Florida voter registration dropped by 14 percent because of the twelve months in 2011-12 when the state shut down voter registration drives. The 1-866-Our-Vote hotline received more than 9,000 calls from Pennsylvanians on election day, many from voters wrongly told by poll workers that a photo ID was required in order to vote. Twice as many voters in Philadelphia as in 2008 had to cast provisional ballots because their names were missing from voter rolls. Of all the swing states, Pennsylvania had the sharpest drop in voter turnout, down by more than 7 percent from 2008, which could be attributable to confusion over its suspended voter ID law.
Berman notes that various legislative reforms have been proposed, but adds that “Before Congress tries to pass sweeping election reform, it should take the baby step of getting an election commission back up and running.” Then there is the very real threat that section 5 ‘pre-clearance’ provision of the Voting Rights Act will be overturned by the Supreme Court. Yet the 2012 election proved that the law is still urgently needed. As Berman concludes, “If anything, Section 5 should be expanded to include states like Ohio and Pennsylvania. Losing Section 5 would greenlight the very kind of voter suppression that proved so unpopular in 2012.”
James Rainey asks at the L.A.Times “Did Romney deserve the negative media coverage he received?” I guess my answer would be ‘No. He deserved more negative coverage than that.’
Gone, unfortunately, are the days when the impulse to be charitable towards defeated political adversaries was generally well-received. Partisan hack that I am, I nonetheless wish we could have better reconciliation and and a semblance of bipartisan unity after elections. Constant bickering gets tiresome and, after a hard-fought battle, it’s a commendable human impulse to let bygones fade away and begin relationships anew, using what has been learned to work together more productively for the common good.
Romney couldn’t even manage to be gracious in defeat, whining about “gifts” to pro-Obama constituencies. It’s as if the concept of being magnanimous toward one’s adversary is anathema to the masters of the universe.
Romney is not alone among his GOP brethren in a lack of graciousness towards President Obama in particular. Despite protestations to the contrary, it’s very hard to discount race as a factor in their overarching resentment of the President, so bitter is the tone of the Republican critique of the Administration. But Romney could have set an example of civility and genuine patriotism even in defeat by reaching out to President Obama and offering to help promote reconciliation. But it appears to have been completely out of the question.
Would it be so unacceptable for Romney to make a statement urging his fellow Republicans to respect the President’s 4 million vote victory and offer some bipartisan cooperation? He certainly sounded the bipartisan trumpet loudly enough in the final weeks of his campaign. Doing so now could help heal the divisions in the electorate.
Democrats have not always been exemplars of goodwill when defeated. Our left flank can get pretty acrid when we get beat. But that usually passes and is replaced by a willingness to compromise and cooperate to achieve the best that we can salvage for the common good. That seems to not be on the radar screen of the leaders of today’s GOP, and unfortunately Romney has done nothing to promote healing. He should. That’s how grown-ups resolve bitter conflicts. President Obama should invite him to the white house and give him a chance to reconsider.
it might be a good idea to start a new tradition, in which both presidential candidates do a few joint appearances after every election, focused on the goal of healing the divisions caused by their campaigns. Policy differences will remain, but the loser should always acknowledge that his/her party has an obligation to compromise to some extent.
It may be that such a gesture on Romney’s part would be greeted with cynicism by his party. But in doing so, he would at least be sending a message of reconciliation to his rank and file supporters. That would do some good and serve him well.
The following excerpt by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, author of The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
I know there will be a lot of very thoughtful and moving blog posts today at all my favorite blogs and news sites about what different people are thankful for. Truth be told, I am actually a pretty sentimental guy, and if this Thanksgiving is like most of the rest, some of those pieces will probably make me a little teary-eyed. I know I am incredibly thankful for how lucky I am, that I live in such an incredible country and have such a remarkable family. I am thankful as well for a country where my mom and other older relatives have Social Security and Medicare to rely on; where my brother Kevin had disability support throughout his life; for a country where an elderly and disabled homeless man I know finally is getting government housing after a long wait.
But I have to admit a certain cynical side as well, because when I see a video like this, I also become very thankful for policy opponents like this:
It is interesting that Mr. Blankfein’s video came out the same day a much smarter, savvier proponent of Social Security and Medicare cuts came out with a memo about how to sell such cuts. Lloyd did pretty much everything wrong, as far as what the memo recommended, and I’m sure my friends at Third Way would not have wanted the CEO of Goldman Sachs as their lead spokesman on the campaign to make those cuts. But God bless him, I am so very thankful: having a man as wealthy and privileged and powerful as Blankfein, a man who is the CEO of a company which has gotten enormous government bailouts and largess over the last 5 years, tell people they need to retire later and have their benefits cut is a great boon to folks like me who are opposing such things.
The people at Third Way are a much tougher foe. They are old political warriors who know how to craft messaging research to make it look like voters are with them, and know how to use people’s love of Medicare and Social Security as a way to scaring them into making cuts in the programs.
It is heart-breaking to me to read the coldly analytical memo describing the focus groups they did with a goal of figuring out how to build support for cutting the programs these voters love, rely on, and are desperately worried about losing. These paragraphs are powerful:
When imagining a future where Social Security and Medicare were not fixed, everyone of our participants imagined a bleak existence, not just for the country, but for themselves personally. They described that scenario as being one in which people “can’t get care,” “die earlier,” “are unhealthier,” and “work longer.” That was a future in which “our system has failed and there were no financial supports.” And how do they view people standing in the way of fixing these programs? As one Minnesota Democrat put it, “blissfully ignorant of the issues or too selfish to care about someone else to deal with these problems.
It’s personal.
Even though our focus group participants were all over the age of 45, with some significantly older and already benefiting from Social Security and Medicare, they all worried that the programs’ financial problems would jeopardize their own benefits – not just those of future retirees. They felt personally threatened and feared a loss of control over their own lives in the absence of changes. One noted, “I don’t think it’s going to be around when I get it.” And another said, “We’ve been told for 30 years it [Social Security] won’t be there and we got into that mindset that we’re not going to get it.”
When asked to write a postcard to their grandchildren in a future where our country had not taken action to shore-up Social Security and Medicare, these participants revealed their deep fear of losing their homes and becoming a burden on their families. One participant wrote to his grandchildren, “You now are responsible for starting a new family while you must also care for your parents.” Another described the consequences to their grandchildren as “that’s why I live off Mom and Daddy. They have to take care of me.” Another said without fixing Social Security, “the payment I am receiving is not enough for me to live by myself so I would like to live with you.” A recurring theme with Medicare was the stability it afforded seniors to stay in their own homes and not burden their children. One woman noted that “you shouldn’t need to be rich to get a lawyer to protect your house” from medical bills. Another described the consequences of inaction more bluntly, “Grandpa and I live in a nursing home. [We] lost our house…and are getting abused.”
As that focus group participant said, for 30 years the fear-mongers have been telling people that Social Security and Medicare weren’t going to be there for people, and because these programs are so loved and so needed, the plan now is to use that fear to sell them on the idea that cuts to benefits are needed. Because of the fear-mongering, people are worried that these programs need to be “fixed”. But here’s where the Third Way memos are especially revealing: they don’t ever seem to tell people, or ask them poll questions, about Third Way’s preferred solutions such as cutting benefits or raising the retirement age. The reason they don’t ask such questions is that they know how unpopular those policy ideas are. Instead, they keep everything general and generic, a classic tactic of people doing a poll for public consumption where they know the specifics of what they are proposing are unpopular.
Republicans, of course, have been doing this for years. You ask questions like “is government too big?”, “would you like a tax cut?”, “do you believe in traditional values?” or “are deficits a problem?”, people tend to nod along and say sure. You get into any kind of policy specifics, people quickly will tell you they prefer Democratic policy positions. Third Way is playing the same kind of game. They ask people whether they want to “fix” Social Security and Medicare, of course they will say yes — they love and need them, and don’t want them threatened as the folks at Third Way and their allies keep saying they are. You ask general things like they asked in their poll, people will say yes. Are deficits a problem? Do they want leaders to come together and compromise? Do they want bipartisan solutions? Isn’t America a great country? Aren’t loving mothers and grandmothers wonderful? Okay, they didn’t ask the last two questions, but they might as well have. Pollsters ask questions like these not because they teach us anything useful, but because they want to release the poll and spin things their way.
But progressives can learn things from the Third Way polling too. We now know what the opposition plans in the fiscal showdown: scare people into thinking that Social Security and Medicare are threatened, and that only by agreeing to cuts in benefits can it be saved. We have to be prepared to lay out the clear facts on Social Security and Medicare, and have our own policy alternatives to promote. The Social Security formula can be shifted so that wealthier Americans contributions are not capped at $95,000, a simple fix Third Way never mentions that would easily solve all of Social Security’s long term fiscal issues for the foreseeable future. Hundreds of billions in Medicare dollars can be saved over the next several years by forcing the drug companies to negotiate with Medicare on their prices, and by cracking down on providers gaming the system. These are simple solutions that don’t require screwing over the middle income and poor seniors dependent on these programs.
You know what is disturbing about the Third Way’s release of these memos at this juncture of the debate? They undercut the President’s and Congressional Democrats’ bargaining strategy with the Republicans on these issues. Republicans all over town were touting the Third Way’s memos yesterday, very excited to have a Democratic group join them in their mission to cut middle class benefits from Medicare and Social Security. This is, sadly, a repeat of an earlier pattern of undercutting Democrats: Third Way in September called Elizabeth Warren’s message “catastrophically anti-business,” a quote the Chamber of Commerce delightedly picked up and ran with in trying to help Scott Brown defeat her.
So on this day before Thanksgiving, let me be gracious to my opponents on these policy debates. Lloyd Blankfein, I salute you for giving us such a great example of a wealthy powerful man who takes massive government largesse and who wants to slash benefits for the middle class and make them work longer before retirement; our side will be able to use that video well in this debate. And to the smart folks at Third Way, thank you for spelling out clearly the kind of messaging the Republicans will be using in their war on Social Security and Medicare.
The class war continues unabated, even on Thanksgiving week: the wealthy and their allies trying to take money out of the hands of the middle class. I’m thankful the middle class is still in the fight.
As Election Day recedes into memory and the harsh realities of day-to-day politics return, I’ve been covering several key developments at the Washington Monthly.
One is the increasingly phony “struggle for the soul of the Republican Party” in which ideology stands virtually untouched, only a few strategic options are discussed, and most of the heat is over tactics, personalities, and blame. There’s now a phony conservative “backlash” building against phony criticism of conservatives, and you have to get up close to discern who is in what camp, so small are the differences.
The first signs of intra-Democratic dissension are emerging in the jittery anticipation of a possible fiscal agreement. But so far, this, too is a phony war, with factional mistrust and rumored behind-the-scenes betrayals taking the place of significant substantive disagreement.
As those focused on national politics await real news in the maneuvering on taxes and spending, a different reality is emerging in the states, where polarization on Election Day generally produced not gridlock but big partisan majorities. Divided control of state governments is at an historic low, and both parties have achieved super-majority status in a significant number of state legislative chambers. So even as pundits complain of unproductive stalemate in Washington, we could be on the brink of an era where states move in very different directions on a whole host of policy fronts, making the continuation of a federal safety net and regulatory presence more important than ever.
This item by Ed Kilgore, James Vega and J.P. Green was originally published on November 15, 2012.
Although it is only a few days since the 2012 election ended, the national media is already settling into a familiar political narrative regarding the GOP, a narrative that goes as follows: the Republican Party, having suffered major setbacks at the polls, is now “reassessing” its approach and seeking ways to “moderate” its image and positions.
This is a profoundly comfortable and comforting narrative – one that reflects a kind of ceremonial ritual in American politics. A political party, chastened by defeat, is widely praised by mainstream commentators as it moves back toward the center, re-establishing the basic “balance” and “moderation” of American political life.
But in this case there is one overwhelming problem with this narrative: it is profoundly and dangerously wrong.
Beginning last spring, a growing chorus of influential observers and commentators – political moderates and centrists rather than partisan progressive Democrats — began to express a very different view of the GOP – a view that the Republican Party was no longer operating as a traditional American political party. Rather, they argued, it had evolved into an extremist political party of a kind not previously seen in American political life.
During the presidential campaign this perspective was temporarily set aside as journalists and commentators tried to keep up with the almost daily twists and turns of Mitt Romney’s reinventions of himself as a conservative, a moderate and then a conservative once again. But now that the election is over, the underlying issue must be squarely faced.
The first major statement expressing the view that the Republican Party had embraced a dangerous extremism appeared in a very influential Washington Post article, “Let’s just say it, the Republicans are the problem” written by the well known and widely respected congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein. As the article’s key paragraph said:
In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party. The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition… [It has] all but declared war on the government….
The two authors quoted Mike Lofgren, a veteran Republican congressional staffer, who wrote an anguished diatribe about why he was ending his career on the Hill after nearly three decades.
“The Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe,”
Mann and Ornstein’s forceful critique provided the impetus for other moderates and centrists to follow their lead and directly address the growing extremism within the GOP. James Fallows, for example, expressed the view as follows in The Atlantic:
Normally I shy away from apocalyptic readings of the American predicament…But when you look at the sequence from Bush v. Gore, through Citizens United…and you combine it with ongoing efforts in Florida and elsewhere to prevent voting from presumably Democratic blocs; and add that to the simply unprecedented abuse of the filibuster in the years since the Democrats won control of the Senate and then took the White House, you have what we’d identify as a kind of long-term coup if we saw it happening anywhere else.
Liberal democracies like ours depend on rules but also on norms — on the assumption that you’ll go so far, but no further, to advance your political ends. The norms imply some loyalty to the system as a whole that outweighs your immediate partisan interest.
American politics has always been open to the full and free expression of even the most extreme ideas, but the profound danger posed by the current extremism of the GOP lies in one deeply disturbing fact: the Republican Party’s extremism goes far beyond support for extreme public policies. Instead, in three key respects, it deliberately seeks to undermine basic norms and institutions of democratic society.
The two very different meanings of political extremism
To clearly demonstrate this, however, it is necessary to carefully distinguish between two entirely distinct meanings of the term “political extremism.”
On the one hand, it is possible for a person or political party to hold a wide variety of very “extreme” opinions on issues. These views may be crackpot (e.g. “abolish all courts and judges”) or repugnant (“deny non-insured children all medical care”). But as long as the individual or political party that holds these views conducts itself within the norms and rules of a democratic society, its right to advocate even the most extreme views is protected by those same democratic institutions.
The alternative definition of the term “political extremism” refers to political parties or individuals who do not accept the norms, rules and constraints of democratic society. These individuals or parties embrace a view of “politics as warfare” and of political opponents as literal “enemies” who must be crushed. Extremist political parties based on a “politics as warfare” philosophy emerged on both the political left and right at various times in the 20th century and in many different countries and circumstances.
Despite their ideological diversity, extremist political parties share a large number of common characteristics, one critical trait being a radically different conception of the role and purpose of a political party in a democratic society. In the “politics as warfare” perspective a political party’s objective is defined as the conquest and seizure of power and not sincere collaboration in democratic governance. The party is viewed as a combat organization whose goal is to defeat an enemy, not a representative organization whose job is to faithfully represent the people who voted for it. Political debate and legislative maneuvering are seen not as the means to achieve ultimate compromise, but as forms of combat whose only objective is total victory.
It is this “politics as warfare” view of political life that leads logically and inevitably to the justification of attempts to attack and undermine basic democratic institutions whenever and wherever they present a roadblock to achieving the ultimate goal of complete ideological victory.
Three tactics of political extremism
The new moderate and centrist critics of Republican extremism have noted three specific kinds of attacks that the GOP has launched on basic American democratic norms and institutions.
This item by J.P. Green was originally published on November 10, 2012.
We know you’re sick of politics and you would like to give it a rest for a while. But Michael Tomasky’s post, “The Obama Coalition in the Off Years” at The Daily Beast has one of the best ideas yet for the mid-term elections, and you should check it out before it fades off the political radar screen. Noting that 2012 voter turnout was near 60 percent, Tomasky explains:
Some rich liberals need to fund a public-education group that will work full-time to make sure the liberal blocs and constituencies come out and vote in off-year elections…And off-year turnout is down around 40 percent. The 20 percent who leave the system are almost entirely Democrats. This has been true all my life. It’s basically because old people always vote, and I guess old white people vote more than other old people, and old white people tend to be Republican. So even when white American isn’t enraged as it was in 2010, midterms often benefit Republicans.
Conceding the exceptions of ’98 and ’06, Tomasky continues,
As long as this is true, the country’s progressive coalition will spend forever taking one step forward in presidential years, and one step back in off years. But imagine if the Obama coalition had voted, even in decent numbers, in 2010. The Democrats might still well have the House.
If liberal blocs can be conditioned in a generation’s time to vote in every federal election, well, combine that with what we know to be the coming demographic changes, and the electoral pressure on Republicans would be constant and enormous. The Republican white voting pool has limits, so the GOP would have to compete even harder for brown and black votes, which would pull our politics even more to the left.
A long-term project along these lines would be $20 million (or whatever) very well spent for some rich liberal who cares about changing the country.
Tomasky’s idea has added appeal, considering that in 2014 an unusually high number of Democratic senators will be up for re-election in red and swing states (6 for each). As for the House, Cameron Joseph notes at The Hill:
On the House side, while Democrats will have some opportunities at districts they missed out on in California and elsewhere, heavily gerrymandered GOP maps in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, Virginia, Wisconsin and North Carolina will continue to limit their opportunities.
Democrats tend to live in more urban areas, concentrating their votes into fewer congressional districts, and legally required “majority-minority” districts further pack Democrats into a few districts and make nearby districts more safely Republican.
According to a recent study by the Center for Voting and Democracy, Democrats start off with 166 safe districts while Republicans start off with 195. There are only 74 true swing districts where the presidential candidates won between 46 and 54 percent of the popular vote, down from 89 before redistricting.
That means the GOP needs to win less than one-third of competitive House seats to stay in control — something that shouldn’t be too hard to accomplish, barring a huge Democratic wave. In a politically neutral year Democrats are likely to have around 203 seats, a number that’s only slightly higher than the number they’ll have once the remaining 2012 races are called.
In addition, it’s just possible that some of the creative GOTV techniques Dems deployed so successfully this year could be transferable to the 2014 mid-terms. In any case, meeting the challenge of making the next mid-term electorate resemble this year’s general election demographics could help insure that progressive change replaces continued gridlock and stagnation.
This staff post was first published on November 7, 2012.
For insightful analysis of elections, it’s always good to check in with the National Journal‘s ace Ronald Brownstein, who observes today:
President Obama won a second term by marrying the new Democratic coalition with just enough of the old to overcome enduring economic disenchantment and a cavernous racial divide.
In many places, particularly across the Sun Belt, Obama mobilized the Democrats’ new “coalition of the ascendant,” winning enough support among young people, minorities and college-educated whites, especially women, to overcome very weak numbers among blue-collar whites and college-educated men. But in the upper Midwest, where there are not enough of those voters to win, Obama attracted just enough working-class whites to hold the critical battlegrounds of Wisconsin, Iowa, and above all Ohio against Mitt Romney’s forceful challenge.
Brownstein notes that with Obama’s victory, Democrats have matched the GOP record of winning the popular vote in 4 of 5 elections. he adds that “Obama also held all 18 “blue wall” states that have voted Democratic in each election since 1992. By doing so he set a new milestone: that is the most states Democrats have won that often since the formation of the modern party system in 1828.”
Brownstein explains that Obama adroitly rode the “tailwind” of demographic transformation, as people of color now cast 28 percent of the ballots in a presidential election, and Obama received 80 percent of their votes, “including not only more than nine in 10 African-Americans, but also about seven in 10 Hispanics, and about three in four Asians.”
“In the key Midwestern battlegrounds with much smaller minority populations,” adds Brownstein, “the president engineered a different formula for victory…Obama exceeded his national performance among white voters by just enough to repel Romney’s challenge” by successfully characterizing Romney as “an insensitive plutocrat.” yet, nationwide, “Obama captured a smaller share of the white vote than John Kerry did when he lost in 2004.”
In that way, the election offered warning signs to each party.
It’s a warning sign for Democrats, says Brownstein, but a disaster for Republicans: “By winning nearly three-fifths of whites, Romney matched the best performance among white voters ever for a Republican challenger–and yet he lost decisively in the Electoral College.” Brownstein adds,
…By failing to compete more effectively for the growing minority population, Republicans have lowered their ceiling in presidential politics, and left their nominees trying to thread a needle to reach a majority either in the popular or Electoral College vote.
Brownstein concludes of Obama’s re-election,
…His victory underscored the enduring polarization along ideological, regional, and racial lines: For instance, while about three-fifths of Hispanics and three-fourths of African-Americans who voted said they wanted his health care law maintained or even expanded, nearly three-fifths of whites said they wanted it repealed…How Washington makes progress on the biggest challenges we face while the nation is both deeply and closely divided is the largest question looming after Obama’s historic victory.
There is no question that President Obama and the Democrats have won an impressive mandate. The challenge ahead is to increase the comfort level of white working class voters as a permanent constituency in the new Democratic coalition.
Craig Timberg and Amy Gardner have an encouraging read, “Democrats push to redeploy Obama’s voter database” at the Washington Post. As Michael Slaby, the Obama campaign’s ‘chief integration and innovation officer,’ put it: “Though often described as “microtargeting,” Slaby said the most important element was what he called “micro-listening.” I have a hunch Republicans are going to have trouble replicating the Dem’s edge in microtargeting and message testing, since listening well is clearly not a big part of their skill set.
As Messina says “Old-Fashioned Door Knocking Got Better Data Than Online Data Mining,” notes Elizabeth Flock of U.S. News.
At The New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin assesses the prospects for filibuster reform.
Interesting: Peyton M. Craighill and Scott Clement report in their WaPo article “Can unions save the white working-class vote for Democrats?” that “At the national level, just 18 percent of voters are union members themselves or live in a house with a member. That’s down six percentage points since 2004 and the lowest level in exit polls back to 1972.” I would say that 18 percent is a pretty sizable constituency.
Wow. John McCain’s nickname should not be “Old Sour Grapes,” as a friend calls him — It should be “Vinegar,” as this revealing report, “The Unhinging of John McCain” by Geoffrey Dunn indicates.
The ratings ass-whupping commeth for Fox news too, courtesy of MSNBC.
This is kind of a knuckleheaded argument, considering that there are more than 6,000 Latino elected officials and more than 45 milion Latinos in the U.S. Also, it wasn’t all that long ago, we saw a guy go from being a lowly state senator with little money and few connections to President of the U.S. in about 5 years.
Oh, please.
The Nation’s Eric Alterman explains how the Romney campaign’s delusions of political grandeur were spoon-fed by the MSM: “Post-truth politics reached a new pinnacle this year as major MSM machers admitted to a lack of concern with the veracity of the news their institutions reported. “It’s not our job to litigate [the facts] in the paper,” New York Times national editor Sam Sifton told the paper’s public editor, Margaret Sullivan, regarding phony Republican “voter fraud” allegations. “We need to state what each side says.” “The truth? C’mon, this is a political convention” was the headline over a column by Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post “fact-checker.”…not only did many members of the MSM give Romney a pass on his serial lying; they actually endorsed his candidacy on the assumption that we need not take seriously any of those statements the candidate had felt compelled to make in order to win the nomination of his party.”
A cartoon for the still-clueless.
