Political parties often face choices between strategies that create (or promise to create) a short-term advantage, and those that address long-range challenges. One of the GOP’s problems right now is that it is developing a real habit of sacrificing the long game to immediate opportunities. I briefly discussed five recent examples today at the Washington Monthly:

The first example involves the many, many lies told by GOP pols and affiliated gabbers about the alleged horrific impact of the Affordable Care Act on old folks. These ranged from deliberate mischaracterization of the Medicare “cuts” in the ACA (raised to an infamous art form by Paul Ryan in 2012), and ranged on up to the amazingly effective if completely fabricated “death panel” meme. As a short-term strategy, this made sense, and certainly helped solidify the GOP’s sudden new dominance among older white voters, a key factor in 2010. In the long term, though, aside from the risk of hellfire, the tactic undermined the GOP’s simultaneous commitment to “entitlement reform,” the linchpin of its fiscal strategy.
A second choice of short-term versus long-term strategies has been the War on Voting, which has risked generational alienation of affected young and minority voters in exchange for dubiously effective electoral advantages. This is an ongoing choice, which only Rand Paul has (temporarily) seriously questioned.
A third, emphasized just today by Ross Douthat (though the critique has always been a staple of so-called Sam’s Club Republicanism), was the decision to make the 2012 economic message of the GOP revolve around the needs and perspectives of business owners, presumably to reverse the advantage Democrats had slowly gained since the Clinton years among several categories of upscale voters. This approach played right into Democrats’ new openness to populist messages, and while conservatives like Douthat are arguing for policies that appeal to the economic interests of middle-class voters, the shadow of Mitt Romney still looms large.
A fourth, which is also ongoing, was the sudden and almost universal embrace by the GOP of a “religious liberty” argument that identified the party with very extreme positions on birth control and same-sex marriages, undermining years of careful antichoicer focus on late-term abortion and reversing an implicit party decision to soft-pedal homophobia. Those who led this campaign in 2012 probably had visions of it serving as a wedge into the Catholic vote (which even some Democrats feared), which just didn’t happen.
And fifth and most definitely ongoing example is the decision to follow an immediate shift to the right in Republican and to some extent independent attitudes towards immigration reform in the wake of the refugee crisis on the border, even though Republicans know they’ll pay a long-term price in credibility with Latino voters.

Taking a snail’s-eye view of strategic opportunities isn’t an inherent Republican vice. But it’s becoming habitual right now, in part because any long-range strategy would require ideological concessions, and we can’t have that, can we?

Dan Balz’s “If voter turnout is key, why is it so low?” rounds up the reasons and possible cures for low voter participation in mid term elections.

Brendan Nyhan has a good post at The Upshot on the folly of the ‘Green Lantern Theory of the Presidency.”

Long-term unemployment is plummeting.

The GOP appears ready to squander many millions of taxpayer dollars on a doomed impeachment effort —even though 65 percent of voters think it is a bad idea, according to a CNN/ORC International poll released Friday.

How many millions would the Republicans spend? One clue is that they spent more than $40 million taxpayer dollars on Ken Starr’s impeachment ploy, and Republican leaders are even less anchored to prudent management of taxpayer dollars today.

From The Hill, Mike Lillis quotes DCCC chair Steve Israel on Democratic strategy to use the House’s August break to underscore who is really responsible for “the do-nothing congress”: “August will be about our action versus their inaction,” Israel said…”We’ll be talking about how they have stalled on everything, and we have a specific series of initiatives to jumpstart the middle class. That is going to be August.”

Tim Devaney writes, also at The Hill, that “Business groups alarmed by rise of ‘micro-unions’ in workplace.”

Some disturbing stats from Robert Reich’s “The rise of the non-working rich” at The Baltimore Sun: “In 1979, the richest 1 percent of households accounted for 17 percent of business income. By 2007, they were getting 43 percent. They were also taking in 75 percent of capital gains. Today, with the stock market significantly higher than where it was before the crash, the top is raking even more from their investments…The six Walmart heirs have more wealth than the bottom 42 percent of Americans combined (up from 30 percent in 2007).”

So why aren’t voters more ticked off about inequality? Eduardo Porter mulls over some possible answers at The Upshot. “Researchers at the University of Hannover in Germany propose a simpler reason: Voters don’t demand more redistribution because they don’t grasp how deep inequality is…Evidently, nobody has a clue: In every one of the 26 nations, most of them in the developed world, for which they collected data, people believe that the income gap is smaller than it really is. And using perceived rather than actual inequality, the median voter theory works much better: Where people believe inequality is worse, governments tend to redistribute more…Unsurprisingly, Americans suffer from a pretty big perception gap. They think an American in the middle of the income distribution makes only 4 percent less than the national average, according to Ms. Engelhardt and Mr. Wagener’s research. In truth, the American in the middle makes 16 percent less.”

From David Lauter’s L.A. Times post, “Democratic strategists prescribe populism to cure party ills“: “Stanley Greenberg, who has advocated populist economic arguments since before his stint as Bill Clinton’s White House polling chief, made a similar argument this week in releasing a new survey of voters in 12 Senate battleground states. The poll showed that some voter groups that are key to Democratic chances are significantly “underperforming” relative to 2012, Greenberg said. That’s bad news for Democrats. But the survey, which tested the impact of different political arguments on voter intentions, indicated that a “populist economic narrative” could motivate those voters, even in states that traditionally lean Republican. The subjects Greenberg tested included raising the minimum wage, stronger laws to guarantee equal pay for women, closing corporate tax loopholes and raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans.”

Democrat Paul Davis leads by 8 points in KSN News poll in bid to take KS governorship away from Republican Sam Brownback.

At latinpost.com Nicole Rojas reports that “Latino Voter Turnout Likely Down in 2014, but Immigration Reform Will Still Affect Results.” Rojas quotes Patrick Oakford of the Center for American Progress: “Colorado has one of the fastest growing Latino electorates in the United States, and a lot of the races right now in Colorado are really close. So the Latino vote will matter,” Oakford said…Latinos will particularly be influential in Colorado 6th District, where incumbent Republican Congressman Mike Coffman will face off against Democrat Andrew Romanoff. “It’s a really close election. Mike Coffman narrowly won his previous election, and Latinos are going to be crucial to that,” Oakford said.”

NYT’s Jeremy W. Peters reports that anti-choicers are polishing their message with a new spin that sounds like it’s from Frank Luntz’s playbook.

At Pew Research Center Drew DeSilver addresses one of the most consequential of questions of electoral politics in the U.S., “Voter turnout always drops off for midterm elections, but why?” Lots of good numbers and analysis here, but could it be as simple as the reality that low-information voters are more likely to cast a ballot in presidential elections?

After reading Aaron Blake’s “Americans hate Congress. They will totally teach it a lesson by not voting,” noting that turnout was twice as high in percentage terms 50 years ago, I wondered if maybe many Americans are too time-challenged/exhausted to get informed about local elections.

At The National Journal Norm Ornstein posts on “The Existential Battle for the Soul of the GOP: What happens when extremism becomes mainstream?,” and observes “The most interesting, and important, dynamic in American politics today is the existential struggle going on in the Republican Party between the establishment and the insurgents–or to be more accurate, between the hard-line bedrock conservatives (there are only trace elements of the old-line center-right bloc, much less moderates) and the radicals.” Ornstein then presents a remarkable catalogue of radical right-wing crazy talk. This one should be a keeper/sharer. Ornstein concludes, “when one looks at the state of Republican public opinion (especially among the likely caucus and primary voters), at the consistent and persistent messages coming from the information sources they follow, and at the supine nature of congressional leaders and business leaders in countering extremism, it is not at all likely that what passes for mainstream, problem-solving conservatism will dominate the Republican Party anytime soon.”
NAACP set to make voter suppression the central focus of its annual convention, which begins Saturday.

At Bloomberg News Mike Dorning explains why “Obamacare Fight Carries Risks for Republicans in 2016 Swing States.”

The “enthusiasm gap” as a predictor of electoral outcomes is one of the Pew Research Group’s less valuable contributions to political analysis. So I took a few shots today at Washington Monthly at Pew’s latest offerings on this subject:

Pew is back with its latest estimates of the GOP “enthusiasm gap” at this point in the midterm cycle. Here’s the relatively good, or perhaps relatively not-so-bad, news for Democrats:

Today, the Republicans lead on a number of key engagement indicators, though in some cases by smaller margins than four years ago. Currently, 45% of registered voters who plan to support the Republican in their district say they are more enthusiastic about voting than in prior congressional elections; that compares with 37% of those who plan to vote for the Democratic candidate. The GOP had a 13-point enthusiasm advantage at this point in the midterm campaign four years ago (55% to 42%) and the Democrats held a 17-point advantage eight years ago (47% to 30%).
However, as many voters who support the Republican in their district say they are “absolutely certain” to vote this fall as said this in June 2010. Three-quarters of Republican voters (76%) say they are absolutely certain to vote, compared with 67% of Democratic voters. Four years ago, 77% of Republican voters and 64% of Democratic voters said they were absolutely certain to vote in the fall.

As regular readers have heard me say on many occasions, voter “enthusiasm” is an inherently questionable metric for likely voter turnout, insofar as “enthusiasm” beyond that needed to get one to the polls is wasted unless it’s somehow communicated (e.g., via volunteer activity).
Another thing to keep in mind when trying to compare this midterm to the last two is that in 2006 and 2010 the party with the least “enthusiasm” was grossly over-extended, particularly in the House, thanks to prior victories in marginal territory. That’s certainly not true of House Democrats today, though you can certainly make an argument Senate Democrats are over-extended in the South.
In any event, these type of surveys are really just a placeholder until late-cycle polls begin to get a grip on the universe of “likely voters.”

So Republicans excited about the “enthusiasm gap” should curb their enthusiasm. And Democrats should focus on the hard, practical work of getting people to the polls who will vote for the Donkey Party, with or without high levels of “enthusiasm.”

While most of the meager national attention paid to yesterday’s Georgia primary runoffs was devoted to David Perdue’s upset win over Jack Kingston for the U.S. Senate nomination, there were significant contests also held in the three heavily Republican districts vacated by House members running for the Senate. Remember back in May when people talked about ridding the House of hard-core wingnuts Phil Gingrey and Paul Broun, who finished fourth and fifth (respectively) in the Senate primary? Well, their successors are in the same mold, as I noted at TPMCafe today:

Gingrey, never the sharpest tool in the congressional shed, will be replaced by state senator Barry Loudermilk, a more disciplined ideologue who crushed former congressman and 2008 Libertarian Party presidential candidate Bob Barr in a sign of how far right Barr’s former district has drifted. Broun’s successor as Republican nominee is a worthily wild candidate, Baptist minister and radio talk show host Jody Hice, famed for homophobic outbursts, and for billboards he put up in an earlier race that replaced the “O” in the president’s name with a hammer-and-sickle.
Kingston will not be succeeded by the similarly colorful “constitutional conservative” in his own House district, Dr. Bob “Christian Conservative” Johnson, who lost the runoff yesterday (probably due to elevated turnout attributable to Kingston’s campaign) to state legislator Buddy Carter despite support from the Club for Growth and Sarah Palin. But presumably Carter would follow Kingston’s lead into movement-conservative repositioning if he were ever to run statewide. That’s how Georgia Republicans roll.

Those who like to talk about the GOP “moderating” via “pragmatist” candidates crushing the dying Tea Party Movement need to start taking notice of what’s happening below the headlines.

Georgia Republicans have nominated David Perdue to hold Saxby Chambliss’s senate seat for the GOP, and all indications are that it will be a close race against Democratic nominee Michelle Nunn. Some regard Perdue’s win as an upset. The AJC’s ‘Political Insider’ Jim Galloway has posted “5 reasons David Perdue shocked Georgia’s political world to win GOP Senate nod,” noting his money advantage, a possible anti-incumbency trend, his ground game edge and other factors. TDS managing editor Ed Kilgore explains at Talking Points Memo:”

In the end, with turnout barely reaching double-digits, down about 20 percent from the primary, geography appeared to have decided the contest. Perdue augmented his primary advantage in metro Atlanta and middle Georgia just enough to exceed Kingston’s base in his coastal congressional district, with Kingston’s Atlanta endorsers Handel and Gingrey not delivering enough votes to make up the difference.

With benefit of hindsight, Perdue is much in the genteel conservative mold of Isakson and Chambliss, with the polished, upper-class persona which state Republicans like to have in the U. S. Senate. Unlike Chambliss and Isakson, however, Perdue’s sometimes graceless comments and dubious work history present problems, which Nunn’s campaign will surely amplify. In their Atlanta Constitution report on Perdue’s victory over Rep. Jack Kingston, Greg Bluestein and Daniel Malloy observe:

Perdue now faces Nunn, who has amassed a considerable bankroll and is leading in some early polls. The strength and crossover appeal of the CEO of nonprofit Points of Light — not to mention the scars of a bloody, nine-week GOP runoff — have Democrats convinced they could break Republicans’ hold on the state.
“There is a clear contrast in this race between Michelle Nunn, a leader who has spent the last 25 years leading volunteer organizations and lifting communities up, and David Perdue, someone who has spent his career enriching himself while oftentimes tearing companies and communities apart,” Georgia Democratic Party Chairman DuBose Porter said in a statement. “Georgians want leaders who will fix the mess in Washington, not someone who puts personal profit ahead of regular people.”

At the Washington Monthly, Kilgore describes Perdue’s vulnerabilities:

…Against Perdue, every weapon used against Mitt Romney would be available, but with Nunn comparing her nonprofit experience with the Republican’s money-grubbing and worker-screwing….Perdue’s shown a tendency to commit gaffes. He gave a huge opening to Karen Handel in the primary by mocking her lack of higher education in casual remarks that were taped and later released. And in a newspaper interview later on, he mentioned “revenues” as part of the federal budget picture without ritualistically swearing he’s die before ever accepting a tax increase, which was turned by his opponents into a dishonest but effective assertion that he’d called for a tax increase. Maybe the GOP would surround Perdue with gaffe-proofers if he won tonight, or insist he limit his entire campaign to the kind of soft-focus saturation ads that made him a contender to begin with.

As Kilgore notes of Perdue in the TPM post cited earlier, “In many respects, he’s a deep-fried Mitt Romney with shallower pockets.”
If Georgia’s swing voters want real change, it’s hard to see how they could favor a business-as-usual Republican over Nunn, who has a significant track record doing real humanitarian work. She is also well-regarded by Atlanta’s African American community, and if Georgia’s Black leaders campaign for her in the state’s five largest cities (Atlanta, Columbus, Augusta, Macon and Savannah), she just might pull it off.

From Democracy Corps and Womenms Voices Womens Vote Action Fund:
A new poll of the 12 states where control of the Senate is being contested, fielded by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for Democracy Corps and Women’s Voice Women Vote Action Fund, shows that control of the Senate rests on a knife’s edge, but that Democrats’ have a powerful weapon in a policy agenda and narrative centered around the needs of working women and men. This survey, the first to poll in all 12 battleground states using a named ballot, reveals a 44-46 race in states that were won by Mitt Romney by 9 points just 2 years ago.
This survey also shows that Democrats have a way to improve their fortunes. They are currently being held back by a serious underperformance with unmarried women, who give them just an 11-point advantage on the vote. But engaging in a populist economic debate and attacks on Republicans with a strong emphasis on women’s issues brings these critical voters back in the fold. It also may be the critical strategy in the open battleground Senate seats.
An “in your shoes” populist narrative about people’s economic struggles, a policy agenda about finally helping mothers in the workplace and making sure those at the top are paying their fair share are issues, and, most important, a critique of Republicans for their polices that hurt seniors and women result in significant gains with unmarried women and other key electoral targets when matched against the Republican agenda and could prove the difference between majority or minority-leader Harry Reid come next January.
Key findings:

• Unmarried women are, perhaps, the most important target for Democrats across this senate battleground.
• The senate race in this battleground is tied and stable, with Democrats held back by underperformance among base RAE voters and unmarried women.
• The Democratic incumbents in this battleground are much better liked than Obama and have significantly higher ratings than their Republican opponents. Their approval rating is 6 points above that for the president.
• Two dynamics could shift this race: the president’s approval in these states is just 37 percent, but stable. Meanwhile, the Republican Party, and particularly the Republicans in the House, is extremely unpopular. And regressions show that sentiment about House Republicans drives the SENATE vote more strongly than sentiment about Senate Republicans.
• Democrats have a message that can move the vote. A populist economic narrative, including strong messaging around the women’s economic agenda, moves the vote in Democrats’ favor when matched against a Republican economic narrative with big gains in the open-seat race and the state that Obama won in 2012.
• A critique of Republicans for their positions on seniors, women’s economic issues and women’s health are powerful and help move the vote among younger voters and women, as well as help move the vote in some of the most competitive races in the battleground.
• And a debate about money in politics, particularly over a Constitutional Amendment to repeal Citizens United and a proposal to get big money out of our campaign system, results in further gains.
• Exposing unmarried women to the economic message shifts their support for Senate Democrats from +11 to +20.
• The economic agenda for working women and men includes a cluster of powerful policies on helping working mothers, equal pay and equal health insurance, and making sure that the wealthy and big corporations pay their fair share.
• Unmarried women are the pivotal group of the debate, as Democrats currently underperform even their 2010 margin significantly, but these voters move strongly in response to the debate.
• Voters in this Republican-leaning district are split on the electoral impact of the Republican candidate supporting the Hobby Lobby decision, but the issue provides an opening for Democrats to make a powerful critique on Republicans on the issue of women’s health. The issue is very powerful with unmarried women and other key blocs of women.

Read the full memo here.

The following article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of “Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win,” is cross-posted from HuffPo:
On October 1, United Airlines is planning to outsource 630 gate agent jobs at 12 airports to companies that pay near-poverty level wages. The airports affected include Salt Lake City; Charlotte, North Carolina; Pensacola, Florida; Detroit and Des Moines, Iowa.
As a result hundreds of employees who formerly made middle-class, living wages will be forced to transfer to other cities, take early retirement or seek employment elsewhere. Union employees who have been with the company for years — many making a respectable $50,000-per-year salaries — will be replaced by non-union employees who will be paid less than half — between $9.50 and $12 per hour.
Nine-fifty an hour is a poverty-level wage if you are trying to support a family — and $12 barely exceeds the poverty level. In fact at $12 a family of three makes so little that they are eligible for food stamps.
That, in effect, means that United and its subcontractor will be subsidized by American taxpayers for the food stamp payments made to their new low-wage workers.
United’s move to convert middle-class jobs into near-poverty level jobs is shameful — it’s that simple.
And United’s move to cut employee pay is emblematic of corporate America’s systematic campaign to lower wages and destroy the American middle class in order to increase returns to Wall Street shareholders. It is exactly the kind of action that must come to a screeching halt if the middle class is to survive — and our children are once again be able to look forward to prosperous secure lives.
Remember that United is not slashing wages in order to compete with firms that pay cheap foreign wages. You have to use American workers to run your gate operations in the United States.
United claims it is outsourcing these jobs to improve its financial performance. The company lost $609 million in the first quarter — though last year United netted over $1 billion for shareholders overall. And over the last four quarters, earnings and revenue figures for the airline have been increasing quarter over quarter, which overall have left investors pleased.
On the other hand, United management is unhappy that its stock is not performing well relative to other airlines, so they have begun a systematic campaign to cut costs.
But whatever their financial needs, big companies cannot be allowed to solve them by exploiting the people who work for them by paying near-poverty wages.
In America we believe that you should have the opportunity to strike it rich. But you should not be allowed to do that by exploiting other people. You can make all the money you want so long as you pay your employees a living wage first.
Over the last 30 years per capita productivity and per capita gross domestic product have both increased by almost 80 percent. If the benefits of that increase were widely distributed, most average Americans would be 80 percent better off today than they were 30 years ago.
But instead average wages have stagnated — and most normal people are struggling just to keep up. That’s because almost all of that increase has been siphoned into the hands of the top 1 percent and out of the pockets of middle-class families.
United’s outsourcing plan is one of the methods that has been used systematically by corporations and Wall Street banks to achieve this result.
And it is exactly the kind of action that we must stop if we are to prevent America from becoming a society composed of a tiny number of wealthy semi-aristocrats and a massive number of workers who barely make enough to make ends meet.
The victims of United’s outsourcing will not just be the employees and their families. The move will contribute to the increased proportion of gross domestic product going to wealthiest Americans and the big Wall Street banks — and lower the proportion going to everyday Americans.
That means that ordinary Americans will have less money to spend on the increasing number of goods and services that our increasingly productive economy produces. If this trend continues the inevitable results will be to lower demand for products and services, lower economic growth and fewer jobs.
It is ironic that one of the stations United is outsourcing is Detroit — the very location where Henry Ford raised the wages of his employees because he understood that in the long run, it was better for business if his employees made enough to buy the cars the produce.
Today, short-term bottom lines seem to be the only benchmark that guides economic decision makers at America’s largest corporations and Wall Street Banks.
United is not the only airline to resort to massive outsourcing of middle class jobs. According to the Wall Street Journal:

American said the vast majority of its domestic airports already are staffed by Envoy or other contractors. Delta said only 42 of its 230 domestic airports employ Delta employees exclusively. Thirty-three airports have Delta workers as customer-service agents and Delta Global Services workers employed as ramp workers. In 80 airports, Delta Global Services workers perform both functions. Another 75 airports use other outside vendors.

Delta Global Services is Delta’s own non-union subsidiary.
The new round of outsourcing just builds upon United’s past actions:
According to the Journal:

United said it employs its own workers at 47 of 227 domestic airports and 27 airports use a mix of United and vendor employees. Fully 153 airports use outside handlers. United has said that as many as 30 more airports may be targeted for outsourcing…

United’s move to cut employee wages also reflects a broader view of big corporations and Wall Street banks, that the work of ordinary people should not be remunerated with middle-class salaries at all.
“It does make economic sense,” Michael Boyd, a consultant at Boyd Group International, told the Wall Street Journal. “It’s not a $40,000 job to load bags. Cleaning planes is not a $20-an-hour job.”
Really? I suppose clipping coupons and hanging out at the country club is a multimillion-dollar job. Or making successful bets on Wall Street is a billion-dollar job.

Read more…