It’s pretty well-established that one of the “fundamentals” that damaged Democrats in 2014 was a big lag between improving economic indicators and public perceptions of how the economy was performing.
Well, now the perceptions are catching up, and I discussed the implications today at Washington Monthly:

This new finding from Bloomberg Politics‘ polling (as reported by Margaret Talev) is a pretty big deal, assuming it holds up as a trend:

Americans are becoming more optimistic about the country’s economic prospects by several different measures. President Barack Obama’s handling of the economy is being seen more positively than negatively for the first time in more than five years, 49 percent to 46 percent—his best number in this poll since September 2009.

Here’s the under-side of that optimism, though:

[T]he national survey of 1,008 adults, conducted April 6-8, also reveals that about three-fourths of Democrats and independents, along with a majority of Republicans, say the gap is growing between the rich and everyone else—and a majority of women want the government to intervene to shrink it. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.

So it may well be that Hillary Clinton’s talk about inequality isn’t just a response to progressives unhappy with Obama’s “centrism,” but a theme we’ll be hearing more of both from her and from Obama himself as the obvious thing for a left-of-center pol to talk about when the overall direction of the economy is looking better. It also probably means that we’ll hear Republicans continue their awkward efforts to suggest shrinking government will unleash upward mobility. All in all, optimism about what a Democratic president is doing plus concerns traditionally associated with Democrats is a pretty good public opinion backdrop for a Democratic non-incumbent.

To put it another way, improving perceptions of the economy amid growing worries about inequality not only strengthens the case for another Democratic presidency but undermines the GOP’s case that it’s “time for a change.”

Something you hear regularly going into this cycle is that Democrats could suffer from “fatigue” or even a “curse” in association with the fact that they have held the White House for two consecutive terms. This makes me a little crazy, because (a) this is a very small data set from which to draw any predictive conclusions, and (b) the data we do have are often examined uncritically. So with some help from academic circles, I examined this myth at Washington Monthly:
To the extent that we are going to keep hearing that Democrats are handicapped in 2016 by “fatigue” with being the party controlling the White House since 2008, it’s helpful to have a truly comprehensive look at the precedents, as supplied the other day by Washington University’s John Patty at Mischiefs of Faction:

Is it really “hard” for a party to hang on to the White House for 12 years? The obvious answer is, “yes,” it is generally unlikely to that one party will control the White House for 3 terms. But, let’s do some math, with admittedly limited evidence.
If we accept that George Washington and John Adams were of the same “party,” then the presidency was held by the same party for the first 12 years (3 terms) of the Republic. Then, Jefferson, Monroe, and John Quincy Adams were co-partisans (of the “other” party relative to Washington and Adams) holding the presidency for 20 years (5 terms). Jackson and Van Buren controlled the presidency for the same party for 12 more years (3 terms).
This ends in 1840, when stuff started to get kind of crazy—at first slowly and then incredibly quickly—as the issue of slavery emerged and stretched the nation to civil war. For 20 years (5 terms), no party held the presidency for more than two terms in a row (and, to be honest, the notion of “party” was remarkably fluid during that time).
Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860, and began (for lots of varied reasons) a period of 24 years (6 terms) of one-party control of the presidency. Starting in 1884, we have 12 years of partisan switching, bookended by Grover Cleveland’s (uniquely) non-successive terms in office. We then have 16 years of Republican control of the office under McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt, and Taft.
Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, served two terms, but surrendered the office back to the Republicans in 1920. The Republicans sent Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover to the White House for one term each, a period of 12 years. They were followed by Franklin Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman for 20 years (4 terms).
Let’s pause for a second. Up through the Second World War, there were 2 elections in which one party had controlled the presidency for 8 consecutive years and was defeated. On the other hand, there were 5 elections in which one party had controlled the presidency for (exactly) 8 consecutive years and retained control. That’s over 70% success in holding on for 12 years plus. So, to be clear, from a very naive standpoint, early history suggests that there might be some “partisan momentum.”

Keep that in mind because most “proofs” of what Patty calls the “eight year itch” hypothesis begin, conveniently, in 1948. But even after that the “itch” argument is, well, scratchy:

Moving to the modern (i.e., post WWII) period, there have been 6 elections in which one party has controlled the White House for exactly 8 years. The other party has won 5 of those.
But the five of six are not exactly clear precedents:
1. The 1960 election was very close and arguably riddled (in important ways) with fraud.
Not to mention the fact that 1960 was preceded by two recessions, and that Kennedy (a) benefited from a large net positive in religious voting; and (b) managed, miraculously, to become the preferred candidate of both African-Americans and segregationists.
2. One of these elections was preceded by an eligible incumbent president declining to run (Lyndon Johnson in 1968).

I’d say the assassinations of MLK and RFK and a rapidly escalating war in Vietnam were also unusual factors.

3. Another was fought by an incumbent who was unelected and succeeded an incumbent who resigned in scandal (Gerald Ford was not elected vice-president).
4. A third one led to the phrase “hanging chads” becoming a thing and was arguably ultimately decided in the courts (George W. Bush’s win over Al Gore in 2000).
Thus, we are left with McCain’s loss to Obama in 2008.

And even then, this wasn’t exactly a “normal” election given the economic collapse of 2008 and the historic nature of Obama’s candidacy.

The whole argument really gets weak when you look at the whole record and then the details. Let’s hear less of it moving forward, please.

Now that Hillary Clinton is set to announce her presidential candidacy on Sunday, perhaps we will get some clarity on the hopes and fears she arouses. I wrote about the latter today at Washington Monthly:

Amidst the growing din over Hillary Clinton’s announcement of candidacy Sunday, there’s one voice I’d recommend listening to if only because I do think he’s isolated the main source of angst about HRC among Democrats. Here’s Brian Beutler at TNR today:

[T]here’s still a good argument that the Democratic Party could use a contested primary this cycle: not to toughen up Clinton’s calluses, but to build some redundancy into the presidential campaign. It may even be the case that some of these Democrats with rattled nerves are less anxious about Clinton’s prowess against Republicans than about the fact that all of the party’s hopes now rest on her shoulders. Her campaign has become a single point of failure for Democratic politics. If she wins in 2016, she won’t ride into office with big congressional supermajorities poised to pass progressive legislation. But if she loses, it will be absolutely devastating for liberalism.
If you’re faithful to the odds, then most of this anxiety is misplaced. Clinton may have slipped in the polls by virtue of an email scandal and her return to the partisan trenches more generally. But she’s still more popular and better known than all of the Republicans she might face in the general, her name evokes economic prosperity, rather than global financial calamity, the economy is growing right now, and Democrats enjoy structural advantages in presidential elections, generally.
But all candidates are fallible, and most of them are human, which means every campaign labors under the small risk of unexpected collapse. The one real advantage of a strong primary field is that it creates a hedge against just such a crisis. Right now either Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker or Jeb Bush is favored to win the Republican primary, but if both of them succumb to scandal or health scares, the GOP can shrug it off knowing that other seasoned Republicans have infrastructure in place, and are poised to swoop in if necessary.
If nobody serious challenges Hillary Clinton, nobody can be her understudy. In the near term that isn’t a problem, but if doubts about her inevitability develop late in the year or early next, the placid silence in the Democratic field will grow eerie.

What I like about Brian’s argument is that it’s not really about Hillary Clinton, but about any “putative nominee” for a party facing so crucial a presidential election–one in which, as Beutler points out, a Republican win could very well create one-party government in Washington. Even if you think–as I do–that the risk of an HRC implosion is a lot lower than it would be with anyone else you can think of, it’s still a risk.
But I’m not so sure there’s any realistic way to create what Brian calls an “understudy….”
This is one area where it should be obvious a parliamentary system would be vastly superior–where “understudies” could be deliberately chosen, groomed and promoted by an all-powerful party. Since we don’t have that, Democrats should probably reassure themselves that if HRC looks really vulnerable really early, there would be time for them to get behind a rival, and not necessarily one currently planning to run. So the risk Beutler is talking about, of a late disaster, is analogous to the fear a driver over icy roads harbors when thinking ahead to that last big curve.

I guess another way to look at it is that there are pros and cons to mostly uncontested and heavily contested nomination contests. We certainly saw the latter in 2012, when the GOP nomination contest drove the eventual nominee to the Right, especially on immigration policy. With a larger and even more complex field this time around, Republicans could have themselves a real demolition derby, one that will not necessarily produce the best nominee in the best condition. And even then, their nominee could experience a late collapse. There’s just no way to eliminate risk in a high-stakes presidential contest.

One of the big unresolved arguments from 2014 involved the theory that pro-Democratic groups didn’t just represent a declining share of the electorate in the midterms, but were also showing signs of trending Republican. I wrote about some new evidence from Pew on this subject for Washington Monthly:

[2014] exit polls showed Republicans doing a bit better among millennials, Latinos and even African-Americans, and a lot better among Asians, than in 2012. Similar findings in 2010 led some analysts to conclude that the Obama Coalition only existed when Obama was at the top of the ballot–not a particularly good omen for Democrats looking ahead to 2016. But other analysts argued the logic of figuring that even as midterm elections produced conservative-skewing turnout patterns across demographic lines, they probably do so within demographic groups. Thus, more conservative millennials, Latinos, African-Americans and Asians show up, at least at the margins, and Republicans get a bonus beyond the overall reshaping of the electorate.
There’s some strong if circumstantial evidence of the latter hypothesis in a big new survey from Pew that shows major demographic groups falling more or less into the same partisan preferences (particularly once the hordes of self-identified but bogus indies are pushed to “lean” one way or another) now as in 2012. This includes Millennials, who tilt Democratic by a 51/35 margin; Latinos, Democratic by a 56/26 margin; and Asians (65/23 Democratic after narrowly–at least according to the exit polls–going Republican in 2014).
These numbers should give triumphalist Republicans some pause at a minimum, while reinforcing the belief of many–myself included–that we are in an era of oscillating elections based on different midterm and presidential turnout patterns rather than some sort of steady trend towards the GOP.

These numbers are also a data point against the presumption that the “Obama Coalition” won’t be there for the next Democratic nominee. Indeed, about the only thing placing a thumb on the scales for the GOP in 2016 is the presumption of “voter fatigue” with the two-term Democratic control of the White House. That’s a presumption that relies on a very small sample with mixed results.

With today’s announcement by the president (carried live in Iran, BTW) of a “framework” for a deal on Iran’s nuclear program, to be completed by the end of June, we’ll hear an acceleration of cries from Republicans to kill the deal in its cradle, and actual promises from GOP presidential wannabes that they will not honor it if elected.
It’s time for Democrats to go on the offensive, as I argued at the Washington Monthly today:

For those who, like Scott Walker, are already promising to blow up such an agreement on his first day in office, it’s time, as Greg [Sargent] suggests, to ask him what he plans to do about the blowback from our European allies, who, after all, are full participants in the negotiations and will not look kindly on a key signatory cutting and running.
Beyond that, what do the critics think we should do? Seek a different, tougher agreement with different goals (e.g., an Iran with no nuclear capacity at all)? This would almost certainly require that the U.S. go it alone diplomatically. Or are the Scott Walkers of the world ready to follow John Bolton into outfront advocacy of war with Iran? And if that’s the case, where does that leave the fight against IS, which a lot of the same people are anxious to expand as well? Who’s going to replace Iran and its client Iraqi Shia militia in that battle? US troops? Guess we just need to nuke Iran while we are at it, since there are just not enough available boots to put on the ground in both places. Or I guess we could bring back conscription. It’s hard to say, until the critics stop second-guessing Obama and the others negotiating with Iran, and start proving they’ve thought this through beyond tomorrow afternoon.

The sense of outrage Democrats had when Republican senators wrote an open letter to Tehran warning there was no point in negotiating needs to be revived. We’ll need it in the weeks just ahead.