This staff post was originally published on October 26, 2012.
For those Democrats who have been puzzling over the inability of the Obama campaign to get more traction with white male voters, Brian Montopoli has an excellent post up at CBS News Politics, with the somewhat misleading title, “Will White Men Sink Obama?”
The title is misleading because Montopoli makes it clear that Obama can win; it’s more about the reasons behind the segmentation of the white male vote at this political moment. Montopoli sheds light on the challenge facing Democrats with this still-influential constituency and provides some insightful observations, including:

…While women outvoted men by about 10 million votes in the 2008 presidential election, men still made up 48 percent of the electorate. And white men alone made up more than one third of the electorate – 36 percent – according to national exit polls.
It’s true that whites are slowly shrinking as a portion of the electorate as blacks, Hispanics and Asians grow in influence, which is why you don’t see many news stories about them as a voting bloc. But they still pack a powerful electoral punch. White men, in fact, are providing the biggest drag on the president of any voting bloc as he tries to win another four years in the Oval Office. Even if the president gets his expected 80 percent support from minority voters, he is unlikely to win the election if he can’t win more than one in three white men. And he might not.
A Washington Post/ABC News poll released this week found that white men support Romney over Mr. Obama 65 percent to 32 percent – a 2-to-1 margin. That suggests the president is doing worse among white men then he did in 2008, when exit polls showed he lost white men by a 57 percent to 41 percent margin. The poll also found white men moving away from the president: Romney’s 19-point mid-October lead on handling the economy among the group has risen to 35 points today.

Montopoli quotes Progressive Policy Institute President Will Marshall on the problem:

Many white men, and many, in particular, non-college white men, have not seen that the Democratic economic agenda is in their interest…There’s an account from the left that says these voters have been estranged from Democrats on social issues. And there’s some truth to that. But I also think these voters believe the economic policies of Democrats have benefitted somebody else – not them…

But, as Montopoli points out, there is a strong regional influence on the way the white male vote breaks down:

…A survey released last month by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) found that Romney led 48 to 35 percent among whites lacking four-year college degrees who are paid by the hour or the job. Yet while Romney led by 40 points among southern working-class whites, the president actually led by eight points among Midwestern working-class whites. The president’s relative strength among whites in the Midwest is the reason a state like Pennsylvania appears likely to remain blue despite a relatively large white population.

As Marshall puts it in Montopoli’s post, “The sense that he’s doing better with white voters in the Midwest is the firewall for Barack Obama…It’s what’s giving him hope that he can win in the Electoral College even if he potentially loses the popular vote.”
Montopoli adds that Romney is weaker in the more unionized midwest, despite his Michigan roots, as a result of his opposition to the auto bailout and Obama’s relative popularity in the region. With white working-class women, however, the situation is a little more complicated. Moreover, adds Monopoli:

…The PRRI study found that while Romney holds a 2-1 advantage among white working class men, the two candidates were tied among white-working class women. David Paul Kuhn, author of “The Neglected Voter: White Men and the Democratic Dilemma,” reported that Democrats have seen a 25 percent decline in white working-class male support between 1948 and 2004, even as white working-class women held steady.

But the Bush meltdown may have exacerbated the insecurity of white men in particular. “The effect of the 2008 economic collapse has been dubbed a “he-cession” because it disproportionately left men out of work,” adds Montopoli.
Romney, for his part, has been struggling to make inroads with white male working-class voters in the region with repeated references to “the war on coal” and the like. But his campaign seems to be stuck in neutral at the moment.
It does appear that 2012 may be the last election in which the white male vote is a decisive force. As Montopoli concludes, “The silver lining in all this for Democrats: The impact of their disadvantage among white men looks likely to diminish as time goes on.”

This item, by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, author of The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, is cross-posted from HuffPo, where it originally appeared on October 23, 2012. :
We are now officially at the end game. What this election boils down to now is simple as can be: pumping up and getting out the Democratic base vote.
It really helps that Obama so dominated last night’s debate. He was steady and authoritative, putting Romney on the defensive early and keeping him there all night. The horses and bayonets line, unanswered by a stunned Romney, is the keeper debate line of the 2012 cycle, destined to join “there you go again, Mr. President” from Reagan in 1980, and the “you are no Jack Kennedy” line from Bentsen in ’88, as one of the most repeated debate lines in American history.
What was most fascinating about last night’s debate happened in the first minute, though. When moderator Bob Schieffer opened the debate by asking Romney the Benghazi question, I think everyone watching assumed that this would be the biggest flashpoint and battle of the debate, that this would be the fireworks and the news coming out of the night. When Romney chose instead to immediately punt on first down and turn the very specific and pointed Benghazi question into a rambling generic answer about foreign policy in general, he stunned everyone — and he took the biggest potential weakness for Obama on foreign policy off the table for not only the rest of the night but the rest of the campaign. If Romney didn’t have the guts to challenge the president on it when the question got teed up so directly for him, how is the Romney campaign going to make a credible case against Obama on it for the next two weeks? They aren’t. I don’t know whether there was some kind of big campaign decision that, having swung and missed in the last debate, he just wouldn’t go there, or whether Romney just flat out choked (I strongly suspect the latter) but, either way, having buried it in the debate, that issue will be very hard for the Romney campaign to resurrect.
The president fired up the Democratic troops last night. Now it is up to the troops to deliver. In the battleground states, we have to not only do the crucial mechanics of turning out the vote — door to door, calls, early voting, visibility, friend to friend and neighbor to neighbor — we have to fire our people up and get them motivated to vote. I have a great deal of confidence in the Obama ground game, but it won’t be easy.
Poll after poll has shown that some of the most important Democratic base groups are less engaged in this campaign and less fired up about voting than they were in 2008. In fact, it is young people, unmarried women, Latinos and African Americans that have been hardest hit by economic hard times, and when you are struggling economically it is a lot harder to get excited about voting. Because of those hard times, more of the voters in these demographic groups have also been wavering in terms of the president, as well. In 2008, Obama won 69 percent of the voters in those demographic groups, but according to the new Democracy Corps poll just out yesterday, Obama is only winning 62 percent right now. In the last two weeks of this campaign, our highest strategic priority should be to focus on these voters, remind them of how terrible Romney’s policies would be for them and do everything in our power to pump them up about voting and voting for Democrats.
The good news is that despite those lower numbers from our base, the DCorps poll showed Obama going into the final two weeks ahead by three, 49-46. I put a lot of trust into DCorps’ numbers, as Stan Greenberg has an extraordinary amount of experience polling in presidential politics and they have the best predictive record of any poll out there. Especially given Obama’s decisive victory last night and the small but steady edge in most of the key swing states, DCorps’ numbers make me think we are going to win this race. But absolutely key to the endgame is appealing to and firing up Democratic base voters. Our success with those voters will determine this election.

This item by Ed Kilgore, James Vega, and J.P. Green was first published on September 28, 2012.

Every Democrat is painfully aware of the widespread GOP/conservative efforts to suppress the Democratic vote in the coming elections. An extensive and detailed report by Demos and Common Cause has carefully delineated the major problems that exist and searing indictments of the voter suppression strategy have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post and a wide range of other national periodicals.
Elizabeth Drew summarized the situation nicely in a recent New Yorker commentary:

…The current voting rights issue is even more serious [than Watergate]: it’s a coordinated attempt by a political party to fix the result of a presidential election by restricting the opportunities of members of the opposition party’s constituency–most notably blacks–to exercise a Constitutional right. This is the worst thing that has happened to our democratic election system since the late nineteenth century, when legislatures in southern states systematically negated the voting rights blacks had won in the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

But while the possibility of Romney and other Republican candidates actually winning elections by disenfranchising Democratic voters is the most grotesque threat on the horizon it is also important for Democrats to be aware of a second major danger that springs directly from the first: even if Obama not only wins the election but does so by a sufficient margin to avoid a contested result, the claim that massive voter fraud occurred can and will be used to de-legitimize his victory to millions of Americans and to provide a bogus justification for continued GOP intransigence and political sabotage during his second term.
Unfortunately, both the Republican Party and movement conservatives have the strongest possible incentives to follow this path if Obama is indeed re-elected.
For the GOP, an Obama victory will generate tremendous pressure on the party to moderate their extremist strategy of complete noncooperation and refusal to compromise with the new administration. The claim that Obama was only elected because of massive voting fraud will provide an easy and hypocritically “altruistic” rationalization for them to continue employing their extremist political strategy.
For movement conservatives, an Obama victory will generate tremendous demoralization among “the troops” and even the most ferocious denunciations of Romney’s ideological weakness and personal ineptitude will not be sufficient to restore their former fighting spirit. The claim that Obama was elected by massive voting fraud, on the other hand, will not only provide an explanation for the conservative defeat but also serve as a rallying cry for continued mobilization and a justification for continued belief that conservatives are still the “real” majority.
It is, of course, completely inevitable that the conservative grass-roots voter fraud groups that have been organized to monitor polling places on Election Day will loudly allege “massive voter fraud” and a stolen election regardless of what actually occurs on November 6th. But for this accusation to gain any significant credibility beyond the circle of already convinced conservatives, an absolutely key requirement will be some kind of dramatic visual evidence of problems or disruptions occurring at polling places. After all, by themselves on-camera interviews with the leaders of the voter fraud monitoring groups — interviews in which these grass-roots “voter vigilantes” will breathlessly allege the existence of busloads of swarthy immigrants and shiftless minorities having been herded from precinct to precinct to vote multiple times — will not be sufficient to convince anyone outside the circle of true believers.
The impact of such charges will be vastly amplified and reinforced, however, if video images of even the smallest and most unrepresentative handful of disruptions at polling places can be obtained and then presented as evidence that something suspicious was actually going on. It is only necessary to remember how Fox News’ relentless repetition of the footage of two motley and rather forlorn “Black Panthers” standing for several minutes in front of a single African-American precinct in 2008 elevated the notion of “thuggish intimidation” of McCain voters into a major national story and an unquestioned truth for millions of Fox viewers.
Most disturbingly, even incidents that are directly and entirely provoked by the actions of the new voter vigilantes themselves will actually serve to bolster and reinforce the bogus accusations of voter fraud. The simple fact is that, from a distance, images of angry people shouting at each other do not reveal what their dispute is about or which side is actually at fault. Any dramatic video images of angry confrontations or disruptions on Election Day, regardless of their actual cause, will powerfully reinforce the false perception that “something fishy” was really going on.
Unfortunately the danger that disruptions will be provoked by the voter vigilantes themselves is extremely high.
In the first place, the grass-roots voter vigilantes are already deeply and passionately convinced that massive voting theft is an established fact. An article in The Atlantic described one grass roots leader in the following way:

Speaking at one Texas Tea Party gathering, Alan Vera, the Army ranger turned volunteer-trainer, cautioned that “evil” forces were about to launch “the greatest attack ever on election integrity,” and implored the crowd to prepare for a “ground war”: “In 2012, we need a patriot army to stand shoulder to shoulder on the wall of freedom and shout defiantly to those dark powers and principalities, ‘If you want to steal this election, you have to get past us. We will not yield another inch to your demonic deception … If you won’t enforce our laws, we’ll do it ourselves, so help us God.’ ” Shaking his fist in the air, he cried, “Patriots, let’s roll!” The crowd cheered wildly.

(Other activists, of course, are far more cynical. A board member of the Racine county Wisconsin GOP who supervised the county’s major voter fraud group in 2010 noted that some precincts might be targeted “just because it’s a heavily skewed Democratic ward.”)
But, for the most part, the conservative ground troops will be utterly committed true believers who are completely convinced that massive voting fraud is occurring and that they are heroic patriots defending the nation from a sinister coup-de-tat.
This problem is then compounded by the fact that the tactics of the voter vigilantes are inherently provocative and extremely likely to provoke conflict.
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