One of the most interesting subdramas in the rise of the newly hyper-conservative GOP has been the role of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), who has regularly been praised by his colleagues for substantive brilliance, but whose substantive brilliance they have often given a wide berth.
Ryan, as you may recall, produced the only thing within shouting distance of a congressional GOP budget blueprint this last year, his “Road Map for America’s Future.” The praise it received on the 2010 campaign trail faded pretty steadily as Democrats promoted awareness of the fact that said Road Map contained pretty radical changes to Social Security and Medicare (particularly since fighting cuts in the latter program had become a major GOP talking point).
Now Ryan is back in the spotlight, partly because he’s been a member of the Bowles-Simpso deficit commission (and one who rejected the commission report on grounds that it ratified ObamaCare), and partly because the post-election afterglow has given him some standing to talk big about the willingness of his fellow Republicans to embrace big cuts in popular federal programs.
Brian Beutler of TPM documents Ryan’s return to prominence as follows:

“The third rail is not the third rail anymore,” Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), the incoming House Budget chairman, told reporters at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast roundtable with reporters yesterday. “The political weaponization of entitlement reform is no longer as potent as it used to be, and the best evidence is this last election.”
Ryan and several other influential Republicans have found new confidence in the idea that the public would support entitlement cuts. Several candidates, Ryan said, won elections in tough districts on policy platforms modeled after his controversial — and conservative — Roadmap for America’s Future would would privatize social security and turn Medicare into a voucher system….
When I asked incoming Speaker John Boehner at his press conference yesterday whether he shared Ryan’s view of the new political landscape, Boehner suggested that the tide really had turned.
“I do believe that the American people expect us to have an adult conversation with each other about the serious challenges that face our country,” he said. “When you look at the promises that us Baby Boomers have made to ourselves, it’s clear that our kids and grandkids can’t afford those promises. We have to have this conversation. We ought to do it respectfully, we ought to do it honestly. But it’s time to have the conversation, and I think the American people are expecting us to come forward with a conversation.”

Now there’s a big difference between “having a conversation” about doing something very unpopular, and proposing to do it, so if I were Ryan, I’d view Boehner’s statements of support as little more than a permission slip to become a mine canary. As House Republicans get closer to that fateful day when they have to draft a budget resolution, however, it will eventually become a matter of embracing Ryan’s blueprint, coming up with something else, or just deciding to cook the numbers dramatically, with or without the help of some sort of supply-side delusion that cutting taxes for wealthy “job creators” solves all problems.

The official release of the Deficit Commission report was one of those events that could be interpreted in a wide variety of ways. No, the report did not receive the 14 commission votes necessary to trigger a vote on its recommendations by Congress. But it obtained 11 votes, including influential representatives of both parties (e.g., Tom Coburn and Dick Durbin), and certainly solidified the impression that Democrats and Republicans alike think (or at least say) that deficit reduction is an urgent national priority.
But will any of the specific recommendations made by the commission gain traction, in isolation from the overall package? That’s very hard to say, since very few of them seem to have genuine bipartisan support, and instead depend on a balance of ideas repugnant to one of the two parties. Ezra Klein does a good job of identifying “best” and “worst” ideas in the proposal. But the horsetrading value of an idea in the context of partisan gridlock isn’t necessarily related to its rationality; a matched set of “bad” ideas that are least objectionable to Democrats and Republicans could be easier to sell. And that’s the problem with “bipartisan solutions” in a partisan era.

As Bill Galston points out, there’s no longer much doubt that deficit reduction has become a very large public concern over the last year. It’s a separate question as to whether Americans are willing to support actual spending reductions or tax increases proposed by either party, and thus whether there is really a popular base for a deficit reduction compromise. But no one should argue any longer that the whole subject is just being cooked up by elites.
Still, the current extend-the-tax-cuts debate in Washington demonstrates pretty conclusively that deficit reduction is not, in fact, the preeminent value of either party in Congress. Both are pursuing a path guaranteed to increase long-term deficits and debt. And since the wealthy benefit disproportionately from an income tax rate reduction in the lower brackets (that’s how marginal tax rates work), even the Democratic approach elevates tax cuts for “all Americans” (to use the Republican battle cry) over deficit reduction.
Matt Yglesias sums up the ironic situation well:

[T]here’s no debate in Washington about whether rich people should get a permanent tax cut. Nor is there any debate in Washington about whether rich people’s tax cut should be financed by long-term borrowing. Nor is there any debate about whether rich people should get a bigger tax cut than middle class people. But we “can’t afford” unemployment insurance, we “can’t afford” to pay bank regulators competitive salaries.
We have a bipartisan consensus that the short-term deficit should be made smaller and the long-term deficit should be made bigger even when all the economic logic points in the opposite direction.

Now Republicans, of course, dispute that we’re talking about “tax cuts” at all, and maintain that failing to extend the Bush tax cuts represents a tax increase, even though the reversion to earlier rates has been established in current law from the beginning, and even though the original rationale for the Bush tax cuts was to “rebate” unnecessary revenues when the federal budget was in surplus. But that’s just another way of saying that low tax rates, particularly for those “job creators” at the top, are an end in themselves for Republicans, crucial in every fiscal or economic circumstance, and thus far more important to them than deficits-and-debt.

It’s no secret that exit pollsters have trouble getting representative samples of Hispanic/Latino voters, with sometimes significant consequences, as in 2004 when it was reasonably clear that the national exit polls overstated the Republican share of the Latino vote.
Well, looks like it happened again on November 2, according to a compelling analysis by Gary Segura and Matt Barreto for Latino Decisions. They note several particularly strange exit poll findings:

[T]he exit poll numbers for Sharron Angle in Nevada are mind boggling. Angle, who arguably ran the most offensive campaign against Latino immigrant is estimated to have won 30% of the Latino vote – an 8 percentage point improvement over John McCain in 2008 who won 22% of the Latino vote in Nevada. It is not possible, nor plausible that Angle improved by 8% among Latinos in 2010 given her attacks on Latinos, and Reid’s strong defense of immigration reform. Rather, the Latino Decisions data in the election poll, and our 10 weeks of data from Nevada in our tracking poll both point to very large gains for Democrats in Nevada, and our 90% estimate for Reid matches very close to the vote totals that resulted in a surprise win by Reid that pre-elections polls missed.
In California, the national exit polls would have us believe that Meg Whitman who saw her favorability ratings plummet among Latinos after her contradictory statements supporting Arizona’s SB1070 and her undocumented immigrant housekeeper scandal, also did better among Latinos than John McCain in 2008. In 2008 McCain won an estimated 23% of the California Latino vote, yet the 2010 exit polls suggest Whitman won 30% of the Latino vote, a 7 point improvement? Latino Decisions estimated just 13% for Whitman in 2010.
In Arizona, Jan Brewer, the force behind SB1070 who claimed Mexican immigrants were beheading innocent Arizonans in the southern desert is reported to have won 28% of the Latino vote according to the national exit polls. In contrast Latino Decisions found back in May that Brewer was attracting only 12% of the Latino vote, and that in October our tracking poll estimated 13% vote for Republicans in Arizona, and ultimately only 14% vote for Brewer in 2010, a far cry from 28%.
In these cases, and across the board in 2010, the NEP Latino exit poll results are laughable.

Segura and Baretto discuss glaring examples of poor Latino vote samples for exit poll purposes, and also evaluate possible reasons for the persistent problem, most notably the failure to sample heavily Latino precincts, and the sparse availability of Spanish-language interviewers.
Does this question really matter? Yes, for a very particular reason. The recent lurch of the national Republican Party towards a position of considerable hostility to comprehensive immigration reform was always a gamble that pitted potential gains among white voters against potential losses among Latinos. If someone like Sharron Angle could do as If well among Latinos as John McCain, then it would appear there was little or no marginal political cost for her immigrant-bashing, and perhaps, conservative strategists might conclude, she or future GOP candidates should double-down on the issue and go all Tom Tancredo in an appeal to white voters.
If I were a Republican, I’d be a lot less inclined to be happy about my party’s performance among Latinos in the exit polls, and a lot more interested in making sure the numbers are right before they lead GOP pols in a very unfortunate direction with respect to the country’s fastest growing voter bloc.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
It’s time to smack down, once and for all, the idea that President Obama will face a serious primary challenger in 2012. This trope has been popping up ever since the 2008 general election, when horserace-hungry pundits speculated that Hillary Clinton would try to knock off the Democratic nominee four years down the road. And it’s only gotten worse with the rise of the “angry left,” which thinks Obama has been too eager to compromise with Wall Street and the Republicans, and considers itself the representative of the Democratic base.
Now, in the aftermath of this month’s “shellacking,” mischief-making pundits have seized on a couple of polls to burnish their narrative: One is from AP/KN in late October, showing that 47 percent of Democrats want the president to be challenged by another Democrat in 2012 (with 51 percent opposed); and one came from McClatchey/Marist just before Thanksgiving, showing 45 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents favoring a primary challenge (with 46 percent opposed).
Sounds pretty dangerous for Obama, right? Well no. For a substantive primary challenge to occur, a coherent bloc of Democratic voters–whether liberal or moderate–would have to sour on Obama and coalesce behind another candidate in such a way that threatens the president’s hold over his base. There’s just no sign of that happening. For instance, the very same AP/KN poll shows that three-quarters of Democrats want to see the president re-elected; i.e., they’re not really discontented with Obama and they just like the idea of a primary that gives them options. Likewise, the McClatchy/Marist survey doesn’t show a single bloc fed up with Obama and preparing to bolt for a latter-day Howard Dean: Given a choice of hypothetical challenges, 39 percent of Democrats and leaners preferred a candidate from the left of the president, and 40 percent a candidate from the right.
What’s more, Obama’s straight approval ratings among rank-and-file Democrats are very high. According to Gallup’s latest weekly tracking poll, 81 percent of self-identified Democrats give Obama a positive job approval rating. Among liberal Democrats, who are supposedly the most likely to rebel, the number rises to 85 percent. Let’s compare that to the last three Democratic presidents, two of whom faced serious primary challenges: At equivalent points in their presidencies, Bill Clinton had a positive job rating among Democrats of 74 percent; Jimmy Carter’s rating was 63 percent; and Lyndon Johnson had a rating of 66 percent. And Carter’s and LBJ’s numbers had to fall by ten or twenty more points before either attracted another contender.
The racial politics of the Democratic Party also make a serious primary challenge less likely. Sure, some progressives have been raging at Obama as of late. But anyone credibly threatening to topple Obama would have to pry away a significant chunk of Obama’s support among African Americans–and in case you haven’t noticed, Obama is the first black president. His job approval rating among African Americans is currently 89 percent, and it has not gone below 85 percent at any point of his presidency. Can you conceive of a left-wing revolt that runs directly counter to the manifest wishes of the largest and most loyal segment of the Democratic base? Imagine Hillary Clinton launching her 2008 candidacy without any of the goodwill that her husband’s presidency had engendered among African Americans.
Above all, primary challenges to incumbent presidents require a galvanizing issue. It’s very doubtful that the grab-bag of complaints floated by the Democratic electorate–Obama’s legislative strategy during the health care fight; his relative friendliness to Wall Street; gay rights; human rights; his refusal to prosecute Bush administration figures for war crimes or privacy violations–would be enough to spur a serious challenge. And while Afghanistan is an increasing source of Democratic discontent, it’s hardly Vietnam, and Obama has promised to reduce troop levels sharply by 2012.
Most importantly, who would run? Hillary Clinton has ruled it out categorically. Al Gore’s electioneering days appear to be long over. There’s been talk of Russ Feingold running (mainly based on a misunderstanding of an “I’ll be back” statement he made on election night which seems to have referred to a future Senate race). Dean would win headlines, but has a poor reputation in Iowa, where any progressive challenge would have to be launched. There are no guaranteed primary vote-getters out there like Estes Kefauver in 1952, and certainly no one close to the stature of Ted Kennedy. And there’s a reason no incumbent president has actually been defeated for re-nomination since the nineteenth century.
So that’s it. What we are likely to see is a marginal opponent: a Dennis Kucinich, or a Harold Ford, or some celebrity who hasn’t held office but is willing to spend some money. More serious comers will be chased away by the hard, cold reality of what it would take to mount a presidential campaign against the White House in places like Iowa and Nevada and New Hampshire and South Carolina. And President Obama will be left facing challengers similar to Pete McCloskey or John Ashbrook, who came at Richard Nixon from the left and right, respectively, in 1972. To the extent that these candidates are remembered at all, it’s as roadkill on the way to Nixon’s renomination.

In a fine riposte to Ross Douthat, who claimed that just about everyone in politics has flip-flopped on privacy and civil liberties issues based on the partisan identity of the administration, James Fallows of The Atlantic shows otherwise:

The anti-security theater alliance has always included right-wing and left-wing libertarians (both exist), ACLU-style liberals, limited-government-style conservatives, and however you would choose to classify the likes of Bruce Schneier or Jeffrey Goldberg (or me). I know of Republicans who, seemingly for partisan reasons like those Douthat lays out, have joined the anti-security theater chorus. For instance, former Sen. Rick Santorum. I don’t know of a single Democrat or liberal who has peeled off and moved the opposite way just because Obama is in charge.
A harder case is Guantanamo, use of drones, and related martial-state issues. Yes, it’s true that some liberals who were vociferous in denouncing such practices under Bush have piped down. But not all (cf Glenn Greenwald etc). And I don’t know of any cases of Democrats who complained about these abuses before and now positively defend them as good parts of Obama’s policy — as opposed to inherited disasters he has not gone far enough to undo and eliminate.

Douthat, of course, is engaging in the everybody’s-doing-it argument that the disingenuous habits of Republicans these days are just a subset of a generalized plague of partisanship in which they are no more guilty than their enemies. But saying it’s so doesn’t make it so, and in fact operates as a way of excusing bad behavior and misunderstanding real-life events. And Fallows calls out Douthat and others who depend on false equivalence exercises as a substitute for actual judgment:

So: it’s nice and fair-sounding to say that the party-first principle applies to all sides in today’s political debate. Like it would be nice and fair-sounding to say that Democrats and Republicans alike in Congress are contributing to obstructionism and party-bloc voting. Or that Fox News and NPR have equal-and-offsetting political agendas in covering the news. But it looks to me as if we’re mostly talking about the way one side operates. Recognizing that is part of facing the reality of today’s politics.

To put it another way, false-equivalence arguments are pernicious not only because they distort reality and misallocate responsibility for misdeeds, but because they reward perpetrators by perversely blaming their victims. The “everybody’s-doing-it” impulse can be as damaging as the conduct it rationalizes.

The brouhaha over the latest (and impending) WikiLeaks disclosure of U.S. diplomatic cables and other classified data will play out over a long time and will involve many tangled issues of national security, official secrets, and misinformation.
But one topic of immediate interest will be the political use of some of the WikiLeaks content to grind particular axes, most notably the conservative claim that the entire Middle East is privately clamoring for Israeli or U.S. military action to destroy Iran’s nuclear program. In that connection, Matt Yglesias makes a very important distinction about the credibility of “secrets:”

There’s often a conceit in both the world of intelligence and the world of journalism that “secret” truths are somehow better than ordinary ones. That the truth is necessarily hidden, and that hidden facts therefore are especially important to know.
But what do we really know about the leaders of the Gulf states? I mean, suppose you were an envoy from Qatar Ministry of Defense and you’re in a meeting with someone from the Defense Department and your private view is that Israel should be pushed into the sea and the United States is the “great satan.” Well, you’re certainly not going to say that in a meeting! So what will you say? You’ll tell your interlocutors something you think they want to hear, and you’ll try to get then to give you advanced military equipment. So there you are, “privately” very concerned about Iran.
Which isn’t to say Gulf officials are in fact lying when they privately say they’re very worried about Iran. If you look at the objective situation, it’s reasonable for the Gulf states to be worried about Iran. So it’s reasonable for us to assume that the Gulf states are in fact worried about Iran. But this is a surmise we can reach based entirely on publicly available information. Their private statements are just private statements. They could be true or they could be lies. Our best guide to their accuracy is what we know about the objective situation.

And what we know about the objective situation vis a vis Arab states and Iran really isn’t changed by WikiLeaks, so far at least.

Just weeks after the midterm elections, conservative activists are already focused on future purges of the Republican ranks to get rid of discordant elements. And as a profile by Jennifer Steinhauer of The New York Times explains, a big bullseye is being painted on the back of veteran Sen. Dick Lugar.

Mr. Lugar’s recent breaks with his party have stirred the attention of Indiana Tea Party groups, who have him in their sights. “Senator Lugar has been an upstanding citizen representing us in D. C.,” said Diane Hubbard, a spokeswoman for the Indianapolis Tea Party. “But over the years, he has become more moderate in his voting.”
Removing him “will be a difficult challenge,” Ms. Hubbard conceded. “But we do believe it’s doable, and we think the climate is right for it and we believe it is a must.”

It’s a “must,” it appears, mainly because of Lugar’s prominent position on foreign policy matters, and his obdurate belief that some “liberal” initiatives like nuclear nonproliferation treaties should be supported by conservatives. Here’s Lugar blunt message to Republican senators on the START treaty:

Please do your duty for your country. We do not have verification of the Russian nuclear posture right now. We’re not going to have it until we sign the START treaty. We’re not going to be able to get rid of further missiles and warheads aimed at us. I state it candidly to my colleagues, one of those warheads…could demolish my city of Indianapolis — obliterate it! Now Americans may have forgotten that. I’ve not forgotten it and I think that most people who are concentrating on the START treaty want to move ahead to move down the ladder of the number of weapons aimed at us.

It’s probably the idea that patriotism sometimes involves supporting Democratic initiaties that makes Lugar particulary offensive to some conservatives. It will be interesting to see if they can tame him or just decide to take him out.

Now that we are not coping with the phenomenon of a national debate over a Bristol Palin victory in Dancing With the Stars, Palin-mania can focus on more Sarahcentric topics, like the former governor’s own TV reality show, or her new book, or the possibility that she’s getting serious about running for president of the United States.
The conjunction of all these phenomena seems to have Republican insiders very worried. There were already reports prior to the midterm elections that the Great Big Grownups of the GOP were talking to each other about how to prevent a Palin nomination in 2012, considered a potential disaster by those who look at general election trial heats.
But the latest shot across Palin’s bow came from an unusual source: the Weekly Standard, edited by one of her earliest and staunchest conservative allies, Bill Kristol. The Standard’s resident semi-satirist, Matt Labash, penned a reasonably nasty review of Sarah Palin’s Alaska that concluded with the assertion that even her Tea Party fans don’t really want her to make a 2012 run.
GOP heretic David Frum sees this as the shape of things to come:

There really is a GOP party establishment. That establishment took up Palin as a useful tool in 2008, deployed Palin as an edged anti-Obama weapon in 2009 – and is now horrified to see that they may have set in motion a force possibly too powerful to halt when its time has ended. The story of the behind-the-scenes struggle to squelch Palin – and her ferocious determination not to be squelched – will be the big GOP-side story of the coming year.

Could this effort actually work, or will it just feed Palin’s power to act as the voice of grassroots conservatives who are tired of being told to keep licking envelopes and let the Great Big Grownups figure out how to seize power? Steve Kornacki of Salon thinks criticism of Palin by conservatives might actually be effective by placing her in some perspective other than as the victim of elitist liberals–but only if it’s systematic and high-profile:

Palin’s poll numbers with the GOP base will only ebb if base voters are exposed, more than once and from more than one voice, to criticisms of her. They don’t have to be harsh, Frank Rich-esque denunciations; just gentle but insistent reminders that maybe she’s not suited to represent the party on its national ticket again.
This is a delicate task, obviously. As I’ve written, the GOP base has rarely been more eager to defy the party establishment than it is today. There is a strong temptation among conservative voters to label inconvenient information the product of the liberal media, or of RINOs. A negative review of Palin’s show from one Weekly Standard writer is noteworthy, but by itself won’t do much. Will Rush Limbaugh ever weigh in and say, “I love Sarah Palin and I hate what the liberals have done to her, but I’m just not seeing her as the nominee”? Will hosts on Fox News, her current employer, start conveying this message? Will Fox’s “straight” newscasts begin touting stories that play up her general election vulnerabilities?

The other factor, of course, is how Palin reacts to conservative criticism. Perhaps she’ll get off reality TV and do some mildly gravitas-building exercises; it’s not like she has a particularly high bar to overcome in raising her game. But ultimately, her fate is closely bound up in the question of how the GOP deals with the contradictory passions it has aroused. If its leaders get serious about taking one path or another out of the incoherent policy agenda they’ve set for themselves, then some elements of the party base are sure to be disappointed. And if those elements include the vengeful grassroots activists who think their day in the sun has finally come, then Palin or someone much like her will always have a political base that no amount of mockery from the Grownups will be able to tame.

I recently did a post on the proposition of a rightward trend in American public opinion, based in part on some new analysis by TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira of the apparent upsurge in self-identifed conservatives in the midterms. This piece drew a spirited response from The Weekly Standard‘s Jay Cost which made some good points but unfortunately missed the main context of what we were saying and took issue with arguments we did not make.
To begin with the “arguments we did not make,” Jay appears to think my denial of any “natural Republican majority” in the electorate means I think Republicans won’t win majorities in the 2012 congressional elections. None of us obviously knows what will happen, but actually, I think the GOP is in a good position in congressional elections going into 2012 because of its big redistricting advantage and the surplus of Democratic Senate seats up next cycle, which means they could hang onto control of the House and make Senate gains even if they lose the presidential election and lose a majority of the national House popular vote. But those advantages may not persist over time; future Senate cycles are less skewed, and let’s remember that in 2002 it was universally assumed that the last round of redistricting had given Republicans a “lock” on the House for decade–a lock that lasted exactly two cycles. Real live events matter, and districts change after they are drawn.
But the main reason for doubting a “natural Repubican majority” is the factor that we have been writing about TDS for months, and wrote about again in this piece: the very different turnout patterns that always prevail in midterm and presidential years.
To be very clear, we have two electorates in this country, which in the past has often only had a marginal effect on partisan outcomes, but now is exceptionally important because the composition of the two party’s voters has become, in 2008 and in 2010, highly correlated with groups that display high (older, whiter, wealthier voters) and low (younger voters and minorities, particularly Hispanics) turnout tendencies in midterms. Jay doesn’t deal with this fundamental argument about “the electorate,” and instead takes issue with Ruy’s analysis of under-the-surface changes in public opinion, best reachable by looking at a more stable sample of Americans, registered voters.
Jay implies that Ruy used Pew rather than Gallup data to look at changes in the ideological composition of voters over time because the former supported his position while the latter did not. I asked Ruy about this, and here was his reply:

First, Pew only provided registered voter data, not all adults data, on their ideological time trend, so I couldn’t have used all adults data even if I’d wanted to. Second, I used Pew data because they provided time trends on ideology for Republicans, Democrats and the three flavors of independents: Democratic-leaning independents, pure independents and Republican-leaning independents. This was central to my analysis.
But let’s look at those Gallup data. Gallup shows a conservative shift of 5 points (2006-2010) among all adults as opposed ot Pew’s 3 point shift among RVs over same time period. However, two other public polls that provide time series ideology data for all adults are actually closer to Pew’s 3 points than Gallup’s 5 points: WaPo/ABC has 3.3 over the time period, CBS/NYT has 3.6 over the period.
Moreover, it’s kind of a strange time to be appealing to the authority of Gallup after its way-off, outlier final generic ballot poll showing a 15 point Republican lead. Gallup was also reporting super-high levels of conservatives among LVs (54 percent in a one mid-October poll). Pew on the other hand nailed the result exactly. So no apologies for the data I selected.
But even if you accepted a 5 point swing among the public, a 10 point jump in conservative representation between ’06 and ’10 still far outstrips that swing. Bottom line: you can’t account for the election results, including the high proportion of conservatives among voters, on the basis of a sharp ideological swing toward the right among registered voters or among the general public. Conservative mobilization clearly had something to do with it.

And both phenomena owed a lot to a shift in identification of Republican voters (including Republican-leaning independents) from “moderate” to “conservative,” which was the main point of his analysis, and is a conclusion shared today by ProgressiveFix’s Lee Drutman in a careful evaluation of the Cost/TDS exchange.
Perhaps a semantic problem clouds this issue for Jay Cost and for other readers: yes, an “electorate” in which some members are moving “to the right” while others stay where they are can be said to be “moving to the right” in an arithmetical sense, but if its main effect is simply to move the party of conservatives a bit farther away from everyone else, that’s hardly an unmixed blessing.
I’ll deal with one other aspect of Jay’s argument: his characterization of our point-of-view as follows:

The electorate has not moved in any significant fashion, and what we saw this November is nothing for liberals to worry about.

I should hope I’ve dealt with the issues involved in the word “electorate;” yes, the midterm electorate moved, but partly because of the turnout patterns already discussed, and partly because of factors (ahem, the economy) which don’t have much to do with ideology or much predictive value for the future. But the planted axiom that Ruy and I don’t think Democrats have anything to worry about is simply wrong. Frankly, I think both parties have a lot to worry about economically, and from a structural point of view, have much to worry about if the current “two electorates” pattern persists, which is hardly conducive to stable policymaking.
Yes, Ruy and I think 2012 will likely be a better year for Democrats overall for reasons ranging from the more positive nature of the presidential electorate, to the close House districts Republicans will now have to defend, to the likely improvement in the economy, to the arguably weak GOP presidential field, to the many dilemmas Republicans face as a party that is simultaneously demanding deficit reduction, new high-end and corporate tax cuts, restoration of Medicare “cuts,” and (among many GOPers) more defense spending and perhaps a new war with Iran. We also think long-range demographic trends favoring Democrats haven’t suddenly gone away.
But if I were a Republican, I’d be less worried about Democratic confidence levels and be a lot more focused on restraining the exceptional triumphalism of my colleagues, many of whom seem to think that every lesson learned in past elections, including the longstanding lack of support of sizable majorities of Americans for key conservative policy positions, can now be forgotten based on one very good midterm cycle. As Democrats just learned, trends can change quickly, and so can “the electorate.”