One of the most interesting spectator sports of this election cycle is to watch Tea Party-oriented candidates rant and rave about government spending being a threat to liberty, and then change their tune entirely when asked about a specific, popular program like Social Security and Medicare. Here (via Dave Weigel) is Forbes‘ Shikha Dalmia, who wants to cut entitlement spending bad, complaining about Tea Party gutlessness:

[P]olls by the New York Times and Bloomberg have found that although a vast majority of Tea Party supporters favor smaller government, they don’t want cuts in their Medicare or Social Security, a contradiction perfectly captured in a sign at a Tea Party rally: “Keep the Guvmint out of my Medicare.” Indeed, the Bloomberg poll discovered that even though Tea Partiers dislike ObamaCare, they want Medicare to offer more drug benefits and the government to force insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions. The upshot is that while the rhetoric on entitlements has become bolder during this election, the discussion about reform has become tamer.
In fact, setting aside the lapsed witch of Delaware, Christie O’ Donnell, in the most visible Senate races where Tea Party or Tea Party-anointed candidates are running, only two have stuck to their crosses on entitlement reform. One is Joe Miller of Alaska, a man so unfamiliar with the First Amendment that he conducted a citizen’s arrest of a reporter for asking tough questions. The other is Sharron Angle of Nevada, a genuine bright spot in an otherwise bleak Tea Party landscape, who admirably admonished Harry Reid to “man up” and admit that Social Security had a problem.
Literally all of the others are equivocating if not completely backing off from their original plans to give at least partial ownership of Medicare and Social Security to individuals themselves.

Indeed, the Man Who Would Be Speaker, John Boehner, seems to be moving in a very different direction, according to David Frum:

On the Sean Hannity radio program this afternoon, Speaker-presumptive John Boehner was interestingly cautious about promising actually to do anything in the new Congress.
But there was one thing Boehner did specifically pledge: Republicans would call a vote on restoring President Obama’s cuts to Medicare.

Clearly, the impending collision between Republican rhetoric on budget deficits and their specific spending and tax cut commitments is going to be pretty massive, and this time, it’s not something that will go without notice.

At present, the CW about November 2 is that Republicans will win the House while Democrats retain the Senate, and if GOPers complain about the spin being a split decision, they have no one to blame but themselves for their year-long orgy of triumphalist rhetoric.
Perhaps anticipating a sense of disappointment among Republicans, RCP’s Sean Trende tries to cheer them up today with some analysis about the nature of Senate contests and what should be reasonably expected. His main point, which should come as no surprise to those who remember this started out as a cycle in which Democrats thought they might actually pick up Senate seats, is that the Senate seats that happen to be up this year are disproportionately held by Republicans already. Thus, the Senate landscape is tougher than the House landscape, as Trende explains by looking at the states and districts from the perspective of PVI (Presidential Voting Index, the generally accepted measurement of the partisan character of any given jurisdiction):

To take the ten seats they need to win the Senate, Republicans have to either run the table in every state that is D+5 or better, or make up for any misses in even bluer states. To put this in perspective, for House Republicans to pull off the same feat, they would have to pick up about 123 seats! The landscape is also more difficult for Republicans given that four of the GOP’s five most Democratic seats are open this cycle.

This is all true, but the same PVI data that makes the likely Senate results look better than they might first appear also creates some needed “perspective” for contextualizing likely House gains:

[B]ecause of Democratic gains in Republican-leaning districts over the last two cycles, House Republicans have been waging this election on relatively favorable turf. If Republicans defeat every Democrat in an R+4 district or better, they’ll pick up 47 seats. Almost 100 seats are held by Democrats in districts that were D+3 or better, i.e., in swing districts or districts leaning toward Republicans.

Turn that insight around, and you can say that Republicans can pick up 47 seats without beating a single Democrat in a district where the PVI is better for Democrats than R+4. That would be an impressive GOP win, but hardly the stuff of any big pro-Republican long-term trend, particularly if you take into account (1) the especially large age-related Republican midterm turnout advantage; (2) the economy; and (3) the near-universal phenomenon of midterm losses by the party controlling the White House.
As Sean says, it’s all a matter of perspective.

We are often told that this year’s GOP/Tea Party uprising is some sort of act of self-defense by Americans resisting the takeover of their lives by Big Government, and that the whole right-wing “movement” is about fiscal issues and constitutional liberty, not cultural resentments or ethnic/racial fears.
Funny, then, that so many political ads this year dwell not so subtly on The Others In Our Midst. Salon‘s Alex Pareene has collected some doozies that he has awarded with what he calls the “Baitys.” Here’s his summary:

Are you scared of gang-banging Mexican illegals? Islamic sleeper cell jihadists? Chinese people? Then this was the election cycle for you! From the primaries through the week before election day, America’s been blanketed with race-baiting political campaign ads from insufficiently guarded border to shining sea. Today’s the day when those countless hours spent by soulless political consultants poring over stock images of young Latino men looking for the shot that screams “about to kidnap your daughter” pays off.

Some of the ads about illegal immigrants are especially over the top, which is interesting insofar as rates of immigration have been dropping rapidly of late. And any Democrat who has failed to wax hysterical about the so-called Ground Zero Mosque is subject to attack as a conscious agent of radical Islam bent on subjecting good Christian folk to Sharia law.
What’s most striking about these ads is how generic they are, with little connection to the actual issues in any actual electoral contest. But then again, given the highly centralized nature of the conservative attack ad machine, it’s small wonder that cookie-cutter race-baiting has spread across the land like pestilence.

Even as many of us deplore the hard cold cash which is dominating the end-game of this election cycle, signs are growing that the most conspicuous vote-buyer, Republican Meg Whitman, is about to lose her $180 million (give or take ten million or so; the final numbers aren’t in) gamble to become governor of California.
Already losing ground in virtually every recent poll, Whitman had a fine opportunity to score some points in an appearance with Jerry Brown and incumbent Arnold Schwarzenegger at the annual California Women’s Conference, an nonpartisan event attended by about 14,000 women. As a female running as a competent outsider, you’d figure this would be a good venue for Whitman; she could have perhaps even resuscitated the “Whoregate” brouhaha to instill some sisterly solidarity in the audience.
Instead, with an assist from moderator Matt Lauer, Whitman floundered in the quasi-debate, and got herself heavily booed. Lauer ambushed both candidates by proposing that they agree to pull all negative ads between now and Election Day (a rather odd idea since the final ads are already booked; Lauer also asked the candidates to talk their allies into pulling “independent” negative ads, which would be, er, illegal), which Brown (knowing it wasn’t going to happen) agreed to and eMeg resisted in a time-draining series of defensive statements. Here’s how Calbuzz sardonically summarized the event:

In a remarkable few moments of unscripted political theater, eMeg turned cheers to jeers at the California Women’s Conference in Long Beach, as she fumbled and stumbled through an excruciatingly awkward exchange about TV attack ads with Democratic rival Jerry Brown and NBC’s Matt Lauer, who moderated the unusual session, which also included outgoing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
As on two previous occasions when she was forced to react in real time outside the accustomed comfort of her campaign cocoon – her famously awful 2009 press conference when she tried to defend her decades-long failure to vote and the presser she convened a few weeks ago to answer questions about employing an undocumented housekeeper for nine years – eMeg on Tuesday displayed a rare combination of political tone deafness and an utter inability to think on her feet.
By the time the fireworks ended, Whitman had not only failed to take advantage of a chance to boost her sagging standing among women voters, a week before the Nov. 2 election, but also succeeded in making her male opponent look good.
In the process, she managed to embarrass herself with a thoroughly dopey performance before the state’s political press corps and most of the TV cameras south of the Tehachapis, making major campaign news out of what should have been a feel-good appearance at a touchy-feely event.

So with all that record-breaking money, the most favorable political environment since at least 1994, and an opponent in an anti-incumbent year who was first elected to statewide office 40 years ago, Whitman appears to be losing this contest the old-fashioned way: poor campaigning. Just goes to show that politicians do have some control over their electoral fate, even if it’s primarily at the margins.

If Republicans do better than expected on November 2, there will be a lot of talk about voter anger and anxiety, Democratic missteps, the economy, the fiscal situation, health care reform, and so on and so forth. Some of this talk will be interesting and relevant.
But any analysis of surprising Republican wins (if they happen) that doesn’t dwell at some length on this year’s massive deployment of “independent” money won’t be getting the story right.
A New York Times editorial yesterday nicely captured how two shadowy conservative groups suddenly painted a bullseye on sophomore Rep. Bruce Braley of Iowa:

Bruce Braley, a Democrat from northeastern Iowa, has been a popular two-term congressman and seemed likely to have an easy re-election until the huge cash mudslide of 2010. The Republican Party had largely left him alone, but then a secretive group called the American Future Fund began spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on distortion-heavy attack ads….
The fund, based in Iowa, has spent at least $574,000 to run a series of anti-Braley ads. One that is particularly pernicious shows images of the ruined World Trade Center and then intones, “Incredibly, Bruce Braley supports building a mosque at ground zero.” Actually, Mr. Braley has never said that, stating only that the matter should be left to New Yorkers.
Another implies that Mr. Braley supports a middle-class tax increase because he voted to adjourn the House at a time when some Republicans had proposed cutting income taxes on everyone. In fact, Mr. Braley supports extending the Bush-era tax cuts for the middle class, while letting them expire for families making $250,000 or more to avoid adding $700 billion to the deficit.
Mr. Braley has also been the subject of $250,000 worth of attack ads by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which also has not disclosed its contributors.

The kind of money being tossed into this race by the American Future Fund and the Chamber is some serious jack for a place like northeastern Iowa. If Braley ultimately loses, you can attribute that to an incumbent’s complacency, or the Mood of the Midwest, or any number of other factors, but you can’t escape the reality that Braley would be coasting to re-election if two anonymous schmoes with big checkbooks hadn’t gotten up one fine morning and decided to take Braley out. They dialed up an upset in IA-1, and whether or not it happens on November 2, it’s sign of the new political world we must all get used to now that the U.S. Supreme Court has gone the extra mile in ensuring that unlimited use of anonymous corporate cash in campaigns is treated as central to the preservation of liberty. And that’s why in this supposed land of equality, some Americans, and even some political candidates, are more equal than others.

Today’s must-read for serious political junkies is a post by pollster.com’s Mark Blumenthal about factors that might be temporarily inflating Republican advantages in polls. It’s a fine refresher course on the various objective and subjective factors used in screening for likelihood to vote, and suggests that “attentiveness” to an election campaign is one factor that tends to decline in importance just prior to Election Day.

If we could see everything about how pollsters model likely voters and all of their data, my educated guess is that the more these models rely on self-reported attention paid to the campaign, the more they tend to produce outsized Republican leads. My sense is that polls that have depended more on other means to model the likely electorate, including the internal campaign polls that also make use of previous vote history gleaned from voter files, have produced results that have been more consistent over time.

So maybe those Gallup and Pew generic ballot polls that have so badly frightened Democrats over the last few weeks are a bit exaggerated after all.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
California’s ballot-initiative system has a way of touching off culture wars that dwarf the buzz surrounding mere state and congressional elections. (Think of Proposition 8 or Proposition 187.) But even by California standards, this year’s Proposition 19 is becoming something of a legend. In case you haven’t heard, Proposition 19 would legalize the possession and cultivation of small quantities of marijuana, while enabling the state and/or local governments (in theory, at least) to license and tax larger commercial pot-growing enterprises. The initiative has been hailed not only by Californians with a taste for cannabis, but by economic boosters, who hope it would transform California by creating a massive new growth industry that solves the state’s chronic fiscal problems.
In fact, there’s so much interest in Proposition 19 that polls show nearly everyone in California already knows about the initiative–without advocacy groups spending more than a few dimes. As Firedoglake’s Jon Walker explains:

According to a Field Poll (PDF), as of mid-September, a remarkable 84 percent of likely voters in California know that prop 19 is on the ballot. Among that same group, just under 40 percent had heard about Prop 23 and Prop 25, two other important measures to be decided this November. For a historic comparison, look at the numbers for 2008′s Prop 8, California’s hotly contested anti-gay marriage initiative, from around roughly the same time in the election cycle. A Field poll (PDF) from mid-September 2008 found that only 70 percent of likely voters had heard that Proposition 8 was on the ballot.
Even more impressive than the generally high awareness of Prop 19 among voters is how nearly every likely voter under 30 has heard of Prop 19. Looking at the cross tabs (via the Sacramento Bee) from this Field Poll, we see 94.4 percent of likely voters under 30 have heard or read about Prop 19. (To give you an idea of how broad this awareness is, that 5.6 percent who is unaware is probably greater than the poll’s margin of error for that subgroup.) Almost no politician in the country has name recognition among young voters anywhere near 94.4 percent.

This phenomenon is making it extremely difficult for political analysts to gauge support for Proposition 19 via traditional means. For one, the marijuana-legalization initiative has not generated the kind of epic pro and con spending that usually has a major effect on voter attitudes. The most prominent opposition group, Public Safety First, had spent about a quarter-million dollars as of October 16, the California equivalent of pocket change–something all the more remarkable when you consider that virtually every major statewide candidate has gone on record opposing the initiative. The biggest spender on the pro side, a medical-marijuana dispensary which may be positioning itself to become a major commercial pot retailer in the future, has spent under a million dollars. Until yesterday, neither side had run TV ads. Meanwhile, about $120 million is being spent on other California initiatives, including around $37 million on Prop. 23 (pro: $9 million; anti: $28 million), which would suspend the state’s landmark carbon-emissions law; $25 million on the far less sexy Prop. 25 (pro: $8 million; con: $17 million), which would abolish the two-thirds requirement for passing a budget in the state legislature; and even $5 million on Prop. 22 (pro: $4 million; con: about $1 million), which involves an arcane system whereby the state “borrows” local transportation funds.
Three recent polls have shown support for the measure dropping into negative territory: Reuters/Ipsos (43 percent ‘yes’ / 53 percent ‘no’); PPIC (44 percent ‘yes’ / 49 percent ‘no’); and L.A. Times/USC (39 percent ‘yes’ / 51 percent ‘no’). SurveyUSA still has the initiative with majority support at 48 percent to 44 percent, but it also shows opinion trending negative. But because of the unusual nature of Proposition 19, many analysts are loath to take them at face value.
They are concerned that numbers might be skewed by something like a stoner Bradley Effect–Nate Silver has dubbed it the ‘Broadus Effect,’ after Snoop Dogg–in which marijuana-legalization supporters tell interviewers they don’t favor legalized pot when they actually do. (With the Bradley Effect, racially-motivated voters won’t admit to pollsters that race would affect their votes.) There’s some evidence that this is occurring, since the anonymous robo-poller SurveyUSA–which would be least likely to skew in this way–shows the strongest levels of support for the initiative.
But there are factors pushing the other direction too. One possible explanation for the polling trend is that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s apparent effort to undercut Proposition 19, by pushing through legislation that all but decriminalizes small-scale pot possession, has worked. This new law, which Schwarzenegger signed on September 30, makes possession of under one ounce of pot an “infraction” punishable by a $100 fine–significantly less than the average California speeding ticket. This may have deflated support for Proposition 19 among voters who are less motivated by the desire to fire up a doobie themselves as by concerns about the injustices caused, particularly against minorities, by criminal sanctions on the use of marijuana.
Another possibility is that voters were affected by the publicity surrounding U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s assurances that the feds will not let California license commercial marijuana operations. This statement makes the economic and fiscal arguments for Proposition 19 a great deal weaker.
And finally, it may be that softer support for Proposition 19 has been revealed by likely-voter screens–which pollsters usually introduce closer to Election Day, and which tend to focus on an electorate that is older and whiter than the registered-voter or “all adults” samples typically applied earlier in the electoral cycle.
Only on election night will we know the voters’ true intentions. No one should be that astonished if Proposition 19 passes, and it may well be that the pro-legalization youth vote can rescue a few notable Democrats in very close races. As it is, Jerry Brown appears to be pulling away from Meg Whitman in the governor’s race, despite or maybe even due to eMeg’s astonishing campaign spending; and Barbara Boxer is maintaining a small but steady lead over Carly Fiorina. Yet, by the same token, it would be a little foolish for Democrats to rest all their hopes on a last-minute, unpolled surge of pot-smoking youngsters at the polls: They’ve been burned that way before.

Many journalists never bother to acnowledge when their theories or predictions don’t pan out. That’s not true of TAP’s Mark Schmitt, who’s acknowledging that his sanguine attitude towards what Barack Obama might be able to accomplish substantively and poltically via a sort of post-partisan pragmatism wasn’t terribly prescient after all:

Republican intransigence and Democratic fecklessness have been well chronicled. But the more troublesome error in the theory appeared only after those barriers were overcome. Obama’s legislative victories, the most significant for a Democrat since Lyndon Johnson, began to seem like a burden rather than a source of future strength. The Obama presidency isn’t over, but his theory of governing — that change is possible by bridging partisan differences and enacting incremental policies that would pave the way for bigger proposals — is defunct. What comes next?

As someone who shared much of Schmitt’s optimism, I guess it’s time for a little self-criticism as well. My own theory of “grassroots bipartisanship” suggested that Obama’s conspicuous post-partisan approach might either split the GOP or force it into a position of self-destructive extremism. The split never happened; in effect, the right wing of the GOP has killed off its moderate wing, such as it was. So the GOP has been encouraged (not that it needed much encouragment) to become extremist, but so far, has not paid any tangible political price for it. Indeed, GOP extremism has excited the party’s conservative base, boosting midterm turnout.
Now it’s almost certain that this short-term outcome is the result of the economic calamity and the inability of Democrats to do much about it that voters will praise (avoiding greater calamity will await the praise of historians). Combined with the pro-GOP tilt of the midterm electorate, and the usual midterm reaction to any new administration, the economy has been enough to largely insulate the newly radical GOP from the consequences of its own bad behavior.
But that’s the short-term outcome. Emboldened by their initial success, and pushed by an activist base that will now be convinced the GOP has a mandate for extremism, the Republican Party going forward is in a fine position to squander its midterm wins and remind swing voters why they got so throughly sick of Repubican rule in 2006 and 2008.
So I’m not ready just yet to accept that Obama’s original “theory of change” was fatally flawed, and might not succeed in the long run. But Schmitt’s obviously right: this is not where we were supposed to be two years after Barack Obama’s election, and fresh thinking about the strategic and tactical challenges facing progressivism and the Democratic Party are most definitely in order. But panic, or a kneejerk decision to emulate Republican extremism, are neither fresh nor a form of thinking