This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
As Election Day approaches, national pundits are naturally focused on certain highly competitive marquee contests. And when observers need some comic relief from the tension of the campaign trail, there’s always Christine O’Donnell to supply fresh material.
But there are a significant number of “sleeper” races around the country that haven’t attracted much national attention, even as they rivet the locals. And one of the most surprising is down in South Carolina, where the once-legendary Nikki Haley’s cakewalk to the governorship is stumbling a bit.
Remember Haley? When she was last on national political radar, she was the triumphant Asian American who–with an assist from Sarah Palin–trounced the good ol’ boys of South Carolina politics in a GOP primary and runoff, despite their efforts to destroy her with false charges of marital infidelity and nasty appeals to ethnic and religious bigotry. In a state as heavily Republican as South Carolina, in a year like this, it was assumed she’d win the general election easily, and given the circumstances, many people outside the Palmetto State who had little reason to like Haley’s hard-right politics felt pretty good about the glass-ceiling implications of her victory.
But in South Carolina itself, Haley has been seen less as a gender or ethnic pioneer (on the latter front, her Democratic opponent, Vincent Sheheen, is himself of Lebanese–i.e., Arab–extraction) than as a protégé of semi-disgraced outgoing Governor Mark Sanford. And Sanford’s administration was marked by endless feuds with other Republicans, and of course, by a sex scandal that is the essential context for understanding why South Carolinians are still talking about Haley’s sex life.
If Haley were facing a really poor opponent, concerns about her of any nature, particularly among Republicans, would probably be muted. But Sheheen has proved to be a gamer; winning his primary convincingly, doing a good job of fundraising, and, in the most startling development of the general election contest, earning the endorsement of that great scourge of liberalism, the Chamber of Commerce.
For her part, Haley seems to have rested on her primary-victory laurels a bit too much. The most notable policy initiative of her campaign has been a proposal to eliminate SC’s corporate income tax, which as observers from around the political spectrum have noted, would only benefit a small number of very large businesses. This position made even less sense when Haley paired it with a suggestion that the sales tax on groceries should be reinstated, on grounds that the exemption didn’t create “a single job” (nor did it, in fact, improve national security, either; who cares?). More recently, she borrowed former primary opponent Andre Bauer’s highly demagogic idea of requiring drug tests for anyone applying for unemployment benefits.
At the same time, details about Haley’s past have come out that have nothing to do with sex, including some questionable consulting contracts and a history of filing her taxes late.
Moreover, the sex stuff just won’t go away. Her two accusers, blogger Will Folks and political operative Larry Marchant, have both filed sworn affadavits attesting to their allegations of illicit liaisons with Haley. The Folks affidavit, as explained in a long Charleston City Paper article on the persistence of the whole story, gets very specific about the time, place and manner of the alleged trysts. The Haley camp has clearly decided to gut it out and continue to accuse her accusers of nasty political motives.
The underlying problem for Haley is that she’s pledged to resign as governor if she is subsequently proven to have lied about the alleged infidelity. And that promise, unfairly or not, is bound to raise unhappy memories of Mark Sanford’s confessional press conferences once he finally admitted to his own adulterous adventures, which made South Carolina a national laughingstock.
So Haley is, by all accounts, losing support as Election Day approaches; but the question is whether the election is close enough for that to matter. Rasmussen shows Haley up by nine points, after leading by 17 points in September. A Crantford Associates survey at the end of September had Sheheen within four points of Haley. (Crantford is a Democratic firm, but the poll was not for a campaign.) And a new Insider Advantage poll just out late last week has her still up by 14 points. But it cannot be a good sign for Haley that a Republican group opposing her candidacy, called Conservatives for Truth in Politics, has been formed by with two prominent Charleston Republicans.The wild card is candidates’ debates, of which two still remain. The first featured lots of charges and counter-charges, and though Sheheen by most accounts did well, he didn’t score any sort of breakthrough. The bigger question is whether Haley can avoid big mistakes, and not do anything that reinforces of existing doubts about her past and present character.
It’s anybody’s guess as to how deep those doubts have sunk. Chris Hair, author of the Charleston City Paper article summarizing the sex rumors, says:

The Republicans may not like it. The Democrats may not like it. But the 2010 gubernatorial race comes down to one thing and one thing only: Did Nikki Haley have an affair with Will Folks?

Even if that’s true–and it’s probably a big exaggeration–Haley currently seems to have most South Carolinians convinced that the rumored affair did not occur. But thanks to a less-than-sterling campaign and perhaps a bit of complacency, she hasn’t left herself a very large margin for error. It’s lucky for her that South Carolina politics is so thoroughly dominated by the Republican Party that she claims she’s fighting to purify.

It’s been clear for a while that Republican congressional candidates this year have basically been divided by those who are screaming for fiscal discipline without being willing to say anything coherent about how to impose it, and those hearty few who are willing to come right out and call for destruction of such highly popular programs as Social Security, Medicare, federal aid to education, and environmental protection.
There’s a fascinating piece in the Washington Independent by Jesse Swick that shines a spotlight on the former group:

Republicans are expected to gain around 50 seats in Congress in next month’s midterm elections, largely running on a platform of deficit reduction. But interviews with a number of Republican candidates who are likely to join the House of Representatives in January reveal that while they have a wealth of creative ideas to cut federal spending, their plans are often lacking in details or far too limited to bring about the level of deficit reduction the candidates are calling for so forcefully on the campaign trail.

I’d say that’s putting it charitably, since “creative” in this context seems to mean “stupid;” “lacking in detail” means “empty;” and “far too limited” means “pretending to slay an elephant with a fly-swatter.”

[S]ome experts say that the areas in which these candidates are advocating cuts — mainly non-defense discretionary spending in the federal agencies — are precisely the places where cuts are the most difficult to find and the least meaningful in terms of deficit reduction.
The problem with the plans that focus on consolidating federal agencies and making them more efficient, said Tad DeHaven, a budget analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, is they distract from real debates about the role of government. “The idea that we can simply rearrange things and reduce bureaucratic inefficiencies is engaging a lot of wasted energy.”
In addition, most candidates advocate taking spending back to 2007-8 levels, which, though politically expedient because it conjures up the pre-Obama era, don’t represent as significant a reduction in the deficit as candidates are claiming. “They’re trying to say, ‘Let’s go back to pre-stimulus levels,'” said DeHaven. “Unfortunately, that’s going back to the decade when Congress shot spending though the roof. And they’re only talking about non-defense discretionary spending, which is a very small portion of federal spending.”

But while Republican candidates are vague or just nonsensical on the spending side of the budget, they are very specific about demands to blow up deficits via tax cuts:

For all their worries about spending and deficits, GOP candidates argue for the extension of the Bush tax cuts, even though Congressional Budget Office estimates predict that a permanent tax extension will force the nation to borrow an additional $3.9 trillion over the next decade. The candidates argue that an extension would stimulate the economy, and that higher incomes would help offset the lost government revenues.
“The problem isn’t that we’re under-taxed,” said [Ohio Republican Steve] Chabot. “The problem is that we overspend. When you reduce taxes, most of that revenue will come back through the resulting growth in the economy. It happened under a Democrat, John F. Kennedy, and a Republican, Ronald Reagan.”

When math fails you, it seems, it’s always time to go back to the old supply-side delusion, which no amount of experience seems able to kill.
In college debate, we called a fundamental mismatch between the affirmative team’s indictment of the status quo and its specific plan for doing something about it a “plan-meets-need” problem. That could very well be America’s problem after this election.

If you are interested in reading a thoughtful piece that will distract you from the day-to-day banalities of politics, while providing a fresh reason to vote and volunteer for campaign activities, check out Thomas Edsall’s essay on the politics of austerity, which is in the latest print version of The New Republic.
Edsall begins with the questionable but much-subscribed-to idea that debt-and-deficits will overshadow U.S. politics for years to come, mainly because the economy won’t resume the kind of growth we used to be accustomed to for many years to come.
Once you buy that premise, then much of what he goes on to say does make sense, and it’s a depressing picture:

With resources shrinking, the competition for them will inflame. Each party will find itself in a death struggle to protect the resources that flow to its base–and, since the game will be zero-sum, each will attempt to expropriate the resources that flow to the other side. This resource war will scramble our politics. Each party will be forced to dramatically change its calculus and remake its agenda. And if you thought our politics had grown nasty, you haven’t even begun to consider the ugliness of the politics of scarcity.

In an atmosphere of austerity, says Edsall, Democrats will be forced to defend the less popular government spending programs, and Republicans will more-and-more openly operate as the party of anxious and resentful older white people who don’t so much want government to shrink as to make sure they are the only beneficiaries. This is Edsall’s way of explaining why Republicans this year are simultaneously posing as anti-government libertarians while swearing to protect Medicare; it’s just a matter of playing to their constituencies:

Republicans understand that one axis of the resource war will be generational. All of their vows to defend Medicare are coupled with attacks on Obama’s health care reform. They implicitly portray Democrats as waging an age war–creating a massive new government program that transfers dollars to the young at the expense of the elderly. Republicans have cleverly stoked the fear that Obama is rewarding all his exuberant, youthful, idealistic supporters by redistributing resources that are badly needed by the old.

There’s not much doubt that’s true, or more generally, that today’s GOP, with our without racial undertones, is battening on the resentment of older white Americans that not only their hard-earned tax dollars, but their hard-earned entitlement benefits, are being threatened by Democrats representing people who are younger and darker than they are.
Edsall has few doubts about the likely winners and losers in a zero-sum politics of austerity:

There’s no doubt which groups will prevail–and which will fall–in these wars. We can already see that the politics of scarcity will inflict the greatest wounds on the poor. The political vulnerability of programs serving impoverished minority constituencies is self-evident. The suffering caused by these cuts is a tragic consequence of this new dynamic. We will not have conceived cuts in a spirit of the common good, or with any eye to creating sound policy, but out of a sense of gamesmanship and the mean-spiritedness that is integral to intense competition over a shrinking pie.

Now if some of this sounds familiar to older readers, it’s probably because the “politics of scarcity” was a standard theme in the stagflation-ridden 1970s. Turns out the United States was not, after all, condemned to an endless future of slow growth and bad choices. Perhaps Edsall’s view of the era ahead of us is off as well. But he’s absolutely right that the nastiness of Great Recession politics, and perhaps the sudden revival of GOP electoral fortunes, has something to do with the rescission of social solidarity and the reemergence of resource fights among highly self-conscious groups of Americans (including the wealthy, who seem as angry and aggrieved as anyone else). With virtually no consensus across party lines about how to conduct government and not just how but whether there is such a thing as “common good,” it’s no time to stand on the sidelines and hope for the best. The stakes, particularly for the most vulnerable Americans, are just too high.

At this late stage of an election cycle, it’s natural to pay attention to the most dynamic contests: those that are close, and where one candidate or another has made recent major gains in the polls. Indeed, you often hear about such candidates having “momentum going into Election Day.”
But as Nate Silver demonstrated rather convincingly yesterday, “momentum” is a term that is misused as often in politics as in sports.

When people say a particular candidate has momentum, what they are implying is that present trends are likely to perpetuate themselves into the future. Say, for instance, that a candidate trailed by 10 points in a poll three weeks ago — and now a new poll comes out showing the candidate down by just 5 points. It will frequently be said that this candidate “has the momentum”, “is gaining ground,” “is closing his deficit,” or something similar.
Each of these phrases are in the present tense. They create the impression that — if the candidate has gone from being 10 points down to 5 points down, then by next week, he’ll have closed his deficit further: perhaps he’ll even be ahead!
There’s just one problem with this. It has no particular tendency toward being true.

Nate then goes on to examine polling of every Senate general election race since 1998, and establishes there’s no clear relationship between gains made in one period of a contest and gains or losses experienced in the next.
As Nate acknowleges, there are sometimes factors which help a candidate improve his or her poll standing one week that could continue to operate later on. Most obviously, a candidate who hoards money until late in the campaign and then spends it is likely to make late gains. A candidate with low name ID who cuts a first TV ad is likely to make gains with a second TV ad as well. And many contests “tighten up” towards the partisan default position as voters begin to pay attention. But that’s not the same as saying that this or that candidate “has momentum” as though polling trends have their own inexorable logic and power.
One scenario where “momentum” does make sense is when gains by a candidate appear to make the contest more or less competitive than was earlier the case, driving financial decisions by party committees or donors. And obviously, there can be external events–whether it’s a change in the political climate or a candidate gaffe–that can drive the numbers in the same direction for an extended period of time. But these factors don’t appear to come into play often enough to make a major mark on the empirical data.
Primary contests (which were outside the scope of Nate’s study) may be different, if only because signs of candidate strength may be interpreted by voters as an indication of “electability,” which some voters value. But the bottom line is that there is no particular reason to believe that candidates who are making gains in the polls released today are going to keep making them between now and Election Day. When a pundit talks about candidate “momentum,” you should probably pay it no more mind than a sportscaster’s assertion that a football team scoring a touchdown has “seized the momentum.” You really can’t know that until the horn sounds.

I’ve been warning for a while that the 2010 midterm election is a political event that is sure to be over-intepreted in most conservative and some progressive quarters. Victor Davis Hanson at National Review has penned an advance spin on November 2 that provides an excellent case in point.
The main burden of Hanson’s column is to argue that since 2008 voters have wised up to Barack Obama’s deceptions, and are poised to do now what they should have done two years ago (talk about elitist contempt for voters!). You wouldn’t know from reading Hanson that among the intervening events was an economic collapse that took hold before and immediately after Obama took office, a development that would have depressed the approval ratings of George Washington. You also wouldn’t know that the stipulated decline in Democratic political standing is exaggerated by failure to note the difference between presidential and midterm turnout patterns, now and always (the electorate that will turn out on November 2 will almost certainly be one that would have, in fact, elected John McCain president in 2008).
No, Hanson’s convinced that Democrats are in trouble because voters are mad that Obama pursued a “radical” agenda after campaigning on a promise of bipartisanship:

Almost all the current style and substance of President Obama were clear enough in the 2008 campaign. But in that long-ago, dreamy summer of mass hypnosis, the excitement about our first African-American president, a biased media, Bush/Iraq, the September 15 meltdown, the lackluster McCain candidacy, and an orphaned election with no incumbent running all conspired to convince voters that what they heard and saw was not so disturbing — or at least that it would end once Obama became president.
So the 2008 campaign, as brilliantly as it was waged in Machiavellian fashion by Obama, will be reinterpreted in the context of the 2010 setback.
The voters are rebelling because they believe they have been had. They now think that they were deceived in 2008 into voting for someone who never had any intention of governing in the bipartisan manner on which he had campaigned.

Now Hanson can plausibly, if not convincingly, argue that many Obama voters were entirely unaware that his platform consistently included precisely the kind of health care reform initiative he pursued in office; precisely the kind of climate change legislation he’s pushed; and precisely the kind of spending initiatives he promoted in the stimulus bill and elsewhere. But he is not entitled to presume, without evidence, that the one thing voters heard was Obama’s promise to reach out to Republicans. It also should be obvious that “bipartisanship” is one of those things that Americans say they like in the abstract, but sometimes interpret differently in concrete cases. Indeed, Hanson is one of those Americans, since he seems to interpret “bipartisanship” as involving abandonment of Obama’s entire platform because Republicans opposed it uniformly. I don’t know where he was when Obama and Senate Democrats were conspicuously sucking up to Republican Senators on the stimulus bill (which wound up being smaller and more oriented to tax cuts as a result) or health care reform, but it’s delusional to think Obama insisted on partisanship as an end in itself (as, say, House Republicans did during the DeLay era, when they typically refused to entertain amendments that might attract Democratic votes and thus dilute partisan credit for legislation).
More to the point, by making bipartisanship the acid test of the Obama presidency, Hanson is certainly setting up Republicans for some embarrassing moments in the near future. Is there any chance a triumphant GOP would “reach out” to Obama in any important way if they make the expected gains on November 2? Will Republicans suddenly forget that the GOP “betrayals of conservative principle” so often demonized by Tea Party activists involved the few genuinely bipartisan initiatives of the Bush administration? Is there any chance whatsoever that a significant number of Republicans would risk destruction by agreeing to consider any kind of tax increase, however construed, in order to obtain a bipartisan deficit reduction agreement?
Now perhaps I’m missing something here and what Hanson is actually saying is that Americans want a conservative government, now and forever, and since John McCain was something of a RINO and Bush turned out to be one, too, then conservatives voted for Obama as the most efficient way to produce a turn to the right, via surrender to conservatives in Congress. If so, it’s just another way of saying that every election, regardless of the outcome, can be intepreted by the same theory of voters desperately begging for conservative governance and only screwing up when they are deceived. It’s certainly no stranger a theory than the conservative conviction that tax cuts for corporations and high earners are always the solution to every economic problem.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
With all the talk about nasty or misleading political ads this year, it’s rare to focus on really good, really effective ads. But California gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown has come up with one that is very effective without being nasty.
It features a long series of alternating video clips of current Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Republican nominee Meg Whitman uttering banal outsider-business-executive talking points in identical or near-identical terms.

This approach is effective on three levels. First, the incumbent is very unpopular; the latest Field Poll, in September, gave him a job approval/disapproval rating of 23-68, which is very bad. Republicans don’t like him much more than Democrats, which is one reason why Whitman has largely ignored him.
Second, the ad shows that Whitman’s efforts to display her campaign as a fresh start towards a “New California” (a term also used by the incumbent) represents the same-old, same-old: A wealthy neophyte promising to run the state as a business and touting his/her wealth as a guarantor of independence. Her depiction as echoing Schwarzenegger also reinforces Whitman’s reputation for running a sort of soulless Death Star campaign based on focus-group-tested bromides.
Third, and most importantly, the ad virtually forces viewers to compare the risk they would take in electing the inexperienced Whitman to the realities of the Schwarzenneger years. The first and last clips nicely capture this theme, showing Arnold and eMeg saying: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting [hoping for] a different result,” and, “What’s the worst that can happen?” Thus, the outsider running against the guy who first won statewide office 40 years ago is tied closely to the political status quo in viewers’ minds.
I don’t know if this ad, entitled “Echo,” will have much impact. But it will be in the back of a lot of minds on October 26, when the incumbent governor and both major candidates to replace him make a joint appearance at a “discussion” sponsored by California First Lady Maria Shriver. Team Whitman will have an interesting challenge prepping their candidate to provide not only a sharp contrast to Brown, but to the Governator.

This item is cross-posted from ProgressiveFix.
With all the numbers and hyperbolic rhetoric being thrown around about potential Republican gains this year, it’s sometimes helpful to look more closely at the patterns. We are often told, for example, that this is going to be some sort of day of reckoning for House Democrats generally, or for House Democratic incumbents in particular. But what, exactly, is the nature of those House seats Republicans are poised to win?
For purposes of this analysis, I’ll use Nate Silver’s House ratings, which are more precise than those of most of his competitors. Nate shows 27 districts where Republicans are “likely” (defined as an 80 percent or better probability) to win Democratic seats. Do many of these contests involve longstanding Democratic bastions where incumbents are being ousted by the righteous wrath of an angry voting public? No. Eleven of these seats are open. Another thirteen are seats wrested away from the GOP in the “wave” elections of 2006 and 2008. And 22 of the 27 have a pro-Republican PVI (the Cook Political Report’s Partisan Voting Index), which means they tilted Republican more than the national average in the last two presidential races.
In other words, these are seats that would inevitably be ripe for the plucking in the first midterm after a Democratic presidential victory, even if you don’t consider the factors (especially age-related turnout patterns and the condition of the economy) that make this an especially promising GOP year.
Looking at Nate’s next category, fifteen “lean takeover” seats where the probability of a switch to the GOP is in the 60-80 percent range, there are far fewer open seats, but plenty of other factors indicating low-hanging fruit for Republicans. Aside from the two open seats, there are twelve that Democrats picked up in 2006-08, and eleven of the fifteen have pro-GOP PVIs.
It’s only in a third category, twenty “even” seats where the probability of a Republican takeover is 40-60 percent, that you start getting into a significant number of contests involving entrenched incumbents. Even there, half the seats were taken over by Democrats in 2006 or later. But 14 of them have pro-Republican PVIs, and many of the Democratic “entrenched incumbents” typically represent strongly pro-Republican districts as measured by PVI: Gene Taylor of Mississippi (R+14); Lincoln Davis of Tennessee (R+13); Jim Marshall of Georgia (R+10); Ben Chandler of Kentucky (R+9); John Spratt of South Carolina (R+7); Baron Hill of Indiana (R+6); John Salazar of Colorado (R+5); and Mike McIntyre of North Carolina (R+5).
Remembering that Democrats will probably win some of these close races, it seems likely that Republican House gains this year will represent more a reversion to the norm than some sort of electoral tsunami–and more of a partisan “correction” than any revolt against Democratic incumbents-particularly if you consider the structural factors that make this particular midterm difficult for Democrats.
Now it’s always possible that Republican gains will be even larger than Nate Silver and most others consider probable, and if so, it will be necessary to reconsider everything I’ve said above. But it’s equally appropriate to demand a reconsideration of all the apocalyptic advanced spin coming from Republican circles if the House results turn out to be relatively predictable. Based on current evidence, the idea that this election is going to usher in some sort of extended era of conservative domination of American politics is no more credible than the belief exhibited by some Democrats two and four years ago that Republicans wouldn’t enjoy power in Washington again for the foreseeable future.

The sudden tightening of the U.S. Senate race in Alaska, as reflected in recent polls and perhaps exacerbated by the bad press that GOP nominee Joe Miller has been richly earning, indicates that Election Night on November 2 could last for quite some time. Aside from the fact that polls in Alaska don’t close until midnight EDT, any close election that revolves around write-in votes (in this case, for incumbent Sen. Lisa Murkowski) is fraught with uncertainty, big questions about vote-counting, and likely litigation.
But there’s another potentially frustrating situation a bit south of Alaska, where Washington’s all-mail-ballot system allows the counting of votes postmarked by November 2. If the Senate fight between Patty Murray and Dino Rossi hangs fire, it will be days if not weeks before the results are known. And there are also a couple of potentially close House races in WA that might not be decided on November 2.
Finally, there’s Georgia, where general election victories require a majority of votes cast. You may recall that the 2008 U.S. Senate race there went into overtime, though a predictable drop-off of African-American and younger voters gave Republican Saxby Chambliss a relatively easy win in the December contest. Could an extended election happen there again this year, particularly in the heated gubernatorial race between Nathan Deal and Roy Barnes? Maybe, says Insider Advantage’s Matt Towery:

The last IA survey showed Barnes slowly improving his numbers among the critical independent swing vote. The trend was not necessarily reflected in the top line results of that poll once the weightings were done for other demographic groups. I’ll be keeping an eye on the independent numbers in the next poll of the race, and also on how Barnes is faring among whites. If he somehow can creep into the upper 20 percentile of whites, reach parity or take a slight lead among independents, and see the turnout among African-Americans reach at least 25 percent of the turnout on Nov. 2, then the two to three percent that Libertarian John Monds is likely to receive might shove Deal into a runoff.

I’d add that Republican disgruntlement with Deal could push the libertarian vote higher than the numbers Towery’s firm is currently showing. In any event, if it happens, it will be interesting to see if Republicans have the same sort of problems Democrats had in 2008 in motivating satisfied partisans to come back out for a runoff.