This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Colorado’s election keeps defying expectations. At first, it seemed that Republicans would make a clean sweep: In a rightward-leaning year, the state has an open gubernatorial seat, an appointed Democratic senator who barely survived a primary challenge, and three vulnerable Democratic House seats all in play. Since Colorado was the classic Democratic surge state in 2006 and 2008, it would take relatively little in the way of a rightward swing to return it to deep-purple status.
Then, Democrats seemed to catch a break in the August 10 primaries, when a lightly regarded and financially troubled Tea Party candidate, Dan Maes, won the gubernatorial nomination over ethically challenged frontrunner Scott McInnis; and another Tea Party favorite, District Attorney Ken Buck, won the Senate primary over early frontrunner Jane Norton. Maes was quickly beset with demands from Republican leaders that he withdraw from the race to allow the party to choose a more seemly nominee–and then the nation’s preeminent immigrant-basher, former Congressman Tom Tancredo, jumped into the race on the ticket of the far-right Constitution Party, apparently guaranteeing the Democrat, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, a victory.
Now, the playing field seems to be tilting again. With Maes reeling from yet another revelation of his spotty personal finances (a personal bankruptcy in 1989), a new Rasmussen poll has Tancredo zooming up to within four points of Hickenlooper as Maes’s support collapses. At the same time, Rasmussen shows Senator Michael Bennet actually gaining ground against Buck, who’s led most polls the last few weeks, creating a virtual dead heat.
Coloradans–and Americans generally–got a fresh opportunity to compare the two Senate candidates Sunday on “Meet the Press.” There were no real fireworks; host David Gregory spent a good chunk of the “debate” asking the candidates to respond to disparaging comments made about both in a Denver Post editorial (which ultimately endorsed Bennet). Predictably, Bennet spent much of his time on the show denying that he’s a stooge of the Obama administration, while Buck sought to appear as not-crazy as possible, half-conceding Gregory’s assertion that he’s moving to the center during the general election. Still, the most jarring moment was Buck’s blunt agreement with the proposition that being gay is a “choice”: He compared the “influence” of biology on sexual orientation to the predisposition to alcoholism. This is pretty standard stuff in right-wing circles, but isn’t the best positioning in Colorado, at least outside of Colorado Springs.
It’s anybody’s guess what will happen on November 2–or more accurately, what result will be announced that day since most Coloradans vote by mail. With Rasmussen ranking the Senate race as too close to call, it would be unwise to write off Bennet, who’s been battling a vast number of attacks from out-of-state groups including Karl Rove’s American Crossroads. But it’s much harder to imagine that Colorado would elect Tom Tancredo as governor; his main concern, it appears, is to wage war on Denver for being an immigrant “sanctuary city.” Tancredo’s election would make the state not only a national laughingstock, but a deadly serious target of boycotts and other tangible forms of opprobrium. Indeed, the most concrete effect of Ol’ Tanc’s candidacy may have been to help Ken Buck, indirectly, in his effort to look less scary during the run-up to Halloween.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
With some help from the media, various officials at the National Organization for Women, and her opponent’s clumsiness, California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman succeeded in turning an offensive epithet uttered in private by a Jerry Brown staffer into a major campaign brouhaha. Now, Whitman has officially called an end to “Whoregate” by accepting Brown’s apology for his minor role in the saga and saying she wants to get back to “the issues.” And no wonder, since “Whoregate” served her purposes quite well.
For those who somehow missed the whole thing, a month-old phone tape leaked to the L.A. Times–and left because Team Brown failed to hang up the receiver on a call–recorded a staffer wondering aloud if the campaign should attack Whitman as a “whore” for exempting a police union (which subsequently endorsed eMeg) from her high-profile proposal to eliminate defined-benefit pensions for public employees. Jerry Brown did not object to the use of the word, which Whitman, happily promoting the “story,” interpreted as a “personal attack” on her and an insult to the women of California. It was a major point of discussion in the candidates’ final debate last weekend, in which Brown did not handle the controversy terribly well.
Now, a moment’s thought should establish that it was more than a little unlikely Brown intended to “attack” anyone via the unusual means of failing to hang up a phone and hoping eavesdroppers would tape the subsequent discussion and then leak it. As for the insulting nature of the private use of the term “whore,” it’s also reasonably clear that the Brown staffer was not trying to suggest that Whitman was employed in the world’s oldest profession, and instead deployed a gender-neutral meaning of the term (as convincingly argued here at TNR Online by linguist John McWhorter) as short-hand for her alleged sale of a policy position in exchange for an endorsement. That’s certainly the way I interpreted it–and I spent a number of years being occasionally called a “corporate whore” by some of my progressive friends for working at the Democratic Leadership Council.
There’s no evidence so far that Whitman’s efforts to encourage female voters to feel her pain about the alleged insult have worked. But whatever wounds she’s suffered have certainly been ameliorated by the obliterating impact “Whoregate” had on Whitman’s recent problems associated with her hiring and firing an illegal immigrant named Nicky Diaz. Here’s news site Calbuzz describing how one “story” affected the other:

With a major assist from an aggressive Team eMeg, which kept blowing and blowing on the smoldering little story until it finally got lit, and aided by the lackadaisical nonchalance of his own handlers, Brown lost his firm grip on the [“Whoregate”] narrative and momentum of the campaign in the 10 days between the Oct. 2 Fresno debate – when he dominated eMeg with a righteous scolding of her dealings with Nicky Diaz – and the Brokaw [debate] event.
In the end, the bizarre whore story may still not matter much to the outcome of the race. However, it is inarguable that Brown’s mishandling of it not only allowed Whitman to instantly change the subject, but also enabled on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-minded members of the press corps to begin drawing a false equivalence between a person in his orbit blurting a rude word in a closed door campaign klatsch, and the more serious matter of Whitman’s employment of an undocumented worker for years.

In other words, it’s the Diaz dustup, not “Whoregate,” that Whitman is happy to escape in her return to “the issues.” The next time the Republican candidate is likely to make major national news is when she shatters the $150 million cap she originally imposed on the personal funds she was willing to spend in this campaign. Meanwhile, the Brown campaign needs to watch its language and learn how to terminate a phone call.

There’s been quite a bit of buzz over the last few days about a TNR article by Sara Robinson of Campaign for America’s Future that argues progressives need to emulate conservative “brand-building” through professional marketing techniques and institution-building.
It’s not exactly a new argument. At TPM Cafe, Todd Gitlin, who strongly agrees with Robinson, notes:

I mean no disrespect when I say that some version of this piece has appeared during every election cycle of the 21st century, and a lot of good books have sounded the theme.

Sometimes, of course, arguments for “branding” or “promoting frames” for progressives are less about using savvy marketing techniques or paying attention to basic values and themes, and more about insisting that the Democratic Party enforce the kind of ideological consistency that has made “branding” a more mechanical undertaking for Republicans, at least since Reagan. Robinson acknowledges that progressives don’t have the sort of level of consensus as conservatives, but argues that disagreements must be submerged in the interest of projecting a clear message.
Personally, I’m all for using smart techniques in politics, and have spent a good chunk of my own career in training sessions aimed at helping Democrats unravel and articulate their values, policy goals, and proposals in a way that promotes both party unity and effective communications.
But it’s important to understand that conservatives have an advantage in “branding” that I don’t think progressives can or should match. The best explication of this advantage was by Jonathan Chait in a justly famous 2005 article (also for TNR) entitled “Fact Finders,” which argued that conservatives, unlike progressives have little regard for empirical evidence in developing their “brand,” and thus can maintain a level of simplicity and consistency in political communications that eludes the more reality-minded. Here Chait makes the key distinction:

We’re accustomed to thinking of liberalism and conservatism as parallel ideologies, with conservatives preferring less government and liberals preferring more. The equivalency breaks down, though, when you consider that liberals never claim that increasing the size of government is an end in itself. Liberals only support larger government if they have some reason to believe that it will lead to material improvement in people’s lives. Conservatives also want material improvement in people’s lives, of course, but proving that their policies can produce such an outcome is a luxury, not a necessity.

Thus conservatives are entirely capable of arguing that deficits don’t matter if they are promoting tax cuts, while deficits matter more than anything if they are trying to cut social spending; that tax cuts and deregulation are essential if the economy’s good, and tax cuts and deregulation are essential if the economy’s bad; and that particular totems like, say, missile defense, should be a top national priority both during and after the Cold War. Their agenda rarely changes, no matter how much the world changes, or how little evidence there is that their policy prescriptions work. The continued adherence of most conservatives to supply-side economics, that most thoroughly discredited concept, is a particularly important case in point.
As Chait notes, the refusal of progressives to ignore reality creates a real obstacle to consistency (and by inference, “branding”):

[I]ncoherence is simply the natural byproduct of a philosophy rooted in experimentation and the rejection of ideological certainty. In an open letter to Roosevelt, John Maynard Keynes called him “the Trustee for those in every country who seek to mend the evils of our condition by reasoned experiment within the framework of the existing social system. If you fail, rational change will be gravely prejudiced throughout the world, leaving orthodoxy and revolution to fight it out.” Note how Keynes defined his and Roosevelt’s shared ideology as “reasoned experiment” and “rational change” and contrasted it with orthodoxy (meaning the conservative dogma that market economics were self-correcting) and revolution.

What progressives gain in exchange for this sacrifice of the opportunity to pound in a simple message and agenda for decades is pretty important: the chance when in power to promote policies that actually work. And of all the “brands” that are desirable for the party of public-sector activism, competence is surely the best. Indeed, the most ironically perilous thing about the current political environment is that Democrats are paying a high price for the consequences of ideologically-driven incompetence–not to mention very deliberate efforts to destabilize the planet and promote economic inequality and social divisions–attributable to the last era of conservative control of the federal government.
The best news for progressives right now is that conservatives are engaged in another, and even more ideologically-driven, effort to promote their “brand” at the expense of reality. Indeed, one way to understand the Tea Party Movement is as a fierce battle to deny Republicans any leeway from the remorseless logic that will soon lead them to propose deeply unpopular steps to reduce the size and scope of government, while also insisting on policies virtually guaranteed to make today’s bad economy even worse, certainly for middle-class Americans. I’m willing to grant conservatives a “branding” advantage and keep my own political family grounded in the messy uncertainties of the real world.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Having just watched the long-awaited, one-time-only debate between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Republican nominee Sharron Angle, I have to say I can’t imagine too many voters were swayed one way or another by what they saw, though the post-debate spin could change things.
The debate format was unusual, to say the least: Every question was essentially a viewer-suggested attack line offered up by the moderator to one candidate or another; indeed, he articulated them with visible emotion, alternatively identifying with angry Tea Partiers or angry progressives.
Reinforcing the sense of Kabuki Theater, both candidates played to type, almost to the point of self-parody. When Sharron Angle wasn’t saying something outrageous, she was blowing dog whistles, repeatedly invoking constitutional originalism and the Tenth Amendment, those hardy perennial symbols of the Tea Party’s desire to return domestic governance to the size and power they maintained during the Coolidge administration. And Harry Reid was the consummate veteran senator, mired in legislative and programmatic language, beginning nearly every answer or rebuttal in mid-sentence, failing to provide the context necessary for viewers to understand his broader message. He was also exceptionally defensive, responding to Angle’s categorical worship of right-wing totems with claims that he’s not all that liberal himself.
The potential gotcha moment in the debate was when Angle, pressed by the moderator, admitted she did not favor any mandates of any sort on insurance companies. Reid stuck to his campaign talking points, decrying Angle’s opposition to mandated coverage for specific procedures, such as mammograms, and missing the chance to destroy her for apparent opposition to any regulation of insurers whatsoever–a position that threatens virtually every Nevada voter with health insurance. Similarly, Reid had a chance to go after Angle’s oft-repeated position favoring privatization of Social Security and Medicare, but his efforts to do so degenerated into a murky argument over various estimates of the solvency of the Social Security fund.
I’m not a Nevadan, and thus have no real sense of how the two candidates came across personally, particularly as compared with prior expectations. But my own impression was that Angle is an amiable kook, and Reid, for better or for worse, is the prime example of that complicated beast, the purple-state Democratic senator. Without question, Angle offered up the biggest targets for post-debate spin, and as we speak, Team Reid is probably coming up with a frightening set of hypotheticals involving her desire for a totally unregulated health insurance market.
As I have been writing this reaction, I’ve been half-listening to another CSPAN debate between Senator Patty Murray and her Republican challenger, Dino Rossi. Compared to the Nevada tilt, it’s coming across like Lincoln-Douglas.

One of the most fascinating aspects of this election cycle is the lesson that most Republicans are going to take from their gains on November 2. In a completely counterintuitive development (though one that had become highly predictable as early as 2006 if not much earlier), the GOP lost two straight elections pretty badly and then responded by moving away from the political “center” at warp speed. And in a vindication of movement conservative strategic arguments that go all the way back to Phyllis Schlafly’s 1964 book, A Choice Not An Echo, it seems to have worked, or at least did not pose any obstacle to a midterm victory. Aside from the exhilirating effect this scenario will have on Tea Party folk and other hard-core conservatives, it will also repudiate a whole generation of “moderate” voices urging Republicans and conservatives to control their ideological impulses in order to appeal to swing voters and win general elections.
The intrepid Dave Weigel got to wondering about those voices, and challenged three of them, David Frum, Reihan Salam, and Ross Douthat, to examine their assumptions.
In Weigel’s summary of the responses he received, Frum posed a short-term/long-term dilemma for Republicans, suggesting that its initial success after moving to the right (attributable to external factors such as the economy) would inevitably produce disastrous and unpopular policies, and generate another round of big political setbacks. (FWIW, that’s pretty much my own view). Salam and Douthat, who have done better than Frum in keeping a toe in the conservative movement while criticizing many of its core tenets, peered sideways at the contemporary Tea Party-oriented GOP and professed to find a validation of their famous Sam’s Club Republicans argument calling for championship of the more conservative policy predilections of non-college-educated white voters.
Weigel’s sardonic rejoinder to these responses was: “It’s an ingenious argument: We’re not wrong. We’re just not yet right.”
But if these “reformers” are indeed right–in the long run if not the short run–then you’d have to figure they would be receiving some support from those non-ideological Republican political pros who are far less interested in destroying the legacy of the New Deal than in building a stable GOP electoral majority.
And there is undoubtedly an implicit belief among Beltway insider types in both parties that after November 2, the “hierarchical” habits of the conservative rank-and-file will lead them meekly into submission to the great big grown-ups who understand you can’t really do what most Republican candidates this year are demanding–a balanced federal budget with more high-end tax cuts and spending cuts that somehow don’t touch cherished domestic programs or the Pentagon. According to this view of the world, the Tea Party Movement will burn itself out, and its activists will happily support a great-big-grown-up presidential candidate like Mitt Romney or Mitch Daniels or Haley Barbourt.
But as Weigel notes, in a follow-up post, if there’s some budding pushback against the proposition that moving right is the path to political victory, it’s awfully quiet:

When a party loses there are two reform factions — the We Were Wrong faction and the Double Down faction. And obviously the Double Down faction won in 2008, because the Republican base really believed that it lost power because it failed to cut taxes and spending. I think that one factor in the abandonment of Frum/Salam/Douthat arguments is that the Republican political leaders who had an incentive, or a record, to argue the other side of this — that would be Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie, who saw the governing and political benefits of “compassionate conservatism” — saw where the energy was and moved into flat-out opposition mode.

Indeed, the posture of Karl Rove is particularly interesting. He was, after all, the architect of the three politically motivated Bush administration policy initiatives that have been most often demonized by conservative candidates this year as examples of Republican betrayal of conservative principles: No Child Left Behind, the Medicare Rx drug benefit, and comprehensive immigration reform. But aside from a quickly repudiated dismissal of Christine O’Donnell as an unelectable kook, Rove has gone along cheerfully with the Tea Party conquest of the GOP.
The precise intensity of right-wing pressure on the Republican Party to completely lose its inhibitions may depend on the details of the outcome on November 2. Three especially conservative Senate candidates, in particular, carry a lot of symbolic weight: Sharron Angle, who is challenging the Majority Leader of the Senate; Rand Paul, who already defeated the candidate of the Minority Leader of the Senate; and Pat Toomey, leader of the principal pre-Tea Party organization demanding purges of party heretics, the Club for Growth.
But even if some or all of these candidates lose, it’s reasonable to assume that the post-election argument among Republicans will resemble one of those debates where one candidate refuses to participate: a debate between the move-to-the-right-and-win faction, and an empty chair.

Politico‘s Alexander Burns has an interesting report on the 2010 activities of alleged 2012 Republican presidential front-runner Mitt Romney, comparing his midterm strategy to that of a very famous GOP candidate of the past:

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney is grinding through the 2010 campaign state by state and district by district, adhering to a go-everywhere, never-say-no campaign schedule that will have recorded visits to 30 states before Election Day.
It’s an approach that sets him apart from other 2012 prospects in its plodding, comprehensive, Nixon-in-’66-like pace.

Other potential 2012 candidates, says Burns, are being far more selective in their midterm campaign activities, with some being constrained by other responsibilities (including elected office) and others focused on early-primary states. Romney’s approach, by contrast, seems to be aimed at creating pockets of support that could sustain a well-known, well-funded candidate like him even if he doesn’t knock out the competition early on:

[B]y establishing himself as a force in states beyond the early-primary circuit of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada, Romney’s cementing his role as a party leader and laying the groundwork for a potential nomination fight that lasts well past the first round of small-state elections.
It’s a strategy that recalls former President Richard Nixon’s slow climb back to power after he lost the presidency in 1960 and the California governor’s race two years later: Gearing up to run for president in 1968, Nixon simply outcampaigned his competitors with a frenzy of activity in the 1966 midterms.

A lot has obviously changed since Nixon’s Long March to the nomination in 1968. Only 14 states had primaries that year; the debts Nixon was able to call in for his 1966 campaign activities were often directly redeemable in delegate votes. Even more importantly, Nixon benefitted from poor and irresolute opposition. Nelson Rockefeller decided at the last minute not to run (surprising and angering such early supporters as Spiro T. Agnew), then got back in too late. Mitt’s father, George, self-destructed before the first primary with his “I was brainwashed” comment about Vietnam. Ronald Reagan didn’t enter the race until just prior to the convention. Maybe Mitt Romney will get lucky and such potentially formidable candidates as Sarah Palin and his 2008 nemesis, Mike Huckabee, will take a pass, or will commit some disqualifying mistake. But Nixon’s 1968 luck, like that of John McCain in 2008, won’t be easy to replicate.
If he is indeed contemplating a 2012 strategy of surviving early setbacks and then using his money and national base to grind out a victory, Romney may, as Burns hints, be thinking of a different model: Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign, perhaps improved by the kind of attention to small caucus states that ultimately made the difference for Barack Obama. But it’s not entirely clear that Mitt Romney has the kind of celebrity power or hard core of committed supporters that both Democrats enjoyed in 2008. At this point, Romney’s main appeal, beyond his checkbook, is that he’s considered reasonably safe and sane by the news media; and that he’s basically acceptable to the party’s dominant conservative faction (among whom he was the favored candidate in 2008) and about as good as it’s going to get for the shrinking moderate wing. In these qualities he is indeed a lot like Richard Nixon in 1968, but he has a very long way to go to establish himself as The One.

We’re at the point in this election cycle when final candidate debates are being held in many places, and although they don’t get the kind of national attention that presidential primary and general election debates obtain, they raise a lot of the same questions: Are they worth anything? Can they be made more substantive? Is anybody really paying attention?
There are no easy answers to these questions, as illustrated by two dramatically different takes on last night’s final debate between California gubernatorial candidates Jerry Brown and Meg Whitman. At the fine group site Calbuzz, which adopts a notably jaundiced viewpoint of Golden State politics and its practitioners, the debate was described as something of a high point in the campaign:

In a sharp, fast-paced and intelligent debate, managed expertly by former NBC newsman Tom Brokaw, Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown gave any voters still undecided about the governor’s race as clear a choice as they could want: a businesswoman focused on private sector jobs and a lifelong public official focused on untangling gridlock in government

That same debate was described rather bitterly by T.A. Frank in The New Republic:

The debate last night between California gubernatorial candidates Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown was pretty awful, but it could have been worse. Yes, the discussion was often superficial and disingenuous, but at least the word “whore” made several appearances. Tom Brokaw was there, too, and it was sort of nice to see him, even if no one had really missed him. The main challenge for viewers was to avoid getting too dispirited by the condition of California (that stubborn socioeconomic death spiral, for example) and instead try to focus on what matters. And those things would be the election-season setbacks and gaffes that–to use a favorite journalistic phrase–“threaten to overshadow” each candidate’s campaign.

Maybe the glass empty/glass full disparity in takes on the debate is attributable to very different expectations; it’s not as though the Calbuzz live-blogger was full of starry-eyed admiration for the candidates:

Tom [Brokaw] waaaayyyy up on Mt. Olympus – JFK’s inaugural address is cited — asks the candidates to tell voters what they – the voters – can do for California.
Meg immediately starts talking about herself. Straight campaign schtick and talking points. Doesn’t answer the question except to say that “What people will have to do is support the next governor,” “pull together” and “there’s going to be some shared sacrifice.”
Brown on talking points too: Can’t point fingers, “rise above the poisonous partisanship” rise above categories and be Californians first. “Some people say this is a failed state – it’s not.” He doesn’t answer either.

This sort of thing appears to drive T.A. Frank crazy, in no small part because the challenges facing the winner defy the sort of breezy can-do talk favored by both candidates:

[B]oth sides probably know that what awaits them in Sacramento is a nearly ungovernable mess. Whitman for some reason thinks that heading up eBay prepares you for this. It makes no sense, but it does appeal to voters dreaming of a new start. Brown, on the other hand, believes he understands Sacramento because he’s been there before. That’s true, but it’s not especially inspiring.

I guess the underlying issue is whether debates that occasionally succeed in luring candidates a few inches away from the focus-group-tested messages they proclaim in their campaign ads are worthwhile, or instead just create a cruel illusion, or worse yet, feature moments of “spontaneity” engineered by moderators firing off gotcha questions on nonsubstantive matters. It’s probably not a good sign that a debate between a candidate as relentlessly programmed as Whitman, and a candidate as endlessly unpredictable as Brown, came across to T.A. Frank as “vacuous.” The two pols are about as different as two members of the same species can get. Getting a useful contrast of their styles and views ought to be pretty easy. If the debates didn’t succeed in doing that, then we have to conclude that for all the trashing of partisanship that’s forever in the air, it’s a good thing there’s a D and an R next to their names to help us keep them clearly apart.

One of the things you hear frequently these days is that whatever happens in the congressional elections on November 2, Republicans are going to be poised to obtain a long-term advantage in the House via control of a greater number of governorships and state legislative chambers just prior to the decennial reapportionment and redistricting process.
But such projections often fail to note that the current House districts were carved out at a time when Republicans held an impressive advantage in the larger states that gained and lost House seats in the 2000 process. At pollster.com, George Mason University’s Michael McDonald supplies an important reminder:

The best case for Republicans is that they will be in the same position as they were ten years ago: they will control the redistricting process in Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas and they will control a point in the process to block Democrats in California, Illinois, and New York…. We know how well that worked out for them. The best case for Democrats is that they will block Republicans in Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas and they will control California, Illinois, and New York, a significant improvement from their position ten years ago.

It was conventional wisdom going into 2002 to suggest that Republicans had used redistricting to obtain a “lock” on control of the House. It turned out that the lock lasted exactly two election cycles. And GOPers are very unlikely to do better this time around.
Yes, redistricting matters, but mainly on the margins, and in any event, Democrats may wind up in a stronger position than they were a decade ago.

J.P. Green’s post earlier today on the possibility of Republicans as a whole becoming dangerously identified with their crazier or more extremist candidates raises a pretty fundamental question about the dynamics of this midterm election: To what extent are voters even paying attention to individual candidates, and how tolerant are they of crackpots?
In answering this question, it’s important to remember some factors that will affect election returns almost automatically. First, and I will keep harping on this so long as so many analysts continue to ignore it, this is a more pro-Republican electorate than the one that voted in 2008 or will vote in 2012, thanks to the age-old disparities in midterm turnout that are particularly damaging to Democrats this year. This gives GOPers something like a five or six percent swing completely separate from anything else that is going on. Second, the economy is in bad shape, and that hurts the party in power no matter how little it did to produce the situation, or how much worse it would be if the other party had been running the country. These are advantages for the GOP that a candidate will have to work pretty hard to lose, particularly in friendly or marginal states. And third, candidate issue positions and ideology are always less clear to voters than to the elites who tend to follow politics closely. It take a fair amount of candidate craziness to break through the broadbased voter consciousness.
The point J.P. is making is that this year’s Republican Party has generated such a bumper crop of craziness that this could be the unusual year when it matters a lot, and his question is whether it’s reached the critical mass necessary to brand the GOP as a whole.
I don’t know the answer to that, and in fact, don’t even know if the most conspicuously extremist Republicans (with the exception of Christine O’Donnell) will suffer enough opprobrium to lose. Democrats should obviously do everything possible to inform voters that there are lots of crazy people whose views are far from the mainstream with an R next to their names on the ballot; it would be political malpractice to do otherwise.
But the good news for Democrats is this: to the extent that Republicans are not held responsible, individually or collectively, for the craziness of their views, they will be lured (or indeed pushed by the radicalized conservatives in their party) into thinking they can be at least moderately deranged in office after November 2, and on the campaign trail in 2012, when the electorate will be more like the one than voted in 2008.

At pollster.com, Thomas Holbrook has a useful piece summarizing current polling averages for 29 of the 31 gubernatorial contests being held this year. According to his calculations, Republicans are favored to pick up no fewer than ten Democratic governorships, but Democratic are favored to flip five Republican governorships, giving the GOP a sizable but not extraordinary net gain of five.
Looking more closely at the data, it’s obvious that some of the turnover involves relatively predictable switches where open gubernatorial slots in strongly red and blue states are returning to type (a trend that Nate Silver noted some time ago). Oklahoma and Wyoming fit this pattern among red states (so, too, do Kansas and Tennessee, which were not included in Holbrook’s analysis since there has been no recent polling in those states). Among blue states, Rhode Island, Connecticut, California and Hawaii have open Republican-controlled governorships.
Another pattern which is hurting Democrats is the backlash against the party in power at the state level in marginal territory. That helps explain current GOP advantages in PA, MI, IA, and OH.
The good news for Democrats other than their ability to offset large GOP gains with some pickoffs of their own is that the closest races could break in their direction. Holbrook has Republicans in the lead in FL, IL and OH; Democrats have made recent gains in the latter two states, and Republican candidate Rick Scott in FL has extraordinarily high negatives that probably set a low ceiling on his support. WI, GA, SC, and TX are definitely within reach for Democrats as well, with unusually strong non-incumbent candidates running in all four states (in GA, the serial ethics and financial problems of Republican Nathan Deal are a real wild card). A third-party candidate could make blue state Maine a sleeper for Democrats as well.
In any event, it should be remembered that gubernatorial contests are more likely to reflect local conditions than congressional races. I’m reminded of 1998, a relatively bad year for Democratic congressional candidates in the South, when nonetheless Democrats won upset wins in gubernatorial contests in AL, GA and SC. The “wrong track vote” in a midterm election isn’t always about national politics.