The Majority Leader of the United States Senate is currently locked in a tight race for re-election against an obscure state legislator once notorious for lonely, extremist positions. But though Sharron Angle has sought to clean up, or at least mute, her act since winning the Republican Senate nomination in Nevada, she can’t seem to stop herself from crazy talk.
Witness this latest example, from an AP wire story:

U.S. Senate candidate Sharron Angle told a crowd of supporters that the country needs to address a “militant terrorist situation” that has allowed Islamic religious law to take hold in some American cities.
Her comments came at a rally of tea party supporters in the Nevada resort town of Mesquite last week after the candidate was asked about Muslims angling to take over the country, and marked the latest of several controversial remarks by the Nevada Republican.
In a recording of the rally provided to The Associated Press by the Mesquite Local News, a man is heard asking Angle : “I keep hearing about Muslims wanting to take over the United States … on a TV program just last night, I saw that they are taking over a city in Michigan and the residents of the city, they want them out. They want them out. So, I want to hear your thoughts about that.”
Angle responds that “we’re talking about a militant terrorist situation, which I believe it isn’t a widespread thing, but it is enough that we need to address, and we have been addressing it.”
“My thoughts are these, first of all, Dearborn, Michigan, and Frankford, Texas are on American soil, and under constitutional law. Not Sharia law. And I don’t know how that happened in the United States,” she said. “It seems to me there is something fundamentally wrong with allowing a foreign system of law to even take hold in any municipality or government situation in our United States.”

The two incidents Angle was talking about are, of course, completely imaginary–just made-up agitprop for Muslim-haters and for Christian theocrats who like to promote the idea that it’s impossible for the state to be neutral towards religion. The mayor of Dearborn quickly set the record straight:

Dearborn Mayor Jack O’Reilly called Angle’s comments “shameful.” He said tea party groups inaccurately spread the word that his Detroit suburb was ruled by Islamic law after members of an anti-Islam group were arrested at an Arab cultural festival in June because a Christian volunteer complained of harassment.
“She took it as face value and maligned the city of Dearborn and I consider that totally irresponsible,” he said. “If she wants to come here, I will take her on a tour. I will show her we follow the Constitution just as well as anyone else.”
Angle, a Southern Baptist, has called herself a faith-based politician. Among her positions, she opposes abortion in all circumstances, including rape and incest and doesn’t believe the Constitution requires the separation of church and state.

If Angle is elected to the Senate, the level of extremism in that chamber will rise significantly, making Jim DeMint look almost like a representative of the mainstream. If Republicans win control of the Senate, Angle could actually chair a subcommittee. Let’s hope it’s not one that requires basic familiarity with objective reality.

There’s been an interesting exchange over at TNR between Jonathan Cohn and Jonathan Bernstein on a subject that’s not discussed much publicly but that’s in the back of most Democrats’ minds: is there some sort of silver lining in the possibility of a Republican-controlled House or Senate? Cohn outlines three such potential silver linings; and Bernstein disputes them.
I tend to agree with Bernstein that Cohn’s supposition of enhanced Democratic unity and an exposed Republican congressional leadership in the wake of a Republican sweep is questionable.
But I think Bernstein is underestimating the extent to which the massive contradictions of Republican policy messaging will blow up on them if they control either House of Congress, for the simple reason that they will be responsible for drafting a budget resolution that cannot possibly accomodate their promises to reduce the defict and cut taxes without touching extremely popular programs or going after the Pentagon. Bernstein suggests they’ll just inflate the deficit as they did under Bush and blithely blame Obama. But the one clear policy implication of the Tea Party Movement’s rise is that deficit reduction, if not (as many Republican candidates are promising this year) an actual balanced budget, is extremely conspicuous in Republican messaging and cannot be discarded as it has been in the past. Nobody with an R next to his or her name is saying “deficits don’t matter” any more. That means a Republican-drafted budget resolution is going to either split the GOP ranks or force them into politically perilous territory on domestic spending cuts, with the 2012 Republican presidential field being forced to take sides on every controversial decision.
In any event, the Cohn-Bernstein discussion is missing a pretty crucial qualifier: a Republican takeover of the House or Senate should be judged as compared to the alternative: Democratic control of Congress by margins that make any effective action absolutely impossible. Yes, it matters who controls Congress in terms of the ability to control floor and committee schedules, investigations, and (in the case of the Senate) confirmations. But the extraordinarily methodical use of obstructionist tactics by Senate Republicans over the last two years really has limited the fruits of majority status. I don’t want to overstate this argument, but you can certainly make a case that the real stakes this November are about which party will preside over congressional gridlock, and be held accountable for it.

I apologize if this site has lately become “enthusiasmgap.com,” but for Democrats, properly understanding the turnout patterns we are likely to see on November 2–what they do and don’t represent–is going to be kind of important to the strategy chosen going forward.
Nate Silver has definitively weighed in on the subject, and reached conclusions that we’ve been offering for a good long while now: much of the “enthusiasm gap” between the two parties is structural, and has to do with the differential turnout patterns of various demographic groups in midterm elections (with Democrats currently more dependent than in the past on low-midterm-voting groups like under-30s and Latinos); and part of it is that a radicalized conservative base is indeed very excited by their conquest of the GOP:

The enthusiasm gap has more to do with abnormally high levels of Republican interest in the election than with despondent Democrats.
Gallup periodically asks a question about whether voters are more enthusiastic than usual about voting in the midterms. When they did so in March, shortly after passage of the health care bill, 57 percent of Democrats said they were more excited than usual about voting in the November elections. This was, in fact, the highest figure that Gallup had ever recorded among Democrats in a midterm year (they began tracking the question in 1994). The problem for Democrats? Some 69 percent of Republicans also answered the question affirmatively. As I wrote at the time, “if the Democrats’ total was record-breaking, Republicans just blew the competition away in Usain Bolt-type fashion….”
Also, we should remember that the Democrats usually have some trouble turning out their base at the midterms, since they rely on constituencies, like young voters and racial minorities, who traditionally do not vote in large numbers in these elections. Their 2010 numbers, therefore, mostly reflect a return to normal (in fact, perhaps slightly better than normal). It was 2006, when Democrats were energized by the Iraq War and other perceived excesses of the Bush administration, that was the odd year out.

There are two big takeaways that Democrats must understand from the enthusiasm gap data. The first is that it’s a mistake to primarily assign turnout disparities to an insufficiently progressive agenda from the Obama administration. Maybe a different agenda would have been a good idea on policy grounds, or might have had a different impact on the congressional dynamics. But there’s really little evidence that the discouragement we see among progressive elites is that widely shared among rank-and-file Democratic voters, whose relative likelihood to vote or not to vote is more easily explainable by structural factors.
Second, Republicans may be benefitting today from the hyper-excitement of its radicalized conservative base. But they will pay a price in the long run for the sort of agenda and rhetoric they are being driven to. That will become immediately evident in the 2012 cycle, when GOPers are forced to disclose their extremist hopes and dreams for the country, in the context of an electorate that is automatically less favorable.
For those who simply can’t buy the idea that there hasn’t been a calamitious deterioration of support for the Democratic Party since 2008, it’s important to remember that the electorate we are likely to see on November 2 would have almost certainly vaulted John McCain to the presidency two years ago. The 2008 coalition isn’t dead; it’s quite literally not showing up, by the sort of small margins that only matter on election days.
And those who are engaged in GOTV activities this year should take courage in the fact that they are not only helping offset the impact of an excited conservative base right now; they are also setting the stage for a 2012 battle in which the political winds are very likely to change direction, even before Republicans finish celebrating whatever gains they secure on November 2.

To those used to this year’s significant variation in polling results for different contests, the latest batch of contradictory surveys may not seem different. But what’s happening now largely reflects the switchover most pollsters have completed from the use of less to more selective samples (or in some cases, the same samples with new weighting or adjustment factors) as part of an effort to determine likely voters.
Nate Silver’s got a good summary of the wild variations produced by different LV models in terms of the generic congressional ballot:

Just this past weekend, for instance, a Newsweek poll showed Democrats 5 points ahead among registered voters — already a good number for them — but with a larger lead of 8 points among likely voters (Newsweek calls them “definite voters”, but it’s basically the same thing ). That is, it showed a 3-point likely voter gap in the Democrats’ favor. By contrast, as we noted, the Gallup poll shows as much as a 15-point swing in Republicans’ favor when a likely voter model is applied.

Mark Blumenthal has published a very good basic primer on why LV numbers differ so much from each other, and from other measurements of the electorate. He begins by presenting the most famous model, that used by Gallup, which combines a series of questions to poll respondents about their intent to vote and their past voting history, with an adjustment based on an overall estimate of turnout. Blumenthal then notes the other best-known approaches:

* The CBS/New York Times variant, which is similar to the Gallup approach except that rather than select specific respondents as likely voters, it weights all registered voters up or down based on their probability of voting.
* The use of two or three questions to simply screen out voters at the beginning of the interview that say they are not registered and not likely vote.
* The application of quotas or weights to adjust the completed interviews to match the pollster’s expectations of the demographics or regional distribution of likely voters.
* The application of quotas or weights to match the pollster’s expectations of the party affiliation of likely voters. I break this one out separately because it remains among the most controversial likely voter “modeling” tools.
* Sampling respondents from lists that draw on official records of the actual vote history of individual voters, so that when the pollster calls John Doe, they already know whether Doe has voted in past elections.
* Finally, many believe that the use of an automated, recorded-voice methodology rather than a live interviewer is itself a useful tool in obtaining a more accurate measurement of the intent to vote.

Hardly just technical differences in these approaches, eh? And without impugning anyone’s motives, it should be obvious that LV models that depend on imposing some sort of expectation about the partisan composition of the electorate could nicely coexist with partisan bias.
In any event, most LV models tend to converge a bit and become more accurate as election day approaches and registered voters make up their minds whether to participate. At present, though, it’s important to have some idea about how individual pollsters determine likelihood to vote, and how that might reflect the results. . .

As we enter the stretch run of this midterm cycle, the latest crosstabs from Gallup´s tracking poll show once again that while turnout among self-identified Democrats may be a problem, support for the president and his policies really isn´t.
For the week ending on October 3, the President´s job approval rating among Democrats is 81%; among liberal Democrats 84% (moderate Democrats are at 79%); among African-Americans it´s at 90%; and among Hispanics 61%. Perhaps it´s random noise unrelated to the emergence of Social Security as an issue in many Democratic campaigns, but the president´s job approval ratings among voters over 65 has suddenly jumped to 45%, the highest level since early June.
To compare Obama to the last two Democratic presidents in terms of base sentiment, at this point in his presidency Bill Clinton´s job approval rating among Democrats was at 69%, Jimmy Carter´s was at 60%.
Disaffection in the Democratic base is not Barack Óbama´s or the Democratic Party´s principal handicap.

At pollster.com, Republican pollster Kirsten Soltis penned a very interesting article late last week pointing out that many surveys this year are showing levels of conservative ideology in the electorate that are difficult to credit based on historical trends:

At the House level, the exit polls have shown that moderates have outnumbered conservatives — and by considerable margins — in every election since at least 1984. In fact, even in 1994, when the Gingrich revolution swept a wave of conservative members into Congress, moderates still outnumbered conservatives. Sure, the gap closed significantly from the 1992 election, but we still did not see the number of conservatives even reaching parity with moderates, much less exceeding them….
Why then are so many of our public polls showing samples with an ideological makeup that looks nothing like this, with conservatives outnumbering moderates?

Soltis has no particular answer for her own question, but neither does anyone else. It’s not clear whether the phenomenon she’s talking about is a function of polling errors, a stronger-than-ever appearance of midterm turnout disparities favoring conservatives, a genuine and unprecedented ideological shift in the population, or just noise disguising the fact that the liberal-conservative-moderate choice pollsters offer respondents isn’t that meaningful to begin with. Still another possibility is that a lot of regular Republican-voting “moderates” now identify as “conservative,” which means the “shift” might have zero net effect on voting behavior.
But the numbers are very weird, and Soltics has some advice for her fellow GOPers:

This isn’t to say that pollsters with very heavily conservative samples are wrong. It isn’t out of the realm of possibility that a massive structural change is occurring in the American electorate this year that has conservatives making a massive jump — so massive as to eclipse that of 1994.
But what it does say to me, as a Republican, is that we ought to stop dancing in the end zone before we’ve scored a touchdown. It tells me that two-and-a-half decades of data show things aren’t as wobbly as they seem, that the electorate doesn’t change its ideological makeup radically, and that polls with more conservatives than moderates just might be painting a rosier picture than we all might find ourselves looking at on election day.

All in all, this is looking more and more like a cycle in which the post-election analysis is going to be difficult and very important.

A month out from Election Day, there are signs that the battleground for control of the U.S. Senate are beginning to firm up, with Republicans privately conceding they are likely to fall short of what it would take to gain control. Here´s today´s report from the insider organ The Hill:

Eight states are emerging as the battlegrounds that will decide the margin of Senate control, according to interviews with Republican and Democratic strategists.
They are Colorado, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, Nevada, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Wisconsin.
Republicans need a net gain of 10 seats to win control of the chamber.

If accurate, this report suggests that the GOP has become pessimistic about the prospects of Dino Rossi in Washington and Carly Fiorina in California. Both have been drifting behind their incumbent opponents, Patty Murray and Barbara Boxer, in recent polls. It also indicates that the political fundamentals in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are likely to tighten those two races; Pat Toomey has had a steady lead for months in PA, and Ron Johnson has recently surged into a sizable lead in WI.
With Arkansas almost certain to flip from D to R, Republicans could win all eight of those battleground contests and still wind up with a tie in the Senate, to be broken by Vice President Joe Biden (barring some unlikely deal with Joe Lieberman or Ben Nelson to gain a majority).
Estimates of Republican chances at a Senate majority that rely on polls rather than insider calculations aren´t bullish, either. Nate Silver rates the odds of that happening at 22%. But he warns:

[T]he Senate will not come easily for Republicans. But, in contrast to previous weeks, the party seems to have multiple paths toward gaining control of it: one runs through “new” states like Connecticut and West Virginia where the polling has been moving in their favor, and the other through “old” states like California and Washington where the numbers had been running against them, but the momentum could reverse itself.

That´s worth remembering, not that Democrats are in any particular danger of becoming overconfident of anything this year.