This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
So you want to run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012? Here’s a hot tip from 2008 nominee John McCain:

Citing his own experience as the Republican nominee for president in 2008, McCain said the still-strong Republican presence in New Hampshire helped catapult his campaign toward the nomination. And since, he predicts, there will be a large group running in 2012, Republicans have to make the strongest showing early on in the campaign.
“For Republicans it seems to me that New Hampshire is still the very key place,” McCain said at the annual Washington Reuters Summit.
McCain also discounted Iowa as a key state to the campaign. McCain has never taken Iowa seriously in his attempts at the party’s nomination. McCain came in fifth in 2000 Iowa caucuses and fourth in 2008.
“The (Iowa) caucuses don’t seem to have the impact anymore that they used to, for the Republicans,” he said.

McCain might have added that this strategy works best if your main NH rival does run in Iowa, and loses there to an underfunded social conservative who goes on to split the vote against you in South Carolina and Florida. But then that would have involved acknowledging that his 2008 nomination was a crazy three-cushion shot that is unlikely to be replicated in the foreseeable future.
Maybe next McCain will offer his advice on how to pick a running-mate who won’t upstage you.

In the regular political column I write for the Progressive Policy Institute over at ProgressiveFix, I observed today that we are getting to the point where all the speculation about individual 2010 contests will begin to yield to hard data, and the actual battlegrounds will emerge.
A good example of how that might be happening is provided by new polls from PPP of two Senate races that have been ostensibly very similar, in WI and CA. In both of these blue states well-regarded but always-vunerable progressive Democratic U.S. senators are under attack from amply-financed Republican “newcomers.”
But according to PPP, Russ Feingold is suddenly in deep trouble against Ron Johnson, while Barbara Boxer is expanding her lead against Carly Fiorina. Both these polls represent a shift by PPP from registered voter to likely voter samples, making the trends interesting measurements of the so-called “enthusiasm gap” afflicting Democrats.
According to an account by its partner DailyKos, PPP finds the “enthusiasm gap” in WI to be “one of the most severe” in the country, with Johnson’s 1-point lead among 2008 voters ballooning to 11 points among likely 2010 voters.
But in California, Boxer’s 49-40 lead among RVs in July is a virtually unchanged 50-41 lead among likely voters today. More specifically, Boxer’s support among Democrats remains very strong, and as PPP’s Tom Jensen notes:

[T]he simple reality is that Fiorina has not proven to be a particularly appealing candidate to California voters. 42% of them see her unfavorably with only 34% rating her positively. Republicans like her, Democrats dislike her almost as much, and independents are slightly negative toward her. Again, not the formula that’s going to get a Republican elected to the Senate from California.
One other factor that should be noted here is that Boxer is just about the only vulnerable Democrat seeking reelection in a state where the majority of voters still approve of Barack Obama’s performance. His approval is 53/42, and by and large the folks that like Obama are supporting Boxer- California’s one of the last frontiers left where he’s not a drag.

Interestingly, PPP also shows Jerry Brown leading Meg Whitman among likely voters by a 47-42 margin in the CA governor’s race, even though Brown is just now getting around to running television ads.
Now it may be that PPP’s current polling in either WI or CA could prove to be an outlier; it happens to all pollsters on occasion. It’s also true that Russ Feingold has a habit of getting into trouble in his re-election campaigns, only to eventually recover and win.
But whether or not these two races in particular are examples, we should soon begin to see disparities in the host of “close races” we’ve all been watching, and separate the sheep from the goats.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Jay Cost is one of those conservative political writers whom I’ve always respected for his interest in empirical analysis and reasoned debate. But in a Weekly Standard column published this week, which pushes back against Democratic efforts to highlight the growing radicalism of the GOP, he made a frankly offensive statement that strays from analysis to agitprop:

At best, this strategy might help swing an odd election here and there to the Democrats–e.g. Delaware and (maybe) Nevada–and increase the historically low levels of Democratic enthusiasm by a point or two. But that’s it. For the swing voters who determine elections, it’s clear by now that the midterm is going to be about the deeply unpopular policies of President Obama.
Attacking the Tea Partiers is not going to distract them because the Tea Partiers have had nothing to do with those policies. This cycle, the GOP has the better argument, and it is not going to take the bait. Republican candidates everywhere will answer the charge of radicalism with a simple question: “Where are the jobs, Mr. President?” The fact that the White House is thinking about such demagoguery is another strong indication that it is simply looking to keep Democratic turnout high enough to prevent a 1974-style tsunami.

It’s “demagoguery” for political leaders of one party to ask voters to compare their policies to those of the alternate party? Last time I checked, the U.S. Congress hasn’t adopted the system that some states have for judicial elections, in which voters simply decide whether to retain or reject incumbents, without knowing anything about their potential replacements. Elections are inherently comparative. Yes, many swing voters do tend to treat elections as a referendum on the party in power, but they don’t have to, and many don’t. And, far from being demagogic, it’s responsible for the major parties to try to educate voters about what they’re choosing, rather than simply what they’re voting against. (What about the center-right voters who pulled the lever for Obama in 2008, but then complained when he turned out to be liberal in office? Should they have paid more attention to what they were voting for?)
In any event, it would be folly for Democrats to accept Cost’s view that the ideas of the GOP are off the table in 2010. There is abundant evidence that the ascendant conservative wing of the Republican Party is determined to pursue policies for which there is relatively little public support, from renewed military aggression in the Middle East, to major changes in Social Security and Medicare, to abandonment of a federal role in environmental protection and education, to destruction of progressive taxation, to maintenance of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and continued assaults on abortion rights. If anything, the Tea Partiers deserve attention for being honest and even proud about the radicalism of their agenda–and Democrats have every right to ask if other Republicans agree with it.
Jim DeMint, who has evolved from a lonely extremist into a genuine Big Dog in the GOP, is clearly not indifferent to the ideological agenda of his party. Yesterday, he announced in The Washington Post and on CNN that the Republican Party would soon be “dead” if it does not keep the outrageous promises it has been making this year. Why is it all right for DeMint to focus on Republican policies, but not all right for Democrats to do the same?
This foot-stamping insistence that the election must be a referendum on the Democratic Party is reckless, in that it excuses the minority party from any inhibition on extreme measures it might take to mobilize its base. At a time when conservative leaders are spewing unprecedented–yes, unprecedented–radical rhetoric about the character, patriotism, motives, and competence of the president and congressional Democrats, labeling liberals “demagogues” for demanding scrutiny of GOP candidates is hypocritical in the extreme. In addition, it is self-defeating: Just wait to see how the Republicans fare in 2012 if their current fervor is given full vent.

With the news that Harry Reid’s figured out a procedural path to a stand-alone vote on continuing middle-class tax cuts that will force Republicans to get 60 votes to stop it, and the likelihood that Nancy Pelosi can find a similar path , the probability of a Democratic retreat on this issue has declined significantly.
But just for the record, it’s a good idea to remember that this is probably the one issue on which Democrats from every ideological and strategic perspective ought to be able to agree. Are you one of those Democrats frantic for a R versus D showdown that can energize the base? This qualifies. Are you a deficit hawk? Resisting the tax cut for the rich has an enormous impact on the deficit. Do you think Obama and Dems have to find some topic where public opinion is in their favor? No question that it is on this one. Are you one of the rare Dems who thinks the party needs to show more bipartisanship or “centrism”? Well, pushing for a tax cut is not exactly a Marxist idea.
Democrats need to keep the pressure up to move forward on this most fruitful issue, and prepare to blast the GOP to hell and back next time Republicans pretend to care more about deficits and debt–or the middle-class folk allegedly furious at liberal “elites”– than anything else.

Weeks before the November elections, leaders of the Republican Party’s increasingly dominant right wing are spending nearly as much time fretting over the potential squeamishness of their own party about implementing a radical agenda as they are ensuring they get the opportunity to enact one.
In a CNN interview yesterday, Sen. Jim DeMint, the one-time kooky loner who’s now a Very Big Dog in the GOP, said the GOP would be “dead” if it didn’t keep its promises to repeal health care reform, balance the federal budget and radically reduce spending. Remember he’s the guy who thinks Social Security and Medicare have ensnared Americans in socialism, and likes to call public schools “government schools.”
Another fringe figure who’s suddenly become very relevant, congressman Steve King of Iowa, is frantic in his fears that a Republican House would fail to shut down the government as part of a strategy to repeal health reform. Indeed, he’s asking would-be Speaker John Boehner to sign a “blood oath” to include a health reform repeal in every single appropriations bill, which would have the effect of shutting down the government, just as Republicans tried to do, unsuccesfully, in 1995, in order to impose a budget on Bill Clinton.
This is a sideshow well worth watching. People like DeMint and King are trying to lash their fellow Republicans to the mast of their ship and make them immune to the siren song of the massive popularity of the public programs and commitments they aim to attack: Medicare, Social Security, federal support for educational opportunity, environmental protection, and on and on. It’s an interesting approach on the brink of what many expect to be a big Republican electoral victory, and says a lot about the gap between what Republicans are campaigning on and how they actually intend to govern when in office.

Before everyone becomes convinced that the results of the midterm elections are already carved into stone, by the zeitgeist, the “enthusiasm gap,” the economy, or the electoral map, it’s a good idea to be reminded that weird things can happen between and betwixt campaigns and election days.
Rather obviously, no one much thought Christine O’Donnell would be the Republican Senate nominee in Delaware a couple of weeks ago.
But there’s another example developing down in Georgia, where Republican gubernatorial nominee Nathan Deal’s long-simmering ethics issues about his private businesses just got considerably reinforced by his forced admission that he’s got some very large business debts that he somehow forgot to disclose on legally required state disclosures.
Deal’s trying to reassure supporters on various fronts: arguing the loans were to help out his daughter, who had stumbled into a really bad business investment; asserting he’s entirely solvent; trying a sort of Bill Clintonish “I feel your pain” message aimed at voters with financial problems; and, of course, blaming the whole incident on the godless liberal news media and his political opponents.
But a quick poll of the governor’s race taken last night by Insider Advantage indicates Deal has lost the lead he appeared to have opened up on Democratic Roy Barnes in the weeks after his nomination.
Deal may well recover and win handily. But like developments in Delaware, his latest problems are a handy reminder that for all the importance of fundamentals, money and message, the best laid plans of candidates can be blown up by the unforeseeable event.

A lot of the discussion about the midterm elections, both here and in many quarters, has revolved around the question of whether these elections will ultimately be a referendum on the status quo or a “comparative” election based on assessments of the two parties. The default drive assumption in most MSM commentary (and the approach being promoted for obvious reasons by conservative media) is that it’s a referendum, which is of course a self-fulfilling prophecy if Democrats fail to change that perception because they think it’s inevitable.
But you probably won’t see a purer presentation of the “referendum” argument than that offered by New York Times columnist David Brooks yesterday. He’s taking this on in order to push back against some asserted belief by “my liberal friends” that America’s on the brink of repudiating the GOP because its Tea Party faction is so crazy.

The fact is, as the Tea Party has surged, so has the G.O.P. When this primary season began in early February, voters wanted Democrats to retain control of Congress by 49 percent to 37 percent, according to an Associated Press-Gfk poll. In the ensuing months, Tea Party candidates won shocking victories in states from Florida to Alaska. The most recent A.P./Gfk poll now suggests that Americans want Republicans to take over Congress by 46 percent to 43 percent.

Being David Brooks and all, the columnist is not about to suggest that Americans really are eating up the Tea Party message like ice cream. Instead, he’s driven to saying nobody out there really cares what Republicans say or do:

Right now, the Tea Party doesn’t matter. The Republicans don’t matter. The economy and the Democrats are handing the G.O.P. a great, unearned revival.

Brooks does acknowledge that at some point, the extremism of the Movement will begin to matter:

This doesn’t mean that the Tea Party influence will be positive for Republicans over the long haul. The movement carries viruses that may infect the G.O.P. in the years ahead. Its members seek traditional, conservative ends, but they use radical means. Along the way, the movement has picked up some of the worst excesses of modern American culture: a narcissistic sense of victimization, an egomaniacal belief in one’s own rightness and purity, a willingness to distort the truth so that every conflict becomes a contest of pure good versus pure evil.

Yeah. But is the apparent indifference of likely midterm voters to the Tea Party excesses and what it means for the Republican Party a matter of not caring about it, or not really knowing about it? I mean, conservative activists do not typically run around boasting that they want radical changes in the U.S. Constitution, the abolition of Social Security and Medicare, and elimination of environmental laws, and when they do go publicly wacky, like Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell, they do pay a price for it.
But it’s the job of Democrats–and to some extent, of journalists like Brooks–to draw attention to what today’s Republicans actually think. And suggesting that such details really doesn’t matter is not helpful.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
In most of the discussions of why Mike Castle lost the Republican Senate nomination in Delaware to the wacky conservative insurgent Christine O’Donnell, commentators emphasize that Castle crossed conservatives by voting for gun control, climate-change legislation, and TARP … as well as being pro-choice. In none of the analyses I’ve read has this last factor been emphasized, or treated as anything more significant than another indicator of his “moderation.”
Ignoring abortion as an issue is an inveterate habit of the chattering classes, particularly on the progressive side of the aisle. Few people, other than celebrating right-to-lifers, have noted how much the already slim ranks of pro-choice Republicans were thinned this primary season. Aside from Castle, Senators Kay Bailey Hutchison and Lisa Murkowski, and Representative Tom Campbell, have lost in major statewide contests.
This is a persistent blind spot in political commentary. When the 2008 presidential cycle began, Rudy Guiliani was treated often as the front-runner, even though his pro-choice views meant he’d have to skip the Iowa Republican Caucuses, which are beholden to that state’s right-to-life movement. Yet Rudy’s candidacy predictably crashed and burned. When John McCain was mulling his decision about a running-mate, the betting favorites in the commentariat were pro-choice figures Joe Lieberman and Tom Ridge. This simply wasn’t going to happen, because the right-to-life movement has an implicit veto over Republican convention nominees. The proved their power by threatening a convention revolt against a pro-choice running-mate, and a chastened McCain iinstead selected the right-to-lifers’ very favorite politician, an obscure governor whom progressives knew nothing about named Sarah Palin.
I see the same dynamic in political coverage this year. We have been told repeatedly that the Tea Party movement is all about economics and fiscal issues, and other than a couple of articles about how Carly Fiorina’s pro-life position is a problem for her in the general election, I’ve seen zero discussion of abortion this year in non-conservative publications, particularly as it affects the Republican primaries.
Perhaps because the national media tend to be secular, we are persistently underestimating the role that abortion plays in right-wing politics. Yet it is key to understanding some of the zealous opposition that caused GOP primary voters to overthrow Mike Castle. Unless you are an aficionado of conservative blogs, you probably didn’t notice the deep opposition that many on the right were taking to Castle’s pro-choice views. Here’s renowned right-wing activist Ken Blackwell:

In the interests of party unity, the pro-life majority in the GOP has gone along with many a “RINO,” hoping that Republicans like Arlen Specter, Susan Collins, and Olympia Snowe could at least be relied upon to stand with us against abortion funding and in favor of originalist judges. But Mike Castle went far beyond even these liberal Republicans.

Even if, as Jon Chait suggests in his brilliant take on the O’Donnell win, many conservative voters now think of climate change legislation as a serious threat to American freedom, it is worth remembering that the RTL movement considers abortion analogous to the Holocaust, and pro-choice pols to be enablers of monstrous evil–at worst conscious advocates of genocide.
This fact should inform the way we think about this year’s right-wing groundswell, and the role of Sarah Palin in particular. How many pundits recognized that her famous Facebook post, which declared that health care reform would authorize “death panels,” contained a dog whistle to her fellow right-to-lifers? Her statement that Trig Palin would be a likely victim of said death panels was the clear tip-off; the subtext was that godless liberals, frustrated by her refusal to kill Trig in the womb, had figured out an alternative means of finishing him off. This is unfortunately standard reasoning for committed anti-abortion activists, who are enraged by politicians and pundits who refuse to take their cause seriously.
For all the endless and interminable talk about “constitutionalism” on the right, it’s rarely acknowledged that lurking in the background is wrath about Roe v. Wade. The same is true with the rage about health care reform; if you read a lot of right-wing blogs, as I do, you’d note that fear about Obamacare producing a massive expansion of publicly-funded abortion was a major motivator of right-wing opposition. House Minority Leader John Boehner knew his constituency when he made this statement just prior to the House vote on health reform:

A ‘yes’ vote for this government takeover of health care is a ‘yes’ vote for sending hard-earned tax dollars to pay for abortions.

More generally, the anger associated with the entire Tea Party movement is, I suspect, traceable among many activists to endless frustration of its desire to end the “genocide” of legalized abortion, to which the GOP “establishment” has given little more than lip service.
Perhaps I’m overestimating the power of the abortion issue, and Mike Castle lost strictly because of his votes for climate-change legislation and TARP, or because he embodied his state’s establishment. But I’m inclined to think that his pro-choice position contributed mightily to his downfall. The abortion issue didn’t go away for the right the day the Tea Party started.

For all you fatalists out there who essentially think there’s nothing to do politically but await the inevitable Republican landslide in November, you might want to take a look at the latest CBS-New York Times poll.
While there’s plenty of gloom-and-doom in the survey about negative perceptions of the economy, the direction of the country, and political incumbents, it’s also clear the GOP has not even come close to sealing the deal on their own “solutions:”

Voters do not perceive Republicans as having better ideas and disagree with them on the biggest economic issue of the campaign — whether to extend the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy — a sign the party has no real advantage on key pieces of their agenda, which makes it more necessary to run as a generic alternative to the party in power.

Attitudes towards congressional Republicans are significantly more negative than of congressional Democrats and Republicans are not perceived as having any clear plan for dealing with the country’s problems. To the extent that the Tea Party Movement is branding the GOP as obsessively concerned with budget deficits and levels of taxation, it’s worth noting that in response to an open-ended question about the most important issue facing the country, only 3% cited deficits and 1% taxes. Said movement itself now has a 18/30 favorable/unfavorable rating among self-identified independents, still another indication that its views are not exactly sweeping the nation.
The quote above from the Times story on the poll includes the most important takeaway: Republicans can only win the midterms if it’s strictly a referendum on the status quo. To the extent that voters start comparing the two parties, the GOP grows weaker. And that is why Democrats should brush aside fears of looking too “negative” and make the terrible “thinking” of their Republican opponents as clear as possible.
It’s also worth remembering that even if Republicans get through the midterms without being held accountable for an agenda that is alternatively empty and crack-brained, this “pass” won’t last forever, and certainly not through the presidential cycle of 2012.

In case you missed it, Calfornia Republican gubernatorial nominee Meg Whitman has officially become the heaviest-spending non-presidential political candidate in U.S. history. Calbuzz has the numbers:

To the surprise of no one, eMeg has already shattered New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s self-funding record for a U.S. political campaign – with seven weeks left to go before the November 2 election.
With her most recent $15 million check to herself, eMeg has now personally forked out $119,075,806.11, according to the ever-punctilious Jack Chang. Rounding off and discounting the couch change, this means that she has spent an average of $203,767.12 on each and every one of the 584 days since she declared her candidacy.
For those keeping score at home that works out to a 24/7 average of $8490.29 per hour, $141.50 per minute, and $2.36 per second.
Talk about in for a dime, in for a dollar.

Whitman originally said she was willing to spend up to $150 million of her own money to win this race. Looks like she’s on track to hit that mark or exceed it by November 2, particularly if her contest with Jerry Brown stays as tight as everyone expects it to be.