It’s been a tough year for the Democratic tradition in the U.S. Senate, with the loss of Edward Kennedy and the solidification of the Almighty Filibuster as the real power in the institution. But the death of Sen. Robert Byrd of WV really does turn a lot of pages, while denying the Senate its unrivalled historian and parliamentarian.
Byrd’s tenure alone makes him one of the titans of Senate history: more than a half-century, spanning the administrations of eleven presidents. He was, however, the junior senator from West Virginia until he was 68, and in another reflection of the Senate’s slow pace of change, his career overlapped with only five Democratic leaders–not counting Byrd himself.
When Byrd was first elected to the Senate in 1958, Democrats from his corner of the world were typically hard-core segregations and equally hard-core New Deal economic progressives. He abandoned and apologized for the former habit, but never the latter. The persistent poverty of West Virginia–for much of his career it included some of the very poorest areas of the country–made it one place where politicians never shrank from the full exercise of power on behalf of the home folks, or from celebration of the seniority system that gave Byrd and so many others the clout to serve as equalizers. Byrd became the embodiment of Senate traditions for good reason: they served his constituents well.
He survived wave after wave of efforts in both parties to change the Senate and make it more responsive to national political trends, and might well have survived one or two more had he been born ten years later. He also survived wave after wave of efforts to bend Congress to the will of presidents of both parties, and in that respect was more consistent than most of his colleagues in both parties.
In this era of political turbulence and simmering resentment of professional politicians, it’s unlikely America will ever see another Senator like him. And so in a very real sense a big part of national history will go to the grave with him. His distinctive and authoritative voice will be missed, and may he rest in peace.

The apparent defeat in the Senate of a long-awaited jobs bill (a.k.a., the “second stimulus”) is mainly being discussed in terms of the Republican strategy of steadily eroding the package and then killing it; or in terms of the impact on unemployed people who will lose their jobless benefits.
That’s all very real, but another consequence of this development will play out in state capitals and perhaps in state general election contests, thanks to the demise of assistance to the states that was much needed to avoid health benefit cuts and personnel layoffs.
Originally, the jobs bill was intended to extend the state aid contained in the original stimulus package. But as the bill was racheted down, the version limping onto the Senate floor included only $16 billion for a partial extension of the Medicaid “super-match” designed to prevent major benefit and eligibility reductions for the federal-state safety net health care program.
Unfortunately, 34 states planned on receiving that money, and its failure to materialize is going to create a whole new round of state budget crises. In many states, we can expect Medicaid cuts and/or reductions in other state spending, quite likely including layoffs of teachers and other public employees. That’s why most Republican state officials did not share the happy-talk of their brethren in Washington about opposing “bailouts of the states.”
State budget cuts will have a baleful effect on the economy, and vague conservative talk that “shringing government” will somehow produce private-sector growth is going to be exposed as illusory.
But there could be political consequences as well, as voters begin to realize that there is no big pot of money labeled “waste, fraud and abuse” that can be tapped to balance state budgets, much less to fund the high-end personal and corporate tax cuts that many Republicans continue to call for in the latest incarnation of the discredited theory of supply-side economics.
In other words, the anti-government populism that conservatives are counting on as electoral magic this November may lose some of its appeal when reality sets in. And Democrats should be quick to point out there is no such thing as a free “austerity” lunch.

Probably no one in the United States has a better handle on long-term demographic changes and their impact on politics than TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira. So it’s a major event when Teixeira releases a new study that consolidates most of the recent work he’s done on this subject, along with some new thoughts about the implications of demographic change for the strategies of the two major parties.
Demographic Change and the Future of the Parties, a working paper published by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, contains Teixeira’s most detailed analysis yet of the demographic trends that have long convinced him that we are likely to be entering an era where Democrats hold a significant advantage in national contests.
The big picture Teixeira paints is familar enough: the future electorate is currently being shaped by the growth of relatively pro-Democratic groups–notably minorities, college-educated (and especially post-graduate-educated) white voters, younger voters, and those with no religious affiliation–and the decline of relatively pro-Republican groups, most importantly non-college educated white voters. Geographically, Democratic success in “mature” and “emerging” suburbs is more than offsetting Republican strength in exurban areas, while Republican majorities in high-growth states are being eroded by the very elements of their population that are growing most rapidly.
But what can Republicans do to deal with an electorate that is less sympathetic than today’s? Teixeira suggests that moderation on cultural issues is particularly critical if the GOP is to strenghten its position among college-educated white votes, and particularly “millienials” who have recently entered the electoral picture. But more importantly, he says, Republicans need to offer voters something other than tax-cutting and antigovernment populism. It’s rather obvious that Republicans at the moment are moving in a very different direction than the demographic trends would indicate.
Democrats, on the other hand, are positioned well with their demographic coalition, but must show that their policy agenda can successfully address the country’s problems:

Conversely, if the Democrats fail to produce–whether through ineffective
programs, fiscal meltdown, or both–even an unreformed GOP will remain very
competitive despite the many demographic changes that are disadvantaging the
party. The next few years will tell the tale.

As Teixeira observes, the GOP’s current strategy seems to depend almost entirely on Democratic policy failures, along with turnout advantages that make their minority coalition more powerful than their numbers would suggest.
Now I suspect that most conservatives, if confronted directly with Teixeira’s findings, would object that he’s placing too much emphasis on trends within demographic groups as measured by a single presidential election, 2008, in which Republican policy failures, not the core message of the GOP, was repudiated. In other words, voters rejected the “big government conservatism” of the Bush administration, and are now showing they did not endorse a shift to “big government liberalism” under Obama. That’s an argument that is at least superficially plausible, but the trends Teixeira is talking about have been underway for decades, so writing off 2008 as a temporary reaction to George W. Bush is a dubious proposition, and there’s almost no evidence that fast-growing demographic groups are attracted to the current anti-government populism of the GOP. At the moment, at least, likely Republican gains in 2010 are attributable to very big turnout disparities and to the low-hanging fruit created by big Democratic gains in 2006 and 2008, not to some fundamental shift in the ideology of the electorate.
Some conservatives of a more apocalyptic bent seem to be under the impression that the events of the last two years–the financial sector collapse, double-digit inflation, TARP and other “bailouts”, the stimulus package, ObamaCare–are producing a massive conservative shift in political attachments similar to the pro-Democratic shift generated by the Great Depression. In other words, you can forget all the data and ignore all the long-range trends; we’re in entirely new political territory now.
That sounds a lot like wishful thinking among ideologues who have always been able to divine, beneath the surface and despite the facts, a conservative majority in the electorate which is always on the brink of being manifested once and for all.
So as a Democrat, it’s fine by me if Republicans want to toss all the objective evidence in the nearest trash can and put their faith in the proposition that 2010 likely voter tracking polls, not long-term trends, are the best evidence of where the country is going over the next few decades. But meanwhile, Teixeira’s analysis should remind Democrats that even the most favorable demographic landscape won’t produce electoral majorities if policies fail to improve real-life conditions in the country. Particularly for the party of public-sector activism, governing matters most.

Yesterday’s one statewide primary (not runoff) was in Utah, where two contests of national significance played out pretty much as expected.
Democratic Rep. Jim Matheson, a Blue Dog who fell just short of the 60% of delegates needed to win the nomination at the State Democratic Convention last month, defeated retired schoolteacher and progressive activist Claudia Wright by a comfortable 68-32 margin. The rumored Republican crossover vote for Wright didn’t appear, and local progressives are probably satisfied they got Matheson’s attention before knuckling down to help him get re-elected.
The Republican Senate primary between entrepreneur Tim Bridgewater and attorney (and former SCOTUS clerk) Mike Lee was, as anticipated, very close, but Lee won 51-49, a margin of just under 4,000 votes. Lee fought Bridgewater pretty much to a draw in the major population centers of the Wasatch Front, and won the runoff with a 60-40 victory in southwest Utah’s Washington County.
The national resonance of Lee’s narrow win derives from its importance to national conservative forces, notably Jim DeMint’s Senate Conservatives Fund (which became a campaign issue on grounds that DeMint was intervening in the state to secure a dumping ground for SC nuclear waste), FreedomWorks, the Tea Party Express and Erick Erickson of RedState. Indeed, some of Lee’s national supporters insisted on treating Bridgewater as no better than vanquished incumbent Sen. Bob Bennett, who finished third at the state convention and thus didn’t qualify for the primary.
As I noted in the runup to the Utah primary, the Lee-Bridgewater contest showed how rapidly the GOP is moving to the right, because supposed RINO Bridgewater held a variety of policy positions (including abolition of corporate and personal income taxation and the phasing out of several major federal departments) that would until recently have placed him on the far fringes of the conservative movement. And redefining conservatism to require ever-more-extreme positions is precisely what the out-of-state forces supporting Lee want to do.

North Carolina was a happenin’ place politically in 2008, particularly for Democrats, with a very exciting and important presidential primary, and of course, a general election in which the Tar Heel State was one of three southern states carried by Barack Obama. There was also a competitive governor’s election and a couple of very interesting House races.
But this year? Not much excitement so far. In the May Democratic Senate primary, turnout was a languid 425,00, down about 40% from the turnout in the last midterm competitive Senate primary in 2002. But in yesterday’s highly competitive runoff, only 157,000 voters bothered to show up. Nor was this just a Democratic problem: in the three competitive U.S. House runoffs for Republicans yesterday, turnout was 15,241 in the 8th District, 6428 in the 13th District; and 2770 in the 12th District. The apathy was infectious: I had to use the search function on the Charlotte Observer site today to find any coverage of the runoffs.
In any event, in the Senate runoff, Elaine Marshall did a much better job of navigating the circumstances than did her opponent, the DSCC-recruited Cal Cunningham, beating him 60-40 in a race where the only public poll (back in mid-May) had the two candidates tied. A look at the county returns indicates that Marshall pulled third-place primary finisher Ken Lewis’ supporters into her camp, while Cunningham did little to expand his appeal.
While some made this out as an ideological struggle between the more progressive Marshall and the more centrist Cunningham, it looks to me like the latter simply failed to make a good enough case as to why North Carolina Democrats should prefer him to a very familiar figure who, after all, has won four times statewide, including a victory over NASCAR legend Richard Petty.
Having symbolically avenged her 2002 Senate defeat to another nationally-recruited candidate, Erskine Bowles, Marshall must now prove her viability against incumbent Sen. Richard Burr, an invisible man in Washington and to some extent in NC, who could be the ideal representative of an apathetic population. All joking aside, Burr’s small footprint in the Senate could make him vulnerable, even in a pro-Republican year like this one.
The aforementioned GOP House runoffs largely went as expected. In the 8th, the self-immolation of wild-man self-funded conservative Tim D’Annunzio ended in a 61-39 loss to Harold Johnson. In the 13th, BP/Obama conspiracy theorist Bill Randall–like SC’s Tim Scott, a hard-core African-American conservative–easily defeated Bernie Reeves. And in the 12th, past nominee Greg Dority won the nomination to take on veteran Rep. Mel Watt in the runoff that only 2770 voters chose to participate in.
Maybe NC political races will heat up later this summer or sizzle in the fall. But right now, it’s as though 2008 soaked up all the energy anyone wants to expend for a while.

As I expected, the cluster of organizations and interests that represent the most conservative wing of the increasingly very conservative Republican Party had some real fun last night in South Carolina’s runoff elections.
Nikki Haley, the Mark Sanford protege who had staked out the “most conservative” territory in her gubernatorial race long before anything was said about her sex life or ethnicity, won the runoff over congressman Gresham Barrett by a two-to-one margin, essentially winning everywhere other than a few counties in Barrett’s upstate base. Similarly, another Sanford protege with a can’t-outconservative-me rep, state legislator Tim Scott, beat Charleston County Councilmember Paul Thurmond by better than two-to-one for an open congressional seat.
I’ve written enough about Haley over the past few weeks; suffice it to say that she won this race the moment her old staffer, blogger Will Folks, accused her of marital infidelity in a way that failed to convince much of anybody but made the entire campaign All About Nikki. And it was especially appropriate that Sarah Palin endorsed Haley just before the Folks furor began; the Haley saga was a pitch-perfect projection of Palin’s own persecution complex–you know, the Good Old Boys and the liberal lamestream media trying to smear a brave Mama Grizzly for telling the simple right-wing truth.
Scott’s victory was equally interesting, and perhaps an even bigger deal for the Republican Right, which will have an African-American spokesman in Congress for the first time since J.C. Watts retired. The symbolism of an African-American defeating the son of Strom Thurmond within shouting distance of Fort Sumter is obviously very striking. But it’s not as though Scott’s win repudiated any aspect of Thurmond’s legacy other than the blatant racism he abandoned by the 1970s; Scott was himself co-chairman of ol’ Strom’s last Senate campaign.
The third great event for South Carolina conservatives was the absolutely humiliating 71-29 defeat of U.S. Rep. Bob Inglis by Tea Party vehicle Trey Gowdy. This result will serve as an enduring reminder to GOP elected officials that The Movement will find someone to run against them if they stray from orthodoxy. Inglis’ fatal act of sacrilege was probably telling fist-shaking protestors at a town hall meeting to stop paying attention to Glenn Beck.
South Carolina has always been a special place for the more radical variety of conservatives. They certainly seemed to have the whole state wired last night.

This is the last multi-primary Tuesday we will see until August, with runoffs on tap in North Carolina, South Carolina and (not so you’d really notice it) Mississippi, and primaries in Utah.
I’ve written up the Carolina runoffs here and the Utah primary here for FiveThirtyEight, so you can check out those posts if you are interested.
To the extent that the MSM even notices today’s primaries, the big news is almost certain to be from South Carolina.
Top billing will be given to Nikki Haley’s gubernatorial runoff win in SC, which will be largely treated as a stirring account of the triumph of an Asian-American woman over slander and bigotry in the paleolithic Deep South. Much less noted will be the fact that Haley’s win will represent a major victory for Jim DeMint’s brand of take-no-prisoners conservatism. Indeed, the ideological character of Haley’s candidacy has been (outside SC in particularly) largely lost in the storms of controversy (real or contrived) about her sex life, ethnicity and religion. The challenge for Democratic gubernatorial nominee Vincent Sheheen between now and November will be to refocus attention on Haley’s ideology–which could be too radical even for South Carolina–and away from her “story” and her Republican tormenters.
Another South Carolina “story” we are likely to hear a lot about tonight involves Tim Scott, an African-American conservative state legislator who is in a runoff with Strom Thurmond’s son (Paul) for the GOP nomination for a relatively safe Republican congressional seat. Like Haley, Scott comes right out of central casting for the conservative movement, and he’s favored over Thurmond today.
The third SC headliner will likely be the mandatory retirement of conservative Republican U.S. Rep. Bob Inglis, who ran a relatively poor second in the primary to Tea Party favorite Trey Gowdy. Inglis’ primary sin was a vote for TARP.
Today’ weather in the Palmetto State is (appropriately) steamy with a chance of thunderstorms, which could hold down what is already expected to be low turnout.
In NC, it’s really too close to call in the Senate Democratic runoff between Secretary of State Elaine Marshall and Iraq War vet Cal Cunningham, but with turnout expected to be relatively terrible, I’d bet on Marshall as the favorite of party activists both locally and nationally.
And out in Utah, the Republican Senate primary between Tim Bridgewater and Mike Lee has become a fascinating struggle between two candidates who are far to the right of what very recently passed for mainstream conservatism. Yet as I noted in my FiveThirtyEight post, Bridgewater is being treated by Lee supporters as some sort of godless liberal RINO. If Lee wins (and it’s anybody’s guess who will prevail), the entire Utah campaign could serve as a case study in how rapidly the GOP has moved right in the last year-and-a-half.

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat penned a thumb-sucker yesterday about the terrrible disappointment, occasionally spilling over into rage and despair, with Barack Obama among liberals. Here’s the nut graph:

American liberalism has always had a reputation for fractiousness and frantic self-critique. But even by those standards, the current bout of anguish over the Obama presidency seems bizarrely disproportionate.

Sure, Douthat has some scattered examples of said anguish. But when you are characterizing the attitudes of those sharing a major ideological self-identification, a bit more precision is in order. And a look at Gallup’s tracking poll at Obama’s approval ratings among liberals and Liberal Democrats makes Douthat’s dark meditation on liberal angst look a bit ridiculous.
According to the latest Gallup survey, 79% of “liberals” approve of Obama’s job performance, compared to 78% month ago, 78% two months ago, 76% three months ago, and a bit over 80% during 2009. If his liberal support has collapsed in “angst,” it’s pretty much hidden in the numbers. And since Douthat’s hinting at some terrible intraparty struggle-for-the-soul-of-the-donkey, it’s worth noting that a reasonably robust 90% of “liberal Democrats” currently approve of the job Obama’s doing, which is well above his average for 2010 and exactly where he stood last Labor Day.
Sure, you can find elite opinion on the Left that’s been souring on Obama steadily as we head towards the midterm elections. But it’s a useful reality check to note that when it comes to actual voting Americans of the liberal persuasion, if there’s any “agony” over Obama, it is mostly derived from anger at the president’s opponents.

As we slog through the shank of 2010 primary season, it should be reasonably obvious to anyone thinking about it that the two major political parties have limited control over the candidate slates they will offer to voters in November. Aside from the anti-establishment mood that is making many GOP (and some Democratic) primary voters react to the Party Label like a red flag, all sorts of factors of ideology, candidate attractiveness, and most of all, money come into crucial play.
But the habit of treating political parties as omipotent agents of their own destiny can be strong, viz. this comment nestled in an ABC story on the campaigns of California Republicans Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina:

“The national GOP wants to make California competitive again, and I think they have decided it’s not just a state they should cede to the Democrats,” says Lara Brown, an assistant professor of political science at Villanova University in Pennsylvania . “Under Howard Dean, the Democratic party adopted a 50-state strategy saying the way to build the party back was to get great candidates no matter what,” she says. “Meg and Carly are part of the same idea by the GOP and are helping even more because they have their own money and the party doesn’t have to invest in them.”

Not to single out Brown for a Copernican Revolution, but she’s got it backwards: Whitman and Fiorina picked the GOP, not vice versa. Meg Whitman’s 80 million smackers in pre-primary spending would have almost certainly won her the GOP gubernatorial nomination even if she had been someone totally different in gender, background and (within the narrow bounds of GOP acceptability) ideology. And if “the national GOP” were truly focused on the “idea” of being as competitive as possible in California, “it” would have probably been wearing a Tom Campbell button on June 8, not backing Carly Fiorina, whose positions on abortion and immigration (not to mention her record as CEO of Hewlett-Packard) could be problematic in the general election campaign.
The essence of party strategy is to develop an infrastructure and a message that is compatible with a broad swath of candidates. That does not include pretending the party chose them from the get-go.

A debate among Republican gubernatorial candidates in Georgia this week illustrated just how far the GOP (particularly in the South) has drifted from the impulse that led George W. Bush and John McCain to support comprehensive immigration reform back in the day. Now it’s all about deporting the undocumented pronto, and the only difference of opinion is over how many public employees need to spend their time in the dragnet for illegals.
According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Jim Galloway, Candidate Eric Johnson, who’s struggling to land a runoff spot, came out for requring both teachers and hospital employees to verify the citizenship status of their patrons. Candidate Nathal Deal professed frustration that few cops in Georgia viewed themselves as immigration enforcement officers, but did draw the line at teachers being enrolled in the chore.
All the GOP candidates, of course, supported the idea of Georgia enacting a law like Arizona’s; this is a position that’s becoming as much a litmus test for southern Republicans as attacking unions. That will become significant nationally in 2012 when the Republican presidential nomination contest moves south.