The many engines of the MSM are gearing up to interpret tomorrow’s Senate primaries in Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Arkansas, and if the results in these three states go a certain way (Specter loses, Paul wins, Lincoln loses or gets thrown into a runoff), we will hear a full-throated roar of “ANTI-INCUMBENCY!”, which is already the preferred meme for understanding the 2010 cycle. The subtext is usually that white independent voters–whether Tea Partiers or “centrists” or “populists”–are driving this phenomenon.
It’s understandable that writers pressed for time and space will always try to force elections in widely disparate locations into a single mold, and furthermore, U.S. Senate elections are usually to some extent “nationalized,” and may be so more than is usual this year.
But the dynamics of these races aren’t quite that simple. Yes, the 80-year-old Arlen Specter does seem to be sort of the ultimate symbol of what many consider the corrupt bipartisan status quo in Washington, and he is benefitting from support from the Obama administration, the Rendell organization, and labor. But Specter’s party-switching actually separates him from the Washington crowd, and is a major problem for him in a Democratic primary where many participants have been voting against him since they turned 18. Moreover, on the margins Sestak will benefit from an “electability” factor, since recent polls have shown him doing better than the incumbent against Republican Pat Toomey. And then there’s geography: Specter’s base has always been in Philadelphia, and regional turnout–particularly in Western PA, where Sestak’s running very well, and in Philly, where Specter’s benefitting from overwhelming African-American support–will matter a lot.
In Kentucky, there is no incumbent running in the Republican primary, and in fact, the actual incumbent, Jim Bunning, has endorsed everybody’s favorite “insurgent,” Rand Paul. So instead we are told the race is a referendum on someone not running, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who is strongly backing Trey Grayson. Perhaps that is what’s on the mind of Kentucky’s GOP voters (and we are talking about GOP voters, since KY has a closed primary), but Paul’s endorsements from an array of national conservative figures (Sarah Palin, Jim DeMint, James Dobson) and Grayson’s recent efforts to attack Paul for opposing pork for Kentucky makes this an ideological as well as an “outsider” challenge. On the Democratic side, both major candidates are statewide elected officials, and while national progressives tend to favor Jack Conway, Dan Mondiardo is alleged to have a better grassroots network. So who’s the “incumbent” in that race?
Down in Arkansas, Lincoln is obviously an incumbent under fire from people in both parties, and she, like Specter, is getting help from the president (and a certain former president from Arkansas). And yes, unions in particular are seeking to punish her for flip-flopping on the Employee Free Choice Act, and for a less than constructive posture on a variety of other issues, including heatlh reform. But Bill Halter’s campaign against her was really generated by her terrible early poll numbers against every imaginable Republican. And the outcome will likely be determined not by angry white independents ready to eject incumbents, but by a battle over African-American Democratic base voters, who are tilting towards Halter but with an unusually high number of undecideds (hence the Obama-Clinton involvement).
So it’s not really some simple referendum on incumbents, and independents aren’t a factor at all in Kentucky and may not be crucial in Arkansas, either. Maybe Specter and/or Lincoln will win and screw up the preferred narrative anyway. But if not, let’s look a bit more deeply at what it all means.

A new AP-Univision poll of Hispanics and non-Hispanics starkly illustrates the very different perspectives of Hispanic and non-Hispanic voters on the controversial new law in Arizona on immigration enforcement. Unsurprisingly, attitudes towards the new law are pretty polarized. Hispanics oppose the law by a 67/15 margin, with fully 60% saying they “strongly oppose” it. Non-Hispanics favor the law by a 45/20 margin, with 31% saying they “strongly favor” it.
Both attitudes appear to be based on an underlying difference of opinion about the advisability of enlisting local law enforcement agencies–i.e., the police officers citizens encounter every day–in immigration enforcement. Hispanics oppose local police enforement of immigration laws by a striking 81/16 margin; non-Hispanics favor it 61/37. Why? Probably because Hispanics by a 73/22 margin believe police “crackdowns” on illegal immigration will unfairly target Hispanics. Non-Hispanics are split down the middle as to whether such crackdowns would unfairly target Hispanics. Beyond that, non-Hispanics seem to have a relatively benign attitude towards the collateral damage that ethnic profiling would inflict on the innocent; only 34% think it would be a very or extremely serious problem if Arizona police stop and question U.S. citizens or legal immigrants as a result of the new law. 73% of Hispanics think it would be a very or extremely serious problem.
So it really does appear that the nationwide Republican rush to endorse the Arizona law represents, among other things, a choice of constituencies; non-Hispanics will tend to approve, though not by massive margins or with great intensity, while Hispanics are going to be unhappy about it in a very personal way. And those conservatives who complain that they only want to target illegal immigrants are ignoring the reality that Hispanic citizens and legal immigrants clear believe local police actions to enforce immigration laws away from the border are inevitably going to compromise their own freedoms.

In their efforts to find something objectionable about Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, some conservatives are resorting to an argument that is so vague as to seem innocuous, but that is also consonant with a serious strain of invidious prejudice: as a lifelong New Yorker, she’s inhabitted a liberal “cocoon” that is remote from the mainstream life of most Americans. Kathleen Parker offered a particularly explicit version of this argument in a Washington Post column yesterday. Here’s a sample:

Certainly New York City dwellers would argue that they struggle with ordinary concerns, just in a more dense environment. But New York, like other urban areas, tends to be more liberal than the vast rest of the country. More than half the country also happens to be Protestant, yet with Kagan, the court will feature three Jews, six Catholics and nary a Protestant. Fewer than one-fourth of Americans are Catholic, and 1.7 percent are Jewish.

This claim that Kagan’s nomination violates some unwritten rules of geographical and ethnic balance on the Supreme Court is spreading pretty rapidly. I did a fairly systematic response over at FiveThirtyEight, noting that (1) this wouldn’t be first time the Court might had three New Yorkers; (2) life in New York isn’t exactly the liberal cacoon that conservatives so often describe it as; and (3) geographical background or even diversity of experience has not in the past been a particulary good predictor of judicial philosphy or contributions to the Court.
If Parker’s argument and many like it strike you as risking encouragement to some very old prejudices, you should check out my response.

So, just three days after Utah’s long-time Republican Sen. Bob Bennett was denied re-nomination, long-time Democratic Rep. Alan Mollohan of West Virginia suffered the same fate, though in his case it was in a primary where he received only 44% of the vote against 56% for state senator Mike Oliverio. Mollohan had been in office for 28 years after succeeding his father, who held the seat for fourteen years before that. Now that’s some serious incumbency!
While it’s natural to link the Bennett and Mollohan defeats to a similar anti-incumbency trend, that’s a bit misleading. Bennett’s problems were clearly ideological in nature. Mollohan’s biggest problem was ethics; he’s been the subject of multiple investigations of conflict-of-interest allegations in his role as an Appropriations subcommittee chairman, and Oliverio’s campaign called him “one of the most corrupt members of Congress.”
With Republicans considering Mollohan an especially ripe target, it’s possible that Oliverio’s win will make the seat an slightly easier hold for Democrats.

Conservatives are picking around Elena Kagan’s bio and record to find some reason to oppose her. One of the more ingenious efforts is by David Brooks, the New York Times columnist whose usual MO is to fly around every contemporary issue from a lofty height and find some reason to land near the talking points of the Republican Party. So, too, with Kagan, where Brooks says a lot of things about her careful avoidance of confirmation-threatening controversies, and then drops this little bomb:

What we have is a person whose career has dovetailed with the incentives presented by the confirmation system, a system that punishes creativity and rewards caginess. Arguments are already being made for and against her nomination, but most of this is speculation because she has been too careful to let her actual positions leak out.
There’s about to be a backlash against the Ivy League lock on the court. I have to confess my first impression of Kagan is a lot like my first impression of many Organization Kids. She seems to be smart, impressive and honest — and in her willingness to suppress so much of her mind for the sake of her career, kind of disturbing.

So on a Court that currently sports nine Ivy League law school graduates–five appointed by Republican presidents–Kagan is the one who is likely to spur a backlash against Ivyism!
Where was this anti-Ivyism when conservatives blocked the nomination of Harriet Miers–a graduate of SMU Law School–to the Court?
Hard to say. Brooks isn’t coming right out and opposing Kagan, but he is lending aid to the invidious argument that all sorts of things about the political status quo should somehow be attributed to the Obama administration and its appointees.

After spending upwards of $60 million, much of it lately on attack ads against her Republican primary rival, Steve Poizner, California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman appears to have lost most of a large lead over Poizner and is heading towards the June 8 balloting in an astonishingly vulnerable position.
A new Survey USA poll out yesterday shows eMeg leading Poizner 39%/37%, a twenty-point net swing in Poizner’s favor since the previous SUSA survey in April. Even if you are skeptical about the accuracy of SUSA’s robo-polls, California political cognoscenti all seem to agree that Poizner is closing fast.
This is significant beyond the borders of California for at least four reasons. The first and most obvious is that Whitman’s epic spending on early television ads doesn’t seem to be doing her a lot of good. If she winds up becoming the new Al Checchi–the 1998 Democratic gubernatorial candidate who broke all previous spending records on heavily negative ads and then got drubbed in his primary–it will be an object-lesson to self-funders everywhere.
The second reason a Whitman defeat or near-defeat would resonate broadly is that it would confirm the rightward mood of Republicans even in a state where they are reputedly more moderate. At this point, both Poizner and Whitman are constantly calling each other “liberals,” with Poizner, who’s running ads featuring conservative GOP avatar Tom McClintock, getting the better of that particular argument. Whitman would have undoubtedly preferred to have kept closer to the political center in preparation for a tough general election campaign against Jerry Brown. But Poizner is forcing her to compete for the True Conservative mantle in a very conspicuous way.
Thirdly, there are signs that Poizner is also forcing Whitman–and by implication, the entire California Republican Party–to risk a repetition of the 1990s-era GOP alienation of Latino voters by endorsing harsh immigration measures. This has been a signature issue for Poizner from the beginning; he supports bringing back Proposition 187–the 1994 ballot measure pushed by then-Gov. Pete Wilson that is widely interpreted as having destroyed California’s Republican majority by making the state’s huge Latino population a reliable and overwhelming Democratic constituency. Poizner has also lavishly praised the new Arizona immigration law. Having tried to ignore the issue initially, Whitman is now running radio ads in which Pete Wilson (her campaign chairman) touts her determination to fight illegal immigration. If those ads migrate to broadcast TV, it’s a sure bet that Whitman is panicking, and that monolithic Latino support for Brown in the general election is a real possibility. And if that can happen in California, where immigrant-bashing is so obviously perilous, it can certainly happen in other parts of the country.
Finally, it’s worth noting that aside from immigration, the issue on which Poizner seems to be gaining traction is the attention he’s devoted to Whitman’s involvement with Goldman Sachs. She was on the firm’s board for a number of years, and earned a very large amount of money from an insider practice–then legal, now illegal–called “spinning,” which she nows says she “regrets.” Poizner’s having a lot of fun with this issue, and the California Democratic Party is chipping in with an ad ostensibly promoting financial reform in Washington that is mainly aimed at Whitman. Lesson to would-be-business-executive-candidates: some kinds of private-sector experience are not helpful to your candidacy in the current climate.
It’s worth noting that there’s another major statewide GOP primary going on in California, involving another female former-business-executive who gained national attention through involvement in the McCain presidential campaign. That would be Carly Fiorina, who is running for the Senate nomination to oppose Barbara Boxer, but is struggling to catch up with an opponent, Tom Campbell, who really does have a moderate repuation, at least on abortion and same-sex marriage. And one of Fiorina’s main problems is a third candidate, Chuck DeVore, who’s running hard as the True Conservative in the race. Fiorina has recently wheeled out endorsements from Sarah Palin and Rick Santorum. All three major GOP Senate candidates have endorsed the Arizona immigration law. The outcome of this race, and where the competition positions the winner, could also have a fateful impact on the general election and on the future of California politics.

Even before the president’s announcement of Elena Kagan as his second nominee for the Supreme Court, progressives were beginning to rethink their position of skepticism (often assumed in the cause of encouraging a different nominee, typically Judge Diane Wood), and conservatives were beginning to gird up their loins for a confirmation fight.
There will be some progressives (probably Glenn Greenwald, but perhaps others) who may never reconcile themselves to support for a Justice with Kagan’s record as Solicitor General on civil liberties issues related to executive power and treatment of terrorism suspects.
But as SCOTUSblog’s Tom Goldstein suggested at The New Republic this weekend, the confirmation debate in the Senate is very likely to fall into familiar partisan/ideological patterns, with the final vote representing a mirror image of the Alito confirmation.
One major argument for her nomination all along has been her recent confirmation as Solicitor General with significant Republican support. But some GOP senators will quickly argue that a different standard altogether will be used for a lifetime appointment to the High Court, and find reasons to vote against her (one senator, Arlen Specter, is in a particularly embarrassing situation, having voted against Kagan for Solicitor General back when he was struggling to placate conservatives; he must now support her for the Court in the midst of a tough Democratic primary battle).
A summary of immediate conservative reaction to Kagan’s nomination by CBS’ Jan Crawford indicates that her enforcement of Harvard Law School’s ban on military recruitment on campus on grounds that DADT violated the university’s non-discrimination policies will be the lightning rod for the campaign against her. That makes sense, because the issue simultaneously strikes chords with cultural conservatives spoiling for a Court fight, and with conservative “populists” generally who will depict Kagan as an New York/Ivy League elitist out of touch with mainstream patriotical values.
But as I’ve argued earlier, the real question is whether the newly radicalized conservative/Tea Party faction of the GOP will insist on making the confirmation fight a showcase for their own distinctive views on the Constitution, which would make any Obama nominee, and most Republican nominees, categorically unacceptable. Kagan’s notoriously short public record of pronouncements on constitutional issues may, in fact, feed conspiracy theories that she represents a carefully planned leftist plot to move the Court in a totalitarian direction.
So even as Republicans search (almost certainly in vain, given the scrutiny she’s already received as a likely Court nominee) for some smoking gun in Kagan’s background, keep an eye on the tone of conservative rhetoric about this nomination. If it gets as shrill as I suspect it will, then progressives need to be prepared for a counter-offensive that exposes the radicalism of the increasingly dominant faction of the GOP.

This item is cross-posted from FiveThirtyEight.
While Arizona has sparked the latest national furor over immigration policy, and Western Republican pols are dancing around the issue like it’s a bonfire (which, politically, it is), some of the most impressive and immediate repercussions have been in the Deep South, where conservatives are stampeding to express solidarity with the Arizona governor and legislature, and, in one case, to revive the English-Only chesnut. Why is that?
I’d suggest there are four inter-related factors: (1) newly visible and culturally threatening Hispanic populations, that (2) aren’t large or engaged enough to represent a significant voting presence; (3) red-hot Republican primaries; and (4) the difficulty of finding ways for Republican candidates to distinguish themselves in an atmosphere of monolithic conservatism on most issues.
It’s reasonably well understood that Hispanic immigration to the Deep South took off during the last decade. If you rank the states by the percentage increase in Hispanic population from 2000-2008, five of the top seven are in the South, with South Carolina (88.1%) ranked first, Arkansas fourth (82.1%), North Carolina fifth (79.8%), Georgia sixth (79.7%) and Kentucky seventh (76.3%). And in some states, the sheer number of Hispanics is reaching impressive heights, particularly for places with little or no prior diversity aside from African-Americans. Census estimates tell us there are now 777,000 Hispanics in Georgia, 685,000 in North Carolina, and 531,000 in Virginia.
While Hispanics are not distributed evenly in such states, nor are they disproportionately “hidden” in the anonymity of big cities. In my own home state of Georgia, it’s a rare small town that during the last decade hasn’t suddenly acquired an authentic family-owned Mexican restaurant or two, begun selling a few votive candles in convenience stores, or displayed signs and school instructional materials in Spanish. This has all happened very fast. In 1990, when visiting the north Georgia town of Gainesville, which bills itself as “The Poultry Capital of the World,” I was a bit surprised to spot a large sign at a used car dealer that simply said: Financiamos. Today Gainesville’s population is one-third Hispanic.
But even as Hispanics have become a regular (and to some, a disturbing) feature of Deep South life, they have not yet become a voting bloc significant enough to matter in all but scattered local elections. For a variety of reasons, including legal status, age, recent arrival and mobility, the percentage of southern Hispanics eligible to vote is very low. In fact, in the states of the Old Confederacy (excluding Florida and Texas), there were only two states as of 2006 in which Hispanics represented as much as 2% of eligible voters: Virginia at 2.8%, and Georgia at 2.3%. The Hispanic percentage of the population in these states in 2006 was, respectively, 6.8% and 7.4%.
So whereas in states with larger and more established Hispanic populations politicians considering anti-immigrant messages have to think seriously about blowback, there are no real negative consequences in the Deep South to offset the incentives for such rhetoric.
And not surprisingly, at least among Republicans, they are succumbing to the temptation to raise immigration as an issue in this year’s highly competitive Deep South primaries.
Most notorious, so far, has been Alabama’s Tim James, for whom the pioneer of viral video, Fred Davis, prepared an ad in which the taciturn Christian Right businessman, who has been struggling to overcome Judge Roy Moore’s strength among his targeted constituency in a multi-candidate gubernatorial field, demands that driver’s tests be conducted only in English. “This is Alabama,” he says. “We speak English. If you want to live here, learn it.” The ad has earned James priceless attention, and so far, his rivals have criticized him only for failing to focus on illegal immigrants rather than foreign-language-speakers generally.
At about the same time as James’ ad, another struggling Deep South gubernatorial candidate, former congressman Nathan Deal, was making support for an Arizona-style law in Georgia his signature issue. Deal is mired in third place in most polls, and is battling the bad aroma of ethics charges that helped speed his resignation from Congress earlier this year. His base region is the highly immigrant-sensitive North Georgia mountain area (which includes the aforementioned chicken-processing town of Gainesville, along with the heavily-Hispanic-staffed carpet industry), which also happens to be the most heavily Republican part of Georgia.
Deal’s gambit hasn’t spurred his rivals to follow suit just yet, but it’s likely. Secretary of State Karen Handel, who’s running just ahead of Deal in most assessments of the race, is famous for championing a tough, controversial voter ID law that was generally understood in Georgia to be aimed more at Hispanics than at the traditional target of Republican “voter fraud” alarms, African-Americans. With the entire field sounding monotonously similar on most national issues, and equally prone to indulge in Tea Party rhetoric about state sovereignty and even nullification, it’s unlikely that Deal’s opponents will give him a monopoly on the immigration issue.
Arizona Fever has spread much more rapidly in South Carolina, where at the first GOP gubernatorial candidates’ forum after the Arizona law was enacted, all four candidates called for adoption of a similar law. The most distinctive note was sounded by Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer, the man who created a national stir earlier this year for comparing beneficiaries of subsidized school lunches to “stray animals” who shouldn’t be encouraged to eat (he later apologized for the “metaphor,” but not for the sentiment). Bauer took the opportunity to suggest that South Carolina wouldn’t be a magnet for illegal immigrants if lazy welfare recipients were willing to work.

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