There’s a lot of talk today about John McCain’s campaign being in a state of disarray, amidst all sorts of strategy sessions and diverse advice about what he should do to halt the steady drift of public opinion towards Barack Obama. The one clear thing that’s emerged is a new stump speech in which he heavily hits one new note: the idea that Americans need to elect him president to prevent one-party domination of Washington:

“Senator Obama is measuring the drapes and planning with Speaker Pelosi and Senator Reid to raise taxes, increase spending — take away your right to vote by secret ballot and labor elections, and concede defeat in Iraq,” [said McCain]….
The reference to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is part of a new Republican effort to warn voters of the consequences of having one party dominate all of Washington, as Democrats would if Obama won in a landslide that helped his party rack up wider congressional margins.

Now you can understand why McCain is taking this tack. He’s yoked with a horribly unpopular Republican brand, and horribly unpopular conservative policies. The issue landscape is tilting decisively against him. All his “maverick” talk hasn’t convinced that many people to forget about that (R) next to his name. But the Democratic-controlled Congress is unpopular, too (even though there’s every indication that Democrats will make major gains in House and Senate races), and trust levels for the federal government in general are very low. So why not try to play on “a plague on both houses” sentiment by suggesting yourself as a personal counter-balance against excessive Democratic power in Washington? Such implicit split-your-ticket talk won’t make GOP candidates for Congress very happy, but that’s a small price to pay if it could actually help close the gap with Obama.
But could it actually work?
It’s an article of High Broderist faith to some pundits that because Americans don’t much trust either political party, or think them “extreme,” vast numbers of them may actually prefer divided government. The main data point for this belief is the preponderance of divided government over the last few decades (the situation for 29 of the last 40 years), buttressed by occasional direct polling evidence that people say they prefer it.
But a quick review of the political science literature on this subject produces a whole lot of skepticism. One good 2005 summary of the academic debate goes through the various reasons divided government is produced (e.g., midterm trends away from White House incumbents), and also why people who say they favor divided government often really don’t (e.g., they simply want their own party to win the branch of government most within reach at any given moment). Most academics definitely challenge the idea that large numbers of Americans vote tactically, with an eye towards complicated balance-of-power results.
Moreover, the most obvious conscious voting decision that could lead to divided government–ticket-splitting–has by all accounts been in a more-or-less steady decline in recent decades. And that in turn reflects the universally-recognized ideological sorting-out of the two major parties since the 1960s, which has made partisan choices clearer while reducing regional anomalies (such as the conservative Solid Democratic South of yore).
But aside from the questionable evidence supporting “divided-government” voting, one thing is pretty clear: support for “gridlock” is naturally associated with high levels of satisfaction with the national status quo. If things are going well, why risk the sort of changes that a single-party dominated federal government might enact? Pro-gridlock thinking is also typically associated with a libertarian attitude towards government (indeed, economist Milton Friedman may have been the first major figure to articulate the advantages of gridlock).
Since “right track” numbers are currently dipping into the single-digits, and the leave-me-alone coalition isn’t heavily represented among swing voters today, this doesn’t strike me as the best time for a presidential candidate to say he wants to block action in Washington.
Perhaps a full-engines-reverse, break-the-Democratic-monopoly message could work for Republicans in 2010, if an Obama administration and a Democratic Congress produce unsatisfactory results. But for now, this may just be another example of a McCain campaign desperately trying out various themes, in hopes of regaining traction.

Sarah Palin no longer seems to be at the center of the presidential contest. But if the McCain-Palin campaign, or its media and advocacy-group allies, persist in making Barack Obama’s alleged “radical friends” a regular talking point, it’s worth remembering that Palin, in contrast to Obama, has had regular, politically significant, and very recent association with some pretty scary folks in Alaska.
During the initial frenzy over Palin, some pro-Democratic political observers noted her cozy relationship with the Alaska Independence Party (AIP), a group characterized by a deep hostility to the United States of America, and with close links to Radical Right organizations (e.g., the theocratic Constitution Party, and various other “secessionist” and sometimes white supremacist groups) in the lower 48. But inaccurate claims that Palin (as opposed to her husband) had actually been a member of the AIP enabled the McCain campaign to discredit this entire line of inquiry.
Now a nuanced and knowledgeable assessment of Palin’s relationship to AIP and other Alaska extremists is available at Salon, by Max Blumenthal of the Nation Institute and Seattle freelance journalist David Neiwert. It carefully documents the role that former AIP chairman Mark Chryson and John Birch Society stalwart Steve Stoll, both from Wasilla, played in her rise in local and then statewide politics. One key incident in this story was Palin’s unsuccessful effort to appoint Stoll (whose nickname was “Black Helicopter Steve”) to an opening on the town’s city council.
More recently, Palin has taken a variety of positions in Alaska politics closely associated with AIP’s, particularly on gun issues, taxes, and environmental regulations. She attended the AIP’s convention the year she ran for Governor, and also appointed as her campaign co-chair Alaska legend Wally Hickel, once elected Governor on the AIP ticket. And nobody seems to dispute her husband, Todd’s, AIP membership and party registration, which he continued at least through the 2002 election cycle. To state the rather obvious, the First Dude is a more central figure in Palin’s political world–appearing on the campaign trail for McCain-Palin regularly–than any of Obama’s “radical friends.”
I think there’s a tendency among political observers to think of phenomena like AIP–and the Palins’ relationship with it–as just some sort of quirky, almost charming Northern Exposure-type feature of the Alaska landscape that doesn’t really matter. It’s true that AIP’s relative respectability in Alaska reflects the state’s strange quasi-colonial political culture, in which anti-American gestures that would carry a political death sentence elsewhere are accepted with a shrug. But there’s nothing charming about AIP’s racist and generally wacko confederates (pun intended) in other states, or even its wildly pro-development and gun-crazy posturings in Alaska.
So those who want to make a big deal out of Obama’s marginal and long-past dealings with Bill Ayers or the Democratic Socialists of America or whatever, should be told to take a longer look at Palin’s undoubted fellow-traveler relationship with the Far Right back home in Alaska.

As the Noteworthy box at the top of this site indicates, a long-awaited Brookings Institution briefing by TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira and the University of Michigan’s William Frey–two of America’s top political demographers–on trends in the “purple states” occurred on Friday. The PowerPoint from the presentation is out, along with the third and fourth installments of Teixeira and Frey’s detailed regional analysis of purple states, on Florida/Virginia and Michigan/Ohio/Missouri.
You should read all this material yourself, but here’s a summary of the five big purple trends that Teixiera and Frey talk about in both the overall summary and the regional analyses:
(1) The struggle for Democratic gains in the shrinking but still critical white working class vote;
(2) Definite Democratic gains (against a persistent Republican advantage) in the expanding white-college-educated segment of the electorate (including those with some college);
(3) Significant increases in the number of pro-Democratic minority voters–especially Hispanics and Asians–in many purple states;
(4) The continued and enhanced domination of battleground states by voters in metropolitan urban areas; and
(5) The relative strength of Democrats in the faster-growing metro areas among the purple states.
These trends help explain some of the more subtle trends in the national political landscape. Those familiar with the 2000-2004 political “map” may have been puzzled this year by polls showing Barack Obama doing as well or even better in “red states” like VA and FL than in midwestern “purple states” like OH. The less-dynamic midwestern states remain dominated by white working class voters, among whom Democrats are doing better, but are still losing by significant margins. VA and FL, on the other hand, are going through significant demographic and political changes thanks to the steady growth of metro areas with major minority voting blocs and rising levels of college education, such as Northern Virginia, Miami, and the I-4 corridor.
There’s a natural tendency among political journalists to forget demographic factors in the daily swirl of candidate competition and real-life events, or, more often, to isolate one demographic group–soccer moms, security moms, “values voters,” etc.–as all-important. Teixeira and Frey help remind us that this is a very complicated country, and that campaigns play out on a constantly changing landscape that can itself make history.

Throughout this long presidential campaign, there’s been endless discussion of race as a factor. But until recently, such talk revolved around hard-to-assess white fears about Barack Obama’s racial identity, along with efforts to conjure up the ancient hobgoblin of the Scary Black Man via images of Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright.
Now, in the wake of the ongoing financial crisis, racism has entered the campaign conversation from an unexpected direction. In the fever swamps of conservatism, there’s a growing drumbeat of claims that the entire housing mess, and its financial consequences, are the result of “socialist” schemes to give mortgages to shiftless black people whose irresponsibility is now being paid for by good, decent, white folks.
Some of this talk is in thinly-veiled code, via endless discussions on conservative web sites (though it spilled over into Congress during the bailout debate) attributing the subprime mortgage meltdown to the effects of the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, which was aimed at fighting the common practice of mortgage “redlining” in low-income and/or minority areas (basically, a refusal to make any mortgages, regardless of the creditworthiness of individual applicants, in such areas).
In truth, the CRA didn’t require lending to unqualified applicants (though it did provide that applicants’ credit-worthiness could be established through means more sophisticated that standard credit scores), and in any event, CRA doesn’t even apply to the non-bank lenders responsible for the vast majority of bad mortgages. (Sara Robinson has a very useful primer on CRA at the OurFuture blog).
A closely associated and even more racially tinged element of the conservative narrative on the financial crisis focuses on lurid claims about the vast influence of ACORN, a national non-profit group active in advocacy work for low-income Americans. Among its many activities, ACORN has promoted low-income and minority homeownership, mainly through personal counseling. More to the point, though it’s unrelated to any of the claims about ACORN’s alleged role in the financial crisis, the group worked with Barack Obama back in his community organizing days on the South Side of Chicago.
Now as it happens, I’ve never been a huge fan of ACORN, mainly because its ham-handed voter registration efforts in recent years have supplied Republicans with their only shred of evidence that “voter fraud” is a legitimate concern in this country. But ACORN, a relatively marginal group, had no real influence over toxic mortgage practices, which again, to state the crucial point, had little to do with CRA-enabled loans to low-income and minority homeowners. Google “ACORN financial crisis” and you’ll be treated to an amazingly huge number of articles and blog posts on the subject, virtually all of them from conservatives. None of them, so far as I can tell, establish that the group has had any significant involvement in mortgage decisions, mainly because most subprime loans were made in areas where ACORN activists would never set foot. ACORN is being singled out by conservatives for a leading role in the crisis simply because it’s crucial to the whole CRA/Socialist/Minorities/Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac/Obama narrative about the financial crisis. And that narrative is not simply all over the internet: it’s common on the airwaves as well, from Lou Dobbs to an assortment of “analysts” at Fox.
While some conservatives are careful not to get too explicit about the racial underpinnings of this argument, others aren’t. As usual, we can rely on Ann Coulter to expose the raw id of conservative sentiment, as in a post on the financial crisis with the title: “They Gave Your Mortgage To a Less Qualified Minority,” which deliberately played off the theme of a famous Jesse Helms campaign ad demonizing affirmative action.
Here’s Coulter’s take on the alleged impact of CRA:

Instead of looking at “outdated criteria,” such as the mortgage applicant’s credit history and ability to make a down payment, banks were encouraged to consider nontraditional measures of credit-worthiness, such as having a good jump shot or having a missing child named “Caylee.”

Nice. The coda of Coulter’s “argument” plows some very familar furrows:

Now, at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, middle-class taxpayers are going to be forced to bail out the Democrats’ two most important constituent groups: rich Wall Street bankers and welfare recipients.
Political correctness had already ruined education, sports, science and entertainment. But it took a Democratic president with a Democratic congress for political correctness to wreck the financial industry.

There you have it: once again, rich liberals in league with shiftless minority “welfare recipients” are sticking it to Joe Sixpack.
Coulter’s uninhibited take seems to be closer to what we are now seeing and hearing among grassroots conservatives, whose anger is now visibly spilling onto the campaign trail, than the more circumspect “analysis” of her more “responsible” colleagues.
It shouldn’t be that surprising. Let’s say you are a classic Main Street conservative, a white middle-class man near or past retirement age. You own your home, you pay your bills. Maybe at some point you benefitted from a government-subsidized or underwritten home loan. Maybe you were lucky enough to do your own modest real estate speculation in the mid-80s or mid-90s or early 00’s, when it all worked. Maybe you even have a defined-benefit pension that insulates you from the immediate effects of the stock market collapse. But still, you’ve played by the rules, and are entirely innocent. And now the whole economy is collapsing around you, and worse yet, many hundreds of billions of your taxpayer dollars are being tossed around Washington to “bail out” everybody but you. Two kinds of explanations are being offered to you for what went wrong. One involves an impenetrable haze of financial jargon about the securitization of mortgages and derivative instruments and hedge funds, which only a handful of people in the country can even pretend to understand. The other is Ann Coulter’s. What are you going to believe?
Perhaps it’s an ironic sign of social progress that today’s emerging racist stereotypes involve minorities getting behind on their mortgage payments, rather than “welfare queens” using change from their food stamps to buy vodka (the famous Ronald Reagan anecdote) or black men impregnating their girlfriends to live off those bountiful welfare payments. But it’s still disgusting. As Rick Perlstein has righteously argued, it’s a blood libel on people who exert no real power in this country.
As the foregoing meditation indicates, I’m less inclined to blame those fist-shaking angry Main Street conservatives at McCain’s rallies than the conservative “thinkers” who promote racist stereotypes as part of a broader effort to deflect responsibility anywhere, everywhere, than towards the corruption and ideological manias of their own leaders.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist
Grassroots conservatives have been fed a steady, toxic diet in recent weeks, on talk radio, on Fox, and in the blogs, of a narrative that suggests “Obama’s ACORN” (with the complicity of Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac) created the financial crisis, is benefitting massively from the bailout, and is now trying to steal the election. This is a race-based Unified Field Theory that connects everything these folks fear and hate, and they want John McCain to talk about it, instead of all this bushwa about greedy lobbyists and bipartisanship.
On a broader front, this may represent the ultimate climax in the original and central dilemma of the McCain campaign: how to stay “bipartisan” and mavericky while channeling the passions of the conservative base. The whole contrived balancing act could well be blowing up, at McCain’s own rallies.

Yesterday I posted a brief notice about a “Memo to the next president” under the auspices of the Progressive Policy Institute, arguing for public financing of congressional elections and redistricting reform as first-order priorities after November 4.
Today I did a somewhat different post for The Hill’s Congress Blog that explicitly makes the case for why this sort of agenda makes particular sense for Barack Obama.

As you may have gathered by now, John McCain’s big October Surprise on the policy front, the mortgage buyout proposal that he sprang during the second presidential debate, is not going over well much of anywhere.
While the proposal bears a superficial resemblence to earlier Democratic proposals for homeowner relief, its structure makes it both vastly more expensive for taxpayers, and grossly more generous to the most imprudent–and in some cases predatory–lenders. Conservatives just hate it, as evidenced by an acid-tongued editorial from National Review today, which noted the McCain plan would displace the much more modest Frank-Dodd legislation, which just took effect on October 1:

We never thought we would defend the Frank-Dodd legislation, which we bitterly opposed last summer. But it looks downright prudent compared to what McCain has proposed. McCain’s plan is a full bailout for lenders, and it cannot do much more than the Frank-Dodd bill without letting “ruthless borrowers” and other reckless types off the hook.

Kaboom.
Unsurprisingly, Barack Obama is going after McCain’s proposal with a big sledgehammer. According to Ben Smith’s account at Politico:

On the stump in Dayton, Obama continued to drill McCain’s mortgage plan.
McCain would have “the government — meaning taxpayers, meaning you — buy up bad mortgages,” he said.
“Taxpayers shouldn’t be asked to pick up the tab for the very folks who helped to create this crisis,” Obama said. “That’s the problem with Sen. McCain’s risky idea.”
“Banks wouldn’t take a loss, but taxpayers would take a loss. It’s a plan that would guarantee that you, the American taxpayers, would lose,” he said.
“It’s not just that Sen. McCain’s bailout rewards irresponsible lenders. It’s that this bailout would make it more likely that those lenders would keep up their bad behavior.”
The plan, Obama said, “punishes taxpayers, rewards banks and won’t solve our housing crisis. This is the kind of erratic behavior we’ve been seeing out of Sen. McCain.”

Note the words “risky” and “erratic” and “irresponsible” in Obama’s speech. At a time when McCain, contrary to what his campaign was saying as recently as Tuesday night, is trying to question Obama’s character via a vast inflation of his relationship to William Ayers, Obama’s returing fire on the character front through McCain’s most recent policy proposal.
But hey, there’s a silver lining to McCain’s latest fiasco. According to Ross Douthat, the Republican nominee is so breathtakingly incompetent at developing a compelling message that he’s free to just start pulling stuff out of his posterior:

Frankly, McCain has done such a lousy job selling the domestic policy proposals he’s put forward that he’s more or less free to change them however he wants at this point. It would have been better if he had changed them dramatically and publicly on Monday, after the bailout passed and the market kept tanking, but before the debate itself. But the next time the stock market has a really bad day (i.e., tomorrow), he should “huddle with his advisers” and announce that in light of the epic crisis, he’s going to postpone his entire domestic agenda (such as it is) for, say, two years in favor of a short-term but expensive stimulus package aimed directly at the middle and working class.

Douthat actually refers to his own idea for McCain as “aggressive pandering to the middle class,” which doesn’t sound very mavericky to me. But he may be right that the poor reception accorded the most recent rabbit McCain tried to pull out of his hat shouldn’t keep him from going back to the hutch and looking for another one. If he does, though, he shouldn’t expect much support from most conservatives.

When John McCain conducted a not-very-effective interview with the Editorial Board of the Des Moines Register a couple of weeks ago, the respected Republican strategist (and longtime associate of McCain’s) Mike Murphy had this to say on the Swampland blog, after discussing the interview itself:

What the Hell was McCain even doing there in the first place?….Obama is going to win Iowa.
….So, 35 days left and McCain is in Iowa? Why put McCain in the wrong state, at the wrong place? No surprise the result is the wrong message and the wrong tone.

Now there are 25 days left, and where’s McCain going to be this Sunday? Davenport, Iowa.
Via Chris Orr, here’s an explanation offered by the McCain campaign to the Washington Post’s Dan Balz:

Mike DuHaime, McCain’s political director, said internal campaign polling does not make the electoral map look as bad as some public polls suggest. For example: Asked why, if he has given up on Michigan, McCain has not given up on Iowa, a state that looks strong for Obama in public polls, DuHaime said because the campaign’s polling has Obama’s lead in the low single digits.

Hmmm. Them must be some mighty odd “internal polls.” FiveThirtyEight.com lists nine surveys of IA since the beginning of September. Six showed Obama with a double-digit lead. The only one showing a close race is from the Big Ten outfit three weeks ago, which just started polling last month, and has no track record. In fact, per RealClearPolitics, there hasn’t been a published poll showing McCain ahead in Iowa since the beginning of the year. That’s not the case with a number of other states that McCain seems to have conceded.
Polls aside, there are four big reasons that virtually everyone outside the McCain campaign has been assuming Obama would carry the state this year: (1) Iowa had one of the country’s strongest pro-Democratic trends in 2006, producing a gubernatorial landslide, a Democratic takeover of the state legislature, and pickups of two U.S. House seats (one against the previously invulnerable Jim Leach, who’s now endorsed Obama); (2) Barack Obama built a powerful organization in the state prior to the Caucuses, which is still in place; (3) McCain skipped the Caucuses in both of his presidential campaigns, which Iowans consider a deadly insult; and (4) McCain has also stubbornly opposed federal subsidies for ethanol, an issue so important to Iowans that a long line of presidential candidates in both parties (including George W. Bush) have flip-flopped on it precisely because of its importance in Iowa.
So I’m with Murphy: I don’t know what’s up with McCain and Iowa. Maybe he has a major weakness for corn dogs and potluck dinners.

The Progressive Policy Institute’s putting together a series of “memos to the next president” arguing for this or that initiative as a top priority. They are by design neutral as to the identity of said president.
I’ve contributed a piece arguing that the next president should make reform of congressional elections, through public financing of campaigns, and redistricting reform, a top priority, to build some sense of real momentum about “changing Washington.” Though it’s cast in terms of being applicable to either candidate, I do think this makes particular sense for Obama, who needs to quickly mobilize public opinion for “real change” before or while undertaking tough initiatives like universal health care. That’s all the more appropriate now that there’s so much doubt about the fiscal “room” he will enjoy to do anything big.
Check it out here.

Those of you who read TDS’ Swing Voter roundtable earlier this year will remember that there’s a lot of disagreement about how to define swing voters. But such disagreements tend to shrink in the course of actual campaigns, as, gradually, the universe of potentially persuadable and motivatable voters converges with “undecideds.”
In his Wall Street Journal column today, Karl Rove, casting about for reasons to be optimisitic about John McCain’s campaign, suggests that there are “probably more undecided and persuadable voters open to switching their choice than in any election since 1968.”
At FiveThirtyEight.com, Nate Silver decided to test Rove’s assertion with actual data. Using the “unaccounted for voter” percentage in the last Gallup Poll (chosen because it’s been around forever), Silver compares that to the number at roughly the same date in earlier election cycles, and concludes:

In the Gallup tracking poll that straddled October 1st, 8 percent of voters were unaccounted for. This figure is significantly higher than 2004, an unusually partisan election in which just 2 percent of voters were unaccounted for. But, it was no higher than 2000 or 1976, and lower than in 1988. On average, since 1936, 6.8 percent of voters were unaccounted for in the Gallup poll as of October 1st, as compared this year’s 8 percent; the difference is not statistically significant.

To determine “persuadable” voters, Silver looks to the Pew Research poll’s numbers for people who have “decided against” one or the other candidate, indicating they are not open to further persuasion. The results are pretty much the same as with “undecideds”:

[A]s of Pew’s most recent survey from late last month, 42 percent of voters said they had decided against Senator McCain, and 37 percent said they’d decided against Senator Obama. This leaves 21 percent of voters who are theoretically open to either major party candidate. We can compare these to the Pew numbers released in Early October 1992, Late September 1996, Early October 2000, and Early October 2004….
This year’s numbers are right in line with past elections, again with the mild exception of 2004, when an unusually high fraction of the electorate had ruled out either George Bush or John Kerry. And remember, more voters have decided against McCain than Obama. The candidates to exceed the 42 percent of voters who have thus far said “no how, no way, no McCain” were George Bush, Sr. in 1992 (46 percent), Bob Dole in 1996 (44 percent), and John Kerry in 2004 (45 percent), all of whom lost their elections.

It’s possible, though not likely, that the undecided or persuadable vote could go up or otherwise change at some point between now and election day. But its current size and shape is not, contra Karl Rove, grounds for belief that Obama’s current lead may not be as significant as everyone thought.

Recent public opinion dynamics have favored Democrats, to be sure, leading, in conjunction with the curent economic disaster, to some predictions of a 1932-style Democratic landslide. But as Chris Bowers points out at Open Left today, we’re in an era where the margin of error, and of victory or defeat, is much smaller than in the past.
Here’s Chris’ analysis on the limits of the swing vote and its implications.

8.5% is the maximum victory: First, as I warned on Monday, please keep in mind that an 8,5% national victory is the maximum. In the last sixteen national elections (U.S. House and Presidential), the largest victory was Bill Clinton’s 8.51% victory in 1996. The simple fact is that no one wins by double digits anymore. This goes for the large Republican victories in 1988 (President–7.72%), 1994 (5.9%), and 2002 (4.6%). It also goes for the large Democratic victories of 1992 (President–5.56%), 1996 (President–8.51%) and 2006 (7.9%). “Landslides” are now 5-8% national victories, not anything larger. Given that a very real percentage of Democrats and Independents won’t vote for him because he is black, it was always absurd to think that Obama was going to break this mark. When Obama reached an 8% national lead, the only place for him to go was down.

Chris is right, in terms of recent precedents, and if that bothers Democrats hoping for a gigantic Obama landslide, it should be comforting in case McCain catches a break and moves ahead between now and November 4. The probability of any particular electoral outcome is not that far outside the MoE of most polls. It will likely be a close race, in popular votes at least, no matter what happens. And that’s why all the Obama campaign’s tactical advantages in money and the “ground game” may matter so much. But Democrats should avoid getting too caught up in either the highs or lows of the polls.