Nate Silver’s “The Geography of Occupation” should erase any doubt that the Occupy Wall St. protests are a nation-wide phenomenon which may yet surpass the tea party in size. Silver explains:

The nascent movement known as Occupy Wall Street had its largest single day of protests on Saturday. And a funny thing happened: most of the action was far from Wall Street itself.
No, I don’t mean at Zuccotti Park — which is not, technically, on Wall Street. Nor do I mean Times Square — all of 19 minutes away from Wall Street on the ‘C’ train — where large crowds of protesters gathered on Saturday.
Instead I mean Europe, where crowds in cities like Rome, Barcelona and Madrid were estimated at 200,000 to 500,000 per city (more, probably, than the protests in the United States combined). And I mean California and other parts of the western United States, where crowds were proportionately much larger than in the Northeast or elsewhere in the country.

Silver argues further that “…the distribution of protests throughout the United States may reveal something about the political orientation of the protesters.” He explains his methodology:

The way that I studied this was to search through hundreds of local news accounts for credible estimates of the crowd sizes for each gathering. Where possible, I used estimates provided by reporters or public safety officials rather than the protesters themselves as they are less subject to exaggeration. In some cases, there were multiple estimates of the size of the protest in a given city — they ranged, for instance, from about 5,000 to 15,000 for the New York protests — in which case I used the median estimate.
This exercise is meant, in part, to provide a comparison to the crowds that gathered for the first widespread Tea Party protests on April 15, 2009, for which I adopted a similar approach and came up with an estimate of at least 300,000 protesters across the country.

Silver concedes that “Saturday’s Occupy protests were probably smaller than that.” He found crowd size estimates for a total of at least 70K protestors, but he believes it could be as many as 100K in 150 cities across the U.S., which is impressive for a single day.
In terms of regional breakdown, Silver says most of the action was in the west, possibly because of the more liberal political attitudes in the region and abundance of tech-savvy youth mobilizing turnout. He presents a chart showing “protesters per 1 million population,” with the highest percentage turnout in the west, followed by the northeast, the midwest and the south. Notes Silver:

Over all, about 38,000 protesters — more than half of the documented total — turned out in the Western Census Bureau Region, which accounts for about 23 percent of the country’s population. On a per-capita basis, the West drew about two-and-a-half times more protesters than the Northeast, four times more than the Midwest, and five times more than the South. And it wasn’t necessarily in large cities — although places like Los Angeles and Seattle had large crowds, so did the wine-and-cheese town of Santa Rosa, Calif., and the college town of Eugene, Ore., among others.

Silver speculates that, “perhaps the protesters are more ideologically minded than they are interested in partisan politics,” which could be problematic for Democratic hopes of benefitting form OWS. If the protests keep growing at the current fast clip, they could easily approach and perhaps surpass the number of individuals who participated in tea party demos. It will be interesting to see if OWS does as well in terms of media coverage and influence on the political agendas of either party.

Ah, some new data rendering the myth of the ‘liberal media’ into a pile of rubble. As Politico’s Keach Hagey reports on a new Pew Research study of “11,500 news outlets — including news websites and transcripts of radio and television broadcasts, at both the local and national levels — as well as hundreds of thousands of blogs”:

Sarah Palin put an end to her possible presidential candidacy this month with a familiar parting critique: President Barack Obama has an unfair advantage as a candidate because he’s got “about 90 percent of the media still there in his back pocket.”
…But a study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism finds that, in the past five months, the reverse has actually been true: Obama has received the most unremittingly negative press of any of the presidential candidates by a wide margin, with negative assessments outweighing positive ones by four to one.
Pew found that just 9 percent of the president’s coverage was positive, while 34 percent was negative — a stark contrast to the 32 percent positive coverage and 20 percent negative that it found Texas Gov. Rick Perry, the most covered Republican, received.
“His coverage has been substantially more negative in every one of the last 23 weeks of the last five months — even the week that Bin Laden was killed,” Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, said of the president’s treatment in the media compared with that of the GOP field.

The wingnuttiest Republicans got plenty of positive coverage, as Pew reports:

The top four most favorably covered candidates, the study found, were all tea party favorites: Perry was followed by Palin, with 31 percent positive coverage and 22 percent negative; Michele Bachmann, with 31 percent positive coverage and 23 percent negative; and Herman Cain, with 28 percent positive coverage and 23 percent negative…Mitt Romney’s positive and negative coverage were almost in a dead heat at 26 percent and 27 percent, respectively.

Of course there is always a cautionary note with this kind of data. Some publications carry a lot more weight than others, as do some stories. Associated Press stories, for example, tend to appear in hundreds of newspapers. Hagey quotes one AP story that put a negative spin even on the killing of bin Laden:

A nation surly over rising gas prices, stubbornly high unemployment and nasty partisan politics poured into the street to wildly cheer President Barack Obama’s announcement that Osama bin Laden, the world’s most wanted man, had been killed by U.S. forces after a decadelong manhunt. The outcome could not have come at a better time for Obama, sagging in the polls as he embarks on his reelection campaign.

Hagey goes on to show that, despite negative stories in the “liberal” media, Perry and Palin have gotten pretty positive coverage, according to the Pew data (Gingrich not so good). Ron Paul has done well on the blogosphere, but not as well in the MSM, while Herman Cain’s coverage has perked up considerably. Hagen quotes Newsweek analyst Jonathan Alter:

…Over the last 2½ years, Obama never got a honeymoon, if you actually look back into the early days of his presidency. He got very positive press on the first day, and he’s been in the scrum ever since…The truth about the American media is that we have gone, over the last 15 years, from something that could accurately be called a dominant liberal media — through the period of American liberalism, from the end of World War II to the founding of Fox News in 1996 — to a dominant conservative media in this country.

Moreover, President Obama is taking plenty of heat from the left flank inside his party, so the cumulative criticism is cited by both the left and right as proof of his growing unpopularity. Yet he still does much better in opinion polls than the Republican Party and surprisingly well in head-to-head horse race polls, considering the current economic situation.
Hagen closes with an inconclusive discussion about whether it is good strategy to attack the media for bias. But what remains clear is that conservative whining about ‘liberal media bias’ won’t find any verification in the best data out there.

At Five Thirty Eight, John Sides has the second installment of “The Moneyball of Campaign Advertising” (part one here) taking a skeptical view of the value of political ads, according to available data — except when a candidate is not well-known.
Dems, know thy adversary. Democrats involved in political analysis, strategy and messaging should check out GOP messaging guru Frank Luntz’s web page. Start here and keep reading and clicking.
Is the upper south trending blue? Kyle Trygstad’s “Latest Quinnipiac Poll Continues to Show Virginia Is Top Battleground” at Roll Call Politics taps a new Quinnipiac University Polling Institute survey to offer some encouragement to both the Obama and Kaine for Senate campaigns.
GOP bullying tactics don’t work so well in the granite state, reports the AFL-CIO blog’s Nora Frederickson. The Republican speaker Bill O’Brien got five of the GOP presidential candidates to pop off in favor of overriding Democratic Governor John Lynch’s veto of the so-called “right-to-work” bill. But after hearing from workers, the override effort flunked, and Bachmann got booed.
John Cassidy’s New Yorker article “Can Obama Win? Not This Way” makes a persuasive case that Obama campaign strategists’ belief that he can win without a strong showing in the industrial states is dangerously wrong.
Curious about top corporate/PAC contributors to Democrats and Republicans? OpenSecrets.org has the percentage breakdowns for the 2012 election cycle thus far.
Need a good soundbite on GOP Senators killing the one jobs bill that has popular support? “There are 14 million people out of work, wages are falling, poverty is rising, and a second recession may be blowing in, but not a single Republican would even allow debate on a sound plan to cut middle-class taxes and increase public-works spending.” So sayeth this New York Times editorial.
But the bill is about to be resurrected — in more palatable bites. Lisa Mascaro and Christi Parsons report from the L.A. Times D.C. bureau on the strategic considerations in their article “Democrats plan next step for Obama’s jobs package“.
Time Magazine Swampland reports that the latest Time/ABT SRBI poll has some good news for Dems. Asked “Regardless of how you usually vote, overall, which party…do you trust to do a better job in dealing with the main problems the nation faces over the next few years?”, 42 percent chose Democrats and 31 percent picked Republicans, with 18 percent saying “neither.” In addition, a total of 54 percent of respondents said they had a “somewhat favorable” or “very favorable” opinion of the Wall St. protests and 68 percent said “the rich should pay more taxes,” while 73 percent favored tax hikes on millionaires.
Jamison Foser at Media Matters has a provocative post “The Symbiotic Relationship Between “Moderate” Republicans And The Tea Party,” which faults ‘moderate’ GOP Senators, who “deserve far more blame than they get for Washington gridlock and the continued failure to fix urgent problems…” He calls out Maine Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, along with Mass. Sen. Scott Brown as particularly blame-worthy for political gridlock because they know better. Ditto, says Foser, for GOP House members in swing districts.

Kevin Drum’s “Rich People Create Jobs,” at Mother Jones provides a handy guide to five must-shred myths Dems will have to address to do their best in 2012.
Eric Lichtblau’s New York Times article “Protests Offer Help, and Risk, for Democrats” reviews the complexities of the relationship between Democrats and the Occupy Wall St. Protesters. Robert Reich has some insights on the topic as well.
Naomi Klein delivered an inspiring speech to the OWS demonstration, urging the protesters to remain nonviolent and “…this time, let’s treat each other as if we plan to work side by side in struggle for many, many years to come. Because the task before will demand nothing less.”
If you haven’t yet seen Alan Grayson’s KO of P.J. O’Rourke’s limp attempt to trivialize the Wall St. protests, Digby’s got the transcript and video.
In his WaPo column, E. J. Dionne, Jr. takes America’s most widely-read columnist, George F. Will, to task for setting up a “straw colossus” in his poorly-supported attack on Elizabeth Warren. “My colleague has brought out his full rhetorical arsenal to beat back a statement that he grants upfront is so obviously true that it cannot be gainsaid. Will knows danger when he sees it.”
And Warren’s fund-raising prowess is proving to be as impressive as her ability to rally progressives, as Sean Sullivan reports at Hotline on Call.
John Nichols has an update in The Nation, reporting on the drive to recall Wisconsin’s union-busting Governor Scott Walker — and his efforts to get control of Wisconsin’s Government Accountability Board, which oversees “the pettioning, the voter registration, the voter-identification rules, the vote counting, the recounting, everything…”
The Occupy Wall St. Protest is rapidly approaching tea party levels of news hits, owing in part to clashes with the police, and Nate Silver has the numbers and charts to prove it in his Five Thirty Eight NYT blog.
According to Mark Blumenthal, “…President Obama large-sample national tracking surveys show that the level and intensity of Obama’s overall approval rating among blacks remains largely undiminished.”

I was hoping it wasn’t true. But Brendan Nyhan, always with the “it’s the economy stupid” arguments, now has me convinced he is probably right about the limitations of the “do nothing congress” meme as a Democratic battle axe. Here’s Nyhan, writing as a guest columnist for Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball, on Dems’ embrace of the meme:

Can President Obama overcome a weak economy and win in 2012 by campaigning against the Republican Congress? The historical evidence for this claim is weaker than his allies would like to admit.
Obama’s strategy seems to be Harry Truman’s 1948 campaign against a “Do-Nothing” Republican Congress. Last week, for instance, David Goldstein of McClatchy Newspapers asked, “Has President Barack Obama been channeling Harry Truman?”
Like most journalists who have written on the subject, Goldstein repeated the conventional wisdom that Truman’s campaign against the “do-nothing Congress” was responsible for his victory: “Facing long odds in the 1948 election, Truman put Republicans in his campaign bull’s-eye and unloaded on the “do-nothing Congress.” He won, and conventional wisdom took a beating.”
This idea, which has been echoed by opinion makers ranging from former New York Times columnist Frank Rich to Washington Post reporter Dan Balz, has given hope to Obama supporters demoralized by the current state of the economy.
Obama himself has paid homage to Truman’s strategy. During a Sept. 15 speech, for instance, he said: “[T]his Congress, they are accustomed to doing nothing, and they’re comfortable with doing nothing, and they keep on doing nothing.”

Nyhan then quotes from an academic article by University at Buffalo, SUNY political scientist James Campbell:

Until recently, for instance, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) figured that GDP in the first half of 1948 (leading into the Truman-Dewey contest) was growing at a healthy 4.1% rate. The BEA’s latest series indicates that this greatly understated growth at the outset of the 1948 campaign. The BEA now figures that the economy was growing at a sizzling 6.8%, a revision that helps explain Truman’s miraculous comeback…

Not content to leave it at that, Nyhan adds,

This well-timed surge in economic growth is likely to have played an important role in the success of Truman’s campaign. By contrast, the International Monetary Fund just downgraded its forecast for US economic growth in 2011 and 2012 to 1.5% and 1.8%, respectively.

Killjoy.
Nyhan then presents some depressing charts comparing the very different economic situations facing Truman and Obama to make his point. He concedes that the predictions could be wrong and an unexpected upsurge could help Obama and Dems.
But there’s really no denying Nyhan’s larger point — that it would be folly for Dems to think they can reheat Truman’s “Do Nothing Congress” strategy without the favorable economic trends that gave HST the needed cred.
That doesn’t mean Obama can’t get some leverage from the meme, because, after all, the Republicans really are all about gridlock, and it needs to be said. But let’s not bet the ranch on it.
I do have one admittedly less substantial quibble with Nyhan’s excellent post — the title “Obama 2012: Not Exactly the Truman Show.” Having just returned from a couple of days r&r not far from Seaside, FL, the otherworldly village where “The Truman Show” was filmed, I can report that the town feels much more like a Republican creation, with it’s pricey neo-victorian houses, manicured landscaping and upscale boutiques, by all appearances a not entirely welcome colony of hedge fund prosperity that developers have superimposed on the Redneck Riviera.

Dems, especially, should read The New York Times editorial, “Where’s the Jobs Bill?,” urging Democrats, not Republicans, to work through their issues and get unified behind the jobs bill. “…The sharp contrast with the Republican plan to do nothing can only be made if Democrats are clearly united behind a plan to invigorate the economy.”
Lori Montgomery has a WaPo article on the politics of defining “rich” upward to “millionaires” as a new Democratic tax strategy.
Ryan J. Reilly of Talking Points Memo Muckraker posts on a topic that hasn’t gotten enough coverage, considering the scope of the problem: “What The Justice Department Can Actually Do About Voter ID Laws.” Reilly notes the legal limitations facing Dems in challenging the voter i.d. laws in states not covered by section 5 of the Voting Rights Act: for all the other states that passed voter ID laws that aren’t subject to Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, federal intervention is a long shot. The only other option for opposing a voter ID law is an argument under Section 2 of the VRA, where the burden of proof is pretty high.
We need revenues. We’re too fat. Why cant we do this?
In his Dissent article “Neither Revolution Nor Reform: A New Strategy for the Left“, Gar Alperovitaz has a challenge for progressives: “A non-statist, community-building, institution-changing, democratizing strategy might well capture their imagination and channel their desire to heal the world…Just possibly, it could open the way to an era of true progressive renewal, even one day perhaps step-by-step systemic change or the kind of unexpected, explosive, movement-building power evidenced in the “Arab Spring” and, historically, in our own civil rights, feminist, and other great movements.”
Ralph Nader shows Dems how to shred the GOP meme about “job-killing regulations” at Reader Supported News, and make the point that regulations which promote health and safety create jobs. “Wake up Democrats. Learn the political art of truthful repetition to counter the cruelest Republicans who ever crawled up Capitol Hill. You’ve got massive, documented materials to put the Lie to the Republicans.”
When do campaigns ads matter most? Nate Silver has some answers in the first installment of his two-parter on the topic. A nugget: “…the effects of television advertising appear to last no more than a week — a “rapid decay,” write the eggheads. A study of the 2000 presidential election finds the same decay. Campaigns may be wasting millions of dollars running ads weeks if not months before election day, only to have any effects of those ads dissipate. ”
There may be a good lesson for Dems in one anecdote in Sabrina Tavernise’s The Caucus post, “Democrat Wins West Virginia Governor’s Race” in the New York Times: “Kathy Jackson, a retired janitor, said she would cast her vote for the Democratic candidate because she did not trust Mr. Maloney…”I heard on TV that he wanted to take away Medicare,” she said, sitting in a wheelchair in a McDonald’s restaurant in Charleston.”
Obama campaign making hay vs. GOP early voting suppression in Ohio. TPM has the video ad here.
Jeremy Redmon and Daniel Malloy have an article in the Atlanta Journal Constitution about the labor shortage and economic cost of the new Georgia immigration law. The authors explain: “Georgia’s economy is projected to take a $391 million hit and shed about 3,260 jobs this year because of farm labor shortages, according to a report released Tuesday by the state’s agricultural industry.” Many farmers believe the labor shortage and crop losses are a direct consequence of Georgia’s new immigrant-bashing law — House Bill 87 — passed by the Republican-controlled state legislature and signed into law by GOP Governor Nathan Deal. Latino farm workers fearing legalized harrassment have left the state in droves.
E. J. Dionne, Jr. sees a transformation of the race for 2012 in the events of the last week — to the benefit of President Obama and the Democratic Party. “Obama is a long way from being able to sing “Happy Days Are Here Again.” But for conservatives, the days of wine and roses are over.”

The image of congress has hit rock bottom. As Paul Kane and Scott Clement report in “Poll sees a new low in Americans’ approval of Congress” in the Washington Post:

After nine months of contentious battles on Capitol Hill, Americans have reached a new level of disgust toward Congress that has left nearly all voters angry at their leaders and doubtful that they can fix the problems facing the country.
Whether Republican, Democrat or independent, more Americans disapprove of Congress than at any point in more than two decades of Washington Post-ABC News polling.
Just 14 percent of the public approves of the job Congress is doing, according to the latest poll. That is lower than just before the 1994, 2006 and 2010 elections, when the majority party was on the verge of losing power in the House.
For most it’s not just a casual dislike of Congress: Sixty-two percent say they “strongly disapprove” of congressional job performance. An additional 20 percent “somewhat” disapprove.

Interestingly, among those who were dissatisfied with congress, 39 percent blamed the Republicans, while 25 percent blamed President Obama, with 27 percent blaming both and 9 percent having no opinion. Respondents were not asked if they blamed Democrats.
The last time approval dipped under 20 percent, Dems reaped the benefit. As Clement and Kane note, “Congressional approval has been cut in half since March and stands below 20 percent for the first time since October 1994, just before Republicans ended four decades of Democratic rule in the House.”
The data certainly indicates that the Republicans’ responsibility for congressional gridlock could be a potent meme for Democratic candidates in ’12. It appears that Dems have little to lose and much to gain by hammering the “do-nothing Republicans” meme in ads and throughout the Democratic echo chamber.
Apart from Republicans getting most of the blame for dysfunctional government, the really good news in the poll is that it looks like President Obama’s jobs initiative is getting a favorable response. The authors note that the President now “holds a 49 to 34 percent advantage over congressional Republicans when it comes to the public’s trust on creating jobs. That is a change from September, when they were evenly split at 40 percent each.” A majority, 52 percent, said they supported the President’s jobs plan, with 36 percent opposed.

At HuffPo Pollster, Mark Blumenthal’s post “Obama’s Approval Rating Is Underwater, But Don’t Try To Predict 2012 Yet,” notes that, despite lowered approval ratings, President Obama lead GOP frontrunners Romney and Perry. Although approval ratings are slightly better predictors of election results than trial heats, “none of these polling numbers can predict the winner of the presidency a year or more before the election,” as Blumenthal points out.
Jim Wallis, CEO of Sojourners has a HuffPo post, “Defining ‘Evangelicals’ in an Election Year” reminding progressives not to write off all evangelicals as conservative Republicans. As Wallis notes, “Now in 2011, the Right still gets it wrong when they claim that most evangelicals are firmly in their base; and the Left still doesn’t get it when they tacitly agree with the Right’s claim that all the evangelicals essentially belong to the most conservative candidates….it is precisely because we are Bible-believing and Jesus following evangelical Christians, that we have a fundamental commitment to social, economic, and racial justice, to be a good stewards of God’s creation, to be peacemakers in a world of conflict and war, and to be consistent advocates for human life and dignity wherever they are threatened.”
Lest you thought there was a limit to GOP electoral scams, Jane Mayer writes in The New Yorker on “State for Sale: A conservative multimillionaire has taken control in North Carolina, one of 2012’s top battlegrounds,” a revealing look at Art Pope’s “REDMAP, a new project aimed at engineering a Republican takeover of state legislatures.”
The New York Times has an update on white house strategy, “Obama Charts a New Route to Re-election” by Jackie Calmes and Mark Landler. The authors believe the Obama campaign is focusing on securing states where demographic trends favorable to Dems have taken root — with rapidly increasing numbers of “educated and higher-income independents, young voters, Hispanics and African-Americans, many of them alienated by Republicans’ Tea Party agenda.”
Some political pundits were shocked when Virginia and North Carolina, as well as Florida cast their electoral votes for Senator Obama in 2008. But demographic trends favoring Democratic candidates are accelerating in the south, as Chris Kromm explains in his Facing South post “Black Belt Power: African-Americans come back South, change political landscape.”
One of the more interesting political history books of the year, “The ‘S’ Word” by John Nichols has a fascinating chapter on Abraham Lincoln’s significant socialist connections and beliefs. That would be Abraham Lincoln, the Republican President, who said “The strongest bond of human sympathy, outside of family relations, should be one of uniting working people of all nations and tongues and kindreds.” and that “labor is the superior – greatly the superior – of capital.” There’s lots more here to annoy Republicans, when they trot out the sanitized, hagiographic Lincoln of high school history books.
Donna Jablonski has an update at the AFL-CIO Blog, “Working Families Stall Ohio Voter Suppression,” which should encourage citizens groups around the country to get organized and fight Republican schemes to disenfranchise pro-Democratic constituencies.
Lawrence Lessig, author of “Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress – – and a Plan to Stop It,” has a post making the case for small-donor reforms at Bloomberg.com. Says Lessig after reviewing several funding pathways: “There are comparisons to make and lessons to learn. But for now my aim is to talk strategy. If you believe that our Congress is corrupted; if you believe that corruption can be solved only by removing its source, if you believe special-interest funded elections are that source, then some version of small-dollar funded elections is the core to a strategy that could restore this republic..”
Michael Cooper reports at The New York Times on the expected impact of laws enacted in a dozen states “requiring voters to show photo identification at polls, cutting back early voting periods or imposing new restrictions on voter registration drives.” Cooper cites a study by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law indicating that the laws “could make it significantly harder for more than five million eligible voters to cast ballots in 2012.”
Well, this is good news. Kyle Trygstad’s “Senate Math Not So Simple” at roll call.com reports that “The conventional wisdom is that odds favor Republicans winning control of the Senate next year. But an examination of the 2012 landscape at the end of the third quarter shows the chamber’s majority could go either way” owing mostly to uncertainty about the outcomes of a number of GOP primaries.

Campbell Robertson’s New York Times article “For Politics in South, Race Divide Is Defining” scratches the surface of a trend Democrats should try to understand better.
Robertson focuses on Mississippi, the state where African Americans comprise the largest percentage of residents:

At a glance, Democrats may seem to be in better shape here than they are in neighboring states. Republicans won a supermajority in the Alabama Legislature in the 2010 elections and took over the Louisiana Legislature a month later as a result of several party switches, while Mississippi Democrats still control the State House of Representatives. Unlike in Louisiana, Democrats in Mississippi have actually managed to field candidates for a few statewide offices in this year’s elections, and hold the office of attorney general.
But the tale told by demographics is a stark one. Mississippi has, proportionally, the largest black population of any state, at 37 percent. Given the dependably Democratic voting record of African-Americans here, strategists in each party concede that Democrats start out any statewide race with nearly 40 percent of the vote.
…Merle Black, an expert on politics at Emory University in Atlanta, said that point is arguably already here. In 2008 exit polls, he pointed out, 96 percent of self-identified Republicans in Mississippi were white. Nearly 75 percent of self-identified Democrats were black. …Indeed, it is hard to imagine that Democratic support among whites could get any lower when, according to 2008 exit polls, only 6 percent of white males in Mississippi described themselves as Democrats.

The title of Robertson’s article is a little misleading. Robertson is not saying, as the title implies, that white southerners in the polling booth think, “Gee, I better vote Republican because I’m a white person.” Nor are African and Latino Americans voting Democratic at the polls solely because of their skin color. In reality, southerners vote more along the lines of their perceived economic interests.
People of color vote their real economic interests for the most part. The distortion in the south is more about the white working/middle class voters casting ballots against their own economic interests. This happens across the country to some extent, but it is more of a problem for Democrats in the south, where unions are weak and so-called “right-to-work” laws keep them that way.
Robertson notes that there are little pockets of Democratic strength in predominantly white communities throughout the south, with northeast Mississippi being a prime example. However, white progressives in the south are more concentrated in the big cities, closer-in suburbs and college towns.
Outside of the cities, most of the mainstream media targeting the working and middle class are conservative in policy outlook. Too many white voters in rural areas rarely hear or read a well-argued liberal opinion. Hopefully, MSNBC and the growth of the progressive blogospshere are beginning to change that. As income inequality continues to grow unabated, it’s not hard to imagine a tipping point at which southern whites will begin to question the wisdom of ever-increasing tax cuts for the rich and the party that pushes such policies as a panacea for all economic ills.
Robertson quotes Brad Morris, a Democratic strategist, on Democratic prospects, saying “We’ve hit rock bottom,” in the south, and I tend to agree. There’s just not much more room for growth of Republican political influence in the region, given current demographic parameters. And most of the demographic trends going forward favor Democrats.
The Republican echo chamber has been very successful in the south in terms of making demagogic attacks against Democratic candidates and policies stick. State Democratic Party organizations tend to be weaker and underfunded in the south and their messaging suffers as a result, while anti-union corporations in the south make sure Republicans have all the money they need. This is the heart of the GOP’s southern hustle.
President Obama’s victories in North Carolina, Virginia and Florida certainly suggest the Democrats should not write-off any southern states, as some have urged. With stronger candidates, Democrats can win more elections.
Looking to the future, Democrats are going to do better as a result of explosive growth of Latino and African Americans in the southern states. But there must also be more of a conscious effort on the part of state and local Democratic parties to recruit and train stronger candidates. Dems need more candidates of color to turn out these rapidly-growing demographic groups. But they also need more candidates, women in particular, who have white working-class roots and/or know how to reach white working families. With that commitment, a substantially more Democratic south in the not-too-distant future is a good bet.

Jim Hightower takes a disturbing look at “The Corporate Takeover of the 2012 Presidential Election” at nationofchange.org. Hightower notes that “Corporate hucksters, intent on political profiteering, are setting up dummy funds with such star-spangled names as Make Us Great Again and Restore Our Future….These groups can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money…As of August, more than 80 percent of the money in Super PACs backing Republican candidates had come from only 35 people writing six- and seven-figure checks.”
In his post, ‘Decision Season” at The American Prospect, Scott Lemieux considers the political and legal ramifications of the Supreme Court ruling on the Affordable Care Act — during the peak of the 2012 presidential campaign.
Steven Shepard reports at National Journal’s Hotline on Call that President Obama is holding a slight lead over both Romney (+2 percent) and Santorum (+3 percent) in a new Quinnipiac University PA poll, with a 6 percent edge over Perry. The poll also found that 52 percent of respondents want PA to keep its winner-take-all electoral vote allocation, with 40 percent favoring the district allocation scheme proposed by the GOP.
The Rude Pundit has the snark chops needed to put into perspective bloated MSM coverage of Chris Christie’s non-announcement, while all but ignoring the Occupy Wall Street protests.
John Paul Rollert posts on “The Hardy Myth of ‘Job Creators‘” at Salon.com, and offers some interesting observations about the elite group of folks the GOP argues should be exempt from taxation. During the Clinton Administration, notes Rollert, “…Higher taxes on the “job creators” proved no obvious hurdle to economic growth — the economy grew for 116 consecutive months, the most in U.S. history — it did cut the deficit from $290 billion when Clinton took office to $22 billion by 1997 and helped put the country on a projected path to paying off the national debt by 2012.”
Conversely, Brian Cooney’s “GOP in Denial: Tax Cuts Do Not Increase Revenues” in the Lexington (KY) Record brings the numbers that show Republican tax cuts are no panacea for joblessness: “In 2008, tax expert David Cay Johnston reported that “Total income was $2.74 trillion less (in 2008 dollars) during the eight Bush years than if incomes had stayed at 2000 levels.” The average family lost $21,000 during this period…The government didn’t do any better. According to the Washington Post, by 2011 the Bush tax cuts had cost, in lost revenue, $2.8 trillion…In September, 2009, the majority staff of the Joint Congressional Economic Committee reported that the Bush economy had the slowest job growth of any administration since Herbert Hoover.”
The Campaign for America’s Future presents “A Contract for the American Dream,” a 10-point agenda to restore America’s economy leading up to the October 3rd “Take Back the American Dream” conference.
We’ve reported on a couple of the unintended beneficial consequences of the ‘Citizens United’ decision, none of which offset the huge damage the ruling does by giving corporations carte blanche in supporting Republican candidates. But In These Times has an article “Corporations Are Not People: A Movement Builds to Fight Corporate Rule and Amend the Constitution,” by Joel Bleifuss, reporting on the emergence of a multi-faceted campaign to address the injustices of the ruling.
Far be it from TDS to gin up paranoia about the integrity of America’s vote-counting systems. But do read Elinor Mills’s “E-voting Machines Vulnerable to Remote Vote Changing” at cnet.com, or at least this graph: “The Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argonne Laboratory, which is a division of the Department of Energy, discovered this summer that Diebold touch-screen e-voting machines could be hijacked remotely, according to team leader Roger Johnston…As many as a quarter of American voters are expected to be using machines that are vulnerable to such attacks in the 2012 election.”
For a motherlode of clever quotes about economic inequality and greed, check out inequality.org, featuring such pearls as Matthew Arnold’s “Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class” and Robert Lear’s “You have to pay your CEO above average or you’re admitting you have a below-average CEO.”
Speaking of economic inequality, E. J. Dionne, Jr. has a WaPo column explaining “Why Conservatives Hate Warren Buffet,” Says Dionne: “No wonder partisans of low taxes on wealthy investors hate Warren Buffett. He has forced a national conversation on (1) the bias of the tax system against labor; (2) the fact that, in comparison with middle- or upper-middle-class people, the really wealthy pay a remarkably low percentage of their income in taxes; and (3) the deeply regressive nature of the payroll tax.”
At commondreams.org, Former U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson takes a look at the latest messaging advice from GOP wordsmith guru Frank Luntz. Grayson has some fun with Luntz’s penchant for euphemisms and suggests some new ones: Vampires are “blood recyclers” and nuclear war is “1000 points of light.” Riffing on Luntz’s “You don’t create jobs by making life difficult for job creators,” Grayson explains that “job-creators” is Republican-speak for “greedy, soulless multinational corporations who don’t give a damn about you.”
Kyle Kondik argues at Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball that Dems’ prospects for retaking control of the House of Reps depends on President Obama’s re-election, and he rolls out charts assessing the most competitive House races. If you wanna help, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s ‘Drive to 25’ campaign accepts donations here and ActBlue’s progressive House candidates can be supported here.