Juan Cole blogs today on the uproar over the burning of old copies of the Qur’an at the US military at Bagram Base in Afghanistan, which has already claimed the lives of U.S. serivice men, as well as Afghanis. The tragedy is made more horrific by demagoguery on both sides amplifying animosity in Afghanistan and the U.S.
We can’t control bigotry in other nations. But when it is practiced by Americans, it should be called out, as Cole does:

Newt Gingrich and now Rick Santorum have slammed Obama for apologizing. Santorum called the gesture weak. (This stance is sheer hypocrisy from someone who has complained that Obama is ‘waging war on religion’ !)

No one should be surprised by the reaction of Muslims in Afganistan and other Arab nations, nor that their protests would escalate into violent protests. It’s right to condemn those violent protests, but it’s also important to understand its causes, in this case the perception of Muslims that their sacred scriptures have been disrespected by an occupying military force from half-way around the world.
There is no question in my mind that President Obama did the right thing in apologizing for the Qur’an burnings. A cornerstone of American values must always be respect for all religions — that’s the American way of our best ideals. Not apologizing for the burnings would the equivalent of insulting millions of people who belong to one of the world’s most widely-practiced faiths. It would also exacerbate animosity towards American troops in Afghanistan and perhaps elsewhere.
The President did the right thing. But the most important lesson for the Obama administration would be that the longer we occupy Afghanistan, the greater the chances for such incidents to occur.
Meanwhile, Santorum, Gingrich and their Republican echo chamber enablers are playing a risky game for political advantage, and one which has the potential for endangering American troops. They should be held accountable by the media and the electorate.

As I mentioned yesterday, “Border” was the most frequently-uttered word in the last Republican presidential debate in Arizona. CNN.com’s LZ Granderson explores some of the implications of the term in his post, “Does ‘secure the border’ mean ‘keep America white’?“:

Now there will be plenty of other buzz words and euphemisms that will be tossed around during the debate, but since it is being held in Arizona, chances are the most popular phrase will be “secure the border.”
…The candidates will argue that it’s a matter of national security. That it isn’t just the friendly illegal immigrants looking for work we must worry about, but terrorists, drug lords and other criminals who seek to make their way through our porous border. They will say if they were president they would build walls, add troops, even commission a Death Star to keep this country safe.
Newt Gingrich has promised to build a double fence along the entire southern border, adding, “”The United States must control its border. It is a national security imperative,”
Ron Paul said “If elected president, I would move to quickly end foreign nation building efforts and use many of the resources we waste playing world’s policemen to control our southern border.”
They all will receive applause, and it will all sound great … until you realize that “secure the border” is slang for “keep the Mexicans out.”

If that sounds a little overstated, consider the border with Canada, as Granderson explains:

…The Canadian border is largely ignored in this dialogue despite being more than twice the size of the Mexican border and less than 1% secure, according to a 2011 report by the Government Accountability Office. Even if we were to disregard the 1,538 miles between Alaska and Canada, the 3,987 mile border connecting the lower 48 to our neighbors up north is still much larger than the 1,933-mile stretch that connects us to Mexico.

Read more…

Republican myopia regarding Latino voters is turning out to be a huge blessing bestowed on Democrats, as some recent statistics indicate:

Most repeated word in the GOP debate last night: “border” (followed by “illegal” and “fence”)
Percentage increase in the Phoenix Latino turnount from 2010 to 2011: 480%
Percentage of likely Republican primary voters in Arizona who “said they’d be more inclined to vote for a presidential candidate who backs SB 1070, according to the NBC News/Marist Poll”: 67+%
Percentage of Latino respondents saying the GOP ‘did not care about their support or was hostile to their commmunity’ in a recent Latino Decisions poll conducted for Univision: 72%
Number of GOP presidential candidates who have “voiced support for a broad amnesty that would allow younger illegal immigrants to become permanent legal residents”: Zero
Number of Times Rick Santorum said “Jobs” in the debate last night: Zero

It’s as if Santorum forgot he was really playing to a national audience. Granted, “Arizona is the epicenter of the national immigration debate,” as Michael Sherer notes in Time Swampland. Yet, even though the GOP still has a better shot than Dems of winning Arizona’s electoral votes, all of the candidates should get it by now that in every debate they are on a national stage, talking to Hispanics nationwide. Of course, their gamble is that immigrant-bashing will give them more value added in votes from whites worried about immigration than they will lose from Latino voters.
To some extent Santorum’s recent emphasis on social issues is understandable. Western Michigan is laden with conservative denominations and sects, and Santorum probably feels that his one shot at a bite of Hispanic votes in Arizona is to play his Catholic traditionalist card, hot and heavy. But the GOP has made a hideous mess of their cred among Latino voters, and it’s hard to see how they won’t pay a dear price for it in November.
“Conservatives have not realized how their tone and rhetoric has turned people off,” says Jennifer Korn, who led George W. Bush’s Latino outreach effort in 2004,” notes Scherer. “Latinos seem likely to account for a bigger share of the general electorate in battleground states like Colorado and Nevada than they did four years ago,” adds Tom Curry at msnbc.com.
But what’s good for the GOP in Arizona, may be disastrous nationwide. As Curry explains:

In the 2008 election, Arizona went for its own senator, McCain. This year, its 11 electoral votes are an alluring target for Obama’s strategists. But the Democrats’ “chances of it flipping are pretty minimal” this year due to the conservatism of white voters there, said Ruy Teixeira, a political demographer and senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a Democratic-allied think tank.
In the NBC News/Marist Poll of Arizona voters, in a hypothetical contest between Obama and Mitt Romney, 45 percent said they’d support Romney and 40 percent said they’d back Obama.
But overall in the general election, “The Latino vote is going to be absolutely crucial in 2012,” Teixeira said at a recent conference on Latino voters at American University in Washington.
In Nevada, for example, Teixeira projects a four percentage-point increase in the minority share of the vote and a five-point decline in white working-class voters’ share of the vote…If Obama can win 80 percent of minority voters nationally, “he could get shellacked” among white voters “as badly as Democratic congressional candidates were in 2010, when they lost the white working class by 30 points” and yet “he could almost survive that level of shellacking,” Teixeira argued.

Looking ahead to Georgia, the biggest state in the March 6 Super Tuesday primaries, Latinos are 8.8 percent of the state population, but only 22 percent of them are registered to vote, according to recent statistics. In addition, it is believed that many Latino migrant workers have left Georgia, angry about Republican-driven state ‘reforms,’ which encourage harassment of Hispanics.
However, the Latino vote can be influential, even in the northeast, as Curry explains:

Even in Pennsylvania, where Latinos were only four percent of the 2008 electorate, they may end up being crucial, Teixeira said…He predicted that Obama will lose among Pennsylvania’s white working-class voters, but “all he has to do is not get totally wiped out. He can afford a 15-point loss, he can afford a 20-point loss, what he doesn’t want is 30-point loss” among white working-class voters…If he can get the Latino vote mobilized and motivated to vote for him at a high level, I think it very much reinforces his chances of taking the state,” he said.

Meanwhile Latinos are experiencing a jobless rate 2 percent higher than the national average. And polls indicate that jobs and the economy are still the primary concerns of Hispanic voters. And Santorum doesn’t even mention the word “jobs” in last night’s debate?
To be fair, Santorum’s GOP rivals are no more appealing to Hispanic voters, with their equally-dismal records on issues of concern to Latinos. But Santorum is supposed to be the Republican candidate with the most cred on job-creation. That candidate was nowhere in sight last night.

Give it up for former Republican Senator Alan Simpson (WY), yes he of the Simpson-Bowles Commission, for speaking out against Santorum’s homophobia, according to The Hill’s Daniel Strauss:

“I am convinced that if you get into these social issues and just stay in there about abortion and homosexuality and even mental health they bring up, somehow they’re going to take us all to Alaska and float us out in the Bering Sea or something,” Simpson said in an interview with CBS News released on Wednesday. “We won’t have a prayer.”
…”He is rigid and a homophobic,” Simpson, a Mitt Romney supporter, said. “He said, ‘I want a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage,’ and they said, ‘Well, what about the people who are already married?’ And he said, ‘Well, they would be nullified.’ I mean what is, what’s human, what’s kind about that? We’re all human beings, we all know or love somebody who’s gay or lesbian so what the hell is that about? To me it’s startling and borders on disgust.”

Simpson didn’t say whether he was bothered by Romney’s failure to speak out with similar indignation.

Political Buzz Examiner Ryan Witt has crunched the polling data for the states and finds President Obama would win by over 100 electoral votes if the election were held today.
Santorum’s vicious attack against President Obama’s religious beliefs is already boomeranging. Kirsten Powers takes him to task at The Daily Beast for his radical contempt for environmental protection, in contrast to a growing community of Christian greens: “Perhaps it’s really Senator Santorum who hews to a “phony theology” at odds with the Bible. Santorum, who has been a shameless apologist for polluters, appears to worship at the altar of business and free enterprise no matter the cost to the health of Americans–including unborn Americans…Most recently he blasted the Environmental Protection Agency’s new rule placing first-ever limits on the amount of mercury that coal-fired power plants can emit into the air. Mercury is a neurotoxin that has been known to damage developing fetuses and children and causes myriad negative health effects in adults.”
E.J. Dionne, Jr. sets the stage for ‘the Ash Wednesday debate,’ and ventures a prediction: “My sense is that Santorum’s social issue extravaganza has put him in danger of losing the Michigan primary.”
Former Bush speechwriter David Frum entertains the Republicans’ most dreaded scenario in his CNN post “GOP’s worst nightmare — a contested convention.”
Wapo’s Ruth Marcus makes a case for Dems moving toward the center, based on a new Third Way report. Says Marcus, “…Democratic-leaning independents have different views than those who call themselves Democrats. As Eberly reports, they are “less supportive of government intervention in the economy, more likely to believe that the government has gotten too involved in things people should do for themselves, and express higher levels of support for cutting Social Security spending.”
Also at WaPo, Eugene Robinson explains why Dems should root for Santorum. Grey Lady conservative columnist Ross Douthat agrees: “it would almost certainly be a debacle.”
For a good round-up of the GOP’s million-dollar Super-PAC sugar-daddies, read the NYT’s “In Republican Race, a New Breed of Superdonor” by Nicholas Confessore, Michael Luo and Mike McIntire.
You know that Suffolk University poll showing Scott Brown with a 9-point lead over Elizabeth Warren in the MA senate race, in contrast to three other recent polls showing Warren with a 3-point lead? Turns out some wonks think the Suffolk poll’s methodology was a little dicey. Mark Blumenthal has the skinny here.
Joan Walsh has a belated Valentine to Rick Santorum at Salon.com, for his calling attention to what a GOP victory would mean for American women who are accustomed to making their own decisions about their bodies. “Santorum may be compromising his own political future almost as much as he’s compromising women’s rights with his increasingly crackpot declarations. He’s also helping Virginians who oppose their state GOP’s extremism to get attention to their cause, while the Virginia GOP helps national Democrats sound alarms about Santorum’s lunacy. It’s a win-win for proponents of women’s freedom. I keep pinching myself to make sure it’s not a political trick.”

Democratic strategist Mark Mellman posts on “From a referendum to a choice” at The Hill, noting that the GOP’s original strategy of making the 2012 presidential contest a “referendum on Obama” is rapidly losing viability, with each of the 4 leading GOP candidates making their less-than-impressive track records an unavoidable concern of sensible voters.
Rubio leads in veepstakes poll of Republican voters conducted 2/6-12 by Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind, despite his declaration of non-interest.
If you missed it, like I did, chuckles await you at The Daily Beast in Barbie Latza Nadeau’s “Rick Santorum’s Communist Clan in Italy.” Nadeau writes “On the campaign trail, Santorum often touts his grandfather’s flight from Italy “to escape fascism,” but he has neglected to publicly mention their close ties with the Italian Communist Party…In Riva del Garda his grandfather Pietro and uncles were ‘red communists’ to the core,” writes Oggi journalist Giuseppe Fumagalli…”
It looks like Dems have a good chance to take the U.S. Senate seat now held by Sen. Richard Lugar. Democratic Rep. Joe Donnelly will run against the winner of the Republican primary, in which Sen. Lugar is “being pounded by state Treasurer Richard Mourdock over questions of residency” (Lugar lives in McLean, VA), as Mary Beth Schneider reports in the Indianapolis Star. The Indiana Election Commission will hear challenges Friday to Lugar’s appearance on the ballot.
The Supreme Court may take a case which could reverse Citizens United, taking into account the experience of the two years since the ruling, reports Brenda Wright at Demos.
With low Republican turnout in the primaries, caucuses and beauty contests, the effort to get Dems to cross over and vote in the GOP contests is gathering steam. Kos explains the strategy behind “Operation Hilarity: Let’s keep the GOP clown show going!” Kos challenges Dems “who live in open primary and caucus states–Michigan, North Dakota, Vermont and Tennessee in the next three weeks–to head out and cast a vote for Rick Santorum.” Kos adds, “…If you’re squeamish about this, just remember what’s at stake–not just the White House, but Nancy Pelosi’s gavel and a Senate run by Mitch McConnell. The weaker the GOP standard bearer, the better our chances in November. Rush Limbaugh and his ilk have had no problem meddling in our own contests…The Republicans have offered up this big, slow, juicy softball. Let’s have fun whacking the heck out of it.”
Ayn Randite Rep. Paul Ryan gets a richly-deserved pummeling by The Economist for his sneering at Europe as a supposed exemplar of debt burden: The Economist responds: “The European Union has lower government debt levels than America. Gross government debt in the 27 nations of the EU was 80% of the region’s GDP at the end of 2010; in America gross federal debt at the end of 2010 was 94% of GDP. Furthermore, government debt is growing more slowly as a percentage of GDP in the EU than in America, because pretty much every nation in the EU is implementing austerity measures. The general government deficit in the EU-27 in 2010 was 6.6% of GDP. In America the federal deficit in 2010 was 9% of GDP..”
Just what Romney needed to reclaim his creds with Michigan workers —Trump to the rescue.
Meanwhile, Andrew Romano reports at The Daily Beast: “For much of his presidency, Barack Obama has struggled with working-class whites. But Michigan is providing him with some signs of hope. Thanks in large part to the Obama-Bush auto-bailout package, the state’s unemployment rate has plummeted to 9.3 percent from a recent high of 14.1 percent–the swiftest, sharpest improvement in the country. Obama’s local numbers have followed suit: his approval rating is now well above water, and he leads Romney by double digits after trailing as recently as November, partly because he has gained ground in Macomb County, the original home of the Reagan Democrats. To win nationally, Obama needs to crack 40 percent (his number in 2008) among non-college-educated whites. If Michigan is a preview of things to come, he stands a good chance of pulling it off.”

Of all the bad decisions Republican leaders have made during the last year — and it is a long litany of stupid calls — it would be ironic if the most self-destructive one turned out to be their suicide attack to destroy the American labor movement.
I say ironic, because last may AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, with the strong support of union leaders, announced at the National Press Club that labor unions were tired of being taken for granted and would no longer provide automatic support for Democratic candidates, who didn’t reciprocate by supporting the priorities of the trade union movement. As Trumka said, “If leaders aren’t blocking the wrecking ball and advancing working families’ interests, then working people will not support them.”
He meant it. Union leaders were sorely disappointed by weak Democratic support of measures like the Employee Free Choice Act, which would help strengthen union organizing rights. And there a number of Democratic candidates who received support from unions, but who didn’t do much to advance other bread-and-butter union priorities, like fair trade. Trumka and other union leaders understood that Republicans were the primary force obstructing pro-union legislation, but they also felt, with some good reason, that too many Dems, including many ‘blue dogs,’ caved to the Republicans too easily.
Smart Republicans welcomed this development. Anything that reduced labor support for their opponents they saw as a good thing. Unions provided about 30 percent of the top four Super-PAC expenditures supporting Democrats and about two-thirds of the financial support provided by the pro-Democratic House Majority PAC. But today, unions are facing a very different reality, as Matea Gold and Melanie Mason report in the L.A. Times:

Flash forward to today: Labor appears squarely back in the Democrats’ corner for the 2012 election — pushed there in large part by Republican attacks on collective bargaining rights for public employees.
Those and other anti-union measures are rallying organized labor to the side of its longtime Democratic allies, and not just in states such as Wisconsin, Ohio and Michigan, where they are battling efforts aimed at curbing union organizing.
The country’s biggest unions also have played a central role in helping a network of federal pro-Democratic “super PACs” get off the ground, pouring more than $4 million into those groups in 2011, even as many wealthy liberals kept their checkbooks closed.
And some major labor groups have even inserted themselves into the Republican presidential primaries with ads that take aim at White House hopeful Mitt Romney.

So, not only have Republicans overplayed their hand as legislative obstructionists, souring the public into record-low approval ratings of their party; Not only have they revealed themselves as groveling lapdogs for their wealthy contributors at the expense of working people; Not only has the GOP defined itself, most recently, as the party of extremist opposition to women’s reproductive self-determination. Now they have also taken a huge trump card that they could have played to significant advantage — labor’s decision to withhold support from some Democrats — and compelled the union movement to not only reverse that decision, but to go all in for record union support of Democratic candidates.
Democrats should hold a national “Thank Scott Walker Day.” But it’s not just Walker; It’s Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels and Ohio Governor John Kasich and other GOP leaders who have been arrogant enough to think they could crush the union movement with little resistance and no consequences. With classic Republican myopia, they are doubling down, as Mason and Gold explain:

Across the country, state GOP lawmakers — many of whom were swept into office by the tea-party-fueled wave that dominated the 2010 midterm election — are aggressively pushing right-to-work laws that would make it harder for unions to collect dues. And in the presidential campaign, Romney has taken a particularly antagonistic posture against what he calls “big labor.”

As a result,

“I think we’ll be more engaged in 2012 than certainly in the last 20 years,” said Mike Podhorzer, political director for the AFL-CIO, a federation of 57 unions. “Working people realize in a way they never have what a threat the current Republican platform is to their well-being.”
Organized labor is now expected to match or slightly exceed the estimated $400 million that unions spent to help elect Barack Obama and congressional Democrats in 2008, according to Marick F. Masters, a business professor who studies the labor movement at Michigan’s Wayne State University.

As the authors note further, one union alone, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, will invest up to $100 million this year to help Democrats. “What’s the alternative?” asks AFSCME President Gerald McEntee. The union has already spent $1 million attacking Romney in Florida. SEIU also ran attack ads against Romney in the Sunshine state. The ads represented unprecedented involvement in a GOP primary.
Labor unions are supporting very few GOP candidates who support them. But the pro-Republican pickings for unions are exceedingly slim this year as a result of the GOP’s jihad on unions. The AFL-CIO will be more selective in choosing which particular Democratic candidates they support this year. But the GOP’s war on collective bargaining has insured that union support of Democrats will be stronger than ever, both in dollars and muscle.

Down 15 points to Santorum in Michigan in a PPP poll, Romney could ill afford to write an op-ed in the Detroit News blasting the federal rescue of Big Auto and calling himself a “son of Detroit.” But that’s exactly what he did. As former Governor Jennifer Granholm put it, “He opposed the rescue package for the automakers…Mitt Romney turned his back on Michigan. I would say he stabbed us in the back during our darkest hour and we’re not going to forget.”
Or, as The Economist puts it in its ‘Democracy in America’ blog: “ONE of Mitt Romney’s problems is that he lays it on too thick. He’s not just a conservative, he’s a “severe conservative”. He feels your pain because he too is “unemployed”. And he understands America’s car industry because he’s a Tigers-cheering motorhead, a true “son of Detroit”…The candidate was born in Detroit, though he grew up in Bloomfield Hills, one of America’s wealthiest cities. He probably cheered for the Tigers as a kid, but his position has since evolved. And cars may really be “in my bones”, as he claims, but he advocated letting Detroit go bankrupt in 2008…Free-marketeers that we are, The Economist agreed with Mr Romney at the time. But we later apologised for that position…”
Santorum up 7 over Romney in a big, bad bellwhether Ohio. But Romney does better than Santorum with RV’s in a head to head with Obama. Go figure.
In collaboration with Labor Council for Latin American Advancement and Mi Familia Vota, the League of United Latin American Citizens announces “strategies to increase the Latino voter registration and turnout; as well as the efforts to defend the rights of Latino voters across the country” and noting that “the Hispanic turnout is expected to be 26% greater than it was in 2008.”
A new CNN/ORC International poll indicates enthusiasm among Republican voters is tanking — a 13-percent decline since October, according to Catalina Camia’s article “CNN poll: Republicans losing fire for election” in USA Today On Politics.
Paul Begala writes in The Daily Beast about Bruce Springsteen’s new single “We Take Care of Our Own,” in which “the Boss is at his blue-collar best,” singing “We take care of our own/Wherever this flag’s flown.” Begala also has a plug for Jonathan Alterman’s new book, “The Cause“: Begala calls it “an important analysis of postwar American liberalism,” featuring a chapter on Springsteen and his vision of America, “one in which working men and women were imbued with dignity, even heroism, where gays were embraced as brothers and sisters, where blacks and whites worked and played together, and where ‘nobody wins unless everybody wins.” Begala adds, “Something’s happening here. From the Boss to Dirty Harry, our leading cultural indicators are foretelling a gritty, gutsy, all-American comeback. If the president is lucky, it will accelerate during Springsteen’s upcoming concert tour, build through the Olympics, gain steam during the political conventions, and crescendo in November.”
Nate Silver’s “Why Obama Will Embrace the 99 Percent” in the New York Times Magazine makes an interesting case that Obama’s new populist themes could serve him particularly well in key swing states, if he picks up 10 percentage points among white voters earning less than $50K: “All told, there are 101 electoral votes in swing states that Obama could either put into play or make more secure under the populist paradigm — well more than the 36 he might lose among Virginia, Colorado and New Jersey…The reason for the imbalance is that most wealthy whites do not live in swing states but in enclaves that the sociologist Charles Murray calls SuperZIPs. Most of these are in states like New York, California, Maryland and Massachusetts that are very far from being competitive. ”
At The American Prospect, John Sides argues in “Zombie Politics” that the only significant trend of white workers tilting to vote Republican is in the southern states.
Stephanie Schriock, president of Emily’s List, sounds the charge at HuffPo: “EMILY’s List — an organization committed to recruiting, training and electing pro-choice, Democratic women — is on track to raise more money to than in any previous election cycle. And we now have more than a million members. It took 26 years for us to reach half a million members, but thanks to the Republican Congress, we doubled our membership in just one year. If their policies weren’t so dangerous, we would have sent them a thank you note…More women are running for the United States Senate than at any time in our nation’s history…We’re confident that come November 6, there will be a record number of women serving on both sides of the Capitol.

Lots of speculative buzz out there about possible third party candidates and what they might do to President Obama’s hopes for re-election. Theo Anderson, for example, has a post up at In These Times, “Why Gary Johnson Should Terrify the Democrats,” arguing that,

The conventional wisdom is that a challenge by a strong Libertarian candidate would hurt the Republican more than the Democrat. But that seems unlikely. Democrats are usually critiqued from the right and pulled toward the center. The pressure coming from the GOP is always in the direction of more defense spending, a more hawkish foreign policy and fewer civil liberties. But what if Democrats are seriously challenged from the left on social and foreign policy-by a self-styled conservative?
The danger for Democrats isn’t that Johnson will win a significant percentage of the Left’s vote. The danger is that he’ll peel away a sizable share of the much-prized independent voters, who tend to be fiscal conservatives and social liberals, and who might feel, understandably, that Obama hasn’t played it straight with them. He backed away from his early-career support for gay marriage rights, for example, and endorsed civil unions when he became president. His position is now reported to be “evolving.” Does anyone know where it has evolved to, or when he might come to a definite conclusion? Or where he’s at on immigration reform? Or on the drug war?
There’s no uncertainty about where Gary Johnson stands on those issues. On every one of them, his position is both clear and deeply offensive to the GOP base, which is why he never had a chance of winning the Party’s nomination and has very little chance of winning the presidency. But it’s exactly why he appeals to independents.

Anderson’s rationale seems a little tortured, especially in stark contrast to Johnson’s limited charisma. Mr. Excitement he’s not, which is one reason he tanked in December, while quasi-libertarian Ron Paul is still a nettlesome factor in the GOP field.
Moreover, Anderson makes the classic mistake of treating Independents as a real-world third force, which they are not, as Alan I. Abramowitz has made clear with hard-headed data analysis on many occasions. From Abramowitz’s most recent post at Sabato’s Crystal Ball:

…There’s an organization that hopes to provide Americans with a centrist alternative to the two major party candidates in 2012. It’s called Americans Elect and it has already raised over $20 million…The absence of a high profile candidate is far from the only major obstacle that Americans Elect faces. Attracting media coverage, raising the hundreds of millions of dollars needed to wage a national campaign and securing a place on the ballot in all 50 states are perennial problems faced by third party candidates.
Of course there will be third party candidates on the ballot in 2012, just as there are in every presidential election. But it is unlikely that any of these candidates will approach the 19% of the vote that Ross Perot received in 1992, or even the 8% that he received in 1996.
Third party candidates have not fared well in recent presidential elections: The total vote won by third party candidates has fallen from 20% in 1992 to 10% in 1996, 4% in 2000, 1% in 2004 and 2% in 2008.
There’s an important reason why third party candidates have fared poorly in recent presidential elections and why third party candidates are likely to fare poorly again in 2012: partisan polarization. The vast majority of American voters today, in fact well over 90%, identify with or lean toward one of the two major parties. And the vast majority of those identifiers and leaners strongly prefer their own party’s candidates and policies to those of the opposing party.
…Over time, the parties have been moving apart. But both Democrats and Republicans are now closer to their own party and farther from the opposition party than at any time in the past four decades. Democrats on average place the Democratic Party exactly where they place themselves while they place the Republican Party very far to the right of where they place themselves. And Republicans on average place the Republican Party exactly where they place themselves while they place the Democratic Party very far to the left of where they place themselves. As a result, very few supporters of either party are likely to be tempted to vote for a centrist third party.

As for “Independents,” Abramowitz clarifies the ‘threat’:

There is one group of voters that might be tempted to vote for a centrist third party: pure independents. These voters, on average, place themselves right in the middle of the two major parties and rather far from either one. But pure independents typically make up less than 10% of the electorate, and they tend to be less interested in politics and less attentive to political campaigns than voters who identify with a political party. There are simply not enough of them and they are too hard to mobilize to have a major impact on the outcome of a presidential election.

None of this is to say that is it impossible for a third party candidate to do significant damage to the Democratic nominee, as many believe Ralph Nader did in 2000. But it is unlikely, especially with the existing possible third party candidates, none of whom appear to have the chops to bust the two-party paradigm.

One of America’s most treasured conceits is that our electorate votes on the basis issues and their interests, which they very often don’t do in the real world. A host of other factors come into play, including judgements about character, family tradition, party loyalty and others.
I’ve often wondered about the role of “likeability,” for lack of a better term, in candidate choice. I suspect that, who knows, maybe 5 percent of voters or more cast their ballots for a candidate because they like his/her personality. Sometimes this works to the benefit of Democrats, as possibly in 1960, when JFK got elected, or maybe ’92 and 2008, when Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, respectively, won.
I don’t know of any definitive measures for quantifying “likeability” in a useful way, although there have been a some dicey attempts. In 2007, for example, a Quinnipiac University poll asked respondents about their “preferences for guests at Thanksgiving dinner” The results indicated more Republicans wanted to have Obama over for Thanksgiving dinner than Hillary Clinton or John Edwards, while Dems preferred Giuliani as a Republican guest over McCain and Thompson.
In that same year, an Associated Press/Yahoo survey quizzed the public about their choices for a bowling teammates. As for the most and least welcome bowling teammates, Hillary Clinton was last choice for 39 percent of respondents and first choice for 20 percent of respondents, while Giuliani was favored by 17 percent and opposed by 13 percent.
Neither one of these polls seems a very serious effort to quantify likeability for purposes of voting. Just because you want to have dinner or bowl with a candidate, it doesn’t mean they have nailed your vote. But it does seem like there should be a way to measure the phenomenon. There have also been “who was more likeable?” questions in polls to assess debate performance, but not much correlation with voting choices.
The “favorability” ratings in many polls are useful. But a favorable opinion about a candidate can be based on issue positions and job performance, well as personality factors. It’s not quite the same thing as ‘likeability,’ which is hard enough to define, much less quantify. Yet it could be a pivotal factor in a close election.
Obama seems to have likeability, which may be reflected in his substantially higher approval and favorability ratings than his party. He conveys a positive spirit and an appealing, relaxed demeanor, which I doubt can be convincingly quantified. Maybe that’s why he was called “No Drama Obama” toward the end of the ’08 campaign, while McCain was awash in tense theatrics. The wingnuts’ shrill personal attacks against him notwithstanding, my hunch is that Obama’s likeability will serve him well again in November.