here. A more detailed description of the methodology is presented here
The results are significant for more than simple bragging rights or partisan propaganda. Ed Kilgore and many other Democratic election analysts have been arguing that structural factors – the typically more conservative-leaning demographic turnout in mid-term elections and the unusual number of Democrats defending seats in basically Republican districts — will explain a large part of the Republican victories, much more than the “enthusiasm gap” that has been detected in the opinion data.
The size of mass demonstrations provides an important source of information about relative levels of “enthusiasm” – one that is independent of opinion polling. If the Republican storyline were correct – that the coming vote will reflect a growing, passionate rejection of the Obama and Democratic agenda by the American people, one would expect to see an increasing arc of conservative mass mobilization as more time passed, more outrage accumulated and the critical elections neared.
Instead, the September 2009 Tea Party march in Washington D.C. – which had at best 90-100,000 participants marked the high point of attendance. This year’s September Tea Party march was only a fraction of that number and Beck’s heavily promoted “Restore Honor” rally was only about the same size. The fact that the March for Sanity was double the size of Beck’s rally suggests that any Republican spin about “All Americans (except a small minority) are rising in rebellion against the Dems” is simply not supported by the data on mass mobilization.

The real issue about Rand Paul’s religion is not what he believed in college, it’s what he believes today. Paul says he is a Christian but at the same time he also says he is a disciple of Ayn Rand.
Sorry, but that’s pure crap. You can’t be both at the same time. Just take a look at what Ayn Rand said about religion:
Ayn Rand on God:

Every argument for God and every attribute ascribed to Him rests on a false metaphysical premise. None can survive for a moment on a correct metaphysics.

Ayn Rand on Faith:

…. The alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind
Faith is the worst curse of mankind, as the exact antithesis and enemy of thought.

Ayn Rand on Christian Compassion:

Now there is one word–a single word–which can blast the morality of altruism out of existence and which it cannot withstand–the word: “Why?” Why must man live for the sake of others? Why must he be a sacrificial animal? Why is that the good? There is no earthly reason for it–and, ladies and gentlemen, in the whole history of philosophy no earthly reason has ever been given.
It is only mysticism that can permit moralists to get away with it. It was mysticism, the unearthly, the supernatural, the irrational that has always been called upon to justify it… one just takes it on faith.

Mysticism, of course, was one of Ayn Rand’s favorite synonyms for religion and her view gets genuinely vile when you add in her countless statements that literally dripped with contempt and loathing for the weak, the helpless, the needy – the people Jesus called “the least of these”. Her “Virtue of Selfishness” described such people as contemptible failures and parasites — inferiors to be despised, not comforted.
So here are three questions the press should demand Paul answer:

1. You have described yourself as a follower of the libertarian philosophy of Ayn Rand but Rand was a militant atheist who said that every single argument for God is false. Which view do you reject today — Ayn Rand’s “objectivist” philosophy or Christian belief.
2. Ayn Rand said that faith is a “curse of mankind”, one that “destroys the mind” – how can you call yourself a follower of Rand and a Christian at the same time?
3. Christianity is based on compassion; Ayn Rand’s doctrine of “The VIrtue of Selfishness” says Christian compassion is not just wrong but contemptible. Which of these two doctrines do you disavow?

It’s possible that at this late stage of the campaign Rand Paul might just throw Ayn Rand under a bus to win the election (it would certainly be consistent with her advice to be totally selfish). But he’s already shown various times that he absolutely hates to disavow his extremist libertarian philosophy. As a result, questions that force him to directly face a choice between the doctrines of compassionate Christianity and Ayn Rand’s genuinely vile philosophy could produce some interesting fireworks.
Update: as the exchange in the comments section indicates, Paul could try to avoid the challenge posed by the questions above by quibbling about whether or not he is exactly a “follower” of Ayn Rand. A questioner need only replace the word “follower” with “stong admirer” to prevent this attempted evasion.

One of the most disturbing ideological views of today’s conservatives and the Republican Party is their acceptance of the idea that politics is literally a form of warfare and that liberals and Democrats can literally be viewed as “enemies.” On many occasions The Democratic Strategist has forcefully argued that this view is actually the distinguishing mark of modern political extremism.
But it is simply impossible to understand the “enthusiasm gap” and the frequent low enthusiasm of Democrats without understanding the military concept of morale. The critical fact that needs to be faced is that Democrats have a deeply engrained “culture of de-moralization” rather than of morale-building. Particularly after Democrats suffer setbacks or defeats, this culture of demoralization plays a critical and deeply destructive role.
In the military world, the term “morale” denotes a powerful mixture of passion, commitment, élan, fighting spirit, camaraderie and group cohesion. At the most basic level, it is what, throughout military history, separates a disciplined military unit from an untrained mass of peasants rounded up and dragged to the front by force who then panic and flee in disarray at the first burst of fire.
At first glance, the term “morale” seems essentially a synonym for bravery – the willingness to charge fearlessly into the face of enemy fire. For many whose only knowledge of war is literature, the civil war charges in Stephen Crain’s “The Red Badge of Courage” are the clearest image they can bring to mind.
This conception seems to fit reasonably well with the picture of war that is presented in a standard history book. In a history text, military campaigns generally appear rather straightforward – one side advances and the other retreats. On a typical map showing the German invasion of Russia in 1941, for example, the German drive for Moscow looks like one long and continuous series of forward thrusts. In 1944, in contrast, the map appears to show the Germans in one continuous retreat.
But when one studies military campaigns more closely, it becomes clear that this is not really what is going on. Throughout military history — from the battles of Roman legions to the panzers at the gates of Moscow — most military campaigns follow a more complex pattern.

• A military offensive pushes against a wide defensive line. In some places the advance stalls and cannot move forward, in others, the attack breaks through.
• In the areas of breakthrough, the offensive drives as far as it can but sooner or later encounters much stronger defenses – often a second prepared defensive line – and is forced to come to a stop.
• At this point the attacking army must dig in and prepare for a counterattack because the defender now knows where penetrations have occurred and can redirect its reserves to attack them. The fact that a counterattack is coming does not come as a surprise nor is it considered a setback: it is understood as a normal and expected part of warfare (during Roman military campaigns, for example, a legion would always build an elaborate defensive stockade every single evening to protect itself from attack, even after marching all day long.)
• In some places the new line created by the offensive holds against the counterattack; in others it breaks and is driven back. Once the line stabilizes along the front, the stronger side begins preparing a new offensive all over again.

Thus, seen in detail, a military campaign like the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 does not appear as a single continuous offensive but rather a vast series of small pushes and shoves – often fighting back and forth, over and over, for same town or few yards of terrain. The advances that look as if they were quick and straightforward on a map actually represent months of nightmarish days and nights of agony.
It is, in fact, hard to read the detailed accounts of individual units like platoons and companies in WWII without feeling a overwhelming sense of awe at the morale and dedication that was shown on all sides – the willingness to fight again and again, day after day, without any hope of a near-term victory.
This is the morale of a professional army- it is a deep and unswerving commitment to eventual victory, a willingness to suffer reverses, privation and death and to keep on going as months pass and seasons change with no sight of an end ever on the horizon.
In the particular circumstance of the aftermath of a setback or defeat, there are three basic ideas that military leaders make every effort to impress on their troops because they know these ideas are vital for maintaining a high level of morale:

• That setbacks and retreats are a normal part of warfare – they are a natural and inescapable part of the standard pattern of battle.
• That the failure of a particular attack or an order to retreat are not necessarily proof that the strategy employed was wrong. Taking calculated risks is an inherent and necessary part of warfare, and not all gambles can be successful.
• That casting blame or sinking into demoralization is not the proper response of a soldier to setbacks – in the military world these are considered reflections of weakness and defeatism, not justifiable frustration and anger.

Seen from this perspective, the idea that Democrats have a deeply engrained and profoundly destructive culture of demoralization now starts to come into clearer focus. Consider the beliefs that are implicitly reflected in the typical Democratic response to setbacks:

Read more…

Among the unfortunate consequences of the petulant White House sniping against the “professional left” is the fact that it has produced an understandable “circle the wagons” reaction and discouraged greater critical self-examination within the left itself. To a large degree, left assertions of the general form “if Obama had taken a more progressive stance on issue X, he would be more popular today” have tended to be accepted as largely self-evident rather than being subject to careful critical scrutiny.
Yet, even when viewed entirely from within a progressive-left perspective, there is an important inconsistency in this kind of critique of Obama’s political strategy – one which needs to be taken very seriously because this kind of critique will become a central part of the intra-Democratic debate after the November elections.
The inconsistency lies in the following:
On the one hand, left-wing critics of Obama are the most prompt and emphatic to reject the idyllic “civics book” vision of American political life as one big Norman Rockwell town meeting – an egalitarian utopia where every voter is equal and no individual has disproportionate power. On contrary left critics will invariably be the first to agree that the dominant social institutions in America — big business and the military primary among them — have massive, indeed, near-decisive power and influence in American politics and invariably use this power to tilt the playing field in their favor.
Yet when these same left critics turn to evaluate Obama’s political strategy, the constraints that this disproportionate power imposes on Obama’s choices are rarely cited as a critical or even dominant factor in his strategic decisions. On the contrary, it is striking to note how much of the left critique of Obama’s strategic choices is essentially psychological – Obama’s less-than-progressive decisions are most frequently attributed to his being too “timid”, “conservative”, “conciliatory”, “gullible in his choice of advisors” , “trapped in the D.C. beltway culture”, “afraid to stand up to powerful interests” or “unwilling to keep his campaign promises” – a mode of analysis which suggests that he actually has had essentially complete freedom to choose his degree of radicalism.
Rarely is explicit consideration given to possibility that Obama’s caution might be a calculated response to the threat of retaliation from major social institutions. Obviously, any particular concession Obama might make because of such a concern could still be judged to be a strategic mistake, but the left critique generally does not even try to distinguish between a concession motivated by concern about potential retaliation and a concession offered because of actual agreement with a conservative position. There is generally no clear conceptual distinction made between a strategic concession and a “sell-out.” All of the former are automatically defined as also the latter.
This leads to a very specific class of inconsistent arguments. Left critiques of Obama often argue that a more progressive or radical stance on some particular issue would have increased Obama’s political popularity but do not simultaneously evaluate the potential setbacks to his agenda that might have resulted if this same stance also provoked retaliation by the dominant social institutions
As a matter of both basic logic and political strategy, this is simply an inconsistent way of thinking. It is comparable to a military commander arguing for the potential benefits of a particular attack if it succeeds but omitting any mention of the potential risks if it fails.
Let us look specifically at the two major cases – Obama’s strategy with regard to big business and the military

Read more…

Democrats have always complained about the effect of corporate cash bankrolling massive ad campaigns and the problem has become vastly worse since the Citizen’s United court decision made secret contributions from unknown sources essentially the most important source of funding for political campaign advertising.
The Center for American Progress dropped an elegant depth charge into this secret world by exposing the facts that the Chamber of Commerce – a major source of this money – does not even keep money from foreign corporations separated from the domestic funds it uses for political ads and insultingly dismisses all calls for openness by essentially saying “it’s none of your F-ing business.”
The details make it even worse, with Chamber employees giving pep talks about the importance of the 2010 elections to foreign members of the organization – even to foreign firms that directly benefit from the export of American jobs overseas.
This provides great ammunition for populist attacks on the tidal wave of secret spending. But Democrats will not be taking advantage of the full power of this issue if they restrict their criticism to this particular line of attack alone.
The emergence of secret corporate cash as a major last-minute issue in the election gives Dems the opportunity to reduce the effectiveness of all Republican advertising — using a fundamental principle derived from social psychology.
In general, Americans know that the advertisements they see on TV are not “real”, even when they feature testimonials by average looking people with a caption below them that says “not a professional actor.” Many years of familiarity with commercials have trained the audience to be able to maintain a basic skepticism– because they know the ad is paid for by the seller — but still entertain the idea that the message being communicated might nonetheless be valid. Generally, viewers do not cognitively categorize commercials as simply either “true” or “false” but rather as either “plausible” or “implausible.” The audience knows, for example, that the square-jawed cowboy praising his Toyota Tundra as a rugged ranch vehicle probably doesn’t drive one, or necessarily even like the machine. But if the commercial is well made, it can still convince the viewer that the Tundra is worth considering as a rough-terrain truck.
Political advertisements work in much the same way. Viewers know that the ads are all one-sided propaganda for the candidates and not “facts,” but they still allow themselves to be influenced by messages that seem sufficiently plausible or convincing.
One basic finding from social psychology, however, is that, if a viewers’ conscious attention can be diverted from the content of an ad to suspicion about the motives of the communicator, the effectiveness of the ad actually does decline tremendously. In effect, if the viewers’ skepticism is consciously activated, the usual “Well, who knows? I know it’s just a commercial but what it says still might be true” reflex is inhibited. The viewer’s attention becomes focused on the commercial itself rather than the message it delivers.
Since Democrats all over the country are now being swamped with a tidal wave of nasty attack ads funded with secret money, every attempt to make voters focus their attention on the secret money behind the ads – rather than on the words of the ad itself – can have a very significant effect. The way to most effectively execute this strategy is with messages that directly and dramatically challenge voters to actively and skeptically think about the commercials they see at the moment when they appear on the TV screen.
Here are several examples of the kinds of messages that can substantially increase voter resistance to secret money anti-Democratic ads.

• That TV ad you are watching right now – guess what? It was paid for by the same people who shipped your job overseas. Are you really going to take advice from people like them?
• If a guy came into your house wearing a mask and tried to tell you who to vote for, would you listen to him? Well, that’s exactly what a commercial paid for with secret money does.
• That TV ad you saw last night – the corporations who paid for it are ashamed to even put their names on it. Do you really think you should believe what the ad says?
• If a corporation won’t even put its name on a TV ad it pays millions of dollars for, shouldn’t you assume that every single thing it says is probably a flat-out lie?
• Honest TV ads at least let you know who paid for them. Ads that don’t aren’t honest. It really is that simple.
• A political ad that hides the identity of who paid for it is no better than a nasty comment about a girl written on a barroom toilet wall.

These are just examples. The general point they illustrate is that, to the extent that Democrats can make viewers focus their conscious attention on the ads themselves rather than the messages they communicate, they can significantly reduce the impact of this years’ secret money advertising.

Ever since the Tea Party rallies and demonstrations began in April 2009, articles in The Democratic Strategist have repeatedly noted that the wildly inflated crowd estimates the organizers promoted were a two-edged sword. On the one hand they certainly cheered up the participants in the events and gave conservative publications a useful propaganda tool. But, at the same time, they also produced among the Tea Party activists a profoundly distorted notion of themselves as genuinely representing the vast, indeed overwhelming, majority of Americans — an illusion that has fueled their purge of more mainstream and more electable GOP candidates in favor of true believers and in consequence significantly weakened the GOP’s long term prospects.
As a result, Democrats and progressives should steadfastly resist the temptation to try to measure the success or value of Saturday’s event by arguing about whether it was as large, or larger, than either Glen Beck’s Restore Honor rally on August 28th or the much smaller Tea Party rally organized by Freedomworks this September 12th. Glen Beck’s rally, it must be remembered, was heavily promoted by the largest single TV network in America, featured the two most prominent and mediagenic national figures in the Tea Party conservative world, and provided an outlet for protest by people who felt profoundly marginalized by the preceding election. To create a roughly comparable sociological situation, one would have to imagine that, in 2006 — when liberals and Democrats were livid with fury at George W. Bush — Teddy Kennedy, Hillary Clinton and Coretta Scott King (had she still been alive at the time) had all jointly headlined a Washington march that was relentlessly promoted by CNN, NBC and all of the major liberal blogs and magazines.
The One Nation rally, in contrast, had no TV promotion, no major speakers, and no major and passionate unifying issue like the outrage liberals and Democrats felt in 2006 toward the Bush administration. As a result, the fact that it was almost certainly not as large as Beck’s August 28th rally but rather perhaps as large or larger than the September 12 Tea Party rally of this year should be considered neither surprising nor disheartening.
What is important, on the other hand, is not simply to recognize that the rally nonetheless represented a major step forward for the progressive movement, but, more important, to recognize three significant weaknesses that were exposed by the event.
First, although the formation of the coalition of 300 organizations that called the rally represents a major advance for the American progressive movement, the only sector of the new coalition that was actually able to mobilize large numbers of participants to attend the rally were the major progressive trade unions. There were substantial contingents at the rally from SIEU, the UAW, AFSME and the NEA. Each of these groups filled one of a variety of pre-divided sections of the mall between the Lincoln Memorial and the World War II memorial.
On the other hand, however, there were no comparable mobilized mass contingents from other major components of the coalition such as the Latino, GLBT, progressive youth or even African-American organizations. To be sure, there were many individual participants with shirts and signs reflecting their allegiance to organizations that represent these communities, and there were various clusters of hundreds who marched together under the banners of these groups. But there should have been clusters of thousands of people marching under those banners rather than just hundreds if these sectors of the coalition still retained the ability to mobilize their supporters in the way that major grass-roots organizations could in the past.
In truth, this is not a surprise. The ability to motivate and mobilize people to come to a demonstration in Washington does not arise spontaneously. It is built on the base of solid local grass-roots organizations. For many progressive groups this grass-roots foundation has withered greatly in the last few decades, leaving them with “supporters” whose support is to a large degree verbal or abstract and cannot be translated into mass action.
The second, related weakness that was revealed by the Washington rally was the startling absence of the progressive netroots. There was no large organized participation visible from any of the major internet based organizations – MoveOn, Daily Kos, Netroots Nation, Huffpo, Democrats.org, FireDogLake, Open Left and so on. While it would be understandable that participants in these online organizations might not be able to arrive at the rally together, the fact that none of these groups joined together in any organized presence for themselves once at the demonstration reflects a very significant disconnect between the virtual and real-world progressive movements. If the progressive netroots is not able to organize and play any significant part in real world progressive actions like mass demonstrations, its strength and relevance for progressive politics is substantially less than is often assumed.
Finally, the rally revealed that this new coalition has not yet developed any common vision or unifying program that could give it the coherence to play the role a leading progressive coalition must inevitably try to assume. The various speakers at the rally reasserted the outlooks and perspectives of their individual organizations but there was no common conceptual framework or agenda for action that could unify the audience at the rally once they returned home.
In particular, it was striking to note the absence of any clear recognition that the Republican Party has basically sabotaged the Obama administration and is now planning to paralyze the operation of government in order to prevent the enactment of policies with which they disagree. This is a profoundly radical and indeed “insurrectionary” program for an American political party and is one which the new progressive coalition will inevitably find itself compelled to oppose. As of yet, however, the looming threat has not even been clearly defined.
None of these weaknesses are intended to be criticisms of the new coalition or to diminish the substantial step forward that the One Nation rally represents. For the first major action of a new political force, the Saturday rally was more than enough of an achievement.
But as a movement that takes itself seriously, however, the new “One Nation” coalition must not imitate the infantile behavior of the Tea Party and make absurd overestimations of the attendance at its event or promote the notion that it already represents the majority of the country. There is hard work ahead, and no time to waste before getting started.
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Several weeks ago TDS predicted that the exposure of the deceptive editing of a videotape of a speech by Shirley Sherrod–and the resultant discrediting of right-wing propagandist Andrew Breitbart — would produce a trend toward even more extreme tactics by the media “action groups” now functioning on the right.
Yesterday, CNN reported on one such action — a plan by Andrew Breitbart’s most famous protégé, James O’Keefe, to trick a female CNN reporter into entering a phony “pleasure palace” filled with pornography, alcohol and sex toys and then to attempt to seduce her while secretly taping the encounter. The goal of the plan was either to embarrass and discredit CNN or else to essentially blackmail them into improving their treatment of right-wing activists in an upcoming documentary.
At first glance the plan seems utterly absurd and infantile – so much so as to be literally delusional (O’Keefe apparently believed that he actually had a realistic chance of succeeding in the planned seduction) and many in the media will be tempted to ignore it on these grounds.
But this is a tremendous mistake. Even a person who explodes in furious indignation at a vile set-up like this the very first instant they encounter it can be made to look like a participant by careful video editing and stage management (e.g. the con-man can say “But this is what you said you wanted yesterday on the phone” or “That’s not the impression you gave me when we had that hot phone call last night”. Carefully edited, a secretly taped video of something like this trap can easily be made to appear ambiguous or even incriminating simply by innuendo – e.g. “Why was she there in the first place?”, “Maybe she just got cold feet at the last minute”)
But the real danger for Democrats right now is not this particular trap – it’s the more sophisticated ones that can easily be sprung on Election Day.
Let’s face it. It is a trivially simple task to find one or two Black or Latino men in any city in America who, for a sufficient bribe, would be willing to show up at a polling place and suddenly begin shouting and brandishing wood canes or telescoping security batons of the kind that is now sold in any martial arts store. As little as 20 or 30 seconds of “amateur” video of such actions would be more than sufficient to create another national “scandal” like the New Black Panthers case that Fox has already elevated to mythic status. Three or four incidents like this in November would be sufficient to create a propaganda firestorm and delegitimize any elections Democrats happen to win.
The defensive strategy Democrats must employ is simple. Democratic poll-watchers and ordinary voters must immediately insist – in front of camera and witnesses — that any suspicious “intimidators” should be immediately arrested, booked and fingerprinted. If those “intimidators” then turn out to be paid agents of right-wing media action groups, the organizations that paid them should then be criminally prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and also sued in civil court for six or seven figure judgments. The Southern Poverty Law Center has successfully destroyed several white supremacist groups using this tactic and it is now past time to start deploying similar tactics against today’s right-wing media action groups.
To put it simply, the best Democratic strategy for preventing phony incidents of voter intimidation on Election Day is to make it very clear in advance that if the perpetrators are caught, the price will be so high that even totally cynical and immoral right-wing organizations will fear the consequences.
In contrast, the biggest mistake Democrats can make is to dismiss events like James O’Keefe’s attempted sexual blackmail of a CNN reporter as unimportant. On the contrary, O’Keefe’s aborted “black op” illustrates the profoundly dangerous extremist mind-set that many on the right now share. There are many right-wing activists who are just as cynical, dishonest and extreme as O’Keefe; Democrats cannot count on all of them being equally stupid.

Ed Kilgore’s post above clearly highlights one very important aspect of a broader problem: the common assumption in media commentary that trends in voter behavior can be meaningfully condensed into just one or two simple factors like an “enthusiasm gap” or “disappointment.”
To a substantial degree this desire by commentators to present simple explanations is motivated by two factors – the 800 word limit for most political commentary and the desire to propose simple answers of the form “If the Dems would just do X, they could win the election.”
In the case of the “enthusiasm gap,” for example, most commentary quickly lumps all of the “unenthusiastic” Democrats into one of the following three categories (1) left critics discuss the trend as reflecting anger at Obama’s “betrayal” of his campaign promises (2) mainstream commentators point to “disappointment” with the lack of significant change and (3) conservatives explain the problem as clearly reflecting a rejection of Obama’s agenda.
It’s not often noted by political commentators that advertising professionals – the people who are held directly and personally responsible for the success or failure of their communication strategies — generally don’t think this way. Quite the contrary, Ad people are trained to try and segment any overall audience they are trying to reach into meaningful sub-groups with distinct outlooks and then create specific message that speak to those unique perspectives. In many textbooks, copywriters are taught to create a dozen or more “profiles” of audience segments. They are told to write short biographies e.g. “Jessie is a 24 year old graphic designer who lives in a studio apartment with a grey and white cat and furniture she bought at from Rooms to Go….” Often, copywriters and designers cut out pictures from magazines to go with the biographies and hang them on the walls of their offices so that they have a specific visual image of the particular kinds of customers they are trying to persuade.
Faced with a vague concept like “unenthusiastic” Democratic voters, most advertising specialists would immediately think about segmenting the group. Market research would fairly quickly produce a list of subgroups something like the following:

1. People who voted for Obama because of the unique “cool” excitement of the 2008 campaign but who are largely indifferent to politics and never bother to vote in off-year elections.
2. People who voted for Obama out of a sense of profound outrage against some particular aspect of the Bush administration but now do not feel a similar sense of anger compelling them to get out and vote.
3. People who voted for Obama and now feel frustrated with the lack of progress but do not blame Obama himself for the problem. Rather the political stalemate has just made them feel cynical about the value of voting.
4. People who voted for Obama and feel frustrated with him for failing to accomplish more than he has.
5. People who voted for Obama and feel that Obama betrayed them on one or more issues but who still prefer him to the Republicans. They would vote for Democrats if they were standing in the voting booth but have no real enthusiasm for going to the polls.
6. People who voted for Obama but now feel so betrayed by him on one or more issues that they flatly refuse to vote for Democrats.

Looking over this list, it is fairly easy to recognize the quite distinct outlooks of these different “unenthusiastic” Democratic voters and the lack of a simple common view. This quickly suggests one key conclusion:
If you were doing door to door voter canvassing and campaign work, you would vary almost everything in your approach depending on which of these different kinds of voter you were talking to – what you would say, your tone of voice, the degree to which you would express empathy and understanding – all these things would be substantially different depending on the particular person.
This, in turn, leads to one key political conclusion: the most important and effective form of pro-Democratic campaigning this year will be face to face personal communication. There is no single slogan or message that will do the job. The only thing that will reliably influence all these different groups – except perhaps the sixth — is being personally contacted by pro-Democratic advocates who sincerely and passionately insist that voting is still worthwhile.
So let’s stop looking for a “magic bullet” slogan, policy or last minute game-changer. The most important thing Democrats can do right now is person-to-person contact and communication.

In the last week and a half a wide range of pro-Democratic commentators have pointed out the absurd extent to which the media has hyped generic “Republican vs. Democrat” ballot poll results that were unfavorable to the Dems and then ignored subsequent results that contradicted them.
In some cases the mainstream media commentators are simply stuck on a “Dems are in trouble” narrative and are simply too lazy to deal with results that don’t fit their preferred storyline. The conservative media commentators, on the other hand, are perfectly happy to gleefully cherry-pick the data with the same scrupulous regard for empirical accuracy that their grass-roots audience displays in choosing the content for their hand-lettered rally signs.
But the real horse-race situation revealed by the generic ballot data is even closer than you think. Yesterday Nate Silver noted that one poll which asked the same group of respondents both the standard generic “Republican vs. Democrat” question and also about a choice between named candidates found the following:

Republicans did better on the first set of questions, which asked voters whether in general they would prefer to see a Democrat or a Republican elected in the district. On average, over the 31 districts, Republicans led on this question by 6 points: 39 to 33.
When the candidates were named, however, the Democrats’ gap was lessened. They trailed by an average margin of 2 points, 43 to 45. That might imply that the generic ballot overestimates Republicans’ standing by about 4 points, at least in swing districts.

Equally, in TPM yesterday, Josh Marshall noted that the generic ballot itself has been visibly tightening in recent days. Here’s his chart from TPM polltracker:

Now if this isn’t enough to make any Democrat realize that they shouldn’t allow the generic ballot data to demoralize them and deter them from getting out there and working their damn butts off, looking even more closely at the latest data – this time from pollster.com — is really an eye-opener.

Remember, this isn’t based on one poll but rather the average of a dozen polls, making the trend much harder to dismiss as the result of sampling error.
Still don’t feel the adrenaline starting to flow and the desire growing to get out there and fight? Well consider one more fact: Rasmussen polls play an outsized role in this chart. When they are excluded, the Democrats actually pull ahead of the Republicans, 45.0% to 44.1%
So, there it is. Sure there’s a ton of polling data available that can be cited as a basis for pessimism, if that’s what you’re looking for, but the generic ballot data, by itself, is simply not enough to reach a pessimistic conclusion. What the data actually shows is an election that is so close that dedication, effort and hard work by Democrats can still make all the difference in the world in literally dozens of individual races.
So, damn it Democrats, stop obsessing about the generic ballot data and get out there and get to work to change the data.
Let others whose job is forecasting try to predict the future — our job as Democrats is not to predict the future but to create it.
(A note to poll wonks: the last chart is produced with Pollster.com’s “more sensitive” setting for trend smoothing. For most purposes Pollster.com’s default setting is the best compromise, but as the FAQ’s on the pollster.com website notes “at times it (the default setting) may appear to be too conservative or too sensitive. In particular, this somewhat conservative estimator may be slow to chase trends early on, which means it can be slow to accept that public opinion is actually changing”)

One reason for the low enthusiasm among many Obama voters is their feeling that voting for Democrats who have been vacillating or inconsistent in their support for a robust progressive-Democratic agenda means those politicians completely get away with “taking progressive votes for granted” or “betraying progressive supporters”
From this point of view, the only way progressives can ever really have any influence on “Blue Dog” and other centrist Democrats is to “punish” them by staying home on Election Day.
In Europe, the voters who are the equivalent of American liberals and progressives have never thought about politics this way. Because the European center-left outside of Britain has historically been divided into several center-left parties rather than one umbrella party like the Democrats the voters realized that – if they ever wanted to build a majority coalition –they had to agree – after voting for their own preferred party in a first round of elections – to support the candidate of whichever coalition-partner got the most votes in a second round of voting.
These voters did not feel “betrayed” or “taken for granted” because even as more left-wing voters in some districts had to support candidates to their right, centrist voters in other districts supported candidates to their left. Both sides understood that their common interests would be better served by cooperating than by their acting alone.
Now I can already hear U.S. progressives complain “Yeah, sure, but here in America we’re always the ones who have to make all the compromises and never the Blue Dog types”, “We’re always the ones who have to take it on the chin”, “it’s always a one-way deal”
Except that it’s not. During the 50’s and 60’s, in dozens and dozens of congressional districts blue- collar Democrats loyally voted for Democratic candidates who were much more liberal than they were on social issues. They did it out of a combination of party loyalty and trust that the Democratic candidate would be more pro-labor on economic issues.
I mean, come on. Did you really think all those Irish guys sitting around the taverns in Southie for the last 40 years were just peachy-keen thrilled with Teddy Kennedy’s position on about 500 different liberal social issues or that the guys in Al Gore’s old district were slapping “save the whales” bumper stickers on their pickups?. No, they were doing a New Deal version of “critical support” and “strategic voting”.
And meanwhile guess who was “taking them for granted” year after year – yeah, that’s right, progressives. Go back and look at how many liberal commentators said Kennedy’s senate seat was clearly a lock because it was “Teddy’s old seat” and those blue-collar guys would never vote for a Republican.
So come on progressives, let’s set aside the “we’re the only ones who ever, ever, have to compromise” rationalization and start thinking strategically about the coming election.
If we want Nancy Pelosi to keep being the Speaker of the House, it ain’t gonna happen because we sit at home and stew because the Democratic candidate in our district is too conservative for our tastes. You vote for whichever Democrat won the primary because that’s how you support Nancy Pelosi and Alan Grayson and Al Franken and all the other Democrats who you do like. That’s the meaning of strategic voting and critical support.