Al From’s and Bruce Reed’s recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, “Get the Red Out” has occasioned much comment, most of it hostile, in the Democratic-oriented blogosphere. Atrios is quite annoyed and feels the DLC basically looks down on 80 percent of Democrats. Josh Marshall is less annoyed, but nonetheless thinks the DLC’s attitude is deplorable and shows contempt for most the Democratic party (though see also his followup post where he tempers his criticism a bit and separates himself from the heavy-duty DLC-bashers). Markos Zuniga over at Daily Kos has perhaps the most stinging rebuke, terming the DLC simply “irrelevant”. He states:

The DLC is a dying organization. But the quicker it dies, the better we’ll be as a party. The path to success lies in finding common ground between the party’s myriad constituencies, not in toeing the Gospel According to From and Reed.

I guess I am not persuaded that the DLC is truly irrelevant (though they certainly do and say some irrelevant things) and dying as an organization. I don’t even believe that would be a good thing if it were true. The DLC is full of smart people who have many good and useful ideas about the road forward for Democrats. You can see some of them in their WSJ article, but Will Marshall’s article, “Heartland Strategy” is a much better source of useful analysis, as is Ed Kilgore’s terrific blog, NewDonkey.
But there’s no denying it: their tone and their attitude are a genuine problem and, in my view, they should be more sensitive to that problem–especially if they don’t want their influence to fade over time. In today’s party, they simply can’t dominate debate the way the once did. If they try to, by casting every debate in an us-against-them way, they do risk becoming, as Zuniga believes they already are, irrelevant. And I think that would be a shame for an organization that has so much to contribute to the party.

What is the struggle for chair of the DNC chair really about? Are we seeing a re-run of the DLC-liberal spats that have pre-occupied the party for so many years? I hope not. That would be stupid, counterproductive and pretty far removed from an emerging and much more important dispute about the party’s future. Nick Confessore over at Tapped gets it exactly right:

[T]he most consequential split in the Democratic Party going forward is not liberals versus centrists. The key split is not really ideological at all, when you get down into it. Here’s how I see the fight shaping up. On the one side are the rump Democratic establishment of consultants, pollsters, and senior members of Congress, people who span the ideological continuum but who share in common an inability to adapt to the Republican ascendancy and recognize it for what it is. Many of them would like Democrats to win more often, but they are not ready to give up the Beltway fiefdoms and influence they still possess in order to achieve it. On the other side are party reformers of left and right, who tend towards ideological ecumenism but are determined to change the way the Democratic Party is organized and funded. Pretty much anyone who is deeply invested in restarting the DLC/liberal food fights is by definition part of this rump establishment, since the distinction of vision between Democratic centrists and liberals pale next to the differences between the Democratic average and the Bush-era conservatives.

The indefatigable Mark Blumenthal over at Mystery Pollster has yet more on the revisions of the the NEP exit poll Hispanic figures. Read his whole post, but here’s the essence:
1. The initial TX Hispanic figure of 59 percent support for Bush, according to the NEP, was the result of a “tabulation” error that improperly weighted telephone interviews with early/absentee voters that were conducted to accompany the election day polling place interviews. (OK–but how’d that happen? And why did it take so long for them to figure it out? And what about the TX white vote for Bush now–doesn’t that have to be higher as a result?)
2. The 40 percent figure for Bush’s national Hispanic support issued by NBC, based on aggregating all the state polls, was not a “correction” of the NEP national poll data, but simply a different, (though better, according to NBC) estimate, of Bush’s national Hispanic support. The NEP national exit poll figure of 44 percent for Bush’s Hispanic support still stands uncorrected by Edison/Mitofsky, the actual exit pollsters. (OK–but if we needed a better estimate than the national poll estimate because the sampling was screwed up–NBC’s story–why is Edison/Mitofsky sticking by their national estimate? If NBC is right, doesn’t it need to be corrected? If not, why not?–isn’t it a problem that the national poll estimate and the state poll-based national estimate don’t matchup (they did almost perfectly in 2000)?
Clear? I thought so. I eagerly await, as I’m sure you do, more “clarifications” from the good folks at the NEP, Edison/Mitofsky, NBC and whoever else is getting into the act.

This just in from Michael McDonald of George Mason University:

New York just reported its certified election results. With only two states (Maine and Pennsylvania, I use their AP reported results) left to certify we have the following popular vote results:
Bush: 61,816,317 (50.62%)
Kerry: 58,824,880 (48.17%)
Total: 122,124,783 (turnout rate: 59.9% of voting-eligible population)
Bush’s popular vote margin is now 2,991,437 or 2.45 percentage points. In all likelihood, it will go lower when Pennsylvania certifies their results.
New York’s turnout is now 2.2 percentage points higher than 2000, meaning that turnout was up in every state.

Interesting. That means, among other things, that you could already round his victory down to 2 points, if you were dealing with whole numbers. And even if you’re dealing with two significant digits, very soon his margin will likely round down to 2.4 (instead of up to 2.5) which will further promote the sense it was a 2 point victory.
So: the mighty Bush win is now down to 2 points. Spread the word.

Peter Beinart, editor of the The New Republic, proposes in their latest magazine that Democrats stop all this unity nonsense and get down to what’s really important: purging the party of all those wrong-headed “softs” who don’t have the backbone to stand up (really stand up) to the new totalitarian threat of Islamic fundamentalism. Their failure to “report for duty” (Beinart specifically mentions only MoveOn and Michael Moore but I think his criteria for softness would also implicate most of the liberal blogosphere, most Dean campaign activists, a good chunk of the leadership of the 527s and countless others within the party) cost the Democrats the White House in 2004 and will do so forever until Democrats decisively remove them from power and influence in the party. Yes, it’s purge time in the glorious spirit of the late ’40s actions against Communists and those soft on them within the Democratic party.
Boy, what a great idea: a massive, no-holds-barred faction fight about who’s really tough on terrorism. That may make the blood course in Beinart’s veins, but I guess I’m not entirely convinced it’s necessary.
For one thing, his prescription seems more suited to, say, the Democratic party of the late ’40s than it does to the actually-existing Democratic party of 2004. Noam Scheiber, who is actually quite hawkish himself, makes this point in considerable and, in my view, devestating detail in a comment on Beinart’s piece on the TNR website.
Also on the TNR website, John Judis takes Beinart to task for a political prescription that won’t work and a complete misunderstanding of MoveOn and Democratic-oriented internet activism in general. I couldn’t agree more. Here’s a couple of key paragraphs from Judis’ article but I urge you to read whole piece:

Initiating factional warfare with, or even purging, everyone to the left of Joe Lieberman will not create a viable Democratic Party. Okay, that may be an exaggeration of what Peter prescribes, but there are clear echoes in his essay of Ben Wattenberg’s Coalition for a Democratic Majority, which tried to do something similar after the 1972 Democratic defeat by creating a party centered around Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson. The voters didn’t buy it, and they won’t buy Peter’s party either.
Peter also misunderstands MoveOn.org and the various other Internet-based groups that have sprung up in the last five years. They are not an old-fashioned militant left but part of a college-educated post-industrial center-left politics that was developing under Bill Clinton in the 1990s. One of their big issues was the deficit, hardly a left-wing concern. They became identified with “the left” because they were early and prescient opponents of the Iraq war–a position that can no longer simply be identified with the left and that is not a reason to criticize them. Sure, they shouldn’t have participated in marches with the Workers World Party, but these new movements are organized by people who don’t have long political pedigrees. If anything, they are the best hope for a new moral vision that will animate the Democrats.

I particularly liked this exchange, “What Now?: A discussion on the way forward for the Democrats” among a very good panel of political observers (E.J. Dionne, Ed Kilgore, James Pinkerton, Walter Shapiro, Michael Tomasky, Paul Glastris and Amy Sullivan) in the new Washington Monthly. Almost everything said is intelligent and perceptive–not always the case with these postmortems–and I found the comments on the national security issue and on the use of narrative in campaigns especially worthwhile. Highly recommended.

I commented on Sunday about the exaggerated importance assigned to the rural/exurban vote in Ohio. Much the same thing could be said about Florida: when you look closely at the county by county vote in Florida, rural/exurban areas were much less important to Bush’s victory there than generally supposed.
Specifically, my analysis finds that Bush received a net gain of 308,000 votes from metro Florida outside the exurbs this year and just an 82,000 net vote gain from exurban and rural counties. Indeed, about half his net vote gain can be accounted for by looking only at counties in medium-sized metropolitan areas like Jacksonville, Pensacola and Sarasota.
The more I look at the data, both nationally and in states like Florida, Ohio and ohers, the more I’m convinced these medium-sized metro areas are critically important to Democrats’ electoral chances. I realize it’s more fashionable for Democrats to weep and wail and gnash their teeth about rural/exurban areas. But these medium-sized metros deserve more study and strategic thought than they have received so far–much more.

On Thursday, I covered the downward revision of the NEP exit poll’s national Hispanic support for Bush from 44 percent to 40 percent. That swings their Hispanic vote estimate from 53-44 Kerry to 58-40 Kerry. Quite a change: that doubles Kerry’s margin among Hispanics from 9 to 18 points. And personally I believe that 40 percent figure is still a touch high and I certainly believe there are still an abundance of unanswered questions about this year’s Hispanic results, both original and revised.
Here are some additional materials about the Hispanic results and revisions that you may find helpful. Mark Blumenthal of Mystery Pollster has a post about the revised national Hispanic figures which goes into some detail on a few questions raised by the revision. And the William C. Velasquez Institute (WCVI), which did their own exit poll of Hispanics that indicated a 65-33 lead for Kerry, has a useful press release on the NEP revisions (national and TX) and summarizing their position on Hispanics and the 2004 election. Here’s a quotation from the Institute’s president, Antonio Gonzalez, on their position:

There is no doubt that some churning of numbers has occurred, meaning Republicans appear to have made significant gains in Texas and Arizona while Democrats appear to have made significant gains in Colorado and Florida. But the net effect among these respective gains is a canceling out of one another. Latino voter partisanship has remained consistent with roughly a 30 point democratic advantage in 2000 and 2004’s presidential elections.

WCVI also provides on their website an analysis of their exit poll data by St Mary’s University political scientist, Henry Flores, and an extensive powerpoint presentation on their poll’s findings.

Gallup has released a useful new report on abortion and public opinion. As the report notes, Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. On the other hand, the public does not favor unrestricted access to abortion, though different questions return different answers on the level of restrictiveness the public actually favors (see my earlier analysis of abortion and public opinion).
The sensitivity of public opinion on abortion rights to quesetion wording suggests that the politics of the issue are particularly sensitive to how it is framed in political debate. As Alan Abramowitz observes:

I think that these results [from the Gallup poll], and similar results from other polls, help to explain how Republicans have been able to use the abortion issue to their advantage in recent elections by downplaying the idea of overturning Roe v. Wade while emphasizing support for restrictions on abortion such as the ban on “partial birth” abortions, parental consent, waiting periods, etc. Liberals are now associated with the idea of “abortion on demand” which is opposed by a majority of the public. As long as there doesn’t seem to be any immediate danger that Roe will be overturned, liberals are likely to remain on the defensive on the issue of abortion.

Food for thought….

Michael McDonald of George Mason University provides the latest turnout numbers and presidential results:

Total vote for President: 121,491,696
Turnout Rate: 59.6%
Bush 61,755,732 50.83%
Kerry 58,554,961 48.20%
Other 1,181,003 0.97%
Still waiting on 17 states to certify results, including California, New York, and of course, Ohio. Turnout might yet inch up a little higher and Bush may yet drop under 50.8% of the vote. New York is the only state to have a lower turnout rate than 2000.

Interesting! Could Bush’s lead drop to 2.5 percent or even (dare I think it?) below? Stay tuned….