Georgia’s Republican Governor Nathan Deal is in big trouble, as a result of the latest ranking of states by unemployment rates —placing Georgia dead last. With polls showing the Governor’s race in a stat tie, Democratic candidate Sen. Jason Carter wasted no time getting out a powerful new ad (above) calling Deal out. The script goes like this:

Gov. Deal: “Now my focus on job creation is paying off.”
Narrator: “Really? Then why is Georgia ranked 51st, worst in the nation for unemployment? Middle class incomes are falling. We have 9,000 fewer teachers in Georgia’s classrooms, 80,000 fewer HOPE recipients in Georgia’s colleges, 380,000 Georgians looking for work.”
Gov. Deal: “Now my focus on job creation is paying off.”
Narrator: “Governor Deal, we can’t go any lower.”

Short. direct and to the point, the ad has Republican Governor Deal and the state GOP squirming with lame rebuttals.

Though it doesn’t provide a unified field theory suggested by the title, Matthew Cooper’s Newsweek cover story “Why Working-Class White Men Make Democrats Nervous” provides a number of insights about Democratic hopes for getting a larger share of the votes of white working-class males.
Much of Cooper’s article is historical review — the emergence and staying power of the Reagan Democrats. Mining the theme of “painful estrangement between working-class white men and the Democratic Party, Cooper notes,

…The white working-class percentage of the electorate may be on the decline, but white working-class men remain a voting bloc neither party can afford to ignore…Since 2000, white working-class men have become so estranged from the party of the New Deal that in some states Obama won only 10 percent of their vote. (Overall, about a third of white working-class men gave Obama their support.)
In the 2012 election, Obama attracted fewer white voters than any Democratic candidate since the 1960s. And in the subset of working-class white men, he lost by a 31-point margin. But because noncollege whites have become an ever smaller part of the pie, Obama was able to win the election. Noncollege whites of both sexes constituted half of Clinton’s electoral strength in 1992, but made up only a quarter of Obama’s support in 2012.

More often, however, it is in the non-presidental election years that white working-class males exert disproportionate influence at the polls:

…This year the impact of white working-class voters looks likely to be amplified. In presidential voting years, minority voters come out in bigger numbers, diluting the impact of white working-class voters who may constitute a third of the electorate in an off year but only a quarter in a presidential election year.
…If the prospect of higher white-working-class turnout wasn’t bad enough for Democrats this fall, the Senate battleground states–Louisiana, Montana, Kentucky, Arkansas, West Virginia, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Iowa, and Michigan–are thick with working-class whites…in some states, especially in the upper Midwest and Northeast, Democrats have reduced their losses to the point where they can win states like Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania because they lose noncollege white voters by a smaller margin.

Citing an unspecified poll which indicates that 56 percent of “noncollege white men” say that the poor have an easy life, Cooper notes that 62 percent of them believe the government should do less for the poor. He quotes Ronald Brownstein’s observation that “once their income started declining, they became very receptive to Republican arguments that [the government was] taking your money and giving it to others…”
Cooper cites regional differences influencing white working-class votes:

Working-class whites in the South are much more estranged from the Democratic Party. In Alabama, Obama got only 11 percent of the noncollege white vote and 10 percent in Mississippi. In Ohio, less fundamentalist and more unionized, Obama was able to pull about 42 percent of the vote of noncollege whites and 43 percent in Pennsylvania, which isn’t ideal for Democrats but is enough–combined with their other loyal groups–to win elections. An even closer parsing of data shows how the collapse of Democratic support among white working-class voters extends beyond the South to the mountain West and Plains States. The president garnered a majority in Maine and Vermont. (If only white men could vote nationwide, Obama would have won just Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, Oregon and Washington.)

Democrats are holding their own at levels better than expected in recent polling on midterm battleground state-wide races. But it’s unclear whether they are gaining any ground with white working-class males.
Hillary Clinton did better than Obama with working-class whites in her 2008 presidential campaign. However, “a new Quinnipiac University poll…shows her with only 27 percent of the white noncollege male vote–behind even Obama’s 31 percent.” In addition, “Hillary wouldn’t need to win these voters; she would only have to stop the hemorrhaging of them to the Republicans. “She’s not going to carry [white] noncollege voters. It’s not like they have to get these voters to love them,” says Ruy Teixeira, author of several books on how the white working-class votes. “You still need to do better than a catastrophic loss. There’s a group in the middle that’s willing to listen.”
Looking toward the future, Cooper suggests:

The greatest opportunities for Democrats to regain the initiative with white working-class men will probably come with a more full-throated economic message–one less about fairness, which working-class white men are more likely to see as a giveaway to the poor, and more about helping them recover their dignity, whether it’s through defending old-school entitlements like Social Security and Medicare or taking a tougher stance on the wolves of Wall Street.

He could have added affordable higher education for their kids, enhanced protection from medical catastrophes, restoring unions, and raising taxes on the rich, all of which are extremely weak spots for Republican candidates. Further, notes Cooper,

Andrew Levison, author of The White Working Class Today: Who They Are, How They Think, and How Progressives Can Regain Their Support, shares Greenberg’s view about how many persuadable working-class voters remain. But he thinks a populist appeal isn’t enough. He also notes that Democrats, let alone unions, are few and far between in many towns and a Fox News cocoon fills the void, while the Republican Party is a living presence. “It goes back to the loss of Democratic machines and institutions,” he says.

The quickening demographic transformation now underway all across America is a huge asset for Democrats. But rebuilding and recrafting the ‘machines and institutions’ that help restore dignity and opportunity to white working-class males is a pivotal commitment that will enable Democrats to get a larger share of their votes — and secure a stable majority coalition that can move America forward.

From “House Dems: Focus on ‘all the single ladies‘” by Deirdre Walsh, CNN Senior Congressional Producer:

The results of the 2012 election show why Democrats believe they have an opening if they concentrate on single women.
According to CNN’s exit polls, unmarried women were about one quarter of the electorate in 2012, which was a record high. In that election, single women voted 68%-31% for Democrats over Republicans in congressional contests.
Democrats admit they can’t replicate that level in a non-presidential year, but they believe boosting turnout in several dozen districts can overtake the advantage Republicans traditionally have among married women…A poll released last month by Democracy Corps, a Democratic leaning group, projects a 20-point drop off in unmarried female voters from 2012 to 2014…
The House Democratic campaign arm is using the playbook developed by Virginia’s Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe in his victorious 2013 campaign.
McAuliffe lost among men, but won the election because women supported him over the then-Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli by 9 points. Among unmarried women, the margin was more dramatic — McAuliffe prevailed 67% -25%.
The campaign committee created “ROSIE,” a voter modeling program named after the iconic World War II “Rosie the Riveter,” which they say stands for “Reengaging Our Sisters in Elections.” This program culls data to identify unmarried voters, and then targets messages using email, paid mail and social media to motivate them to vote in November.
The task to get these women motivated enough to go to the polls will be tough.

Nearly everyone agrees that Democrats are not going to win back a House majority in November. But if ‘Rosie’ and other Dem GOTV projects are good enough to reduce the projected 20 percent drop-off in single women voters by, say, a fourth, Democrats can cut the GOP’s House margin significantly and set the stage for a 2016 takeover.

Polls show stat ties in U.S. Senator and Governor’s races in GA, despite Republican voter suppression. Dems also competitive in state-wide races for Lt. Gov and Secretary of State.
Jennifer De Pinto has an update on early voting at CBS News, which notes “Thirty-six states plus the District of Columbia have some form of early voting, that is, allowing many people to vote before Election Day without needing an excuse to do so. Eight of these states feature races for the U.S. Senate that CBS News is calling competitive…The portion of voters who cast their ballots early has been on the rise. Ten years ago, fewer than a quarter of ballots were cast early nationwide for president, but that figure climbed to 35 percent in 2012 (representing about 45 million votes) and 30 percent in the 2010 midterm elections…Among the eight Senate battleground states, Iowa is the first to kick off early voting on Thursday. Next up, Georgia begins early voting on Oct. 13; Kansas on Oct. 15; Alaska, Arkansas and Colorado on Oct. 20 (although mail ballots may be sent out earlier); Louisiana on Oct. 21; and North Carolina on Oct. 23.”
RCP hosts a freewheeling chat with Joe Trippi and Karl Rove, and both of them seem to agree that the battle for majority control of the U.S. Senate is in toss-up territory.
At The Upshot, Nate Cohn notes, “It does help to have an advantage in advertising, but the Democratic edge is extremely modest in most states. The Democratic share of television advertisements exceeds 60 percent only in Georgia, and it is not large enough to account for any meaningful disparity between the state and national polls.”
Whoopsie-Daisy slip-up at the Republican Governor’s Association reveals which corporations are giving their candidates the secret big bucks. As Jonathan Weisman reports at The New York Times, “The most elite group, known as the Statesmen, whose members donated $250,000, included Aetna; Coca-Cola; Exxon Mobil; Koch Companies Public Sector, the lobbying arm of the highly political Koch Industries; Microsoft; Pfizer; UnitedHealth Group; and Walmart. The $100,000 Cabinet level included Aflac, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Comcast, Hewlett-Packard, Novartis, Shell Oil, Verizon Communications and Walgreen.”
The New York Times editorial board opines on the ‘long lines’ technique of voter suppression favored by Republicans: “In South Carolina, the 10 precincts with the longest waits had more than twice the percentage of black registered voters, on average, than the rest of the state…Florida has no standards for machines or poll workers, but the study found far fewer poll workers in heavily Hispanic areas. That contributed to an average delay in the most populous counties of 53 minutes — a wait that encouraged people to walk away and discouraged them from returning in the future… an outcry that the move would disenfranchise low-income and black voters…Several counties in North Carolina have moved or closed minority election stations…These changes are in addition to the cutbacks on early voting and burdensome ID requirements that have been imposed by Republican lawmakers to reduce the turnout of people who are likely to vote Democratic, including minorities and the poor. Many state and local officials see voting as a partisan game they can manipulate and will continue to do so unless challenged in court, or until Congress steps in and makes voting a universal right that cannot be infringed.”
The massive climate change march notwithstanding, Gail Collins notes, also at The Times that “Only 3 percent of current Republican members of Congress have been willing to go on record as accepting the fact that people are causing global warming. That, at least, was the calculation by PolitiFact, which found a grand total of eight Republican nondeniers in the House and Senate. That includes Representative Michael Grimm of New York, who while laudably open-minded on this subject, is also under indictment for perjury and tax fraud. So we may be pushing 2 percent in January.”
Re the mass climate change march, Mark Hertsgaard’s post at The Nation asks a great question. But the best answer may be that big demonstrations alone won’t do it, unless they are followed up with voter registration and GOTV campaigns, specifically targeting young voters in midterm elections.
Michael Tomasky gets two thumbs up (the list and the order) for his well-reasoned short list at The Daily Beast, “Five Awful GOP Governors Who Need to Go.” Lots of quotable zingers here.

The following article by Anna Greenberg, Senior Vice President at Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
In 2004, John Kerry had a problem with women voters. Pundits declared that Kerry was losing women voters – the so-called Security Moms – due to their deep-seated concerns about terrorism. These security moms simply trusted George Bush more to keep their children safe. Never mind that this swing bloc of mothers did not exist (security-focused women voters were Republicans), it was also clear that concerns about terrorism were not the main drivers of women’s vote choice (see my piece, “The Security Mom Myth“). This narrative was but one in a long series of narratives (e.g., Soccer Mom, Waitress Mom) that stereotype and simplify a complex and diverse women’s electorate.
Ten years later, here we go again. The tragic and horrific acts by Islamic State, Russian aggression and the deepening crisis in Iraq are disturbing and contribute to a sense of unease at a time when most voters think the country is on the wrong track. Recently, the NRCC launched a new ad offensive against Democrats highlighting a “weakness” on terrorism, declaring that Staci Appel (IA-3) would give “passports to terrorists,” that Dan Maffei (NY-24) would give terrorists constitutional rights and that Rick Nolan (MN-08) does not support the fight against Al Queda.
Some now declare the reemergence of the Security Mom, citing surveys and focus groups that show women expressing elevated levels of concern about safety and security with ominous implications for Democrats. To be sure, an election cycle defined by security concerns would not be ideal for Democrats.
But we should not conflate an expression of concern about terrorism with it as a driver of vote choice. First, voters typically look to the President and to the military for security, not to members of Congress. (Name one Democratic incumbent who lost his or her office for voting against the first, and popular, Iraq War.) Moreover, there is a world of difference between where we are now and where we were just after the 9-11 attacks. According to Gallup, in June 2002, 46 percent said terrorism was the most important problem facing the US; just 4 percent do so today. A majority of voters says that this year, their decisions will be driven by domestic issues. In the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll (9/3-7), 64 percent of voters say that domestic issues such as the economy, healthcare, and immigration are more important to their vote than international issues such as Iraq, Russia and terrorism (22 percent).
It is true that a few surveys suggest women are more concerned about terrorism than men: for instance, in a CNN/ORC poll (9/5-7), 18 percent of women say they are very worried about terrorism compared to 8 percent of men. But in the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, there is no difference between men and women in prioritizing domestic issues over international issues when it comes to the election. In a Pew Research Center study (9/2-9), the biggest “priority gaps” between men and women are on issues like abortion, birth control, economic inequality and healthcare rather, than terrorism and foreign policy.
Finally, men are significantly more likely to support military action around the world. This has been true historically and it is true now. In another Pew study (9/11-14), women are more opposed (33 percent) than men (25 percent) to “Obama’s plan for a military campaign against Islamic militants in Iraq and Syria” and more concerned (46 percent) than men (37 percent) that US military action will “go too far”.
There is no doubt that Americans are feeling a profound sense of insecurity and recent international turmoil contributes to this unease. But voters are still more focused on the state of affairs at home with women are no more likely to prioritize terrorism and security as a voting issue than men. Even in the “Walmart Mom” focus groups cited in most coverage of this issue, the authors note that women’s concerns about the Islamic State were tied up with other issues related to safety like school shootings, Ferguson, and crime. But every election cycle, commentators trot out gender stereotypes to try to define the “women’s vote” as a monolithic bloc and this election is no different.

It comes a little late for the 2014 midterm elections, but Brian Beutler’s “How to Save Obamacare: Make It a Women’s Issue” at The New Republic has some buzz-worthy advice for Democrats:

As Matt Yglesias observed at Vox last week, in our political discourse, we tend to lump all “women’s issues” together into the same category as culture war flashpoints like abortion. But for public opinion purposes, this is a big mistake. In truth, the politics of things like childcare and wage equality cut very differently than the “social” issues we associate them with, and that’s at least in part because they alter the distribution of income. Higher wages, family leave, subsidized childcare–all of these increase women’s income, and, thus, their economic power.
That helps explain why they’re winning political issues. Transfer payments and “big government” aren’t exactly in vogue right now, but gender equity is very popular. And the key is that Obamacare doesn’t stand apart from these issues in any way.
Whether you like Obamacare or you hate it, chances are you don’t think of it as a heavily gendered initiative, like equal pay. But though the debate over Obamacare centers around nominally gender-neutral values–should the government guarantee coverage, and are the benefits too generous?–the law operates as a substantial income transfer from men to women. For the past few years, this aspect of the law has given rise to rancorous debates over contraception and maternity care. But the contraception and maternity care guarantees are both manifestations of the fact that the law prohibits gender rating. Women consume more health care than men. This is in large part by accident of the fact that men don’t get pregnant and give birth. Before Obamacare, insurers sorted that out by charging women higher premiums than men. Women were therefore less likely to be able to afford insurance on the individual market than men, more financially dependent on their employers for insurance than men, and thus faced greater tensions between their familial and professional ambitions than men. Obamacare doesn’t end these inequalities, obviously, but it seeks to curb them. As a result, employers and spouses are less able to interfere in women’s professional and reproductive decision making.

Beutler goes on to note that “In polling Obamacare fares noticeably worse with men than with women and points out that “the ACA substantially enhances women’s economic security.” At this point it appears that the most serious threats to Obamacare comes from Supreme Court meddling, not from voters — it’s unlikely that Republicans are going to get enough of a majority to repeal it and replace it with nothing anytime in the foreseeable future. But it may be that a campaign to better inform women swing voters about the ACA’s benefits for women could help Democrats in 2016, if not in 2014.

The following article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of “Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win,” is cross-posted from HuffPo:
It takes a lot of gall for people like Dick Cheney to utter even one critical word about President Obama’s strategy to eliminate the threat of ISIL in the Middle East.
In fact, it was the unnecessary Bush/Cheney Iraq War that created the conditions that led directly to the rise of the “Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant” (ISIL).
Former George H.W. Bush Secretary of State James Baker said as much on this week’s edition of “Meet the Press.” He noted that after the first President Bush had ousted Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991, the U.S. had refrained from marching on Baghdad precisely to avoid kicking over the sectarian hornet’s nest that was subsequently unleashed by the Bush/Cheney attack on Iraq in 2003.
But it wasn’t just the War in Iraq itself that set the stage for the subsequent 12 years of renewed, high-intensity sectarian strife between Sunni’s and Shiites in the Middle East. It was also what came after.
Bush’s “de-Bathification program” eliminated all vestiges of Sunni power in Iraqi society and set the stage for the Sunni insurrection against American occupation and the new Shiite-led government. Bush disbanded the entire Sunni-dominated Iraqi Army and bureaucracy. He didn’t change it. He didn’t make it more inclusive of Shiites and Kurds. He just disbanded it. It is no accident that two of the top commanders of today’s ISIL are former commanders in the Saddam-era Iraqi military.
General Petraeus took steps to reverse these policies with his “Sunni Awakening” programs that engaged the Sunni tribes against what was then known as Al Qaeda in Iraq. But the progress he made ultimately collapsed because the Bush/Cheney regime helped install Nouri Al-Maliki as Prime Minister who systematically disenfranchised Sunnis throughout Iraq.
And that’s not all. The War in Iraq — which had nothing whatsoever to do with “terrorism” when it was launched — created massive numbers of terrorists that otherwise would not have dreamed of joining extremist organizations. It did so by killing massive numbers of Iraqis, creating hundreds of thousands of refugees, imprisoning thousands, and convincing many residents of the Middle East that the terrorist narrative was correct: that the U.S. and the West were really about taking Muslim lands.
And after all, contrary to Dick Cheney’s absurd assertion that U.S. forces would be greeted in Iraq as “liberators,” no one likes a foreign nation to occupy their country.
The War did more than any propagandist could possibly do to radicalize vulnerable young people. And by setting off wave after wave of sectarian slaughter it created blood feuds that will never be forgiven.

Read more…

Don’t bet the ranch on it just yet, but when Huffpost Pollster joins the Princeton Election Consortium in forecasting that Democrats are more likely to keep their Senate majority, that’s good news. Today Huffpost Pollster calculates a 56 percent “chance that Democrats will keep control of the Senate.”
Of course 56 percent doesn’t allow all that much breathing space. But 8 weeks from election day, it’s fair to say that it’s a sign that Dems are in a much better position in the battle for Senate control than many pundits thought they would be in in mid-September, given the lopsided Democratic vulnerabilities this year.
Huffpost Pollster’s Mark Blumenthal and Natalie Jackson explore the ramifications of “the Orman factor” (Independent U.S. Senate candidate Greg Orman in Kansas) in their calculations, and conclude:

…Now, however, in the simulations that project an Orman win, our model will usually assign him to the party in the majority…In the rare scenario in which Orman wins and the chamber is split with 49 Democrats and 50 Republicans, we give Orman a 50 percent chance of caucusing with the Democrats and a 50 percent chance of caucusing with the Republicans. (Thus, the overall probabilities of each party’s winning the majority still add to 100 percent.) But we also note the probability of this situation occurring — we call it “the Orman factor.” On the Senate model dashboard, this number appears right below the probabilities for Democratic and Republican majorities.
Other models have also assigned Orman to one side or the other in the case of 49 Democrats and 50 Republicans, but in slightly different ways: Daily Kos similarly assumes there is a 50/50 chance Orman will caucus with each party, but FiveThirtyEight assumes a 75 percent chance he will caucus with the Democrats, and The Upshot assigns him to the Democrats 100 percent of the time.

Sure, as noted elsewhere there are respected poll analysts who still believe the odds favor a GOP takeover of the U.S. Senate. But with both Mark Blumenthal and Sam Wang arguing otherwise, Dems have cause for optimism — especially if they mobilize an energetic GOTV effort where it counts.

Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium posts today at The New Yorker on the latest development in the Kansas Senate race, and observes:

Last night, Chad Taylor, the Democratic nominee in the upcoming Senate election in Kansas, announced that he was dropping out of the race. This is the biggest political story of the week: the path is now clear for the independent candidate Greg Orman to run against the unpopular Republican incumbent Pat Roberts. Orman is now the front-runner, a change that puts the Democrats squarely in the driver’s seat to retain control of the Senate.
…An Orman win could have a seismic effect on who controls the Senate. Orman says that he would caucus with the Senate’s two other independents, Bernie Sanders and Angus King. Both Sanders and King currently caucus with the Democrats. To be fair, Orman is not just a Democrat in disguise-he has promised to vote out Democrat Harry Reid as Majority Leader if he gets the chance. But Orman says that he wants to break the current gridlock in the Senate, and Senate Republicans have been gumming up the works on legislation and judicial appointments. So while Orman would be far from a shoo-in to vote for every Democratic position, he would certainly not be involved in any alliances with the Republicans.

Wang crunches some numbers and concludes, “…With Orman facing off alone against Roberts, the probability of Democratic control shot up to eighty-five per cent. During the past two weeks, polls in other states have moved even more in the Democrats’ favor. It’s safe to say that thanks to Chad Taylor’s decision, the Democratic Party is now the odds-on favorite to retain control of the Senate.”