…the Roberts Court may have actually handed the Democratic Party a political gift.
…When Nate Silver looked at studies assessing the impact of voter ID laws, he estimated that they tend to reduce turnout by around 2 percent — and that reduction crosses racial lines, rather than affecting African-Americans exclusively.
A 2 percent dip is still enough to influence a close election. But voter ID laws don’t take effect in a vacuum: as they’re debated, passed and contested in court, they shape voter preferences and influence voter enthusiasm in ways that might well outstrip their direct influence on turnout. They inspire registration drives and education efforts; they help activists fund-raise and organize; they raise the specter of past injustices; they reinforce a narrative that their architects are indifferent or hostile to minorities.
This, I suspect, is part of the story of why African-American turnout didn’t fall off as expected between 2008 and 2012. By trying to restrict the franchise on the margins, Republican state legislators handed Democrats a powerful tool for mobilization and persuasion, and motivated voters who might otherwise have lost some of their enthusiasm after the euphoria of “Yes We Can” gave way to the reality of a stagnant, high-unemployment economy.
So a lengthy battle over voting rules and voting rights seems almost precision-designed to help the Obama-era Democratic majority endure once President Obama has left the Oval Office….Liberal demagogy notwithstanding, voter ID laws aren’t a way for Republicans to turn the clock back and make sure that it’s always 1965. But they are a good way for Republicans to ensure that African-Americans keep voting like it’s always 2008

This is how a scandal implodes:

First, the head of the investigation overpromises. “This was a targeting of the president’s political enemies, effectively, and lies about it during the election year so that it wasn’t discovered until afterwards,” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the House oversight committee, said in May of the IRS targeting scandal. He later declared President Obama’s press secretary a “paid liar” for stating otherwise.
Next, facts emerge to undermine the investigator’s presuppositions. Documents released by Ways and Means committee Democrats this week show that the IRS, in addition to targeting tea party groups, also had “Be on the Lookout” (BOLO) lists for groups using descriptors such as “progressive,” “health care legislation,” “medical marijuana,” “paying national debt” and “green energy.”
Finally, evidence surfaces that the investigator stacked the deck. Tuesday night, the Hill newspaper quoted a spokesman for Treasury’s inspector general, Russell George, saying the group was asked by Issa “to narrowly focus on tea party organizations.” The inspectors knew there were other terms, but “that was outside the scope of our audit.”
Certainly, something went badly wrong at the IRS that caused groups to be targeted because of ideology. But it’s nothing like the conspiracy Issa cooked up in which the president and his men supposedly used the tax authority to attack their political foes.
…the collapse of the Issa-driven scandal has reinforced a growing impression in the capital that ultimately will help Obama: The chairman is full of it.

E.J. Dionne:
Whenever conservatives on the court have had the opportunity to tilt the playing field toward their side, they have done so. And in other recent cases, the court has weakened the capacity of Americans to take on corporate power. The conservative majority seems determined to bring us back to the Gilded Age…
…Liberals will still win occasional and sometimes partial victories, as they did Wednesday on same-sex marriage. But on issues directly related to political and economic influence, the court’s conservative majority is operating as a political faction, determined to shape a future in which progressives will find themselves at a disadvantage….
The voting rights decision should be seen as following a pattern set by the rulings in Bush v. Gore in 2000 and Citizens United in 2010. Bush v. Gore had the effect of installing the conservatives’ choice in the White House and allowed him to influence the court’s subsequent direction with his appointments of Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito. Citizens United swept aside a tradition that dated to the Progressive Era — and to the Founders’ deep concern over political corruption — by vastly increasing the power of corporate and monied interests in the electoral sphere.
The Shelby County ruling will make it far more difficult for African Americans to challenge unfair electoral and districting practices. For many states, it will be a Magna Carta to make voting more difficult if they wish to.
Howard Fineman
The shrewdest, most manipulative and radical politician in this city isn’t the president or a member of Congress. He’s the chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, John G. Roberts Jr.
In a now familiar two-step of jurisprudence, the Roberts Court on Wednesday tactically ceded ground it did not regard as crucial — this time, on two gay rights cases….But politically, these tolerant rulings on the country’s social fabric deflect attention from the Roberts Court’s deeper goal: to remove the federal government as an impediment to corporate, state and local power. In other words, to dismantle a framework of progressive laws and court rulings stretching back to Teddy Roosevelt, the New Deal and the Great Society….
Viewed over a series of years, the major decisions of the Roberts Court exhibit a contrapuntal political rhythm — and a sharp awareness of how it’s all playing.
Roberts may have wanted to be cautious initially, but his eyes grew wide when presented with the Citizens United case. In 2010, he led the court to declare that corporations, like individuals, have free speech rights that bar the government from limiting what they spend independently on campaigns and elections.
The reaction was swift — and negative. So even as the court sought ways to limit federal regulation of business and markets, Roberts boldly created a majority to uphold the central provision of President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act in the midst of the 2012 campaign.
Court observers figured — rightly as it turned out — that Roberts would balance that move with the one he made on Tuesday: writing the opinion that eviscerated the Voting Rights Act and essentially freed the Republican-dominated South from the last vestiges of federal control of the region’s election laws. And then observers figured that once the Supreme Court had lurched to the right on voting rights, it would angle back on gay rights….Gay rights won Wednesday. Voting rights lost Tuesday. But in the Roberts era, big money tends to win every time

Cross-posted from TP Ideas:
We’re almost exactly half way through 2013. It’s a good time to ask whether the coalition of voters Obama rode to victory in 2012 is sticking with the president under the pressure of conflict with Congress, several “scandals,” and an economy that seems stuck in slow recovery mode.
An easy way to get a sense of the coalition’s health is to look Obama’s job approval numbers by demographic group and see how they compare with his support by demographic group in the 2012 election. The latest Pew Center poll allows us to do that by providing a very detailed table with Obama’s approval numbers broken down by dozens of demographics. The general health of Obama’s coalition looks pretty good — maybe even great.
His support among minorities remains extremely high. Black approval is 87 percent (though this a fall-off from the 93 percent support he got in the election) and Hispanic approval is 71 percent, identical with his 2012 vote support, with a 50 point approval spread (approval-disapproval) that exceeds his 44 point margin among Hispanics in 2012.
His support among Millennials is also holding up. Obama’s 58 percent approval rating among 18-29 year olds is just under his 60 percent vote support in 2012 with his approval spread (25 points) again exceeding his 2012 support margin (23 points).
The Pew data also include detailed breakdowns among whites, the source of some of the most intriguing data on the Obama coalition. First, Obama is doing substantially better among white college graduates than he did in the election. Not only is his approval rating among this group (44 percent) now higher than his 2012 vote support (42 percent) but his approval spread today (-5 points) is also far better than his vote support margin last November (-14 points).
This change is being driven by white female college grads. In 2012, Obama got 46 percent of this group, losing them by 6 points, a considerable falloff from 2008 when he carried them by 5 points. In the new Pew data, Obama has 49 percent approval among this demographic and sports a positive 5 point approval spread.
The news is less positive among the white working class. Obama’s job approval (34 percent) is a couple of points down from his abysmal 36 percent vote support in 2012. Interestingly, while his overall approval spread (-24) among this demographic is pretty close to his 2012 vote margin (-25), men and women have gone in opposite directions. Obama now garners only 29 percent approval among white working class men, with an approval spread (-35) which is distinctly worse than his 2012 vote margin among this demographic (-31). White working class women on the other hand give Obama an approval rating of 39 percent, identical with his 2012 vote support among this group, and an approval spread (-13) substantially better than his 2012 vote margin (-20).
These data suggest that continued Republican extremism and intransigence may be swelling the mostly intact Obama coalition with more white college-educated women (and perhaps some white working class women). On the other hand, the GOP appears to be shoring up their already formidable position among white working class men, one of the most conservative groups in the electorate. We shall see if this trade-off turns out to be a wise strategy or an inadvertent gift to the Obama coalition.

Shame on Justice Roberts for green-lighting voter suppression and turning the High Court into an instrument of aggressive political partisanship. That said, Democrats should get organized, and quickly, at the federal, state and local levels.
It’s good that Democrats and progressives across the nation are calling on congress to restore the Voting Rights Act and enact other electoral reforms and that there is optimism that it might be possible. No matter how hopeless the Republican political gridlock seems, we can’t function from a foundation rooted in cynicism about what can be done. In addition there is value in forcing votes on restoration of the Act, so that the public is reminded again and again which party supports voter suppression.
At the same time, however, we have to be realistic about prospects for enough Republicans in congress doing the right thing regarding restoration of voting rights. As Sen. Chuck Schumer put it, “As long as Republicans have a majority in the House and Democrats don’t have 60 votes in the Senate, there will be no preclearance.”
With few exceptions, the GOP’s record on voting rights in recent years is worse than poor. Already they are aggressively capitalizing on the ruling in TX, NC and AL to disenfranchise voters of color and youth, just as the pro-Republican majority hoped.
Dems must organize a full-court press to restore the Voting Rights Act. But the ruling also underscores the critical urgency of mobilizing a record mid term turnout in 2014, without which, the Voting Rights Act is likely to remain unenforceable. It’s just possible that the ruling will energize African Americans, Latinos, young voters and other constituencies who will be targeted for disenfranchisement by Republicans in the states to turn out in unprecedented numbers for the mid term elections. But it’s likely only if leaders and activists in these communities make it a top priority.
As a new Democracy Corps study points out, Democrats are in better than expected shape looking toward the 2014 mid term elections. The challenge now is to make the most of the Court ruling in turning out key constituencies. With that commitment, we can set the stage for a wave election in 2014 and a win in the next presidential election, which is imperative for restoring balance to the Supreme Court.

The following article is cross-posted from a Democracy Corps e-blast and linked to a major new Democracy Corps study, “Not so fast: 2014 Congressional Battleground Very Competitive“:
Not so fast.
The first Democracy Corps Congressional Battleground survey of the most competitive House races will challenge serious commentary and the informed presumptions about the 2014 election. Analysts, pundits, and commentators have concluded that there will be fewer seats in play in 2014 and that neither party is likely to upset the current balance. To be honest, this poll surprised us. Republicans have lost half their lead from 2012 – despite the more Republican seats and a more conservative electorate. It shows Democrats could at least replicate the net gain of 8 seats they achieved in 2012 – and that Republicans are exposed as the country tires of Tea Party gridlock, Obamacare repeal efforts, threats to Medicare and Social Security, and politicians protecting the richest. The parties’ strongest attacks, including on health care, produce big gains for Democrats – bigger shifts than we have seen in a long time. In the past, that has been a precursor to future gains.
Democracy Corps’ Congressional Battleground poll is the only one where interviews are conducted exclusively in the most competitive Democratic and Republican seats, using the actual names of incumbents in their districts. This is not a generic test ballot. And this survey has been a pretty good guide to the expanding battlegrounds in the elections of 2006, 2008, and 2010.
Read more at Democracy Corps.

It now seems hard to believe that there was a time when America’s corporate leaders gave a damn about the welfare of the nation. Yes, it was true that their market was overwhelmingly domestic back then. But there was also a genuine patriotism mixed in with the drive for profits, some of it attributable to the World War II generation who rose to top decision-making positions in their companies.
But you rarely hear the word “patriotic” in the comments of today’s corporate leaders. Their sole loyalty now seems to be their stockholders and the global marketplace, which they are milking for every available dollar. Nowadays they are far more likely to express their love of “free trade” than their love for America.
Thomas B. Edsall notes in his NYT Opinionator post that Alan Krueger, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers says that “the uncritical worship of the free market in the 1980s allowed the nation’s corporate elite to abandon longstanding constraints in its treatment of labor, especially in shifting the rewards of rising productivity from employees to the owners of capital.” Worse, writes Edsall:

With the blessing of the new right, Krueger argues, corporate America has abandoned its commitment to the commonweal over the past three decades. It no longer honors norms of fairness and equality. To Krueger, it is in the economic sphere that American integrity has been eroded and its ideals corrupted.

Edsall then quotes Krueger directly:

In considering reasons for the growing wage gap between the top and everyone else, economists have tended to shy away from considerations of fairness and instead focus on market forces, mainly technological change and globalization. But given the compelling evidence that considerations of fairness matter for wage setting, I would argue that we need to devote more attention to the erosion of the norms, institutions and practices that maintain fairness in the job market. We also need to focus on the policies that can lead to more widely shared – and stronger – economic growth. It is natural to expect that market forces such as globalization would weaken norms and institutions that support fairness in wage setting. Yet I would argue that the erosion of the institutions and practices that support fairness has gone beyond market forces.

Krueger dismisses the routine explanation of many economists that increasing inequality and middle-class stagnation are caused by technology and globalization. Corporate profits are soaring, and coporate leaders could easily raise wages and salaries, without hurting their companies. He argues further that productivity has also suffered as a consequence:

Productivity growth has not accelerated over the past 30 years; in fact, except for the late 1990s (when inequality narrowed) productivity growth has slowed. If the rise in inequality had improved incentives, one would have expected productivity growth to rise even more quickly, not slow down. Indeed, it is hard to see what the macroeconomy has gained from the enormous shift in the income distribution.

Before the 1980s, C.E.O. pay used to adhere to “norms of fairness, so that the range of compensation between janitors and top executives was kept within limits.” Meanwhile, notes Krueger, other wealthy nations which have experienced economic downturns have escaped sharp hikes in inequality.
There has been a lot written about the decline of values in America and the rise in narcissism, with ample evidence all around us. But where it hurts most is in the values of the corporate decision-makers, who have the power to rebuild America, but who have instead replaced patriotism with geckoism.

From Why We Shouldn’t Trust ‘Independents’ By Jonathan Bernstein at The Washington Monthly:

[Here’s] a reminder of my good-enough way of thinking about how the actual electorate breaks down: it’s one-third Republican, one-third Democratic, one-third independent…but that final one third is itself really one-third Republican, one-third Democratic, and one-third (and thus one-ninth overall) true independent. And what’s more, those true independents are overwhelmingly the least informed and least attentive to politics…

In his New York Times magazine article, “Data You Can Believe In The Obama Campaign’s Digital Masterminds Cash In” Jim Rutenberg illuminates some of the strategies and techniques deployed by the Obama campaigns digital wizards in 2012.
With respect to ad-buying, Rutenberg explains:

… The campaign recruited the best young minds in the booming fields of analytics and behavioral science and placed them in a room they called “the cave” for up to 16 hours a day over the course of roughly 16 months. After the election, when the technology wizards finally came out, they had not only helped produce a victory that defied a couple of historical predictors; they also developed a host of highly effective marketing techniques that were either entirely new or had never been tried on such a grand scale.
Grisolano and McLean and the others were part of a singular breakthrough in the field of television-ad buying, where about 50 percent of the campaign’s budget was spent, or more than $400 million. Previous campaigns would make decisions about how to direct their television-advertising budgets largely based on hunches and deductions about what channels the voters they wanted to reach were watching. Their choices were informed by the broad viewership ratings of Nielsen and other survey data, which typically led to buying relatively expensive ads during evening-news and prime-time viewing hours. The 2012 campaign took advantage of advanced set-top-box monitoring technology to figure out what shows the voters they wanted to reach were watching and when, resulting in a smarter and cheaper — if potentially more invasive — way to beam commercials into their homes. The system gave Obama a significant advantage over Mitt Romney, according to Democrats and many Republicans (at least those who were not on Romney’s media team).
…Grisolano told me that the campaign literally knew every single wavering voter in the country that it needed to persuade to vote for Obama, by name, address, race, sex and income. What’s more, he hinted, the campaign had figured out how to get its television advertisements in front of them with a previously inconceivable level of knowledge and accuracy.

Regarding data-collection and classification:

Wagner dismisses the notion of “romantic war rooms” operating on political gut instinct as outdated and misguided. His is a hard-data system that rejects anything that is not definitively quantifiable. In the Bush era, strategists boasted about how they could predict voter behavior based upon car and sport preferences, a well-publicized bit of political magic that captured the imaginations of politicians and journalists alike. Wagner’s approach, part of a broader move in politics, cut all of that out; why engage in such divination when you have the time and money to just call voters and ask them about their leanings directly? “We’re trying to predict political preference; we’re not trying to predict whether you buy a car,” Wagner says dismissively.
The campaign couldn’t call the more than 150 million registered voters, obviously. But they could call enough of them in swing states (up to 11,000 a night) to figure out how they — and other people who lived near them, looked like them and earned like them — were likely to vote with an increasing degree of accuracy. In 2008, Wagner and his small team combined information from those calls with any other data they could find — census data, state voter lists and the like — and fed it into algorithms that produced support scores. One ranked how likely swing-state voters were to support Obama on a scale of 0 to 100, and another ranked how likely they were to show up at voting booths. Those scores helped the campaign direct resources toward the right voters, and Obama beat John McCain by 7 percentage points.

Read more…

Robert Reich’s ‘Why the GOP Can’t learn” at HuffPo provides a lucid explanation for the Republican party’s inability to grow in credibility:

…The Republican base is far more entrenched, institutionally, than was the old Democratic base. And its power is concentrated in certain states — most of the old Confederacy plus Arizona, Alaska, Indiana, and Wisconsin — which together exert more of a choke-hold on the Republican national party machinery than the old Democrats, spread widely but thinly over many states, exerted on the Democratic Party.
These Republican states are more homogenous and conspicuously less like the rest of America than the urbanized regions of the country that are growing more rapidly. Senators and representatives from these states naturally reflect the dominant views of their constituents — on immigration, abortion, and gay marriage, as well as guns, marijuana, race, and dozens of other salient issues. But these views are increasingly out of step with where most of the nation is heading.
This state-centered, relatively homogenous GOP structure effectively prevents the Party from changing its stripes. Despite all the post-election rhetoric about the necessity for change emanating from GOP leaders who aspire to the national stage, the national stage isn’t really what the GOP is most interested in or attuned to. It’s directed inward rather than outward, to its state constituents rather than to the nation.
This structure also blocks any would-be “New Republicans” such as Chris Christie from gaining the kind of power inside the party that a New Democrat like Bill Clinton received in 1992. The only way they’d be able to attract a following inside the Party would be to commit themselves to policies they’d have to abandon immediately upon getting nominated, as Mitt Romney did with disastrous results.

As for the Republican Party’s future,

The greater likelihood is a steady eclipse of the Republican Party at the national level, even as it becomes more entrenched in particular states. Those states can be expected to become regressive islands of backwardness within a nation growing steadily more progressive.
The GOP’s national role will be primarily negative — seeking to block, delay, and filibuster measures that will eventually become the law of the land in any event, while simultaneously preaching “states’ rights” and praying for conservative majorities on the Supreme Court.

The increasing marginalization of the GOP may hep the Democrats win more elections. But it doesn’t provide much of an incentive for Dems to pursue creative or innovative policies, as challenges from a healthier Republican Party might do. In a way, a the GOP’s ‘death spiral’ hurts Dems too.