Rachel Weiner’s “No, It’s Not a Push Poll” at The Fix has a level-headed take on the new PPP poll showing Senate Minority Mitch McConnell in a dead heat in his race for re-election in KY, when matched against Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes. Says Weiner: “Two things are true: 1. McConnell is probably not as vulnerable as this poll might suggest. 2. it’s not a push poll, as some Republicans have alleged.”
Weiner goes on to point out correctly that many polls test negative memes, and also quotes American Association for Public Opinion Research President Nancy Mathiowetz: “Message testing, when campaigns test the effectiveness of possible messages about opponents and even themselves, is very different; and it is a legitimate form of surveying.”
A push poll is one that is designed to damage a candidate. PPP has an excellent track record in terms of both integrity and accuracy in predicting election outcomes. In addition, Weiner reports that to compensate for distortion caused by negative questions, PPP “weights its sample to account for that possibility.”
Stu Rothernberg quoted in Weiner’s post, adds: “No sane person would think he could affect a Senate race by calling 500 people — certainly not in a state with over 4 million people.” However, the small sample size also suggests Dems shouldn’t get too giddy about the results of the poll.
As Weiner concludes:

A more salient attack on this poll might be that it’s designed more as a tool to convince her [Grimes] to run than anything else. While non-partisan polls also suggest McConnell’s numbers are weak, Democrats are struggling to field a candidate in the increasingly conservative state and the senator is well-prepared for a challenge.

Another prudent conclusion might be that, when the GOP’s most powerful senator can only manage a tie against a Democratic Secretary of State who hasn’t yet announced her candidacy, she likely has a shot — particularly in a wave election. But Dems should probably save the happy water cooler chat for the announcement of Michelle Bachman’s retirement.

The following article, by Ruy Teixeira, is cross-posted from TP Ideas:
Could the great state of Texas turn blue? That’s a question that’s been debated recently in the blogosphere, sparked by a Democratic move (“Battleground Texas”) to turn loose the data-mining and mobilization techniques that worked so well for President Obama in 2012 on the Lone Star state. Republicans, as they should, certainly seem worried. Greg Abbott, the Republican Attorney General in Texas, described Battleground Texas’ efforts in the following terms:
One thing that requires ongoing vigilance is the reality that the state of Texas is coming under a new assault, an assault far more dangerous than what the leader of North Korea threatened when he said he was going to add Austin, Texas, as one of the recipients of his nuclear weapons.
This outburst has only added to the effort’s credibility.
The theory of blue Texas relies heavily on the ongoing demographic transformation of the state. Every year, there are relatively fewer white voters and relatively more minority voters, particularly Hispanics. According to recent CAP projections, white eligible voters in Texas will decline from 56 to 52 percent between 2012 and 2016, with a corresponding rise in minority voters primarily driven by Hispanics.
All else equal, this makes Texas only somewhat bluer, since the white vote in Texas remains overwhelmingly Republican. But when you expand the timeframe under consideration, the picture may look considerably darker for the GOP. In a New York Times column, Tom Edsall takes the projections out farther, relying on some work by political scientist Robert Stein. According to Edsall, these projections suggest that the white share of eligible voters could be down to 35 percent by 2025 and the Hispanic share up as high as 44 percent. If he’s right, getting to a blue Texas is no more complicated than simply waiting around for demographic change to take effect.
This projection should be taken with several grains of salt. As Nate Cohn points out, Edsall’s argument is based on very old (1995) Census state level projections (Census no longer does state level projections of race-ethnic change) and are not reliable at this point. The state of Texas, however, does do such projections and they suggest a more moderate rate of change — ones that look fairly consistent, I might add, with the short-term projections CAP has done. Instead of 35 percent white eligible voters and 44 percent Hispanic voters by 2025, these projections indicate that the highest level of change we are likely to see would produce 44 percent white eligibles and 37 percent Hispanic eligibles. That’s still significant change, but not quite Edsall’s demographic slam-dunk.
Cohn also rightly notes that you can’t assume that the proportion of Hispanics among actual voters is going to match their proportion among eligible voters and, moreover, the rate of Democratic voting among whites in Texas is so low that it constitutes a huge barrier, even with demographic change, to a blue Texas. In 2008, the white vote for Obama in Texas was only 26 percent and Cohn estimates that the white vote for Obama in Texas in 2012 could have been as low as 20 percent (there was no Texas exit poll this year so all we have for 2012 are estimates).
All this suggests to me that the quest for a blue Texas is going to have to be built on three pillars, only one of which is ongoing demographic change. The other two are matching minority, particularly Hispanic, turnout to white turnout and elevating white support for Democrats. In the latter area, if the Democrats can simply get their support to the 30 percent level — in other words, make the typical landslide among whites for the GOP just a little bit less of a landslide — they will be in a good position to stand on all three pillars and make their dream (and Greg Abbott’s nightmare) of a blue Texas come true.

From Susan Page’s USA Today interview with DCCC Chair Rep. Steve Israel, who likened the 2014 upcoming election to the situation Dems faced in 1998:

“It was very similar to the climate that we have now,” Israel said. “The president gets elected, re-elected, in 1996. The Republicans in the House of Representatives make a decision to do everything they can to bring him down. … They launched 35 separate, partisan, witch-hunt investigations — and the Democrats won seats in the second midterm election of the Clinton presidency; won five seats.”
Democrats need to pick up 17 House seats to regain the control they lost to Republicans in 2010. Israel says there are 52 House seats “in play.” The non-partisan Cook Political Report now identifies 37 Democratic-held seats and 30 Republican-held seats as competitive or potentially competitive.
One big target for Democrats: Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, who for a time sought the Republican presidential nomination in 2012 but only narrowly held on to her House seat in November. She faces a rematch against businessman Jim Graves. Israel said a campaign poll taken last week by the firm PPP for the Graves campaign put him ahead of Bachmann, 47%-45% — within the margin of error of 4.4 percentage points but a sign of a close contest.

In the interview, Israel adds “”If the economy shows signs of health, then I think we have a much better climate in which to win the House.” In addition, Rachel Weiner reports at The Fix that Dems have a 48-40 edge in generic ballot preference, according to the latest WaPo/ABCNews poll.

Grover Norquist was not kidding when he said “I’m not in favor of abolishing the government. I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” His intentions became quite clear later on when he made his equally infamous pledge an oath of faith for conservatives.
But Norquist’s nightmarish vision may now be becoming a political reality. As Noam Scheiber writes in his disturbing post, “Hunger Games The conservative plan to starve government has paid off with the IRS scandal” at The New Republic.

The more we learn about the IRS vetting of conservative groups, the less it looks like an abuse of power than something much more mundane–a beleaguered agency with too few resources to handle its work-load…As The New York Times reported this past weekend, the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt groups was chronically understaffed and overwhelmed even before a surge in applications from political groups in 2010. Once the dodgy applications started piling up (dodgy because political groups that don’t reveal their donors aren’t supposed to get tax exemptions), it’s not surprising that the IRS cut corners, adopting search terms like “patriot” to help flag the conservative groups who were largely behind the increase. This was insensitive and inexcusable–a real crime against political correctness. But it was the kind of mistake people make when they’re overworked, not on a witch hunt.

However, explains Scheiber,

…The scheming is on the right and not the left. Since the Republican House takeover in 2010, conservatives have laid the groundwork for a cynical two-step: First, squeeze funding for government programs, making it harder for civil servants to do their jobs. Then, when the inevitable screw-up comes, use it as further justification for cuts. Against this backdrop, the IRS scandal looks like only the latest step in the conservative long-game.

Scheiber adds that the same tactics have been leveraged to undercut the Affordable Care Act, and the enforcement powers of the FEC and CFTC, and weaken government by drastic cuts in discretionary spending. As Scheiber says, “the GOP’s entire budget strategy for the last two-and-a-half years only really makes sense as an effort to discredit government…The budget strains prevented the agency from staffing up appropriately across the board, increasing the chances of a major snafu somewhere in its vast organization chart.”
Worse, adds Scheiber:

The just and logical result of this chain of events would be to discredit the people intent on starving government. Instead, the scandal has become a convenient talking point for opponents of government itself. The IRS uproar “probably represents the last shovelful of dirt on the central mission of Barack Obama’s presidency: rehabilitating Big Government’s reputation as a necessary first step toward a new Progressive Era,” wrote the economics commentator James Pethokoukis in National Review. More alarmingly, mainstream pundits are echoing this conclusion. “The IRS flap eats away at the underpinnings of what President Barack Obama promised when he first ran in 2008,” wrote the centrist columnist Jerry Seib the following week. “A revival of confidence that government is capable of solving problems in a smart and nonideological manner.”
I’m afraid Seib is right. As it’s currently playing out, the scandal probably is sapping confidence in government. But how we got to this point is no accident. It was the plan all along.

What the GOP could not completely achieve with gerrymandering and voter suppression, they are accomplishing through legislative obstruction and paralysis — rendering government incapable of functioning effectively. Whether they can hoodwink enough voters into agreeing with them remains to be seen. What voters must decide on November 4, 2014 is whether government is inherently evil and incompetent — or is it just the Republicans in congress.

New York Times op-ed writer Bill Keller arguing for appointing a special counsel to investigate the IRS affair:

The third reason for a special counsel is that the government has serious business to conduct, and the scandal circus on Capitol Hill is a terrible distraction. Oversight, so-called, is what we do these days instead of passing a budget, reforming the immigration system, or processing the countless government and judicial appointments awaiting confirmation. Handing off the I.R.S. problem to a special counsel and putting congressional hearings on hold would allow everyone, including journalists, to turn their attention to all that unfinished business.

In Keller’s alternate universe, one nust assume, the GOP is not refusing to pass a budget, not blocking appointees, not filibustering every bill and not refusing to fund programs already on the books. In this universe, on the other hand, the only thing the scandals are distracting the GOP from doing more of is obstruction.

In his Political Animal post “Losing the Thread on the IRS Mess” at Washington Monthly, Ed Kilgore illuminates the shifting GOP rationale for amping up the I.R.S. ‘scandal.’ Kilgore cites Steve Benen’s Maddow Blog post, noting that ‘the goalposts have moved rather quickly” and Jeffrey Toobin’s New Yorker observation that the White House seems to be rather more engaged in “the opposite of a cover-up.” Kilgore adds that The Village scribes’ new meme is that the white house is guilty of, gasp, political incompetence. Kilgore observes further:

Well, whatever. It’s not exactly breaking news that this White House, like any White House, isn’t politically infallible. If the scandal is poor handling of the scandal, we are a very long way from the original claims, which are still being repeated every single second throughout conservative-land, that the administration has gotten caught deploying the IRS to destroy the First Amendment rights (which apparently includes the right not to pay taxes and to hide donors) of innocent activists who were minding their own business.
The ultimate howler here is that we are supposed to believe that IRS bureaucrats, in obedience to the “dog whistle” of the president’s demonization of conservative groups’ involvement in the 2012 presidential campaign, chose to ignore the groups that were actually involved in the campaign in a significant way, and instead go after small fry Tea Party organizations (who apparently could not express their views without a certificate of tax-exempt status), many undoubtedly operating in non-competitive states. This idea reflects the deeper delusion that the Tea Party Movement is perceived by Democrats as a deadly threat to their electoral prospects, instead of as the Democratic Party’s very best friend, driving the GOP into extremism and political cul de sacs every day. You know, like the one we’re all barreling down right now in inflating IRS stupidity in processing 501(c)(4) applications into the central issue of American politics (with the possible exception of Benghazi!).
But hey, forget all that: Lois Lerner (the same bureaucrat who came up with the brilliant idea of making this whole subject very public by planting a question about IRS “targeting” at a luncheon so that she could “apologize”) is taking the Fifth! Crimes must have been committed! To hell with those portions of the Bill of Rights that don’t involve the self-protection of Tea Folk! To hell with the law and logic! Down the rabbit hole we go, world without end!

If this is the best they got, 2014 just might pan out substantially better than expected — for Democrats.

If you have noticed a growing disconnect between the loudly trumpeted priorities of Republican political leaders and the reality-based community, you are in pretty good company. Charlie Cook’s National Journal post, “Republicans’ Hatred of Obama Blinds Them to Public Disinterest in Scandals” explains it well:

Red-faced Republicans, circling and preparing to pounce on a second-term Democratic president they loathe, do not respect, and certainly do not fear. Sound familiar? Perhaps reminiscent of Bill Clinton’s second term, after the Monica Lewinsky story broke? During that time, Republicans became so consumed by their hatred of Clinton and their conviction that this event would bring him down that they convinced themselves the rest of the country was just as outraged by his behavior as they were. By the way, what was Clinton’s lowest Gallup job-approval rating in his second term, throughout the travails of investigations and impeachment? It was 53 percent. The conservative echo machine had worked itself into such a frenzy, the GOP didn’t realize that the outrage was largely confined to the ranks of those who never voted for Clinton anyway.
These days, the country is even more polarized, and the conservative echo chamber is louder than ever before….Although the Republican sharks are circling, at least so far, there isn’t a trace of blood in the water. A new CNN/ORC survey of 923 Americans this past Friday and Saturday, May 17-18, pegged Obama’s job-approval rating at 53 percent, up a statistically insignificant 2 points since their last poll, April 5-7, which was taken before the Benghazi, IRS, and AP-wiretap stories came to dominate the news and congressional hearing rooms…
In Gallup’s tracking poll, Obama’s average job-approval rating so far this year is 50 percent. For this past week, May 13-19, his average was 49 percent, the same as the week before. The most recent three-day moving average, through Sunday, May 19, was also 49 percent. Over the past two weeks, even as these three stories/scandals have dominated the news, they have had precisely zero effect on the president’s job-approval numbers. His ratings are still bouncing around in the same narrow range they have been for weeks.

Cook acknowledges that “things could change” and the public might care more about the scandals later on. However, Cook notes that economists expect the economy to perk up at least a little in the second half of this year. Regarding the GOP’s scandal-mongering, Cook observes:

One wonders how long Republicans are going to bark up this tree, perhaps the wrong tree, while they ignore their own party’s problems, which were shown to be profound in the most recent elections. Clearly none of these recent issues has had a real impact on voters yet. Republicans seem to be betting everything on them, just as they did in 1998–about which even Newt Gingrich (who was House speaker that year) commented recently to NPR, “I think we overreached in ’98.”…Republicans and conservatives who are so consumed by these “scandals” should ask themselves why, despite wall-to-wall media attention and the constant focus inside the Beltway–some are even talking about grounds for impeachment–Obama’s job-approval needle hasn’t moved.

It’s a good question. But don’t expect a coherent answer from leaders of a political party that prefers pandering to hatred and wallowing in self-delusion to addressing the economic priorities of middle-class Americans with credible reforms.

David Jarman has an insightful post, “The most vulnerable House members in 2014, in two charts” up at Daily Kos. Jarman has developed a “House Vulnerability Index,” which “proved to be quite accurate” overall in 2010 and hinted at a couple of upsets that actually occurred. Jarman explains:

How the Index works is by combining the two elements that I discussed in the two prevoius weeks’ diaries: The House districts occupied by Republicans that have the most Democratic-friendly presidential results (and vice versa), and the districts where the incumbent members won the narrowest victories the year before. That way, it downplays members who had a close call (probably because they were running in open seats, without the benefit of incumbency) but who are likely to be protected by the blueness or redness of their districts, and it downplays members who are in “crossover” districts but have gotten entrenched and rarely attract top-tier competition. Instead, it casts the spotlight on those House members who fall into “perfect storm” territory of future vulnerability, of being in both difficult districts and having had a difficult election themselves.

Jarman has quite a bit to say about particular House races, and his insights are well worth a read, especially by those who want to more closely monitor the 2014 mid terms. As for vulnerable Republicans, he observes:

You’ll notice that, compared with the Democratic table, there aren’t a lot of vulnerable freshmen near the top of the list. (With 2012 winds blowing in a fairly Dem-friendly direction, Democrats won most of the close races in swing districts). In fact, once you get outside the top 10 or so, there really isn’t that much to see on the list in terms of inviting targets; you start getting into the territory of guys like Scott Rigell and John Kline, who are largely unremarkable and who just perform largely in line with their district’s leans … but who are in districts that are Republican-leaning enough to protect them, absent a wave.
As you make your way down the list, a few names do pop out as outliers, and these are races that will no doubt be competitive. That includes Dem-leaning CA-21, where David Valadao’s large victory margin was aided [by] Democrats getting saddled with a poor candidate; with a better Dem candidate, he’ll face a tougher race, although in this mostly-Hispanic district, he’ll also be helped by extra-large falloff in a non-presidential year. That also includes MN-06, where Michele Bachmann just gives you so much material to work with, so much so that even an R+10 district might not be enough to get her over the top.

Jarman’s model doesn’t yet provide a metric for predictions, since it’s still early in the cycle. “…We’ll need more information about how much of a wave is building,” he adds “in order to determine how far up the table the waves will splash and how many people get taken down.” But in his conclusion, Jarman does venture sort of an ‘all other things being equal’ guestimate: “As it stands right now, it looks like a rather status quo election, and I’d be surprised to see more than five or ten seats changing hands in either direction.”
The wild cards which could improve the 2014 outlook for Dems going forward would be if reports of much-improved Democratic GOTV, technological advantage and significantly better candidates are accurate. But it’s not likely we will have a clear fix on that admittedly optimistic scenario until after the votes are counted.

Noting that interest in fighting voter suppression seems to have dropped off after the November elections, Abby Rapoport’s “Five Voting Fights You’ll Care About Come Election Time” at The American Prospect can help get you up to speed on voting reforms in the states, bad and good.
Rapoport’s five “voting fights” include: voter i.d.; same-day registration; early voting; online registration and ‘partisan wars.’ Most readers of TDS probably have an idea about the first three of Rapoport’s categories, which have been pretty well-covered here and elsewhere. But do read her post to get current. Regarding online registration, however, actual bipartisan cooperation (gasp) seems to have gained a foothold, Rapoport explains:

…Going into the year, 15 states had approved online registration and Virginia and West Virginia have since joined the ranks. (Not all of those states have implemented systems yet.) New Mexico also passed a law allowing voters to update their voter information online, a significant move towards full online registration. Both liberals and conservatives supported these measures.
Republicans like that the policy saves money and cuts down on errors in the voting rolls. Democrats like how the policy increases access for people who move or need to get signed up for the first time. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, which tracks state policy, there are currently 12 states still considering measures. In Pennsylvania, where the legislators warred over voter ID, the online registration passed unanimously through the Senate. …

With respect to ‘partisan wars,’ Rapoport is somewhat encouraged by other efforts to bridge gaps in interstate cooperation regarding interstate data sharing and more cooperation between local and state authorities to help insure voter eligibility. She adds that the difference between Republican and Democratic reforms is largely the difference between measures to shrink or expand the electorate, respectively.
Rapoport does not get into felon disenfranchisement, which is one of the GOP’s most powerful means of voter suppression, with an estimated 5+ million, mostly African American citizens rendered ineligible to cast ballots in 2012 (there is a good Sentencing Project fact sheet on state laws here). It’s a problem that deserves more coverage in the blogosphere, as well as the MSM.
At Talking Points Memo, Hunter Walker reports on “Ohio Republicans Push Law To Penalize Colleges For Helping Students Vote,” which is one of the more blatantly partisan ‘reforms’ being pushed by Republicans. According to Walker,

Republicans in the Ohio Legislature are pushing a plan that could cost the state’s public universities millions of dollars if they provide students with documents to help them register to vote. Backers of the bill describe it as intended to resolve discrepancies between residency requirements for tuition and voter registration, while Democrats and other opponents argue it is a blatant attempt at voter suppression in a crucial swing state.
“What the bill would do is penalize public universities for providing their students with the documents they need to vote,” Daniel Tokaji, a professor and election law expert at Ohio State University told TPM. “It’s a transparent effort at vote suppression — about the most blatant and shameful we’ve seen in this state, which is saying quite a lot.”
…”The way that they’ve written this bill makes it clear that its only purpose is to suppress student voting,” he said. “What I’d say to the Republican Party is this is not only a shameful strategy, but it’s a stupid strategy because, you know, the Republican Party already has a signifcant problem with young voters. They’re on the verge of losing a generation of voters. Their path to victory is not to suppress the student vote, but to win the student vote.”

Looking ahead to 2014, midterm political apathy remains a serious problem for Democrats, and a major asset for the Republicans. In addition, Democratic GOTV mobilizers will have to bring their ‘A game’ to thread through the latest round of election law reforms in the states, good and bad.

It’s quite possible, writes Ronald Brownstein at The National Journal, that the Benghazi and I.R.S. ‘scandals,’ along with the Administration’s seizure of journalists’ phone records may serve the GOP cause of tying up Washington in investigations. But it’s equally likely that any advantage they gain will be overshadowed by the difficulties the Republicans will cause within their own party. Brownstein notes how this happened in the Clinton and other adminstrations and explains further:

…President Obama may not prove to be the only one hurt by the eruption of controversies around the Benghazi attack, the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative groups, and the Justice Department’s seizure of Associated Press phone records.
…Examining such questions is a necessary congressional function. But in our polarized era, oversight often becomes a partisan cudgel. And that process, which is already infecting the Benghazi inquiry, could bruise not only Obama but the Republicans driving the investigations as well.
These confrontations’ most predictable effect will be to enrage the GOP base, which will strengthen the party factions most dubious about any compromises with Obama. In that way, these storms will likely weaken not only the president but also Republicans who believe the party must reboot to restore its competitiveness for the White House. “The base of the party is going to go ballistic on this, particularly the IRS [issue],” says Tom Davis, the former chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. “It makes it harder for [GOP legislators] to go along with Obama on things in general.”
…Even before these disclosures, congressional Republicans had dramatically escalated their resistance to Obama’s second term. While the House is voting yet again this week to repeal the president’s health care law, Senate Republicans have blocked consideration of Obama’s nominees for Labor secretary and Environmental Protection Agency administrator. As in Clinton’s era, the approaching cycle of investigation, media leak, and hearing-room confrontation over the IRS and Benghazi will deepen a sense of unstinting partisan conflict that will further narrow the space for serious legislative negotiations.

But the polarization is even worse now, owing to Obama derangement syndrome and tea party hubris. Brownstein adds:

Davis, now director of federal affairs at the Deloitte consulting firm, says one critical difference from the Clinton years is that many GOP leaders still consider deals with Obama on immigration and the debt ceiling to be in the party’s self-interest. But to the extent Republicans believe scandal is bloodying Obama (and thus Democrats for 2014 and 2016), party leaders will face greater pressure not to buttress him with any policy agreements…

Prospects for any legislative reforms are seriously imperiled, Brownstein believes, and that hurts Obama’s legacy prospects. However, concludes Brownstein, “Yet such a breakdown would also endanger the GOP’s need to expand its unsustainably narrow electoral coalition. Republicans could find that stoking the flames of scandal may sear not only Obama’s hopes but also their own.”