The following post by Democratic strategist James Carville, is cross-posted from the Carville-Greenberg memo:

When I hear people talking about the troubled state of today’s Republican Party, it calls to mind something Lester Maddox said one time back when he was governor of Georgia. He said the problem with Georgia prisons was “the quality of the inmates.” The problem with the Republican Party is the quality of the people who vote in their primaries and caucuses. Everybody says they need a better candidate, or they need a better message but – in my opinion – the Republicans have an inmate problem.
Slightly more sympathetic, my colleague Stan compares the Republicans to an “endangered species.” But we agree that the strange political obsessions of the Republican base – from denying global warming to defending assault weapons – continue to doom any moderate politicians within their party. How should Democrats seize the political opportunity created by Republican extremism?

If Michael Tomasky is right in his Daily Beast post, “Why Republican Efforts to Block Obama Won’t Work This Time,” The Republicans’ long run of fear-driven domination of U.S. politics has nearly run its course. Tomasky cites three factors that will likely prevent them from making a comeback, like they did in 2010:

…The jobless rate is falling at a decent clip, the Fed is evidently strongly committed to getting it down to 6.5 percent, confidence is up, and all the rest of it. Republicans will have no bleak numbers to bleat about. America won’t be doubting Obama’s ability to get results on his most important task. If the positive indicators keep going up, so will Obama’s job approval numbers, and Republicans will find the audience for their economic critiques to be both smaller and less persuadable.
Second, they can’t get away with the just-say-no, Berlin Wall of opposition in the same way they did four years ago. Oh, don’t get me wrong. They’ll still do it. But I don’t think they can get away with it without paying a hefty political price. After four years of no, the party now has the reputation it has rightly earned, as less willing to compromise than Obama, less trusted than he is, and just less well-liked. The broader American public is going have a lot less patience for GOP obstructionism than it did the first time around.
And third, and maybe most of all–the country has changed culturally. Four years ago, conservatives, liberals, and centrists alike all assumed that middle-of-the-road Americans were, while not Dittoheads, pretty conservative by default. Among the political class, this has meant–for pretty much my entire adult lifetime–that your average American was likely to embrace conservative arguments about the culture, and that Democrats had to be crazy to do anything but meekly suggest that they more or less agreed with a caveat or two.
But no more. With each new day that the election recedes into the past, it becomes more and more apparent just what a watershed it was. No, it wasn’t a realignment election according to the standard political science definition. But it was in a way even bigger than that. The election was a cultural watershed moment. All the old dog-whistle tricks, hating on gay people and all that, failed utterly. After decades of struggle and activism and fights and losses for the liberal side, a switch got flipped in November. Middle-of-the-road voters just stopped buying right-wing fear-mongering.

Tomasky goes on to argue that the Republicans will begin to wake up to the reality that they have to compromise on some key issues to survive as a competitive party, or, worse:

Second, they won’t budge. In this case, Obama is not going to be able to steamroll them. They still control the House, and they have a large enough minority in the Senate to filibuster. And history suggests that they’ll probably win some seats in the 2014 elections, especially with more Democratic senators up for reelection than Republicans. But such small victories as they get over Obama will exact a price. The more obstructionist they are–against a newly popular president, riding a decent-to-good economy, trying to pass common-sense proposals that most Americans support, like higher tax rates at the upper-end and reform of the immigration laws–the more they will look, to more and more Americans, like a knot of toads that you wouldn’t want to put in charge of cleaning out the garage, let alone running the country.

Another very possible scenario that could benefit Democrats is a standoff between the toads and the compromisers, leaving the GOP embroiled in internecine warfare, while the Democrats leverage their new unity into a filibuster-proof majority. All three scenarios bode well for the Democrats.

There’s been some commentary in the media about the extra sadness and irony of this latest horrific school shooting coming during the Christmas season, but according to the book of Matthew in the Christian Bible, the first Christmas was one of intense sadness and pain due to unthinkable violence, as well. According to this account, King Herod heard about the birth of a baby prophesied to be “a leader who will shepherd my people Israel,” and he immediately saw this as a potential threat to his family’s, and Rome’s, power. Herod ordered the killing of all male children under the age of two years old. Matthew then refers back to a verse from the prophet Jeremiah:
A voice was heard in Ramah,
sobbing and loudly lamenting:
it was Rachel weeping for her children,
refusing to be comforted
because they were no more.
All Americans with a living heart today are weeping for our children, sobbing and lamenting those beautiful children and their teachers slaughtered in Sandy Hook on Friday. Our little ones are being killed in front of our eyes: why aren’t we doing something to stop it? My weeping is turning into anger, but not only at the NRA and the gun industry (which are as inextricably locked together as the machinery of one of their automatic gun killing machines) and the politicians who worship at their altar, but at Democrats too gutless to lift a finger to try and end the madness.
The ironic thing is that the politics of the gun issue is actually a plus for Democrats willing to take this on. When Bill Clinton pushed through the Brady Bill and the ban on assault rifles in his first term, his vote among rural and small town voters in 1996 actually went up in comparison to 1992. In fact, with the NRA in all-out attack mode and running against a rural state, small town icon Bob Dole, Bill Clinton did better among rural and small town voters than any Democratic candidate since LBJ in the ’64 landslide, and far better than all the Democratic presidential candidates who haven’t mentioned a peep about gun control since.And with the 52 plus majority Obama has gotten twice being overwhelmingly urban/suburban, women and people of color, the gun control issue just doesn’t have the capacity to shave much from a Democratic majority at the national level.
There are a couple of reasons Democrats are so terrified of this issue, and both of them are based far more on fear than fact. One is that the 1994 tide that swept the Democrats out of power after being in control of the House for 40 years did include a lot of Democrats from the South, where the gun issue mattered a lot. But those seats are mostly not coming back anyway, and it is clear that based on the 2006/8 House majorities that we can win a majority in the House, as we can in presidential elections, by winning big in the parts of the country where guns are not only not a negative, but can help us win votes.

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The following article, by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
The tragedy in Connecticut forces America to confront a simple question: Why should we allow easy access to a weapon of mass destruction just because it could conceivably be referred to as a “gun”?
I count myself among the many Americans who at various points in their lives have owned and used long guns — hunting rifles and shotguns — for hunting and target shooting. No one I know in politics seriously proposes that ordinary Americans be denied the right to own those kinds of weapons.
But guns used for hunting have nothing in common with assault weapons like the ones that were used last week in the mass murder of 20 first-graders — except the fact that they are referred to “guns.”
Rapid-fire assault weapons with large clips of ammunition have only one purpose: the mass slaughter of large numbers of human beings. They were designed for use by the military to achieve that mission in combat — and that mission alone.
No one argues that other combat weapons like rocket-propelled grenades (RPG’s) or Stinger Missiles should be widely available to anyone at a local gun shop. Why in the world should we allow pretty much anyone to have easy access to assault weapons?
Every politician in America will tell you they will move heaven and earth to prevent weapons of mass destruction from falling into the hands of terrorists. Yet we have allowed the ban on this particular weapon of mass destruction to expire. As a result, a terrorist named Adam Lanza was able to have easy access to the assault weapons he used to kill scores of children in minutes.
Let’s be clear, Adam Lanza was a terrorist just as surely as he would have been if we were motivated by an extreme jihadist ideology. It makes no difference to those children or to their grieving families whether their loved ones were killed by someone who was mentally deranged or by someone who believed that by killing children he was helping to destroying the great Satan.
When an individual is willing — or perhaps eager — to die making a big “statement” by killing many of his fellow human beings, it doesn’t matter what their motivation is. It does matter whether they have easy access to the weapons that make mass murder possible.
And after last week, can anyone seriously question whether assault weapons are in fact weapons of mass destruction? If Lanza had conventional guns — or like a man in China who recently went berserk, he only had knives — he would not have been physically capable of killing so many people in a few short minutes.
Of course you hear people say — oh, a car or an airliner can be turned into a weapon of mass destruction — many things can become weapons of mass destruction. And there is no question after 9/11 that we know that this is true. But cars and airliners have to be converted from their primary use in order to become instruments of mass death. It takes an elaborate plot and many actors to take over an airliner and it isn’t easy to methodically kill 27 people with a car.

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In the video clip below Michigan State Rep. Brandon Dillon (D-Grand Rapids) explains his opposition to House Bill 4054, which made Michigan a so-called “right-to-work” state. The bill was fast-tracked through the state House in one day without a committee hearing or a word of testimony.

The following article by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, author of The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
The chattering class is fond of far-fetched theories that lead to lots of intrigue, and one fanciful idea that has been floating around lately is that Scott Brown is ready for a comeback.
The hypothesis is that if John Kerry is nominated to President Obama’s cabinet, then Brown would be a strong contender to fill Kerry’s seat. It has even been speculated that Senate Republicans went after U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice so harshly just to improve Brown’s chance at a comeback.
If you look at the facts, though, you’ll see that Brown is far from the sure bet to win another contest that Republicans hope he is. Consider the following:
Who lost by a bigger margin than almost any candidate in a competitive Senate race in the country?
Scott Brown. The 7.5-point loss he suffered at Elizabeth Warren’s hands was even worse than the 5.5-point loss for Brown’s fellow Republican Richard Mourdock in Indiana–that’s right, the guy who said pregnancy from rape is “something that God intended.” In short, as convenient as it is to refer to the Massachusetts contest between Brown and Warren as a close race, Brown took a beating.
Who was the only incumbent in the entire U.S. Senate to lose in 2012?
Scott Brown. Every one of Brown’s colleagues in the Senate who vied for reelection managed to win. That includes Bill Nelson in the swing state of Florida. That includes Democrat Jon Tester, who held onto his seat in Montana. That includes Bob Casey in the perennial battleground of Pennsylvania. It includes the other Senator Brown — Sherrod Brown of Ohio. Scott Brown proved himself uniquely inept in his failure to fend off his challenger — and to in fact lose by 7.5 percent. And remember, this wasn’t months or even years ago — this was last month.
Who lost to Elizabeth Warren by the same margin that William Weld lost to John Kerry?
Scott Brown. Weld and Brown both lost by approximately 7.48 points, but Weld was going up against a popular two-term incumbent, whereas Brown was the incumbent facing a first-time political candidate. For all the talk about his special campaign skills and positioning, nothing in the results was very special.
Who in the Massachusetts Senate election appeared to pick up no last-minute support or votes from undecided voters?
You guessed it: Scott Brown. Dozens of polls conducted in the seven months leading up to Election Day show that Brown hovered around the 46 percent mark the whole time. Of course, 46 percent is what Brown actually ended up with on Election Day. In other words, Brown made no progress during his campaign, despite an enormous war chest of roughly $30 million to spend on it.
These facts tell only part of the story, though. What’s most damning to Brown’s future prospects isn’t the margin of his defeat. It’s the campaign he ran and the issues he stood for.
Time and again during the 2012 election, Brown showed that he is dangerously out of step with the people of Massachusetts and more in line with the Tea Party supporters who helped him win back in 2010. Opposing the Buffett Rule, supporting tax cuts for the wealthy, backing the Blunt Amendment to limit people’s access to contraception and health care — Scott Brown dug in on each of these positions and has shown no sign of changing during the lame duck session in Congress.
And on top of his out of sync policy positions that cost him the last race, Brown also ran a pretty despicably negative campaign. He shattered his nice-guy image — something that propelled his fluke 2010 victory — by focusing the majority of his efforts on personal attacks against Warren. And in one of his final television advertisements, he even went after Warren’s so called support for “illegal aliens.” At a time when the national GOP is desperately searching for an answer to its Latino problem, it’s hard to imagine why anyone sees Scott Brown as the Republicans’ future more than they do Mitt Romney.
Scott Brown won his special election in 2010 because the people of Massachusetts didn’t know who he really was. Once they did, they made clear by compelling margin that they don’t want him to be their senator anymore. Pundits have long bought into the hype of Brown’s pick-up truck and barn jacket more than voters, and the 2012 election proved that.

Jonathan Chait’s New York Magazine post “In Michigan, the Republican Will to Power” provides a lucid analysis of the rationale behind the GOP’s campaign to crush unions in Michigan, and throughout the industrial heartland. Chait describes the Republican’s ” obsession with the ways in which the power of government can be used to help the governing party maintain its own power” and adds:

… Norquist’s ill-founded suspicions of the Democrats was merely a failed attempt to mirror-image project his own operational mode, which is widely shared among movement conservatives. It was the driving force behind the Bush administration’s failed 2005 campaign to privatize Social Security, which conservatives widely and gleefully predicted would, if successful, bring tens of millions of Americans into the “investor class” and thus transmute them into allies of capital rather than labor.
This is the same mentality at work in numerous states where Republicans, having gained power in the 2010 off-year election wave, have invested their political capital in legal changes designed primarily to tilt the future playing field in their party’s favor. That is the basic purpose of the wave of laws to make voting less convenient (Democrats being more heavily represented among sporadic voters) and to crush unions. As much as Republicans detest unions as economic actors, they hate them far more as political actors, organizing significant minorities of voters as discrete voting blocs aligned with the Democrats.
This is the best way to understand the Republican party’s sudden attack on unions in Michigan. Last year, the Michigan director of Americans for Prosperity, the right-wing activist group, explained, “We fight these battles on taxes and regulation but really what we would like to see is to take the unions out at the knees so they don’t have the resources to fight these battles.” Republicans understand full well that Michigan leans Democratic, and the GOP has total power at the moment, so its best use of that power is to crush one of the largest bastions of support for the opposing party.

Despite the Republicans’ delusions to the contrary, Chait concludes “I don’t think Democrats abstain from this behavior (to anything like the degree the GOP employs it) because it’s made of angels. Rather, the Democratic party comprises an economically diverse coalition, including not just labor but business as well.” However, he adds, “nobody in the GOP cares about labor at all, so it’s easier to unify them behind the kind of political/class war strategy we’re seeing here.”

In his Washington Post column, “The Lansing-Beijing connection,” Harold Meyerson has an interesting take on the right-to-work sneak attack in Michigan perped by the Republicans. Like China, explains Meyerson,

…The United States also has a problem of a rising gap between profits and wages. The stagnation of wages has become an accepted fact across the political spectrum; conservative columnists such as Michael Gerson and David Brooks have acknowledged that workers’ incomes seem to be stuck.
What conservatives haven’t acknowledged, and what even most liberal commentators fail to appreciate, is how central the collapse of collective bargaining is to American workers’ inability to win themselves a raise. Yes, globalizing and mechanizing jobs has cut into the livelihoods of millions of U.S. workers, but that is far from the whole story. Roughly 100 million of the nation’s 143 million employed workers have jobs that can’t be shipped abroad, that aren’t in competition with steel workers in Sao Paolo or iPod assemblers in Shenzhen. Sales clerks, waiters, librarians and carpenters all utilize technology in their jobs, but not to the point that they’ve become dispensable.
Yet while they can’t be dispensed with, neither can they bargain for a raise. Today fewer than 7 percent of private-sector workers are union members. That figure may shrink a little more with new “right to work” laws in Michigan — the propagandistic term for statutes that allow workers to benefit from union contracts without having to pay union dues.

Addressing the Republican argument that right-to-work laws are good for the economy, Meyerson responds:

…An exhaustive study by economist Lonnie K. Stevans of Hofstra University found that states that have enacted such laws reported no increase in business start-ups or rates of employment. Wages and personal income are lower in those states than in those without such laws, Stevans concluded, though proprietors’ incomes are higher. In short, right-to-work laws simply redistribute income from workers to owners…The gap between U.S. capital income and labor income hasn’t been this great since before the New Deal

Then Meyerson explains the real reason for the Republican war on unions: “The Republicans who took control of the Michigan statehouse in 2010 understand that Democrats’ foot soldiers come disproportionately from labor. GOP efforts to reduce labor’s clout help Republicans politically far more than they help any Michigan-based businesses or local governments. (The legislation, which Gov. Rick Snyder (R) signed into law Tuesday evening, establishes right-to-work requirements for the public sector, too.)”
It’s primarily political. But the Republicans also want to help corporations to avoid sharing their record-level profits with the workers who produce their products. As Meyerson concludes, “…Workers don’t get raises if they can’t bargain collectively, and all the hand-wringing about our rising rates of inequality will be so much empty rhetoric unless we insist — in Lansing and Beijing — on workers’ right to form powerful unions.”
Those who want to get involved in fighting the war against unions in Michigan — regardless of where you live — should check out this ‘Take Action’ post at The Nation, and also read this TDS post by J.P. Green identifying household products sold by the anti-union Koch brothers, who reportedly supported the Michigan war against unions.

The following article by Erica Seifert is cross-posted from the Carville-Greenberg Memo:
If you followed the punditocracy’s conventional wisdom in 2012, you were likely surprised by President Obama’s popular vote margin–which is now 3.7 points and climbing. Despite the fact that President Obama consistently led Mitt Romney- and by significant margins in the battleground states where a close race would likely be decided–pollsters and pundits presupposed a very tight race. Joe Scarborough pronounced, “…Anybody that thinks that this race is anything but a tossup right now… should be kept away from typewriters, computers, laptops and microphones for the next 10 days.” The Wall Street Journal proclaimed “Obama and Romney deadlocked.” The Economist asserted the race was “about as close as it could be.” Most other media and pundits thought so, too. Except us.
Our final Democracy Corps poll (completed two days before Election Day) showed the race 49 to 45 percent -an unrounded margin of 3.8 points. With other public polls still showing the race tied or Romney ahead, our poll was an outlier.
We were so confident in our results, we put our reputations on the line in the waning days of the campaign. We were confident we had it right because we believed that the national poll tracking averages were likely underrepresenting Obama’s vote. The main issue was cell phones and the changing demographics that most other pollsters miscalculated. Those pollsters did not reach the new America. Plain and simple.
Our accuracy in this election reflected years of intense study and a series of careful decisions about demographic and turnout trends among pivotal voting groups, notably Latinos. And our accuracy also reflected our intense focus on the methodological changes necessary to accurately sample the full American electorate – such as insisting on a higher proportion of cell phone interviews, despite the higher costs.
This matters for many reasons. It is great to be right. It is even greater to be the rightest. But most of the time, we do not produce polls to predict imminent election outcomes. Most of the time, as now with the fiscal cliff, we poll the American people on major policy issues, on their own pocketbook experiences, and on the messages that speak to the positions and issues most critical to their lives. That we got it right not only undergirds our ability to speak authoritatively on these policy issues in the halls of power, but also allows us to fulfill our mandate to tell powerful people what real people think. After all, we cannot accurately represent American voters if we are not producing representative polls.
At this moment, when a very few leaders in Washington are making decisions that will effect our economy now and in the years to come, more than anyone else, Democracy Corps has the authority to tell leaders what voters sent them to Washington to do. It was not, as it turns out, to keep taxes low for the wealthiest while bargaining away middle class tax deductions. Nor was it to slash the Medicare and Social Security benefits on which this and future generations so deeply depend. Nor was it to defund local governments, preventing them from making investments in education and infrastructure.
Instead, this election was about the middle class–how to sustain, secure, and grow the middle class in this generation and the next. The people spoke clearly on this topic… and we were happy to represent them.
Democracy Corps projected the final vote more accurately than any other pollster:
Click here to see graphs depicting DCorps edge.

In his latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’ at the Center for American Progress web pages, TDS Co-Founding Editor Ruy Teixeira pinpoints the kind of investments the public wants the government to make. As Teixeira explains, ” It’s not just taxes. A large part of the current fiscal showdown in Washington, D.C. is the automatic, across-the-board spending cuts that will occur if Congress can’t come to an agreement to avoid sequestration. The public, however, doesn’t want cuts–they want spending to actually go up in key areas.
In a postelection Democracy Corps Economy Media Project poll, the public supported:

Spending $55 billion over the next three years on rehiring teachers and modernizing schools (65 percent to 30 percent)
Enacting a one-year, $53 billion tax rebate for low- and middle-income households to offset the expiring payroll tax cuts (56 percent to 33 percent)
Restoring 99 weeks of emergency unemployment benefits over the next three years (52 percent to 41 percent)
Investing $234 billion in infrastructure, along with creating an infrastructure bank (51 percent to 43 percent)”

As Teixeira concludes, “Conservatives may be allergic to spending on the unemployed and our social needs but the public clearly is not. Let’s hope conservative policymakers in our nation’s capital remember that fact as the fiscal showdown heats up.”