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:
News reports from a variety of places, and my own personal report-backs from participants at yesterday’s progressive organization leaders meeting at the White House, indicate that the president is signaling loudly that he will stand strong on at least some of the very highest priority things that progressives care the most about in the fiscal showdown talks. He continues to demand that the Bush tax cuts for those making over $250,000 go up. He said yesterday in the progressives meeting that Social Security was “off the table”, and he said that while he believes there can be Medicare and Medicaid savings from a variety of administrative methods, that he had no intention of cutting benefits. We don’t know how all of this is going to end up, but right now at least, the president has decided that in unity there is strength.
This doesn’t come as a big surprise to me. In a conversation a couple of months back with a senior White House official, we were talking about the fiscal showdown politics, and I was emphasizing that there would be a serious civil war in the Democratic party if Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid were cut — that our side wasn’t going to back down on this fight. His response was that the Obama team had learned from the past that the administration was in a far stronger position if they were unified with progressives, that they felt that was when they had gotten things done and had been in stronger political shape than when they had tried to triangulate things.
Now before you get too excited about that statement or take it as gospel, keep in mind something I learned early when I worked in the Clinton White House: there is no one White House political strategy or philosophy about how to do things. There are a lot of different players in a White House, and almost always several different views on how to get things done or play things out. I’m sure there are still people in that building who think it is smart politics to pick fights with the base, or who wish the “professional left” would just go away. But I do believe that there is a clear trend in the White House toward thinking it is better for Democrats to be unified in policy fights with the Republicans, simply because they keep getting rewarded politically when they are.
Look at some of the big political decisions this White House has made in the second half of the first term. When it came to prioritizing the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and endorsing marriage equality, there were advisers that argued against those actions because of how it might hurt with swing voters; same with the decision to stop deporting the DREAM Act young people. When Obama decided to put out his own deficit reduction budget proposal last fall, there were Democrats strongly urging that it include cuts in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits as a good will gesture to the Republicans and to show the president was “centrist”; when the president was getting ready to unveil a major new jobs initiative, there were advisers, worried it would look too government-oriented, who urged it be scaled back; when the president took a turn toward middle class populism with the Osawatomie speech, Third Way Democrats cringed, and from what I hear it might have been the final nail in the coffin for Bill Daley as White House Chief of Staff, as he was uncomfortable with the approach, fearing it would drive away business support.
In all of these cases, though, the president was rewarded for these decisions. The LGBT community, after being unhappy with him earlier, rallied behind Obama with support and money more than any other president in history. Fired up by the DREAM decision, Latinos turned out in bigger numbers and voted for the president in bigger numbers than in 2008. And the president’s populist approach on economics and message paid off big time in both firing up the president’s base and winning over working class swing voters.
We don’t know how this fiscal showdown is going to play out. Progressives have to fight with all their strength against any deal, supported by the president or not, that cuts Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits and doesn’t hold the line on repealing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. But the president seems to be understanding more and more that in unity with his progressive base, there truly is strength.

The following e-blast is excerpted from this Democracy Corps memo.
Definitive.
Barack Obama won because he recognized a New America. The President managed only 39 percent of the white vote, the lowest white percentage recorded for a winning national candidate, and suffered a 12-point swing against him among independent voters, but won both the popular vote and an Electoral College landslide by energizing voters we describe as the Rising American Electorate. These voters–unmarried women, young people, Hispanics, and African Americans–not only delivered huge margins to the incumbent–nearly matching 2008 totals among unmarried women and African Americans, exceeding 2008 among Hispanics–but also turned out in ever greater numbers. Collectively, these voters made up nearly half (48 percent) of the 2012 electorate according to national exit poll estimates, up four points from 2008, up four points from 2008, including a 3 point increase among unmarried women.
This outcome was not inevitable. It reflects conscious and deliberate decisions by both campaigns, who made different calculations about what the 2012 electorate would ultimately look like and executed a strategy accordingly. For the first time, a national campaign ran advertising explicitly targeting unmarried women, a group who, heretofore, was too often overlooked by national candidates, despite the fact that they account for 26 percent of the voting age population. While much has been said about the gender gap in this campaign, both married men and married women voted for Romney (53 to 46 percent Romney among married women; 58 to 40 percent Romney among white married women). Barack Obama won the women’s vote and thereby won the White House by rolling up a huge margin (67 to 31 percent) among unmarried women. The marriage gap–the difference in margins between married and unmarried women–dwarfs the gender gap by 25 points (43 and 18 percent), as it has for the last three presidential elections.
Partnering with Women’s Voices, Women Vote Action Fund, Democracy Corps and Greenberg Quinlan Rosner conducted a survey of 1,001 voters in the 2012 election to explore the role of the Rising American Electorate. Read the full memo at Democracy Corps.

The following article is cross-posted from a Democracy Corps Public Campaign Fund e-blast:
In 2012, election spending went through the roof. More than $6 billion were spent at the federal level, with Super PACs pouring in more than a billion in outside spending. A post-election survey conducted November 6-7, 2012 by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for Democracy Corps and Public Campaign Action Fund shows that voters are fed up with a system that they believe undermines democracy.
We will release a full report on voters’ attitudes toward money in politics and the policies they overwhelmingly support to change the current system, but we want to immediately release some of the dramatic highlights from what voters told us on Election Day 2012.
In an otherwise intensely partisan and divided electorate, concerns about money in politics unite voters across parties and demographic groups. Democrats and Republicans give nearly identically negative ratings to lobbyists and are equally concerned about the level of spending in this year’s presidential campaign.
Seven in ten said there was more advertising in this election compared to past years and more than a quarter characterized it as “unhealthy for our democracy.”
Two thirds (64 percent) of 2012 voters said that democracy was undermined in this election by big donors and secret money that control which candidates we hear about. Accordingly, more than three quarters (78 percent) say there is too much money spent on campaigns and there need to be reasonable limits.
Lobbyists and Super PACs are, not surprisingly, overwhelmingly hated by American voters. And on our thermometer scale, 61 percent give the current level of money in politics an unfavorable rating.
Even as they went to the polls to vote for their representatives in Congress, just 15 percent of voters said the views of their constituents have the most influence on how members of Congress vote–compared to 59 percent who said “special interest groups and lobbyists” and 46 percent who believe campaign contributors have the most influence on members’ votes.
Join Stanley Greenberg, CEO of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner and Co-Founder, Democracy Corps, and David Donnelly, Executive Director of Public Campaign Action Fund on Tuesday for an in-depth look at these important findings.
When:
Tuesday, November 13, 2012, at 11am EDT
Call-In Details
Audio: 888.647.2706
Online Presentation:
1. When it’s time for the meeting, visit this link: https://gqrr.webex.com/gqrr/j.php?ED=160440867&UID=480457007&PW=NNTYwNDJmM2Uw&RT=MiMxMQ%3D%3D
2. Enter your name and email address.
3. Enter the meeting password: gqrr.
4. Click JOIN NOW.
5. Follow the instructions that appear on your screen

Democracy Corps, along with partners at Campaign for America’s Future and Women’s Voices. Women Vote Action Fund, conducted election night and day-after interviews among those who voted this week to probe attitudes about why they made the choices they made in this election, what they expect of their leaders, and what their priorities are for the period ahead.
The most important issue is that this election was a battle for the middle class. Both candidates wanted to make the future of the middle class a central part of their campaigns. In the convention and the final weeks of the campaign, Obama turned to a narrative about the future of the middle class and it made him much stronger electorally. Romney began talking about the middle class in a serious way, particularly in the first debate, and made it his closing argument. So that’s where the battle was.
Republicans could not win the battle for the future of the middle class. Republicans have a major brand problem that they will need to address if they are to win future elections. It’s pretty clear that to most voters, what defines the Republican Party and Mitt Romney is that they are totally for the rich and out of touch with average people, which is key when you have an election about the middle class.
Our survey data shows that Obama had a 9-point advantage over Mitt Romney on which candidate would do a better job at restoring the middle class, which is 3 times that of his advantage in the election. That’s what gave him his ability to get a vote majority. This was also an election about Medicare, and the President ended up with an 11-point advantage on Medicare.
If this was an election about the middle class, what moved the agenda moving forward? The starting point was creating jobs and getting the economy going. Half of all voters said that the most important thing leaders should focus on was jobs and the economy. The next top two priorities, relatively even at 40 percent, were reducing the deficit and protecting middle class retirement benefits like Medicare and Social Security. The most important piece here is that the top priority is not the deficit. It’s creating jobs. By more than a 2-to-1 margin, voters said that the biggest priority after the election is to work to grow the economy rather than work to reduce the deficit.
And when we asked voters the reasons why they voted for Obama, the most important reasons were his economic actions–that he brought us through economic crisis, his jobs plan, and commitment to social insurance–the Affordable Care Act, Medicare, and Social Security. But above all, jobs and the economy for the middle class. Conversely, Mitt Romney lost because he was not a believable caretaker of the future of the middle class. The strongest theme in voters’ reasons to vote against Romney all centered on the fact that he was out of touch with ordinary people and for the rich–because of his comment about the “47 percent,” corporate policies, and support for more tax cuts for the wealthy.
It is not surprising that these economic concerns were front and center for the Rising American Electorate of unmarried women, young people, and minorities, which grew as proportion of the population in this election, and grew as base voters for Obama. They now form almost half the electorate, and that’s why Obama was able to win. For those voters, the two top issues by far in terms of advancing middle class was creating jobs and protecting retirement benefits. For those who gave this election to the president, it’s clear what their priorities are–on restoring the middle class.
Barack Obama won because he recognized this New America of unmarried women, minorities, and young people. The President managed just 39 percent of the white vote in a tough economy, but won both the popular vote and an Electoral College landslide by energizing voters we describe as the Rising American Electorate. These voters–unmarried women, young people, Hispanics and African Americans — not only delivered huge margins to the incumbent–nearly matching 2008 totals among unmarried women and African Americans, exceeding 2008 among Hispanics–but also turned out in ever greater numbers. Collectively, these voters made up nearly half (48 percent) of the 2012 electorate according to national exit poll estimates, up four points from 2008 and with the biggest gain coming among unmarried.
This outcome was not inevitable. It reflects deliberative decisions by both campaigns, who made different calculations about what the 2012 electorate would ultimate look like and executed a strategy accordingly. For the first time, a national campaign ran advertising explicitly targeting unmarried women, a group who, heretofore, was too often overlooked by national candidates, despite the fact that they account for 26 percent of the voting age population. While much has been said about the gender gap in this campaign, both married men and married women voted for Romney (53 to 46 percent Romney among married women; 58 to 40 percent Romney among white married women). Barack Obama won the women’s vote and thereby won the White House by rolling up a huge margin (67 to 31 percent) among unmarried women. The marriage gap–the difference in margins between married and unmarried women–dwarfs the marriage gap by 25 points (43 and 18 percent), as it has for the last three presidential elections.
More information, including frequency questionnaire and graphs, can be found here:
http://www.democracycorps.com/National-Surveys/post-election-the-real-mandate/
Graphs:
http://www.democracycorps.com/attachments/article/926/WVWV%20post-elect%20(draft6).pdf
http://ourfuture.org/electionpoll2012
http://www.democracycorps.com/In-the-News/how-unmarried-women-youth-and-people-of-color-defined-this-election/

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.
In the face of five years of the deepest economic troubles this nation has seen since the 1930s, which put voters in a bad mood, and veritable floodgates of millionaire money unleashed by Citizens United (far, far surpassing anything in American history), an incumbent president won a clear victory and over 50 percent of the vote. Except for FDR in 1936, Barack Obama is the only Democratic president to win reelection in an economy this tough, and he is the only one except for FDR and Andrew Jackson to get over 50 percent of the vote. And beyond the presidency, with Democrats having to defend over twice as many seats in the Senate as the Republicans and pundits earlier in this cycle suggesting that a Republican Senate was practically a lock — and again with all those hundreds of millions of dollars of millionaires’ money spent against them — the Democrats actually look like they will be picking up two seats.
This remarkable, historic achievement was accomplished with the kind of old-fashioned middle class populism that modern day DC sophisticates have been saying for 25 years doesn’t work anymore.
Little more than a year ago, in the fall of 2011, after an ugly deal with the Republicans on the debt ceiling that had followed two earlier deals with the Republicans on the budget that left a bad taste in Democrats’ mouths, the president was at his lowest point, politically. His poll numbers were bad, his base was upset, the swing voters he was trying to court thought he looked weak. The reelection looked like it was in deep trouble. But the president made the right political decision and made clear he was fighting for the American middle class and those young and poor people who were striving to get into it. He channeled his inner Teddy Roosevelt, giving a speech that was a tribute to TR and was the kickoff for a yearlong campaign firmly rooted in the hopes and aspirations of working- and middle-class voters.
He enthusiastically embraced the car company bailout that had been so unpopular when he had first done it. He started strongly defending Obamacare after Democrats had run from it — and been pilloried with it — in 2010. He recess-appointed aggressive consumer watchdog Rich Cordray to the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and asked aggressive Wall Street prosecutor Eric Schneiderman to co-chair a new task force to investigate financial fraud. He hammered the Ryan budget for voucherizing Medicare and block-granting Medicaid and cutting taxes for the wealthy. He stuck to his guns on boldly attacking Romney’s role at Bain Capital when Wall-Street-friendly Democrats were calling on him to back off. He started talking about, and working on, rebuilding our manufacturing base.
It worked. Turns out that both Democratic base voters and the mostly working class swing voters liked this new populist approach. So despite those tough odds that I discussed in the first paragraph, President Obama found his rhythm and found his way. After Mitt Romney — the perfect candidate to run a populist campaign against — became the Republican nominee, the Obama campaign established a small but steady lead in the key swing states which, through all the ups and downs of a long, tough campaign, they never relinquished.

Read more…

For insightful analysis of elections, it’s always good to check in with the National Journal’s ace Ronald Brownstein, who observes today:

President Obama won a second term by marrying the new Democratic coalition with just enough of the old to overcome enduring economic disenchantment and a cavernous racial divide.
In many places, particularly across the Sun Belt, Obama mobilized the Democrats’ new “coalition of the ascendant,” winning enough support among young people, minorities and college-educated whites, especially women, to overcome very weak numbers among blue-collar whites and college-educated men. But in the upper Midwest, where there are not enough of those voters to win, Obama attracted just enough working-class whites to hold the critical battlegrounds of Wisconsin, Iowa, and above all Ohio against Mitt Romney’s forceful challenge.

Brownstein notes that with Obama’s victory, Democrats have matched the GOP record of winning the popular vote in 4 of 5 elections. he adds that “Obama also held all 18 “blue wall” states that have voted Democratic in each election since 1992. By doing so he set a new milestone: that is the most states Democrats have won that often since the formation of the modern party system in 1828.”
Brownstein explains that Obama adroitly rode the “tailwind” of demographic transformation, as people of color now cast 28 percent of the ballots in a presidential election, and Obama received 80 percent of their votes, “including not only more than nine in 10 African-Americans, but also about seven in 10 Hispanics, and about three in four Asians.”
“In the key Midwestern battlegrounds with much smaller minority populations,” adds Brownstein, “the president engineered a different formula for victory…Obama exceeded his national performance among white voters by just enough to repel Romney’s challenge” by successfully characterizing Romney as “an insensitive plutocrat.” yet, nationwide, “Obama captured a smaller share of the white vote than John Kerry did when he lost in 2004.”
In that way, the election offered warning signs to each party.
It’s a warning sign for Democrats, says Brownstein, but a disaster for Republicans: “By winning nearly three-fifths of whites, Romney matched the best performance among white voters ever for a Republican challenger–and yet he lost decisively in the Electoral College.” Brownstein adds,

…By failing to compete more effectively for the growing minority population, Republicans have lowered their ceiling in presidential politics, and left their nominees trying to thread a needle to reach a majority either in the popular or Electoral College vote.

Brownstein concludes of Obama’s re-election,

…His victory underscored the enduring polarization along ideological, regional, and racial lines: For instance, while about three-fifths of Hispanics and three-fourths of African-Americans who voted said they wanted his health care law maintained or even expanded, nearly three-fifths of whites said they wanted it repealed…How Washington makes progress on the biggest challenges we face while the nation is both deeply and closely divided is the largest question looming after Obama’s historic victory.

There is no question that President Obama and the Democrats have won an impressive mandate. The challenge ahead is to increase the comfort level of white working class voters as a permanent constituency in the new Democratic coalition,

From the Carville-Greenberg Memo:

by James Carville
It’s Election Day…the latest and last pre-election Democracy Corps poll shows President Obama up by four points nationally…so Stan and I are feeling pretty good about today’s results. There’s nothing in other national polls or state polls to contradict our assessment about this election – and if anything, the president gained momentum in the final day or so.
Instead of learning from experience, the Republicans continue their war on science and facts. Now they’re furious that anyone would dare use polling data to predict an election outcome that isn’t going their way, and taking it out on Nate Silver, the polling blogger at the New York Times.
If a play were opening tonight, I think the title should be “The Ass-Whuppin’ Cometh.”