the following memo is cross-posted from a DCorps e-blast:
In this intensely partisan season, money in politics is one issue that breaks through the partisanship and the campaign media fog. This new battleground survey, conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for Democracy Corps and Public Campaign Action Fund in the 54 most competitive congressional seats held by Republicans, finds that voters from both parties and all demographic groups are intensely concerned about the corruption of the democratic system. By more than a two-to-one margin, voters say that the current system of “big donors and secret money…undermines democracy.”
This survey of the most vulnerable Republican districts–districts that could determine the balance of Congress for the next two years–are hotly contested ground where outside funding is big business and where both candidates and party committees will spend the most money. According to the Federal Election Commission, candidates, parties, and PACs have already raised more than $4 billion through June, and some estimates place campaign spending this election cycle on pace to break $6 billion.
In the context of this experience, our survey found that 78 percent of constituents say it is important for their candidates to come up with a new plan to reduce the amount of money in politics and the influence of Super PACs.
All in all, voters in these 54 districts are already sensitive to big money in politics and they’ll be even thirstier for solutions as the final weeks unfold.
These are vulnerable incumbents in the most unpopular of partisan institutions, and their outside challengers will surely see the opportunity to confront them on the role of Super PACs, special interest money linked to wrong-headed policies, and their plans for reform and transparency.
Read the full memo and findings at Democracy Corps.

Over the last week or so, you may have heard a few progressive friends and/or commentators say something like “I almost feel sorry for Romney” as a result of his epic meltdown. We can do no better than to refer them to New York Magazine, where Jonathan Chait has an aptly-titled piece, “The Poetic Justice of Romney’s Self-Immolation,” which should provide some relief for bouts of unwarranted sympathy for the GOP nominee. Here’s an excerpt, but do read the whole post:

…If the 47 percent comments do finish Romney off, as now appears likely, it will be eminently fair….There is a poetic justice in the substance of Romney’s self-immolation. This is not a random gaffe, a joke gone bad, or even a terrible brain freeze. It is Romney exposed for espousing a worldview that is at the heart of his party’s mania. The idea he summed up at that fund-raiser was a combination of right-wing fever dreams I’ve been analyzing since Obama took office — the Ayn Randism, the fact-free class warfare, the frantic rage at a changing America. The Republican Party is going down because its candidate was seen advocating exactly the beliefs that make the party so dangerous and repellant.

Compassion for one’s adversaries is occasionally appropriate. Considering Romney’s and the GOP’s shameless and total cave to the tea party and fat-cat agendas, this would not be one of those times.

Ed Kilgore flags a new Gallup poll indicating that the ‘divided government is good’ meme is losing its appeal with many voters. As Andrew Dugan reports at Gallup politics,

A record-high 38% of Americans prefer that the same party control the presidency and Congress, while a record-low 23% say it would be better if the president and Congress were from different parties and 33% say it doesn’t make any difference. While Americans tend to lean toward one-party government over divided government in presidential election years, this year finds the biggest gap in preferences for the former over the latter and is a major shift in views from one year ago.
These findings are based on Gallup’s annual Governance survey, conducted Sept. 6-9. The data show an increased level of support for one-party rule amid a currently divided government in which the Democrats control the presidency and the Senate, while the Republicans control the House. This suggests many Americans are experiencing divided-government fatigue.
Opinions on divided government have fluctuated over the years. When one party controlled both Congress and the presidency in 2006 and 2010, Gallup found near-historical lows supporting one-party rule. This suggests Americans may simply tend to prefer what they don’t have or see problems in whatever the current situation is. At least one chamber of Congress changed hands in the subsequent elections, and the increase in support for one-party government in 2008 foreshadowed an election that would give the Democrats sole control of the presidency and both houses of Congress.

Dugan cites stats showing that most of the increasing preference for one-party government is among Democrats, which is no great shocker. But it isn’t too much of a stretch to assume that the trend has broader roots, given the recent uptick in Democratic self-i.d. and broadening support for Democratic candidates down ballot. It looks like more voters are clear about who is responsible for gridlock in Washington.

At HuffPo Mike Lux makes a compelling argument that Republican desperation indicates a solid Democratic victory on November 6 is likely– if Dems will now press their case.
Lux provides three video clips, which reveal the GOP’s increasing desperation. There’s one of ‘Morning Joe’ Scarborough holding his head in despair about Romney’s painful cheerleader attempt, another showing Romney’s new ‘Me too — I’m like Obama’ ad, and the last one depicts Sen. Scott Brown’s supporters disparaging Elizabeth Warren’s Native American heritage. But it’s Lux’s commentary that explains what is going on and the extraordinary opportunity Dems can now seize. Regarding the ‘me too’ ad, Lux writes:

This is the classic “I really am more like my opponent than you think I am” commercial, one that, as a Democrat, I am way too familiar with our own party running. For 30 years, scared Democrats have been running ads talking about how much like Republicans they really are: fiscal conservatives, won’t raise taxes, tough on crime and welfare cheats. They were defensive ads that accepted the Republican framing and assumed voters wouldn’t accept Democratic/progressive message and issue and values and ideas. Now the tables are turned, and Romney is resorting to having to run ads that say “I really do care about people who aren’t rich!”
The reason this is happening isn’t just that Romney has to play defense because of the infamous 47 percent video (which around 90 percent of voters in swing states are saying they have heard about). It is because the Republicans have lost the central debate in this election. An evenly divided, frozen-in-place electorate spent the two weeks of the conventions getting the chance to take a long look at both parties’ central arguments, and the result was a tectonic plate shift. It wasn’t huge, but it was decisive. Went from an electorate that had been absolutely stationary in their voting plans for several months, practically dead even with the margin barely changing, to an electorate that suddenly moved a very solid 4-5 points not just at the presidential level, but in virtually every competitive race around the country. And that change in numbers has only been reinforced and hardened by the 47 percent video.
Even in the face of a weak economy and the huge money edge the Republicans have, voters have heard the case for Romney-Ryan economics and values, and they are rejecting it. They don’t believe that people who need a hand up from the government are lazy moochers who have grown too dependent. They don’t believe that Medicare ought to be privatized and turned into a coupon. They don’t believe that women should have no right to contraceptive coverage, or that students should only go to college if they can borrow money from their parents. We are winning this debate and we’d be winning even bigger without a weak economy and the boatload of special interest cash.
Here’s the key: since we are winning, let’s not back down. When you have the other team on the run is not the time to back off and give them a breather. It’s not the time to play prevent defense, to get mealy-mouthed and cautious the way some campaigns do when they are ahead. We are winning this debate: let’s keep confidently making our arguments and pushing this pro-middle class, pro-investment in our people message.

As for the Scott Brown clip, Lux explains,

…The other thing that happens when campaigns are losing the central argument in the race is that they get desperate. They start trying to change the subject and throw dumb stuff in the air to distract people. And they start ginning their team up to do desperate things…Brown is losing the essential issue debate in this race, so he is trying to change the subject. We are going to see a lot more of this from Republicans in the weeks to come.

As Lux concludes, “The debate has been won by the Democratic side, and now the Republicans are left with ads apologizing for being Republicans and Rovian tactics designed to distract the electorate. It is time for the Democrats to press their case..”

Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, has an important post, “Five Reasons We Can’t Trust Romney With Our National Security” up at HuffPo. Here’s some excerpts:

Romney’s neocon foreign policy adviser, Richard Williamson, told the Washington Post that, “There is a pretty compelling story that if you had a President Romney, you’d be in a different situation.” He’s right about that. We’d be in a very different — and dangerous — situation if Mitt Romney were in charge of American national security. There are at least five reasons why every American should be frightened at the prospect of Mitt Romney as Commander-in-Chief.
1). Mitt Romney has no guiding principles when it comes to foreign policy — or anything else for that matter — but one: his own personal ambition…Romney has demonstrated time and time again that he has no lasting commitment to principle whatsoever. He has gone from being pro-choice to ardently anti-abortion; morphed from a Massachusetts moderate to a “severe conservative”; demonstrated his willingness to buy companies, load them with debt, bleed them dry and destroy the lives of workers and communities all to make money for himself and his investors.
After favoring immigration reform in the past, Romney became the most anti-immigrant major presidential candidate in modern history.
Romney drafted and passed RomneyCare and then promised to repeal a similar bill when one was passed by President Obama and a Democratic Congress. Why? Because that’s what the thought was necessary to get the Republican nomination for president.
Romney has no North Star guiding his behavior except his desire to enhance his own personal wealth and his own driving ambition.

Read more…

This article, by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, author of The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
I have been in politics way too long to take anything for granted in this presidential race, and I am way too superstitious to assume a victory no matter what. The strongly anti-Obama vote remains at a rock solid 45 percent no matter what ridiculous things Romney says or does, and there will be a few percent undecided right to the end, which means Romney will hang relatively close through the last weeks of this race. By everything I can tell, including both public and private polls I have seen, this is a 4 point race, and that is still close. World events, a weak Obama debate performance or some other kind of mistake, or any number of other things might still put Romney even closer before it is done.
Having said all that, Romney is in a world of hurt, primarily because of the way he has defined himself philosophically and values-wise to the American people. He has lost the essential debate in this race, and the Republican base has created a locked box that imprisons him and makes his comeback very difficult. It’s not just that he is down by a few points: the voting dynamics have solidified, and the chances for Romney’s vote to grow are severely limited because the key groups of swing voters really don’t like him. If Romney comes back and wins, it will not be because of Romney, it will be because of something big happening — a major Obama mistake, people falling asleep in the Get-Out-The-Vote operations, a huge international or economic crisis — that Romney has nothing to do with. Romney’s chances for winning are now out of his hands, so all the stories about whether the Romney campaign will ever get its act together are irrelevant. With a big Obama campaign mistake or an earth-shaking world event, Romney could still win this election, but he and his party have lost the debate over values, policy, and the future of the country.
Given that, we Democrats and progressives should — without losing focus for a moment on turning out the vote and finishing off the re-election job — begin thinking about the implications of a second term for Obama, and how we can begin working now to make it successful for most of the American people. That analysis needs to be done both on the political and economic side of things.
When it comes to politics, naturally the big story is the nature of the next Congress. Because we are winning the central debate, our numbers have gone up in competitive House and Senate races throughout the country. We need to keep driving home our winning argument about community, investing in our people, and fighting for a strong middle class — and we need to do everything possible(except in a few swing states and districts that lean Republican) to nationalize this election.
The chances for the Democrats to retake the House are now a lot better than the conventional wisdom has it, and my view is that for the sake of Obama’s second term the entire party needs to re-orient itself to that possibility. The Obama campaign, big Democratic donors, and the progressive movement should be willing to take the risk of starting to redirect some resources toward winning House races, because if we can take the House back it will make a second term so much better in terms of getting things done for the American people. We also ought to be working to expand the playing field, because that is how we took the House back in 2006 when through most of the cycle very few people thought we would: the DCCC started out only targeting about 25 races, and in the end more than 60 were competitive. We ended up losing more than half of the closest races that cycle but still easily won the House back, and if we had only been playing in 25 races, Nancy Pelosi would not have been Speaker. Now is the time for the Democratic party, donors, and progressive groups to make the investments needed in enough second and third tier races to allow the possibility of riding the wave if it starts to build. Barack Obama’s second term is going to look a lot better if he has a Democratic House to work with instead of the tea partiers currently in control.
The good news in terms of targeting is that many of the most competitive and potentially competitive House races in the country are concentrated in presidential swing states. The presidential target states — NH, IA, NV, CO, IA, WI, MI, OH, PA, NH, VA, NC — all have at least one first tier House target, most of them have multiples, and they all have 2nd tier races as well. But there are 3 more big states with large numbers of competitive races — IL, NY, and CA — where a lot of resources can and should be targeted as well. Fortunately, they are all big fundraising states, so when the president makes trips there to raise money, he should be spending some time campaigning for House candidates as well.
If Obama ends up winning this election by even just a couple of points, the chances for a Republican Senate takeover are slim to none, but to really give a second term the kind of energy and push it needs, Democrats and progressives should be making sure that the strong progressives running in competitive Senate races get maximum assistance and support. Sherrod Brown, the progressive populist champion of Ohio’s middle class, needs to win re-election. And the party and progressives should give top priority to helping strong economic populists Elizabeth Warren, Tammy Baldwin, Mazie Hirono, Chris Murphy, Heidi Heitkamp, and Martin Heinrich win seats in the Senate. With these kinds of voices for working and middle class folks in the Senate, they will push the Obama economic team to be bolder and more progressive in their economic thinking.
Which leads me to economic policy. In a second term, the Obama economic team will need to think big and bold to get us out of the fundamental economic problems that have been 30 plus years in the making. There’s a brilliant new long term economic plan written by Jacob Hacker and Nate Loewentheil that lays out in detail how the Obama economic team should be thinking about economic policy for the next four years. We need to rebuild and revitalize the great American middle class, and allow low income people and young people starting out to climb their way into it; we need to invest in our people, our infrastructure, and our R&D; we need to revitalize the small business sector by giving them access to credit and leveling the playing field in terms of competing with big business; we need to raise wages, strengthen the pension system, and build on the reforms in Obamacare; we need to break up the Too Big To Fail banks and take on the power of Wall Street.
If Romney is elected, none of this will happen, and his and Ryan’s terrible budget policies will sink us back into a depression. But even if Obama is elected, progressives will need to push like crazy (both in the administration and in Congress) to get these kinds of policies that would lift the economy for the long term enacted.
This election is far from over, but Democrats have won the essential philosophical debate, and now have a real opportunity for a wave election. Let’s hope they take advantage of the moment to win the election, and then take advantage of winning to rebuild the American economy.

Pro-Democratic worry-warts seeking relief from terrifying visions of game-changing electoral disaster are directed to Ed Kilgore’s Washington Monthly post ‘Where’s the Change Coming From?” Coach Kilgore has a pep talk for your pre-game jitters in his comments about Charlie Cook’s post at The National Journal noting the Obama-favoring stability of the presidential race:

Cook goes on to look at developments in the battleground states, which provide even worse news for Team Mitt, and notes in passing that of course something unexpected could happen to change the dynamics. But as you read him, it’s hard not to think about how many “game changers” that were discussed earlier this year just haven’t come to pass and may be off the table.
The economy? Yeah, we could get bad jobs reports for September and October, but they’d have to be pretty bad to have a real impact at this late date, and many economic indicators (most notably consumer confidence) are pointing at least modestly upwards in the short run. As WaPo’s Greg Sargent notes today, polls are beginning to show a significant majority of Americans think the economy is now improving or will soon improve under Obama.
The enthusiasm gap? That’s pretty much gone, most observers (including Cook) note…The debates? Rarely a big factor, as political scientist John Sides has demonstrated in a recent piece for the Washington Monthly.
Social issues? It’s enough to note that even though Republicans once thought the “war on religion” would wedge Catholic voters in their direction, it’s now Democrats who raise “social issues.”..The ground game? Even if you accept that Team Mitt is doing a better job in this area than did Team McCain in 2008, nobody seriously argues it has an advantage over Obama, and may have a big advantage.
The ads? Again, it’s pretty well established among political scientists that there is a point of diminishing returns for paid media in presidential campaigns, a point that earlier saturation advertising has already reached. And there’s the little matter of asking what content in political ads would make a difference, given all the strategic conundrums facing Romney.

Sure, an unexpected disaster could lead to an upset. But the (Intrade) smart money says it’s not happening.

Thomas Stackpole has a TNR post, “How NARAL is Hoping to Win the Election for Obama,” which shows an innovative approach to voter turnout. As Stackpole explains:

Wednesday morning, in a small conference room in its Washington, D.C. office, NARAL Pro-Choice America rolled out a plan to clinch the election for President Obama. That’s an ambitious goal for an organization pushing a niche issue in a contest dominated by the economy, but they’re hoping to win big by thinking small. Their plan is to target what they’ve termed “Obama Defectors”–pro-choice women who supported Obama in 2008, but are now poised to vote for Mitt Romney–and win them back. Nationally, they’ve identified 5.1 million across the country, 1.2 million of whom live in swing states.
But their real focus is actually on a much smaller number: a mere 338,020 women who live in swing counties in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio, Virginia, and Wisconsin. By their math, targeting this highly prized–and potentially persuadable–demographic in the right places could be enough to push Obama over the edge.
This micro-targeting strategy isn’t anything new, but it’s the first time it’s being employed by a group with such narrow interests and with such a small target group. “I don’t know if anything like this has been done–at least not this election,” boasted Drew Lieberman, the pollster behind the model…

Stackpole goes on to explain that the technique was adapted from an earlier data mining approach pioneered by Republican operatives, including Karl Rove and Alex Gage and tweaked for pro-Democratic constituencies. Stackpole adds that “Team Obama brought their data analysis to a new level, and, using a database called Catalist, applied behavioral science to identify and communicate with voters at a level of specificity that would have seemed like science fiction a generation ago.” Stackpole adds,

NARAL is basing its strategy on a 20,000-interview survey conducted by former Clinton pollster Stan Greenberg’s firm (Greenberg, Quinlan, Rosner), which used roughly 500 data points–like whether they’re cable subscribers, what publications they read, even what products they like–to identify their target voters. While Obama leads among women, they found that he’s polling eight points lower than he finished in 2008, creating a seemingly up-for-grabs voting bloc that both sides are pursuing aggressively. From there, NARAL narrowed the group down even more by dividing their so-called “Obama Defectors” into persuasion voters, who were likely to show up on election day, and Obama supporters, who were less likely to head to the polls, and focusing on the former. This segment, it turns out, tends to be white, independent female voters younger than 40.

In addition, ” the GQR survey found that 40 percent of its target group would vote for a candidate that was pro-choice, even if they disagreed with the candidate on every other issue. They also found that Obama was able to pick up six points when his position on abortion rights was explained and compared to the Republican platform.”
It’s an excellent example of how creative, data-driven political research is increasingly important in modern campaigns.