The following report, by Stanley Greenberg, James Carville, and Erica Seifert on behalf of Democracy Corps and Women’s Voice. Women Vote Action Fund, is cross-posted from GQR.com.
Executive Summary
Last month, virtually all House Republicans voted for Paul Ryan’s latest budget plan (“The Path to Prosperity”)–and according to the latest battleground survey by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for Democracy Corps and Women’s Voices. Women Vote Action Fund, they will pay the price in November. In this survey of 1000 likely voters in the 56 most competitive Republican-held districts, the climate has shifted in favor of the Democrats. Voters view the Democratic Party more favorably than the Republican Party, the President is viewed far more favorably than Mitt Romney, and both the President and congressional Democrats have made gains on the ballot since last September.
Key Findings
• The President’s approval and vote against Romney has surged in the battleground. Obama is now tied (with a marginal 1-point advantage) with the presumptive GOP nomi-nee. This compares favorably to the 7-point deficit he faced against Romney in these dis-tricts in December. Just 32 percent give the former governor a positive rating.
• Democrats are winning the image battle, up and down the ticket. While half of the voters in these districts register cool feelings toward the Republican Party and Republican Con-gress, the Democratic Party has enjoyed an 8-point bump in favorability since September 2011, and Democrats in Congress have seen a 7-point rise.
• Republican incumbents have not improved their vote position in the 33 districts where we have been tracking since March 2011– something you would expect from incumbents building support at home. In September, these incumbents were winning by a sizeable 14-point margin, 53-39. They now have just an 8-point lead, 49 to 41 percent, hovering just below the 50 percent threshold.
• Republican incumbents’ job approval rating is just 41 percent, and just 37 percent in the top tier of the most competitive 28 districts.
For more in-depth analysis, visit Democracy Corps.

Ed Kilgore has a post up at Political Animal, demonstrating that “voters are currently breaking down pretty much as they did in 2008.” He notes further,

In the context of a contest in which Obama is shown as leading Romney by four points (among registered voters), as compared with his seven-point win over John McCain, here are the changes in Obama’s margin from 2008 among basic demographic groups: Men: -5; Women: Even; 18-29: -6; 30-44: -2; 45-64: Even; Over 65: +2; White: -3; Black: +2; Hispanic: +4; >100k: +4; 50-100k: Even; <50k: -13; Republicans: -2; Democrats: +7; Independents: -14. Among white voters, Obama's big glaring losses as compared to 2008 are with those earning less than $50,000 (-12) and independents (-18).

As he concludes, “All in all, the partisan patterns established in 2008 have proved to be impressively durable during the Obama administration. ”

The following article by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
There is a new study out by a pair of political scientists saying that the current Republican caucuses in Congress are the most conservative in a hundred years. I think they are underestimating.
The 1911-12 congressional Republicans, after all, at least had some Teddy Roosevelt Republicans still in the Congress, so while a distinct minority, the party had some reformers and moderates in their caucuses. No, I think you would have to go back into the 1800s, into the Republican Congress swept into power with William McKinley’s 1896 election, to find a party as thoroughly reactionary as this one. This is somehow appropriate, because these Republicans clearly do want to repeal the 20th century. Starting with the early Progressive movement reforms Teddy Roosevelt got accomplished, the tea party GOP is trying to roll back all the progress our country has seen over the last century plus.
Let’s go back to those late 1890s Republicans — who they were, what they believed, how they operated. This was the heart of the era dominated by Social Darwinists and Robber Baron industrialists, and the McKinley presidency was the peak of those forces’ power. The Robber Barons were hiring the Pinkertons to (literally) murder union leaders, and were (literally) buying off elected officials to get whatever they wanted out of the government: money for bribery was openly allocated in yearly corporate budgets. These huge corporate trusts were working hand in hand with their worshipful friends in the Social Darwinist world, the 1800s version of Ayn Rand, who taught that if you were rich, it was because that was the way nature meant things to be — and if you were poor, you deserved to be. Any exploitation, any greed, any concentration of wealth was justified by a survival of the strongest ethic. It was an era where Lincoln’s and the Radical Republicans of the 1860s’ progressive idea of giving land away free to poor people who wanted to work hard to be independent farmers through the Homestead Act was being overturned by big bank and railroad trusts ruthlessly driving millions of family farmers out of business. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act was being completely ignored by McKinley. And of course, none of the advances of the 20th century were yet in place: child labor laws, consumer safety, the national parks or later environmental laws, consumer safety, popular election of Senators, women’s suffrage, a progressive tax system, decent labor laws, a minimum wage, Social Security, Glass-Steagall, the GI Bill, civil rights laws, Medicare, Medicaid, Legal Services, Head Start. None of it existed.
Flash forward to today. With the exception of women’s suffrage (and given the gender gap, I have no doubt that secretly Republicans would be happy to get rid of that), various high-level Republicans from this session of Congress have argued for the repeal or severe curtailment of all of those advances. This is not just Conservative with a capital C, but Reactionary with a capital R.
This is why the worship by so many pundits and establishment figures of bipartisanship and meeting in the middle as the all-around best value in American politics is so fundamentally wrong as a political strategy for Democrats. With the Republicans in Congress actually wanting to repeal the gains of the 20th century, for Democrats to meet them halfway becomes a nightmare strategy. Repealing half of the 20th century is just not a reasonable compromise, even though that would be meeting the Republicans halfway. What we need to do instead is to propose our own bold strategy for how to move forward and solve the really big problems we have. Our country needs to have this debate, and I am confident once people understand the two alternatives, they will choose our path forward rather than the Republicans’ path backward.
Ultimately, this is a debate about values. Conservatives believe in that old Social Darwinist philosophy: whoever has money and power got that way because nature intended it, and they ought to get to keep everything they have and to hell with anyone not strong to make it on their own. Selfishness is a virtue, as Ayn Rand said; greed is good, as Gordon Gekko proclaimed in the movie Wall Street; in nature, the lions eat the weak, as Glenn Beck happily proclaimed to a cheering audience. That is the underlying ethic of the Ryan-Romney Budget. What progressives argue is the opposite: that we really are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers; that we should treat others as we would want to be treated, and give a helping hand to those who need it; that investing in our citizens and promoting a broadly prosperous middle class that is growing because young people and poor people are given the tools to climb the ladder into it is the key to making a better society and growing economy.
The debate is well worth having. The good news is that the Republicans are hardly shying away from it: by embracing this radically retrograde Ryan-Romney Budget, they are wearing their hearts on their sleeves and openly yearning to return to 1896. The Democrats should welcome this debate with open arms.

Mark Schmitt, who has been monitoring the depradations of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) over several election cycles, has an instructive post up at TNR about their influence. Schmitt’s post, “A Surprisingly Effective New Path to Neutralizing the Political Influence of Big Business” should provide some encouragement to Dems, who are interested in exploring some less traditional paths to check the GOP’s corporate funders.

In the past, progressives have responded by trying to create a “counter-ALEC,” a network of progressive and moderate state legislators, though they’ve never quite reached the necessary scale. (I served on the board of one such counter-ALEC, the Center for Policy Alternatives, which dissolved in 2008.) And they’ve tried various means to expose ALEC’s operations to scrutiny, publicizing its role in drafting and promoting model legislation at the state level, and its funding by the now-notorious Koch brothers. This time, progressives tried a new tactic, encouraging a boycott of the mainstream corporations that fund ALEC. And it seems to have worked: Coca-Cola, Kraft, Wendy’s, and several other large corporations on ALEC’s “Private Enterprise Board” announced they would drop their support of the organization.

Schmitt goes on to argue that the boycott threat compelled companies to rethink whether they really wanted to sub-contract out their lobbying efforts to benefit their companies to an organization that was more obsessed with extremist ideological crusades.

A number of those donors seem to have decided that, faced with even modest amounts of negative publicity, the access provided by ALEC wasn’t worth the price of being associated with political positions they didn’t want to publicly endorse. Far from “intimidation,” what the boycott threat did was force the companies to make a more careful, deliberate choice about what kind of political speech it actually wanted to support and put its reputation behind.

As Schmitt explains, it’s really about understanding the psychology of corporate decision-making:

…Corporate political giving is not typically about political speech, or trying to change the actual outcome of elections. It’s about access to the elected officials, whoever they are. What organizations like ALEC do is sell access, which they in turn use to promote a broader range of conservative causes. Boycotts and shareholder activism can break that pattern–not by intimidation, as conservatives suggest, but by forcing the decision out of the hands of the lobbyists alone and into higher levels of the company. A similar tactic was developed by The Center for Political Accountability, which uses shareholder resolutions to encourage companies to disclose their political giving. More than 100 companies have agreed to disclosure, but much of the value comes not just from disclosure, but from forcing companies to consider at a high level whether the organizations they are supporting really reflect the values the company wants to express.

Schmitt acknowledges that “ALEC will survive, with fewer donors and perhaps less of the sheen of a mainstream organization,” but adds that “the apparent success of the ALEC boycott has revealed an untapped path toward rebalancing the power of money in American politics.”
As Jason Easely puts it at Politicus USA, “In an incredible display of the power of boycotts, it only took 5 hours for ColorofChange to get Coca-Cola to stop supporting ALEC…One of the reasons ALEC has been successful is that it wasn’t until the last few years that the left started to expose them. All of these stealth threats to democracy need to operate out of the public view…The power of the boycott should never be doubted..”

The Republicans just can’t get any mainstream traction with their tired meme equating fairness in taxation and the ‘Buffett rule’ with ‘class warfare.’ It’s not a big mystery why, as TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira explains in his new ‘Public Opinion Snapshot‘:

Probably what bothers conservatives the most is that the Buffett rule is so damn popular. In a March Ipsos-Reuters poll, an overwhelming 64-30 majority said they favored the rule.

Teixeira notes that “conservatives have spent a lot of energy–joined by some political commentators–arguing that the whole idea of fairness is misguided, vaguely un-American, and against our country’s rugged individualism.” But few are buying it, adds Teixeira:

…A just-released ABC/Washington Post poll found that 52 percent of Americans believe unfairness in the economic system that favors the wealthy is the bigger problem in the country compared to 37 percent who believe overregulation of the free market that interferes with growth and prosperity is the bigger problem.

As Teixeira concludes, “Conservatives better get used to it. Fairness is here to stay in the public debate and, so far, they’re on the wrong side.”

TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira has an article in The New Republic which brings clarity to the confused discussion about ‘swing voters.’ As Teixeira explains:

…There’s good reason to believe that the vast majority of Americans, including professional journalists and campaign operatives, wouldn’t recognize a typical swing voter if they met one.
Indeed, the application of the term “swing voter” deserves a lot more scrutiny than it generally earns. As it is, the term is thrown around carelessly to apply to large demographically or ideologically defined groups. The most common assumption, for example, is that swing voters are synonymous with political independents, but as I explained at length in a recent book review, that is an utterly fanciful notion.
Instead, the simplest and clearest way to think about it is on the level of the individual voter…The relevant criterion that needs to be fulfilled is persuadability. And that’s not a quality that’s exclusive only to those who are completely undecided, or who are only weakly committed to a candidate. Even those who are moderately committed can be persuaded to deepen their commitment. And the deepening of an existing affiliation with a candidate can be just as significant, both statistically and electorally speaking, as attracting mild commitment from someone who had previously been mildly committed to another candidate.

Teixeira walks his readers through some numerical exercises in “shifting probablility” in terms of commitment to candidates to illustrate the range of swing voters and adds,

Persuadability, then, is not logically restricted to voters in the center; it can potentially be far more broadly distributed. That is what William Mayer found in his analysis of swing voters based on National Election Study data. Swing voters are least likely to be found among strong partisans (12 percent of this group); more likely to be found among independent leaners (27 percent) and weak partisans (28 percent); and most likely to be found among pure independents (40 percent). But since pure independents are such a small group, they wind up being just 13 percent of all swing voters, actually less than the number of strong partisans among swingers (18 percent). Another 28 percent of swing voters are independent leaners, and the largest group, 42 percent, are weak partisans. Thus the overwhelming majority (70 percent) of swing voters are weak or independent leaning partisans–the kind of voters whose probability of support for “their” candidate is more usefully thought of as being movable from 70 to 80 percent than from 45 to 55 percent.

Nor do swing voters tend to be clustered in particular demographic groups, as Teixeira explains: “The idea that swingers are heavily concentrated in special groups like “soccer moms” or broader ones like the white working class or Hispanics is incorrect. In reality, swing voters are scattered throughout the social structure.”
But the broad distribution of swing voters does not mean they can’t be reached. “…Given the fact that the overwhelming majority of swing voters are partisans, the logical place for a campaign to start is by consolidating support among “their” swing voters–that is, by driving up their support rates among weak partisans and independent leaners.” He acknowledges that targeting swing voters with particular messages is very difficult, since “swing voters are everywhere.”
Teixeira suggests “setting support rate targets” for demographic groups,” then “figuring out how to hit each of the targets…however boring it may seem, that’s how you win elections.”

The following post, by Dylan Scott, spotlighting research and analysis by TDS co-editor Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow of the Center for American Progress, is cross-posted from governing.com
Current population and voting trends appear to favor Democrats for the foreseeable future, demographic experts said during a discussion at the Bipartisan Policy Center Wednesday, but they acknowledged that projecting long-term political behaviors is difficult.
The growing minority vote (which leans heavily Democratic), the shift of white college graduates from red to blue and the shrinking white working class (which traditionally votes Republican) are good omens for the left, said Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress. Sean Trende, senior elections analyst for Real Clear Politics, said he largely agreed with Teixeira’s analysis, although he sees room for the GOP to make gains down the road.
Teixeira and Trende told Governing that however these trends play out on the federal level, the effects are likely to be felt in state legislatures and governorships. The 2010 midterm elections, in which Republicans gained 69 seats in Congress and nearly 700 seats in statehouses nationwide, are the latest example of that correlation.
“It could have a huge impact,” Trende said. “The evidence definitely suggests that state politics follow the national trends.”
Teixeira concurred, with the caveat that state politics have their own peculiarities (such as the gerrymandering of state legislative districts) that distinguish them from national elections.
“These trends have got to filter down in some ways,” he said. “This will have a big effect.”
The increasing minority vote (led largely by the budding Hispanic population) framed Teixeira’s rosy forecast, based on population data and historic exit polls, for the Democrats. Minorities’ share of the overall voting population has inclined from 15 percent in 1988 to 26 percent in 2008. That electorate has consistently voted more than 70 percent for the Democrats in the last decade, reaching a peak of 80 percent in 2008.
Long-range projections expect minority population to only grow in the coming decades. The Census Bureau predicts Hispanics will jump from 16 percent of the American population in 2010 to 30 percent in 2050. Over the same period, whites are projected to drop from 65 percent to 46 percent.
Democrats are also making gains with white college graduates. Republicans still hold a slim advantage, but that difference has shrunk from 20 percent in 1988 to 4 percent in 2008. Like minorities, white college graduates as a share of the voting population have grown by 4 percent since 1988 and are expected to continue to do so.
Meanwhile, voters from the white working class (some college or less) are slowly disappearing. Their share of the voting population has declined by 15 percent from 1988 to 2008. That block is staunchly Republican with the GOP commanding a 20-percent advantage on average.
Rounding out the good news for Democrats is the emerging millennial generation. Young adults only slightly favored Democrats in 2000 (48 percent to 46 percent), but the gap widened to 66 percent to 32 percent in 2008. That population is expected to increase from 46 million eligible voters in 2008 to 90 million in 2020. Not coincidentally, the millenial generation is also expected to be more diverse.
Looking at some key battleground states, as Teixeira did in his presentation, illustrates how these trends could play out at the state level.
In Ohio, presidential candidate then-Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ili., decimated challenger Sen. John McCain, R- Ariz., among minority voters with an 83-16 advantage. Minorities are expected to add at least 1 percent to their share of the voting population in 2012. Obama also lost by only one point (49-50) among white college graduates and their share is expected to grow by 2 percent. White working class voters were firmly behind McCain (54-44 in his favor), but their share is projected to drop by 3 percent.
In Pennsylvania, minorities voted for Obama by an 86-13 margin and their voting share should increase by 2 percent. White college graduates favored the president-elect, 52-47, and their share is expected to grow by 3 percent. Once again, white working class voters solidly backed McCain (57-42), but their share could fall by up to 5 percent.
Nevada, Florida and Virginia (all of which went for Obama in 2008 and whose demographics are expected to shift in his favor in 2012) follow the same trend, according to Teixeira’s analysis.
It is noteworthy, however, that Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida and Virginia have GOP majorities in their state legislatures and a Republican in the governor’s house. That fact, Trende said, reflects the difficulty in translating demographic projections to real-world politics. While population trends might suggest future gains for Democrats, don’t expect a sudden shift in majority control. “These things tend to seek equilibrium,” he said.
Generally, Trende acknowledged that Teixeira’s analysis was sound. He did, however, find a few bright spots for the right.
The Pew Research Center found that migration out of Mexico (the vast majority of which comes to the United States) declined from more than 1 million people in 2006 to 404,000 in 2010. Over the same period, migration into Mexico (again, more than 90 percent of which comes from America) stayed more steady, falling from 474,000 in 2006 to 319,000 in 2010. Those figures could impact projections on the growth of the Hispanic vote.
Trende also pointed to exit poll data that suggests Hispanic voters are more likely to vote for Republicans if they receive a higher income — much more so than African-Americans, although less frequently than whites. He theorized that, if the economic well-being of Hispanics were to improve in the coming years, a shift to the right could occur.
Regardless, both Trende and Teixeira recognized that demographic data tells only part of the political story. Party platforms and economic outlook also factor heavily into voters’ decisions.
“There is no guarantee that demographic trends will automatically lead to dividends. There is this thing called governance,” Teixeira said. “Parties always have to deliver. Elections are always contested.”
Trende pointed again to the 2010 midterm elections, which came right on the heels of Obama’s sweeping 2008 victory, as evidence that policymaking is as influential on election outcomes as more entrenched variables like ethnicity and age.
“Once you get into power, you have to start picking and choosing what you’re going to do,” Trende said. “You’re inevitably going to alienate somebody.”

First McDonalds and now Wendy’s. The downers for the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) keep on coming. Andy Kroll of Mother Jones reports that Wendy’s tweeted on Tuesday that “We decided late 2011 and never renewed this year. It didn’t fit our business needs.”
Chalk up an especially-gratifying victory for the progressive coalition that has organized specifically to challenge ALEC’s growing role in state legislative politics across the nation, as Kroll reports:

Wendy’s departure is arguably more significant than McDonald’s given Wendy’s past support for conservative and staunchly pro-industry causes. For instance, Wendy’s International has funded the Center for Consumer Freedom, a phony grassroots group that fights regulation of the food and beverage industries. And Wendy’s political action committee has given significantly more of its money in recent election cycles to Republican lawmakers than Democrats, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

In response ALEC whined in an official statement about the coalition’s “well-funded, expertly coordinated intimidation campaign” and how “We are not and will not be defined by ideological special interests…” blah blah.
Kroll adds that Wendy’s joins McDonald’s, Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Kraft and Intuit in bailing out from ALEC. The coalition, which includes Common Cause and ColorofChange.org targeted the companies, in part because of ALEC’s support for voter suppression laws and more recently, the “Stand Your Ground” law in Florida and other states.
In addition to the good that comes from checking ALEC’s power as an advocate of right-wing legislation, the campaign has another important benefit — demonstrating how progressive organizations can creatively leverage the mere implicit threat of consumer economic withdrawal. These companies clearly feared losing customers as a result of their membership in ALEC and acted accordingly.
As Common Cause President Bob Edgar puts it, “Good corporate managers know that attaching their brand to radical and divisive legislation is not in the best interest of their shareholders…Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and we will continue to educate the public about ALEC’s agenda, and highlight the influence of corporate money in our state laws and public policies.”

Mike Lux’s HuffPo post, “That Old-Time Populism Debate ” provides a smart analysis of the recent Third Way study “Opportunity Trumps Fairness with Swing Independents.” Lux faults Third Way for what he considers some pretty extravagant claims in “their latest memo denouncing economic populism as a message.” As Lux frames his concerns about the survey:

When Mitt Romney is denouncing Obama for wanting to end Medicare, and Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum are denouncing Mitt for corporate greed at Bain Capital — in a Republican primary, no less — it is hard to see how populism isn’t working as a messaging approach. And given that the entire Democratic Party including the Obama campaign — in spite of their earlier deep reluctance and the president not being a natural populist — is going for a strongly populist approach is further proof that most of the party’s pollsters and message people are in the same place…Suffice to say that there is overwhelming data to suggest that broad majorities of voters, including swing voters, don’t like Wall Street, love Social Security and Medicare (which Third Way has also argued should be cut), love taxes on the wealthy and closing corporate tax loopholes, deeply dislike big business lobbyists and special interests, are appalled by outsourcing, and all kinds of other populist topics.

Lux comes down hard on the study, citing Third Way for “a rubberman type of stretch that is breathtaking in its creativity.” He notes that seniors and working-class voters are underrepresented and the survey sample, while college grads are overrepresented. he feels further that the survey questions were slanted to elicit responses and sees a failure to test “the kind of populist economic growth message they declared so certainly would not work.”
Lux concedes that Dems need a more thoughtful message for swing voters than has too often been the case — “A pure give’em hell eat-the-rich stem-winder of a message may not appeal to them without some nuance in it.’ But, he adds:

…Winning political messages can never work for just one slice of the electorate. Third Way may well have found that segment of swing independents who were less old, less blue collar, and less populist than any other group of voters in the potential Democratic electoral coalition. But your message has to appeal to all different kinds of folks. For a Democrat to win a national election, you need a message that inspires your volunteers and small contributors and fans who will talk to their neighbors about you; a message that generates enough excitement from blacks, Latinos, young people, and unmarried women to get them out to vote; a message that appeals to all those underwater homeowners and people without jobs that voted for Obama last time but may be leaning Republican or too discouraged to vote because of their own hard times; and a message that appeals to a wide array of different kinds of swing voters. If the message can’t do all those things at once, it will not get you 51 percent. That’s what makes economic populism so incredibly valuable: it is the message, if nuanced correctly per the paragraph above, which comes the closest to doing that. Even if I lost all my doubts about the Third Way analysis in terms of the small slice of the electorate they had identified, the message still wouldn’t work strategically because it would fail with all those other voters we Democrats need to have to win.

Any strategy that ignores the broadly-held populist sentiments unearthed by the Occupy Movement is courting a disaster. As Lux concludes, “Democrats, especially Democratic incumbents, who are trying to win elections in times like these when the middle class is being squeezed so hard, need to be willing to take the populist torch and carry it proudly.”

This New York Times editorial explains why women voters may be the political force that sinks Scott Walker in the Wisconsin recall: “..He signed the repeal of a 2009 law allowing the victims of wage discrimination to pursue damages in state court…The principal reason for the original law was to narrow a significant gap in compensation between men and women. At the time the law was passed, women earned an average of 75 cents for every $1 men earned; by 2010, after the law was passed, the average for women had edged up to about 78 cents…Mr. Walker was acceding to the lobbying demands of business groups, including hotel and restaurant trade groups that employ large numbers of women in low-paying jobs and do not wish their wage scale to be challenged in court.”
GOP clown act summons unwelcome ghost of Joe McCarthy.
Dems need a stronger pitch for the votes of 11 million underwater or near-underwater homeowners, as SEIU activist Stephen Lerner reports at The American Prospect: “…In states like Florida, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Ohio and Michigan–where tens of thousands of homeowners are looking for leaders to make some sense of the last five years–the “homeowner at risk” could well be the “soccer mom” of 2012, a group that demands attention, and will vote accordingly…Many economists believe a second settlement is needed to bolster the housing market and the overall recovery, so in this case the right thing is a win-win for the White House.”
Apparently, the ‘fair and balanced” network has a low tolerance for candor and transparency in the workplace .
In his post, “Understanding Political Codewords,”Richard Brodsky of Demos Policy Shop exposes some conservative euphemisms, wherein “sustainability” = pension benefit cuts for public workers and “fairness” = tax cuts for the rich.
Paul Begala makes a cogent argument that Sen. Rob Portman, a former Bush budget director, will be Romney’s veep choice.
John Sides explains at FiveThirtyEight why Dems shouldn’t crow too loudly about President Obama’s 12-point “empathy gap” edge over Romney: “…Republicans win all the time without closing the empathy gap. This is because Democratic candidates are generally perceived as more empathetic — more likely to “care about people like me” — than Republican candidates, regardless of who wins. Ronald Reagan in 1984, George H. W. Bush in 1988 and George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004 were all perceived as less empathetic than their Democratic opponents.”
If the ‘War on Women” debate comes down to Ann Romney vs. Lilly Ledbetter, don’t bet against Ledbetter as a more authentic voice of working women, as is suggested by this Obama campaign video, via TPM Live Wire.
Poll Analyst Mark Blumenthal chews on a new Pew Research Center poll at HuffPo Pollster and concludes that at least this one poll indicates that registered voters are not all that dumb, as far as assessing differences between the two parties: “…Registered voters answered an average of 12 of the 17 questions correctly, compared to an average of just nine correct answers from the unregistered.” The questions seemed like pretty good indicators of basic political awareness. Even still, 70.6 percent correct answers isn’t all that great for grown-ups. Hard to avoid the conclusion that “low information voters” are still a problem.