TDS managing editor Ed Kilgore Blogs at The Washington Monthly on the MSM buzz about some Democrats taking a pass on the upcoming convention, and it’s a fun read because Kilgore knows the turf like few other political writers — from the inside.

Both Republicans and some MSM purveyors of a snail’s-eye-view have been richly enjoying the drip-drip-drip of “stories” about this or that Democratic pol in a highly competitive race deciding to skip the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte. …Look, don’t get me wrong: I love national party conventions, God help me. I’ve been to six of the suckers myself, and have watched as much as I could of both parties’ conventions since 1964. Hell, there are years when it was about the only thing I watched on TV, other than election night coverage itself and University of Georgia football games.
But let’s face it: national conventions lost their deliberative functions long ago. The last multi-ballot affair was in 1952, long before the advent of the modern primary system. The last convention where there was any doubt after the opening gavel about the identity of the nominee was in 1976, and that was only because of a miraculously close primary finish between Reagan and Ford. The last time there was any serious convention maneuvering over the platform was in 1980, when the Carter forces blithely caved to a full-employment plank designed to embarrass the president.

Kilgore acknowledges that political conventions do serve some worthwhile functions as “a well-timed opportunity for message delivery” and “fundraising and GOTV preparations.” However, “For a junior congressional candidate in a tough race, it’s time better spent either on the hustings or dialing for dollars. Kilgore concludes, “So let’s give the no-show meme a rest, folks. It’s news about nothing from nowhere. ”

At The New Republic, Dissent Co-Editor Michael Kazin makes a cogent argument for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and spare America future campaign finance debacles. Of course none of several proposed amendments can pass, as Kazin acknowledges, since that would require a two-thirds majority just to get out of congress and into the state legislatures. In addition, notes Kazin, “as long as Sheldon Adelson, the brothers Koch, and their ilk are eager to finance some politicians and destroy others, no proposed amendment of this kind will get beyond the agitational stage.”
But Kazin, author of “American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation,” makes a persuasive case that such an amendment could be very helpful in starting a serious movement for campaign finance reform:

But that drawback can be turned into a virtue. Agitation has, in fact, been the initial purpose of many proposed amendments, including those that keep failing (like that which would require the federal government to balance its budget) to those that are now unassailable (like the 13th, which abolished slavery.) The idea of altering America’s foundational document can give focus and legitimacy to movements which need to show that the people are truly on their side. In 1994, the balanced budget amendment became the centerpiece of Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America and helped conservative Republicans present themselves as tribunes of common sense. Of course, if enacted, it would have forced the government to slash spending in 2009 instead of increase it, turning the Great Recession into a second Great Depression. An amendment is good to campaign with before it has a chance to become law–and even if it never should.
For prime examples of amendments that helped movements grow, one can look back a century ago, to the aptly named Progressive Era. From 1913 to 1920, four major amendments were quickly passed and ratified–the 16th establishing the income tax; the 17th creating the popular election of senators; the 18th, prohibition of the business in alcoholic beverages, and the 19th women’s suffrage. Each victory capped a grassroots struggle that had lasted for decades and, for much of that time, had seemed rather hopeless. Suffragists and prohibitionists–whose ranks often overlapped–had begun organizing in the 1840s. The groundswell for an income tax, which, at first, only the richest citizens had to pay, and the push to democratize the election of Senators both grew out of the anti-monopoly fervor of the late 19th century….

As for the political psychology behind those amendment campaigns, Kazin adds “Each proposed amendment helped progressive organizers to focus the attention of the press, to galvanize supporters of their cause, and to unify campaigns that otherwise were fragmented by local desires and diverse constituencies.”
Kazin notes a pervasive reluctance to champion constitutional amendments among modern liberals and the failure of alternative approaches to get much traction. Yet, he argues that, “To shake up a system that both parties have long abetted and the High Court has graced will require a massive effort by angry outsiders and those members of the political class who share their disgust. To transform that system will require having a true alternative in mind. Advocating for a constitutional amendment could aid both purposes…”
Where all other reforms have clearly failed to generate much excitement, the very boldness of a constitutional amendment just might be the tonic that revitalizes the progressive base. As Kazin concludes, “the end result might even breathe some new life into that 225-year old promise to “promote the general Welfare.”

At The Washington Monthly Political Animal, TDS Managing Editor Ed Kilgore illuminates the “hate the whole, love the parts” paradox that pops up in just about every in-depth opinion poll addressing the Affordable Care Act. Commenting on the findings of the latest Reuters-Ipsos poll, Kilgore adds clarity to the discussion throughout his post, especially in this excerpt commenting on surprising Republican support for key ACA provisions:

Greg Sargent called up the pollsters and got more partisan breakdowns, and it’s interesting to see how far the “hate the whole, love the parts” sentiment penetrates into GOP ranks…Greg thinks these numbers simply reflect GOP opposition to the law on grounds that it’s Obama’s. That’s undoubtedly a big part of it, but a complete lack of understanding as to how insurance markets work is a factor as well. You can bet GOP pols will be telling their base and independent voters alike that can get all the rich chocolatey goodness of the above reforms via a somewhat different menu of individual tax credits, high-risk pools, interstate insurance sales, medical savings accounts, association health plans, and maybe tort reform. It would not be true by any stretch of the imagination, but so long as they can keep holding such “ideas” out as an alternative to reenactment of the popular provisions of ObamaCare, they might be able to keep their folks placated for a while, particularly if an eliminated individual mandate leads to higher premiums that can be blamed on the surviving parts of the law. In the end, though, the Republican “agenda” on health care will amount to a big bait-and-switch, even for Republican voters.

Kilgore concludes with a note on the importance of Dems protecting Medicaid from GOP attacks after the upcoming Supreme Court ruling, as a critical component of anything that purports to be serious health care reform. Without it, “the whole effort to move towards universal access to affordable health care will fail, regardless of what happens on all the regulatory issues.”

This article, by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, is cross-posted from HuffPo.
When the history of the 2012 presidential election campaign is written, last week may or may not rank as the most significant — but it will certainly be viewed as a major inflection point in the race.
Romney’s bad week began on Friday, June 15, when the Administration announced that the Department of Homeland Security would defer action to remove the “Dreamers” — undocumented young people who came to this country before the age of 16 and were less than 30 years of age. This includes the young people who would have been covered by the Dream Act that passed the House and received a majority vote in the Senate in 2010 — back when Democrats still controlled both bodies. Unfortunately, the Dream Act did not receive final passage in the Senate because it was blocked by a Republican filibuster.
First and foremost, the President’s action was enormously significant because it gave formal status — and work permits — to 1.4 million young people who had previously been subject to deportation from the only country many of them had ever known.
But as a political matter, it was also a game changer.
President Obama already led Romney among Hispanic voters by ratios of two or three to one in most polls. But over the last three years, Republicans have successfully blocked all of his attempts to pass comprehensive immigration reform through Congress, and his bold action for the Dreamers sent a bolt of electricity through the Latino electorate. His action will almost certainly turbocharge efforts to boost Hispanic voter turnout that will likely be decisive in key swing states like Colorado, Nevada and Florida — and may still put Arizona in play.
What’s more, it completely undercut Senator Marco Rubio’s attempt to craft a bill that would provide relief to Dreamers without giving them the pathway to citizenship promised in the Dream Act. That bill would have had no chance whatsoever of passing the Republican House this year, but it would have given Romney and the Republicans a fig leaf to hide behind in their attempt to improve their dismal standing in the Hispanic community. In fact, the President’s action turned the Tea Party-backed Rubio into the incredible “shrinking senator” and took Rubio off the Vice Presidential list of most pundits.
For his part, Romney spent the week dodging questions from reporters — and Dream students — about whether he would leave President Obama’s action in place if he were elected.
The political impact of these events was on display at last week’s conference of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO). Romney was given tepid, polite applause. Obama received a thunderous ovation.
In his speech to the group, Romney pledged that he could be trusted to “keep his promises.” The next day, the President pointed out in his remarks that one of those Romney “promises” was a firm pledge to “veto the Dream Act” earlier in the campaign.
The entire episode highlighted the fact that Romney is running as the most anti-immigrant major party candidate for President in modern history. His embrace of the Arizona “papers please law” as a “national model” and his connection with the architects of that law, like rabidly anti-immigrant Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, will be highlighted once again when the Supreme Court rules on the law’s constitutionality early this week. And in an amazing show of ineptitude, Romney’s people have scheduled him to actually be in Phoenix for a fundraiser on Monday when it is expected that the Supreme Court is likely to rule.
But last week’s development on the immigration and the Dream Act did more than damage Romney with Hispanics and help mobilize them to participate in the fall election. It also turned around the political momentum in the race. In politics, like sports, momentum — the bandwagon effect — is a big factor. Last week it returned to the Obama camp after several weeks of bad economic news and Romney’s consolidation of his base as he secured the GOP nomination.
Romney had sought to continue his previous momentum through a bus tour that carried his economic message to New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa and Michigan — all states the President had won in 2008 — all critical to the outcome in 2012. The first day of his bus tour was eclipsed by the President’s action on immigration. Day two, the big news was the campaign’s decision to wave off a planned stop at a Wawa store in Quakerstown, Pa., when 150 Democrats and former Governor Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania gathered there to greet Romney’s bus.
Matters were made worse when, after diverting to a more friendly Wawa, Romney marveled at the “touch screen” sandwich machine that local Wawa customers had used for a decade — recreating the out of touch moment first experienced by the first President Bush when he was awestruck by supermarket bar code scanners in the early 1990’s. Of course, Romney had already shown his contempt for convenience stores early in the campaign when he complained that what turned out to be cookies made by a favorite Pennsylvania bakery looked like they came from a 7-11 store.
His tour continued to be dogged by a counter-tour organized by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) that preceded Romney’s own. The DNC’s “Romney Economics: Middle Class Under the Bus” tour drew competing press throughout the Romney route.
And things just kept getting worse for the GOP. On Monday of last week, a group of nuns launched their own press tour: “Nuns on the Bus — the Nuns Drive for Family, Faith and Fairness.” This two-week press tour — complete with a bus wrapped with their slogan and powerful testimony from Catholic Women Religious — focused on the fact that the Ryan-Romney-Republican budget does not square with Catholic values. The “Nuns on the Bus” tour generated press coverage of Biblical proportions everywhere it went — including key swing states in the presidential and congressional races. It continues until July 3.
Finally, at the end of the week, the Washington Post published a major story exploring how — when he was head of Bain Capital — Romney was a “pioneer” outsourcing American jobs abroad. All the Romney campaign could do to respond was quibble over the term “outsourcing” and “offshoring.”
In a campaign stop in Florida on Friday, President Obama argued that we don’t need a “pioneer in outsourcing” in the Oval Office. Instead we need someone who will work every waking moment to create American jobs. Obama campaign senior adviser, David Axelrod, tweeted that Romney is running to be “Outsourcerer-in-chief.”
There’s no other way to put it. This issue is devastating for the Romney candidacy. That’s because it simultaneously moves the two groups of voters that affect the outcome of any election: persuadables and mobilizables.
It is particularly important to white working class swing voters that are President Obama’s weakest swing demographic. At the same time it energizes his base — especially organized labor and progressives.
Americans understand that the outsourcing of American jobs — especially manufacturing jobs — is one of the key factors that has devastated the middle class. And Republican strategist Frank Luntz was right when he said, “If next year’s campaign is couched as a battle over the middle class, Democrats will win.”
The “pioneer of outsourcing” story will become one of the iconic symbols in the 2012 campaign. It clearly and simply summarizes the growing concerns among swing voters that Romney Economics — and Romney’s history at Bain — are both about making millions for himself and other millionaires and throwing the middle class “under the bus.”
As if that wasn’t enough, the week ended with an extravagant Romney Retreat for his the biggest fundraisers and bundlers for the Romney campaign and its super PAC at a posh resort town in Utah. Trackers captured dozens of corporate jets landing at local airports ferrying the members of Romney’s true base — the CEO/millionaire set — to the Romney soiree. The retreat brazenly featured meetings of “industry groups” like bankers, who strategized about their political aims with Romney and other Republicans leaders like Senate Banking Committee ranking Republican Spencer Bachus. It also provided attendees with a weekend of unfettered access to top Republican political strategists like former Bush adviser Karl Rove, who might once again return to government if Romney wins.
Americans United for Change Communications Director Jeremy Funk blogged:

With doubt about Mitt Romney’s ability to create jobs reaching new heights this week following the revelation that companies he oversaw as CEO of Bain Capital were “pioneers” of the cold, greedy practice of shipping U.S. jobs overseas to bottom-wage countries, you might think he would think twice about rubbing elbows and clinking glasses with his former outsourcing specialist colleagues at Bain anytime soon. Yet, not 48 hours later, Bain Capital’s private jet was spotted today near Romney’s exclusive retreat in Utah for mega campaign donors, undoubtedly including a who’s who list of outsourcing corporate interests — a retreat unofficially billed as “Outsourcers of the World Reunite.”

Romney’s bad week was punctuated by a Bloomberg poll that showed Obama had lept to a double digit lead in the race. While some pundits dismissed the poll as an outlier, few could argue that Romney was making ground in his uphill battle to the White House. And most handicappers agree that, though the election will almost certainly be close, right now they’d rather be Barack Obama than Mitt Romney.
Lots can happen in the four and a half months that remain until November 6 — and all those Romney donors will flood the airwaves with attacks ads in the weeks leading to the election. But if the Obama campaign can string together more weeks like the one that just passed, it will be Barack Obama, not Mitt Romney, that will be standing on the Capitol steps taking the oath of office next January.

President Obama has clearly played a very good hand, considering public attitudes toward his recent announcement regarding the deportation of young illegal immigrants, reports TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira in his latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot.’:

President Barack Obama recently announced that his administration would stop deporting illegal immigrants who came here before age 16, have been in the country for five years, have no criminal record, are in school or have a high school diploma, or were honorably discharged from the military. This change is similar to some of the provisions of the DREAM Act, which has stalled in Congress, thanks to conservative opposition. The DREAM Act also includes a path to citizenship.
President Obama’s move generated a positive response–not just among Latinos, who, of course, are wildly enthusiastic. In a Bloomberg poll of all voters, Obama’s announcement received support by an overwhelming 64 percent to 30 percent.

Teixeira adds that “the public is quite supportive of the DREAM Act. In a recent Latino Decisions poll, the DREAM Act was backed by a decisive 62 percent to 33 percent margin.”
“Conservatives may weep and wail about Obama’s announcement,” concludes Teixeira. “But it appears that the public agrees with the president: It’s the right thing to do.”

The following post by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
This news about Bain Capital being a pioneer in outsourcing, investing in some of the leading early companies that advised American companies in how to most effectively do it, is a pretty big deal on the face of it, but it has even deeper implications than many people realize. Being in this kind of business when the vast majority of Americans are so upset by out-sourcing is just one of Mitt Romney’s deep dark secrets that he has been trying to hide, and helps to powerfully make the case that Romney’s entire business career has been fundamentally at odds with the interests of the American middle class.
The other thing this news does is that it very likely ends the debate within the Democratic party as to whether it is okay to talk about Bain Capital’s business practices. There are still going to be Wall Street Democrats squeamish about beating up on this kind of wealthy financial company, but to defend a company that was literally a pioneer in helping American companies out-source jobs would be incredibly unpopular. Given how deeply unhappy voters are about out-sourcing, given how it generally is one of the top issues mentioned by voters in any poll I have seen over the last decade, it would be political malpractice not to attack Bain and Romney over this news, and any honest Democrat will have to understand and acknowledge that fact.
The reason this story goes so deep is that Romney’s entire political strategy is based on carrying blue collar white voters very heavily. Obama won 53 percent of the vote in 2008 while losing white working class voters by 18 percent. Even if you assume Obama doesn’t do quite as well turning out his base voters, to win this election Romney will have win that white working class demographic by at least 62-38 percent. Given how big a deal out-sourcing is to blue-collar workers, this story becomes close to a deal-breaker for Romney.
The Romney campaign’s reaction to the story is hilarious:
“This is a fundamentally flawed story that does not differentiate between domestic outsourcing versus offshoring nor versus work done overseas to support U.S. exports.” The very incoherence of the quote speaks to their strategy: try to confuse the issue, try to make it sound complicated. The problem for Romney is that this is a remarkably simple story: whether you call it out-sourcing or off-shoring (and I don’t see how the new word helps him), Romney was caring only about his company’s profits and not at all about creating jobs here in the U.S., and he saw out-sourcing jobs as a great new way to make money.
Perhaps as interesting as the story itself is the fact that after four years as governor of Massachusetts, and more than six years of his running for the presidency non-stop, even with all his talk about his business career helping him understand job creation, this is the first time we have heard about these investments. Mitt Romney is big into secrets, and is very good at keeping them. He has Swiss bank accounts, and Cayman Island accounts as well. His financial disclosure for years past has been unusually secretive in nature. He won’t say what his positions are on a whole range of critically important issues. I think we can guess why Romney tried to hide the news about his being a pioneer in out-sourcing, but why does he have secret off-shore bank accounts and so little information in his financial disclosure reports? What has he invested money in all those years that requires such skullduggery? This is as secretive a man as has run for president at least since Dick Nixon with all his dirty little secrets.
This is the candidate who said that we must only speak of issues about the concentration of wealth “in quiet rooms”. He prefers speaking about these kinds of things in quiet rooms, because to be open about how he made his money would be such an insult to the exact voters he most needs to win this election. But Romney made his incredible fortune by doing insider deals in those quiet rooms, by quietly helping companies turn a profit by out-sourcing their workers. After he made his money off these kinds of deals, he hid a great deal of it in secret Swiss and Caymans bank accounts. Is a man with these kinds of values — and these kinds of secrets — the kind of man we want to be president?

Framing wizards George Lakoff and Elisabeth Wehling, authors of The Little Blue Book: The Essential Guide to Thinking and Talking Democratic, have some instructive messaging pointers for the Obama campaign from their book up at HuffPo. Some excerpts:

Obama’s strategy is to pin the Bush economic disaster on Romney, with good reason, since Romney has essentially the same policies as Bush. Since Obama has not consistently pinned the blame on Bush over the past four years, he comes off as defensive.
…Pinning the disaster on Bush is possible, but it will take a lot of repetition, not just by the president, but by Democrats in general. Not just a repetition of economic facts, but of the moral differences that led to both the Bush disaster and the Obama attempt to recoup.
Perhaps the most important omission from the Obama speech was any overt mention of The Public — everything that our citizenry as a whole provides to all, e.g., roads, bridges, infrastructure, education, protection, a health system, and systems for communication, energy development and supply, and so on. The Private — private life and private enterprise — depends on The Public. There is no economic freedom without all of this. So-called “free enterprise” is not free. A free market economy depends on a strong Public. This is a deep truth, easy to recognize. It undercuts Romney’s central pitch, that is it private enterprise alone that has made our country great, and that as much as possible of The Public should be eliminated.

Noting Romney’s near-demonization of government, the authors explain:

Although Obama intends to argue against this understanding, he unintentionally feeds it. He does so in three ways: First, by accepting and reinforcing many of Romney’s central frames (often by negating them); second, by moving to the right in his own argumentation; and third, by not spelling out his own moral principles explicitly right from the start.
First, here are three examples of Obama repeating Romney’s frames (in bold):
“Governor Romney and his allies in Congress believe deeply in the theory that the best way to grow the economy is from the top down.”
“They maintain that if we eliminate most regulations, if we cut taxes by trillions of dollars, if we strip down government to national security and a few other basic functions, the power of businesses to create jobs and prosperity will be unleashed and that will automatically benefit us all.”
Republicans “believe that if you simply take away regulations and cut taxes by trillions of dollars, the market will solve all of our problems on its own.”
Though Obama’s statements are supposed to be taken sarcastically, they actually are positive, straightforward, easy to understand versions of Romney’s positions and beliefs.

The authors fault Obama for using conservative-favoring terms like “spending” and “cutting taxes” in defending his positions, noting:

Language is important here, as well as policy. “Spending” is a conservative term; it suggests a needless draining of financial resources, a waste of money. But most of that money was “invested” in our people or used to maintain our infrastructure — not just “spent”. Though a tax reduction for working families may very well have been a good idea, the term “cutting taxes” is a conservative term, suggesting that taxes in general are bad and should be “cut.”

Ditto for the President’s listing his reforms:

…The president gives a long list of perfectly reasonable policies: ending oil subsidies, investing in education, hiring more teachers and pay them better, not deporting young immigrants, investing in clean energy, encouraging energy innovation, supporting R&D tax credits, rebuilding crumbling infrastructure, reforming the tax code, eliminating tax breaks for businesses that ship jobs overseas, strengthening Medicare and Medicaid, and so on.
No such list is going to be remembered by most of those who heard it. Moreover, what is said first matters; it sets the moral frame. In his speech, Obama first repeats the Romney frames, opposes them to numbers and policy lists, and only at the end talks about his own moral vision.

There is an alternative, say the authors:

Frame everything from his own moral perspective, including Romney’s positions and assumptions. Avoid the Romney language. Start with his own moral position, which he stated beautifully in his 2008 campaign but has since dropped: That democracy is based on empathy (citizens caring about fellow citizens), responsibility both for oneself and others, and an ethic of excellence (doing one’s best not just for oneself, but for one’s family, community, and country).
…Repeat the truth that The Private depends on The Public. It is The Public that provides economic freedom. Give a vision of responsible, progressive business. Talk freedom — as well as fairness. Point out that the hoarding of wealth by the 1 percent kills opportunity, as Joseph Stieglitz has discussed at length. Speak of an “Economy for All — not just rich bankers, managers, and job killers like private equity firms.” Yes, Romney and those like him are job killers. Say it. Point out that during the economic recovery of 2010, 93 percent of the additional income went to the richest 1 percent of taxpayers. Stop using “top” to mean rich. “Top” suggests high morality, merit, and ability. “Bottom” signifies the opposite.

As Lakoff and Wehling conclude, “We are now in a situation where conservatives have framed almost every issue. The least Democrats can do is to refuse to repeat their language and so help them.”

A message from Ed Kilgore:
Dear Readers:
The Democratic coalition is currently engaged in an intense and urgent debate about vastly expanding the scope and role of grass-roots organizing. From Democratic financial contributors to political campaign managers and strategists, the issue has now attained critical importance in the new post-Citizen’s United age.
The Democratic Strategist is proud to present the first in-depth look at one of the most important organizations in this field — Working America, the three million member community affiliate of the AFL-CIO. Although little known and less understood, Working America is actually a critical player and extraordinary social “laboratory” for progressive grass-roots organizing in white working class America.
Every participant in the current debate should become familiar with how WA works and what it has been able to achieve.
To read the memo, click here.

One of the least discussed topics in conservative circles these days is inequality of wealth and income. Yet, as TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira points out in the latest edition of his ‘Public Opinion Watch’, “public awareness of inequality is very high these days,” according to the Pew Research Center’s New American Values survey:

…One survey question asked respondents if they agreed that today the rich get richer while the poor get poorer. About three-quarters (76 percent) agreed, while just 23 percent disagreed.
And it’s not just the poor who are losing ground to the rich–it’s the middle class as well. In the same survey three-quarters (76 percent) also say the gap between the standards of living of the middle class and the rich grew over the last decade, compared to just 16 percent who think it narrowed.

Teixeira adds that “These sentiments are too lopsided to go away anytime soon” and conservatives should “offer a few solutions as a refreshing change.” However, that’s not likely, as Teixeira concludes, “since that would mean recommending something besides tax cuts for the rich, conservatives’ one-size-fits-all economic policy.”

Ronald Brownstein’s post, “Just Like the Gipper” at the National Journal can add clarity to any discussion about Mitt Romney’s prospects for winning in November. Brownstein spotlights Reagan’s success in winning the votes of whites without college degrees as a key to his victory — and explains that demographic changes since then have reduced the size of this constituency in percentage terms, but not their pivotal importance to Romney’s hopes. As Brownstein argues:

…Reagan won 58.8 percent of the vote, 49 states, and an unmatched 525 Electoral College votes. But he did so in a country demographically very different from today’s America. Those changes may be the most important asset available to Obama as he struggles against an intensifying economic undertow. Yet even that might not save the president.
For an upcoming National Journal report illuminating voter trends over the past eight presidential elections, Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz conducted a detailed analysis of exit polls from the 1984 race. That exercise captures the magnitude of the cultural and demographic changes that have remade the nation since then.
When Reagan routed Democratic nominee Walter Mondale in 1984, the white working class dominated the electorate. White voters without a four-year college degree cast 61 percent of all ballots that year, and they gave Reagan 66 percent of their votes, the NJ analysis found. White voters with at least a four-year college degree cast an additional 27 percent of the vote, and 62 percent of them went for Reagan. Eighty-one percent of minorities backed Mondale, but they represented just 12 percent of all voters then.

But Republicans face a much tougher demographic breakdown today, as Brownstein explains:

By 2008, minorities had more than doubled their vote share to 26 percent. College-educated whites had increased their share to 35 percent. The big losers were whites without a college degree, who dropped from 61 percent of all voters to 39 percent–a decline of more than one-third from their level in 1984. That is social change at breakneck speed.
By itself, this evolution in America’s social structure goes a long way toward explaining why Democrats have won the popular vote in four of the five presidential contests since 1992 after losing (usually emphatically) five of the six races from 1968 to 1988. Mondale in 1984 carried only 40.6 percent of the popular vote. But if college-educated whites, noncollege whites, and minorities all voted as they did in 1984, but were present in the same proportions they represented in 2008, Mondale would have taken nearly 48 percent of the vote. Conversely, if those three groups voted as they did in 2008, but were present in their 1984 proportions, Obama would have lost convincingly.

Then there is the rising tide of educated women, who are also a tough sell for Republicans, as Brownstein explains: “…College-educated white men grew only slightly, college-educated white women increased their share by more than half. Those women, most of whom are socially liberal and receptive to activist government, consistently support Democrats more than other whites…” Brownstein adds:

Most polls this spring show Obama running near the 52 percent he won among those upscale white women in 2008, and also remaining very close to his 80 percent showing among all minorities. If Obama can hold that level of support from those two groups, Romney could amass a national majority only by winning nearly two-thirds of all other whites–the men with college degrees, and the men and women without them. To put that challenge in perspective, Reagan, while winning his historic landslide, carried a combined 66.5 percent of those three groups. To defeat Obama, in other words, Romney may need to equal Reagan.

Brownstein concedes that matching Reagan’s support with the less-educated white voters is possible, and if Romney can also make some inroads with educated women and minority voters, that could be his route to victory. Brownstein notes that Obama is doing about as badly with working class white voters as did Mondale, and the economy is a pivotal factor going forward. On the other hand, Brownstein adds that “Obama has a much sturdier base than Mondale did.”
But if Romney fails to energize white working class voters, and Obama turns out his key constituencies, Romney will lose.