The following post is by Alan I. Abramowitz, author of The Polarized Public:
For the past 8 months, Rasmussen has consistently found more Republicans than Democrats in its national party id polling and that’s among adults, not likely voters or registered voters. They’re virtually alone in this regard and well off of the overall polling average which has a D lead of about 7 points with Rasmussen removed.
Do we need any more proof of Rasmussen’s Republican slant? This isn’t just a “house effect.” Rasmussen is a shill for the Republican Party as is clear from the wording of many of the questions he asks as well as his results. For more evidence, see Nate Silver’s 2010 polling post-mortem in which Rasmussen received the worst rating of any major polling organization for accuracy and bias:
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/04/rasmussen-polls-were-biased-and-inaccurate-quinnipiac-surveyusa-performed-strongly/
As in 2010, Rasmussen is “flooding the zone” by releasing numerous state and national polls, thereby strongly influencing polling averages because of the frequency of his polls and their outlier results.

The following article by Mike Lux, author of The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Sometimes candidates running for office say especially ridiculous things, but the conventional wisdom crowd doesn’t even notice because it sounds like something they already assume to be true. Mitt Romney’s statement on Wednesday that the Obama administration had pursued the “most anti-investment, anti-business, anti-jobs series of policies in modern American history” is the ultimate example of this.
Mitt Romney shouts from the rooftops how pro-business he is, but here’s the deal: he is only pro-certain kinds of business. His policies, whose only differences with George W. Bush’s policies are that Romney’s are more extreme, are lavish in being supportive of the biggest banks and his old pals in the leveraged buyout world; the biggest fossil fuel energy companies; big insurance and pharmaceutical companies; the biggest defense contractors; the companies who dominate certain industries like retail and agribusiness. Romney is pro-incumbent businesses who are already big and wealthy and powerful, and pro-financial sector businesses who make money off of financial speculation and tax loopholes. But that’s pretty much it. For the 200 or so big conglomerates in those categories, he is all for them.
But for all the small businesses that got destroyed in the wake of bank collapse caused by financial speculation, he’s no help at all. For the small community banks and credit unions competing with the Too Big To Fail banks, he has nothing to say. For green jobs companies fighting to compete with oil and coal companies and all the solar, wind, and conservation industries being created in China and Europe, Romney will not lift a finger. For the small retailers trying to compete with Wal-Mart, there will be no targeted help of any kind. For independent bookstores and publishing houses trying to survive Amazon’s anti-competitive practices, there will be no relief at all. The auto industry and their suppliers would be gone if Romney had been president these last four years. U.S. steel and rubber companies would have been decimated. Home construction companies and realtors would just have wait to let the housing market “hit bottom,” and would continue to be decimated in the meantime.
And in community after community, all those local businesses who survive because teachers and cops and firefighters and road construction workers have jobs and the money to come in and buy things would be out of business. As entrepreneur Nick Hanauer said so brilliantly, it isn’t the rich people who create the jobs, it is the middle-class people who are their customers, and in Mitt Romney’s economy, a whole lot less of them would have jobs. That is not pro-business.
The contrast between President Obama’s speech and Mitt Romney’s economic speeches yesterday could not have been clearer. Romney believes in siding with the incumbents — the most powerful businesses who make money because they dominate the marketplace and because their lobbyists and their political money get them extra tax breaks and subsidies they can manipulate. Romney wants the wealthy people and businesses at the top to stay firmly and permanently planted at the top of the heap, and give them ever more tax cuts and loopholes and subsidies from our government. Obama’s speech made clear that his vision of the future is more firmly planted on the side of growing the middle class and helping up and coming entrepreneurs rather than just the incumbents. And it was Obama who made the decision to save the American auto industry and the hundreds of thousands of small businesses who supply parts and sell those cars and have autoworkers as customers. It was Obama who is pro-solar and wind and energy conservation. It is Obama who wants to expand broadband internet access, which could create millions of new jobs all across the country. It is Obama whose stimulus bill and fiscal relief for state and local governments that has created or saved the jobs and customers that kept hundreds of thousands of local businesses alive.
Both Romney and Obama have businesses that they are for helping, but the number of businesses in Romney’s case is so much smaller, because he wants to help only the biggest, wealthiest, and most politically powerful. Obama is pro-business, the difference being that the number of businesses he is working to help is a whole lot bigger.
As weak as our economy is right now, Romney’s version of economics would break us, causing a depression as millions more people get laid off, millions more homes get foreclosed, and a few powerful banks and companies rob the rest of us blind. That isn’t pro-business, it’s pro-economic collapse.

Commenting on all of the Hoo Ha surrounding President Obama’s recent remarks about the private sector doing fine, Brendan Nyan’s post “Do campaign gaffes matter? Not to voters” at the Columbia Journalism Review makes a few excellent points, including:

…Journalists routinely promote the importance of these sorts of pseudo-controversies, even though there is little convincing evidence that gaffes affect presidential election outcomes…there is no evidence that the president has been damaged by the incident thus far. As Emory’s Alan Abramowitz pointed out by email, Obama’s job approval and trial heat numbers against Romney have not declined since the press conference…
…When we compare Obama’s approval from the three days before the “doing fine” statement to the three days afterward, we see that the proportion of Americans who approve of the job he is doing actually increases from 46% to 49%. Without further calculations, it’s not clear whether such a change is statistically significant given the margin of error on the polls, but the result is certainly inconsistent with the notion that the president has been hurt by the statement.

And it’s not about President Obama having Reaganesque teflon. It’s more that negative ads don’t seem to have much lasting impact, as Nyhan explains:

…Negative ads are indeed the most likely way that Republicans might try to make the quote salient in the fall. The problem, however, is that evidence for the effectiveness of negative ads is quite limited. The best experimental evidence suggests that the effects of television advertising decay quickly. Moreover, as Georgetown University political scientist Jonathan Ladd pointed out on Twitter, the relevant question is whether ads (or speeches or commentary) that exploit gaffes are more persuasive than the material Republicans would otherwise have used. How much will it matter if a Romney ad quotes the “doing fine” statement or, say, criticizes the stimulus or healthcare reform instead?

Same seems to go for presidential candidate gaffes, says Nyhan:

One way to evaluate the claim that gaffes affect election outcomes is by considering recent history. Indeed, Cillizza cites two examples as evidence in his most recent piece (the second was also cited by Tumulty): John Kerry’s March 2004 statement that “I actually did vote for the $87 billion [to fund military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan] before I voted against it,” and John McCain’s statement, in the early stages of the financial crisis in September 2008, that “the fundamentals of our economy are strong.” However, it’s not at all clear that the statements in question were the reason that the campaigns turned out as they did, rather than the winning candidates’ underlying advantages in the campaign fundamentals. Both George W. Bush in 2004 and Obama in 2008 performed approximately as well as election forecasting models expected, which suggests that these campaign events had limited influence.
Moreover, the effect of gaffes is not always clear even when they take place in high-profile presidential debates. As UNC political scientist James Stimson points out in his book Tides of Consent, Gerald Ford actually gained ground on Jimmy Carter after a widely-criticized gaffe in which he falsely said Eastern Europe was not dominated by the Soviet Union during a 1976 debate.

Nyhan argues “the biggest reason that gaffes are perpetually hyped by the media in the absence of evidence that they matter to voters–is that, despite all the cutbacks in journalism, too many reporters are chasing too few stories at this point in the presidential campaign…”
In concluding, Nyhan asks an excellent question: “Why not devote more resources to investigations, enterprise stories, and down-ballot races, and reduce the number of reporters covering the minutiae of the presidential campaign? We, the readers, will be just fine without them.” Amen.

Nate Cohn reports at The New Republic that “Obama’s Problem With White, Non-College Educated Voters is Getting Worse“:

…over the last four years, Obama’s already tepid support among white voters without a college degree has collapsed….Since February, 25 state and national polls from Quinnipiac and Pew Research disaggregated Obama’s standing against Romney by educational attainment. The dataset has weaknesses, as the Quinnipiac state polls sample six somewhat unrepresentative East Coast states. Even so, the degree of consistency across the six states and the six national polls is striking: Of the 25 polls, 22 show a larger drop-off among non-college educated white voters.
On average, Obama has lost nearly 6 percentage points among white voters without a college degree. Given that Obama had already lost millions of traditionally Democratic white working class voters in 2008, this degree of further deterioration is striking. In the three national polls conducted since April, Obama held just 34 percent of white voters without a college degree, compared to 40 percent in 2008. Thirty-four percent places Obama in the company of Walter Mondale, George McGovern, and the 2010 House Democrats. These are landslide numbers.

Cohn reports that the same polls show Obama holding his own with educated white voters. He adds, “If Obama’s enduring strength among educated and non-white voters keeps Obama competitive in traditionally Republican states like Virginia and North Carolina, but Romney doesn’t get his end of the bargain in Democratic-but-white-working-class states like Wisconsin, the electoral map starts to look a lot better for Obama.
Moreover, notes Cohn, Romney is having trouble sealing the deal with less educated white voters. “In all but one of the 25 polls, less educated whites were more likely to be undecided than college educated whites. In the six national polls, 5 percent of college educated whites were undecided compared to 9 percent of whites without a college degree.”
As for messaging, Cohn sees Romney’s image as a potent Obama asset. “Depicting Romney as a plutocratic corporate raider seems likely to resonate with working class voters, especially since many traditionally have voted for Democratic presidential candidates.”

Tired of all the campaign 2012 jabber? Take a peek at America’s longer-range (12 year horizon) political future at Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, where some of America’s top political visionaries share their insights in a forum on “Decision 2024: Our Parties, Our Politics.”
Included in the forum are: “Demography and Its Discontents” by Ruy Teixeira; “Can the GOP Evolve?” by David Frum; “The Browning of America” by Gary Segura; “The Center Must Hold” by Christine Todd Whitman; “Yes, Labels!” by Nancy L. Rosenblum; “The Millennials Grow Up” by Andrew Baumann & Anna Greenberg; “The Importance of Philosophy” by Felicia Wong; and “The Coming Resource Wars” by Kevin Drum.
A couple of teasers from the editors’ introduction:

…Being Democracy, we told them not simply to tell us–and you–that this demographic would have more electoral power, or that interest group might shift allegiances. We asked them all to describe the impact such changes would have on governance and policy-making.
Electoral demographer Ruy Teixiera, one of the country’s leading experts in this field, espies a progressive opportunity created by new demographic realities–but only if we shift our economic policy priorities from security to opportunity. The writer David Frum sees a Republican opportunity in the years ahead, but only if the party becomes more like conservative parties in other countries. Gary Segura of Stanford argues that that the growing Latino population will move our politics to the left and force the GOP to make some tough choices…Pollsters Andrew Baumann and Anna Greenberg take up the issue of young voters and find that while they are in general more liberal and will shift our politics leftward, they may well force the Democrats to change their posture on a bedrock progressive issue. Felicia Wong of the Roosevelt Institute worries that the middle class will keep sinking, and calls on progressives to articulate first principles more effectively to keep that from happening.

As pivotal as the 2012 elections are to America’s future, it’s also important that we mine the insights of the nation’s more perceptive political visionaries about the longer haul. This Democracy forum is a good start.

This article by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Everyone who watches politics pretty much agrees that last week was Obama’s roughest week yet in this campaign, and I am not going to argue that point for a moment. But I see some potential silver linings in the mess that was last week, one of which may well be seen after this election as the most important messaging turning point in this campaign. If Obama and his team take the right lesson from last week, they will put themselves on a course toward victory.
I see two smaller rays of light, and one potential very big one. In terms of the first, I hope last week definitively ends the over-confidence factor among Democrats. Given how embarrassing the GOP primary process was, all the mistakes Romney has already made, and all the talk from the campaign about the five paths to Electoral College victory, a lot of Democrats have been making the mistake of being relaxed about this campaign, which is crazy when you look at the economy. A wake-up call, especially now as opposed to having a rough week in September, is exactly what the doctor ordered for my fellow Democrats. Romney is still a terrible candidate who is completely out of touch with middle-class voters, but in this economy that factor alone will not win this race.
The second silver lining is that all the talk about Bain that has resulted from pro-Wall-Street Democrats attacking the Obama team for daring to criticize how a Wall-Street firm makes its money is keeping the issue alive. The more people talk about Bain, the more curious voters are about what all the controversy is about, and the better for Obama. If people take time to learn how Bain made its money — sweetheart deals, tax loopholes, loading companies up with debt and siphoning off their profits, slashing jobs and wages and benefits — the more they will understand that Mitt Romney is not who we want as president. As irritated as I am with Clinton and other Democrats, they are keeping the issue in the news, which is good for us.
The biggest silver lining, though, might be because of the president’s worst mistake last week. I can tell you that as someone who has been arguing vociferously for months now that the president should stop saying the economy is getting better, my heart sank when I heard him say his line about the private sector being fine, and I immediately knew it would become the subject of innumerable Republican attacks. The silver lining is this is that perhaps the reaction to this mistake will finally convince the Obama campaign that they are playing with fire when they try to make the argument that the economy is getting better. As a recent Democracy Corps memo eloquently puts it:
It is elites who are creating a conventional wisdom that an incumbent president must run on his economic performance — and therefore must convince voters that things are moving in the right direction. They are wrong, and that will fail. The voters are very sophisticated about the character of the economy; they know who is mainly responsible for what went wrong and they are hungry to hear the President talk about the future. They know we are in a new normal where life is a struggle — and convincing them that things are good enough for those who have found jobs is a fool’s errand. They want to know the plans for making things better in a serious way — not just focused on finishing up the work of the recovery.
It has been clear to me for some time in looking at all kinds of polling and focus-group data that voters are way ahead of the elites about the nature of this economy. The middle-class voters who will help decide this election understand to the bottom of their toes that this economy is not just in a typical downturn, that something big, fundamental, and historic is going on. They feel every day the way the middle class is getting hammered, and they are coming closer and closer to becoming less “middle-income” and more “low-income.” They are far less worried than elites about the month-to-month upticks and downticks of an economy in deep trouble. And they know the problem isn’t so much the politicians as the wealthy and powerful economic special interests that are pulling the strings.
In this context, it makes no sense for the Obama campaign to keep arguing that things really aren’t as bad as they seem, or that things are getting better. Presidents and the people close to them always feel a need to do that, but in this context, it just doesn’t work. What does is to be straight with the American people, fully acknowledging the pain they are feeling and making it clear that their instinct is right, that the economy is in a deep hole because of decades of having our priorities screwed up. We are at a make or break for the future of America’s middle class, and we need to put government back on the side of that middle class. Here’s the paragraph Greenberg tested in the DCorps focus groups that worked the best:
We’ve got to do everything possible to get people back to work. Unemployment is too high and we know that new jobs pay less and offer fewer benefits. It is really a struggle. That’s why we have to address not just the recovery but the fact that the middle class has taken it all on the chin for years and that’s got to change. We’ve been exporting American industries and outsourcing American jobs. The cause of healthcare, college, groceries and gasoline keep going up but the middle class can’t catch a break. They’ve taken on more debt and can’t save for education or retirement. At the same time, Wall Street’s big banks and the richest got big tax breaks and oil industry got special interest subsidies. This election is about the future of the middle class. We will put tax rates for those earning over $200,000 back up to where it was under President Clinton, eliminate special interest subsidies and cut our deficits over the long term. We have to protect retirement by securing Social Security and Medicare, expand support for education, training and innovation, American industries and make college affordable. We need an America where the middle class can proper again.
We are going to be seeing Obama’s private-sector-doing-fine quotation over and over in Republican TV ads. But if the president and his team internalize why people are reacting so negatively to what he said and pivot decisively away from the things-are-getting-better message and toward a message about fighting for the middle class in historically bad times, this week will ironically come to be seen as the turning point that headed President Obama toward reelection.

The following memo is cross-posted from Democracy Corps.
What is clear from this fresh look at public consciousness on the economy is how difficult this period has been for both non-college-educated and college-educated voters – and how vulnerable the prevailing narratives articulated by national Democratic leaders are.[1] We will face an impossible headwind in November if we do not move to a new narrative, one that contextualizes the recovery but, more importantly, focuses on what we will do to make a better future for the middle class.
It is elites who are creating a conventional wisdom that an incumbent president must run on his economic performance – and therefore must convince voters that things are moving in the right direction. They are wrong, and that will fail. The voters are very sophisticated about the character of the economy; they know who is mainly responsible for what went wrong and they are hungry to hear the President talk about the future. They know we are in a new normal where life is a struggle – and convincing them that things are good enough for those who have found jobs is a fool’s errand. They want to know the plans for making things better in a serious way – not just focused on finishing up the work of the recovery.
We are losing these voters on the economy, but holding on because Romney is very vulnerable. They do not trust him because of who he is for and because he’s out of touch with ordinary people; he is vulnerable on the Ryan budget and its impact on people; he is vulnerable on the choices over taxes. But in the current context, it produces a fairly diminished embrace of Obama and the Democrats, the lesser of two evils, without much feeling of hope.
But we underscore the sentiment they expressed in the postcards to the President they wrote at the end of the exercise: overwhelmingly, these voters want to know that he understands the struggle of working families and has plans to make things better.
With the economy faltering, we conducted fairly open-ended focus groups among white non-college-educated voters in Columbus, Ohio and college-educated suburban voters in suburban Philadelphia. We excluded strong partisans from both camps. These were all independents or weak partisans and ticket-splitters–swing independent voters–and the groups included an even mix of 2008 Obama and McCain voters.
Job losses have left them struggling to pay the bills.
The discussion always begins with discussion of their experience with job losses for themselves and their families — and how that has left them struggling to pay for groceries. Most have jobs now, but speak about their lower wages and benefits. Because wages are down, there has been a dramatic rise in discussion of very basic pocketbook issues. And this does not seem like some passing phase.
This has not been a pocketbook-level recovery for ordinary Americans. This is especially true for non-college-educated voters, who have been uniquely hit by this economy. They, their families, and people they know are on food stamps, on unemployment, and on disability.
We’ve had a lot of layoffs in our family and my husband just got over that. He drew unemployment for a year and a half. (Non-college-educated woman, Columbus, OH)
I had to go in for hernia surgery on Friday. I’m unemployed, you know it’s expensive, they don’t care. Nobody cares. (Non-college-educated man, Columbus, OH)
They have trouble finding work that will pay the bills. And for many older workers, it is difficult to find work at all.
I’m getting paid $7.70 an hour …I’m 53 years old…If I want a job, that’s what I’ve got to do. And actually… I’m having problems trying to get a full-time job because people are looking at it and saying, you know, we’ve only got a couple years. Most companies are looking and saying, we probably got a couple good years out of you, possibly less, that’s about it. And I mean, they all – used to be the laws were there that says, actually, you’re supposed to get two, 10-minute breaks… and a half hour lunch. Laws have changed now, companies don’t have to give that… And they’re working us to the bone. It’s like, wow, we’re back in the 1900s, you know…Because you’re just slave labor, you know. (Non-college-educated man, Columbus, OH)
Things are really tough, I’m self-employed, I’m just drumming up work and it’s just, like, living, like, from pay to pay, from job to job. And you know, I can’t buy things for my kids or my grandkids like I – like I was before. And it upsets me, because you know, come Christmas time and stuff like that, their birthdays and stuff like that, you know, I can’t give them what I want to get them. (Non-college-educated man, Columbus, OH).

Read more…

(Editor’s Note: We are extremely pleased to publish this significant strategic analysis by noted political analyst and TDS contributor Alan Abramowitz, the Alben W. Barkley Professor of Political Science at Emory University)
With five months to go until Election Day 2012, all indications are that the presidential race between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney is going to go down to the wire and that the outcome will ultimately be decided by voters in 10-15 battleground states where neither candidate has a significant advantage.
In deciding how to allocate money and other resources in these battleground states, the key question facing the Obama campaign is how much emphasis to give to voter registration and mobilization versus persuasion of undecided and weakly committed swing voters. The conventional wisdom about the 2012 presidential election, trumpeted by most pundits and media commentators, is that the outcome will be decided by the swing voters and that the candidate who is viewed as closest to the center will have the best chance of winning their support. However, the evidence presented in this article, based on recent polling data from the battleground states, shows that Democrats have little chance of winning over many swing voters but a much better chance of winning the votes of the unregistered if they can get them on the voter rolls and turn them out on Election Day.
Swing Voters: Unhappy with Obama but Unenthusiastic about Voting
In order to compare the potential payoffs of a strategy emphasizing mobilization compared with one emphasizing persuasion, I analyzed data from a March 20-26 Gallup Poll in twelve key battleground states: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin. This was the most recent battleground state polling data available for analysis. A total of 1046 adults were interviewed on landline and cellular telephones including 871 registered voters.
One important finding from Gallup’s battleground state poll is that there were relatively few swing voters in these swing states. Among registered voters, 49 percent supported Barack Obama and another one percent indicated that they leaned toward Obama while 41 percent supported Mitt Romney and another two percent leaned toward Romney.
The March 20-26 survey was conducted at a time when Mitt Romney was still battling with Rick Santorum for the Republican nomination. Now that Romney has locked up the GOP nomination, Obama’s lead in these battleground states may very well be smaller. What is striking, however, is that as early as March, relatively few registered voters were unwilling to state a preference in a Romney-Obama contest. Even combining leaners with the undecided, swing voters made up less than 10 percent of the electorate in these twelve states.
Still, with the race between Obama and Romney expected to be very close, even a small group of swing voters could decide the outcome. So who were these swing voters? To answer this question, I compared the characteristics and political attitudes of swing voters (those who were undecided or only leaning toward a candidate) with the characteristics and attitudes of registered voters who were supporting either Obama or Romney. The results are displayed in Table 1.

The data in Table 1 show that compared with voters supporting a candidate, swing voters were disproportionately white and female. They were also much more likely to describe themselves as completely independent and much less likely to describe themselves as Democrats or independents leaning toward the Democratic Party than other voters. But the most dramatic differences between swing voters and voters supporting a candidate involved their opinions about President Obama and their enthusiasm about voting in 2012.
Swing voters had much more negative opinions of President Obama’s job performance than other voters. In fact their opinions were almost as negative as those of Romney supporters. Only 11 percent of swing voters approved of Obama’s job performance compared with 6 percent of Romney voters. In contrast, 92 percent of Obama voters approved of the President’s job performance.
But while swing voters were similar to Romney voters in their evaluation of President Obama’s job performance, they were much less enthusiastic about voting. Only 19 percent of swing voters described themselves as extremely or very enthusiastic about voting in 2012 compared with 47 percent of Romney supporters and 50 percent of Obama supporters. And 58 percent of swing voters described themselves as not too enthusiastic or not at all enthusiastic about voting compared with only 27 percent of Romney supporters and 21 percent of Obama supporters.
These findings suggest that efforts by the Obama campaign to persuade swing voters are likely to be unproductive and could even backfire. These voters have a decidedly negative view of the President and are very unlikely to vote for him. The best the Obama campaign can hope for is that most of these swing voters will stay at home on Election Day.
The Other Unknown in the Equation: Unregistered Voters
In addition to swing voters, there is another group in the electorate whose behavior has the potential to influence the outcome of a close presidential election–those who are not currently registered. In fact, in the Gallup battleground state poll there were almost twice as many unregistered voters as swing voters.

Not only did unregistered voters outnumber swing voters, but their characteristics and political attitudes were very different from those of swing voters or those of registered voters. Table 2 compares the characteristics and attitudes of unregistered voters with those of registered voters in the Gallup battleground state survey. Unregistered voters were disproportionately young and nonwhite and, in marked contrast with swing voters, had more favorable opinions of President Obama’s job performance than registered voters. Most importantly, when asked about their presidential candidate preference, unregistered voters chose Barack Obama over Mitt Romney by a better than two-to-one margin.
These findings suggest that the Obama campaign would be well advised to focus its efforts in the battleground states on voter registration and turnout rather than on trying to win over swing voters. However, unregistered voters, like swing voters, were rather unenthusiastic about voting. Getting them registered and to the polls could be challenging.

But while unregistered voters in general were unenthusiastic about voting, unregistered Obama supporters were considerably more enthusiastic than unregistered Romney supporters. This can be seen very clearly in Table 3. Fifty-nine percent of unregistered Obama supporters were at least somewhat enthusiastic about voting compared with only 34 percent of unregistered Romney supporters. These results suggest that a strategy that emphasizes turning unregistered Obama supporters into Obama voters could pay significant dividends for the President’s reelection campaign in the swing states.
A Note on the Results of the Wisconsin Recall Election:
Turnout Key to Walker Victory
The level of overreaction to the Wisconsin results, even by some usually sensible folks like Ezra Klein and Greg Sargent, is excessive. This one election does not mean that we are now in a new, “post-Citizens United” era in American politics. It is not necessary to diminish the importance of the Supreme Court’s decision to recognize that, empirically speaking it is simply not why Barrett lost. He lost because, as the exit polls revealed, a lot of Wisconsin voters were uncomfortable with the idea of recalling a sitting governor in the absence of evidence of misconduct in office and because the Republicans turned out in larger numbers than Democrats. Massive advertising certainly played a role in the election but it wasn’t the key factor.
An examination of the voting patterns and exit poll results in Tuesday’s Wisconsin recall election indicates that, in fact, turnout was a key factor in incumbent Republican Scott Walker’s victory over his Democratic challenger, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett. While there was a heavy turnout for a special election, the final total of just over 2.5 million votes fell well short of the nearly 3 million votes cast in the 2008 presidential election. And Republicans appear to have done a better job of getting their voters to the polls. Turnout for the recall election was 91 percent of 2008 turnout in suburban heavily Republican Waukesha County, the largest GOP county in the state, but only 83 percent of 2008 turnout in Milwaukee County, the largest Democratic county in the state.
The same pattern was evident in the exit poll results. The 2012 recall electorate was noticeably older, whiter, more conservative and more Republican than the 2008 electorate. Voters age 65 and older outnumbered those under the age of 30 by 18 percent to 16 percent on Tuesday. In contrast, four years ago, 18-29 year-old voters outnumbered those 65 and older by 22 percent to 14 percent. Most significantly, on Tuesday Republicans outnumbered Democrats by 35 percent to 34 percent according to the exit poll. Four years ago, Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 39 percent to 33 percent.
Despite Scott Walker’s fairly easy win on Tuesday, Democrats apparently were able to retake control of the state senate by defeating one GOP senator. And Democrats can take heart from one result from the exit poll. Even with a Republican-leaning electorate, Barack Obama led Mitt Romney by 51 percent to 44 percent when exit poll respondents were asked how they would vote in the presidential election. These results suggest that, Obama should be considered a solid favorite to carry the state again, especially if Democrats turn out in larger numbers in November.

If the Supreme Court majority guts the Affordable Care Act this month, it will be ruling against the will of the American people, as indicated by a recent opinion poll. According to TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira’s latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot,’

The latest Kaiser Health Tracking poll confirms that the public is not interested in repealing the Affordable Care Act, whatever its misgivings about the law. In fact, a plurality (47 percent) say they want to either see the law expanded (27 percent) or kept as is (20 percent), compared to 39 percent who want the law either repealed and replaced with a Republican alternative (18 percent) or repealed altogether (21 percent).

Nor is the public much interested in cutting funding for the Act, as Teixeira, notes:

And the public is strongly opposed to conservatives’ pet idea of cutting off funding for implementing the law if they are not successful in repealing it. Just 32 percent of those polled support such a move versus 58 percent who are opposed.

If the High Court’s forthcoming ruling has any regard for the overwhelming support of the public for keeping the law and strengthening it, the ACA will remain in force.

Thomas B. Edsall takes some recent demographic and attitudinal trends out for a ramble at his New York Times ‘Campaign Stops’ blog, and comes across some interesting insights, among them:

In a study published in February 2008, the Pew Forum on Religious and Public Life found that mainline Protestants, once the dominant force not only in politics but in the national culture, had fallen to 18.1 percent of the electorate, behind both Protestant evangelicals and Catholics – and barely ahead of the fast-growing category of “unaffiliated,” which reached 16.1 percent.
Although a majority of the American population today decisively self-identifies as Christian, at 78.4 percent, America and its politics have in fact become vastly more heterogeneous. The connection between religion and politics is very complicated, of course. On the one hand, many people do not feel their religious beliefs and their political beliefs are directly related, but for others the former determines the latter. Not to mention the fact that the tenets of Christianity are themselves subject to partisan and subjective interpretation.

That latter point comes alive in a survey by an April 2011 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, which asked respondents, “Is capitalism compatible with Christian values?” The results, as Edsall summarizes:

By two to one, 53-26, Democrats believe that capitalism and Christianity are not compatible. Republicans, in contrast, believe there is no conflict, by a 46-37 margin. Tea Party supporters are even more adamant, believing that capitalism and Christian values are compatible by a 56-35 margin.

You can imagine the field day neo-McCarthyist Republicans will have with that one. The findings are corroborated somewhat with other surveys cited by Edsall. The Public Religion Research Institute found, for example, that 70 percent of Democrats agreed that “one of the big problems of this country is that we don’t give everyone an equal chance in life,” compared to just 38 percent of Republicans. A healthy majority of Republicans, 54 percent, on the other hand, agreed that “it’s not really that big a problem if some people have more of a chance in life than others,” while only 25 percent of Dems endorsed this view. Looking at all Americans, 53 percent agreed with the more liberal view, with 40 percent also embracing the more conservative perspective.
Edsall’s take on these and other survey data he presents is that “As presently constituted, the Republicans have become the party of the married white Christian past.” He rolls out an array of questions about how both parties will adapt to the demographic changes ahead, leaving his readers with an unavoidable conclusion that there is a well-rooted altruism/compassion gap which is reflected in party identification and economic philosophy.