The following article, by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, is cross-posted from HuffPo.
By all rights, the Republican presidential candidate should have a lot of wind at his back in 2012.
*President Obama’s economic policies brought an end to the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression and have now yielded 25 straight months of private sector jobs growth. But many Americans are still out of work.
*The far right has been energized by passage of President Obama’s legislative agenda: health care reform, the equal pay for equal work, ending Don’t Ask-Don’t Tell, Wall Street reform. They hate these policies and they are highly motivated to stop the President’s re-election.
*The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision has allowed a flood of corporate and right wing money that should allow the right to out-communicate the President’s campaign for re-election.
Instead, Mitt Romney is struggling. There are many factors:
*President Obama’s well organized, highly disciplined campaign;
*A bloody Republican primary season;
*The high regard in which most Americans hold the President — last week’s ABC News poll showed 56% regard him favorably while only 40% regard him unfavorably.
But Mitt Romney’s biggest enemy is Mitt Romney.
That same ABC News poll showed Romney is the first major Presidential candidate in modern history to be “underwater” in his favorables. Only 35% of Americans regard him favorably, while 47% regard him unfavorably.
Why does Romney have such a “Romney problem”?
People are not just reacting negatively to the “public persona” of Romney. There is no evidence the Romney campaign simply needs to do a better job getting to know the “real Romney.”
In fact, it appears that the more people to know him, the less they like him. A February Washington Post poll showed that 52% of Americans responded that the more they know about Romney the less they like him. The same was true for 39% of Republicans. That trend seems to be continuing.
No, the problem is not that they aren’t getting to know the “real Romney.” The problem is the “real Romney.”
In elections — and especially highly publicized Presidential elections — voters do not fundamentally make choices between two sets of issues positions, or economic policies. They make a choice about who should be their leader. They choose between living, breathing human beings.
They ask themselves two major sets of questions:

Read more…

Michael Tomasky’s “Barack Obama and the ‘Centrist’ Fantasy About Dealing With the GOP” merits a slow, sober read by White House strategists. It’s a familiar argument from progressive Democrats. But it’s exceptionally well-stated — and very persuasive. Tomasky laments the return of the “Obama should compromise more to win centrists/independents/swing voters” meme-that-refuses-to-die, and then explains why it’s a sure loser:

…Let’s imagine a scenario. Obama comes forward with a tax-reform proposal along Bowles-Simpson lines, one that meets the GOP halfway. He comes up with three marginal rates for individuals, the highest one around 35, maybe 38 tops; or maybe he adds a fourth “LeBron James” rate, a higher rate on dollars earned above some fantastically high figure that applies to something like .2 percent of all tax filers; but that would probably be in there as a bargaining chip. He proposes the elimination of certain “tax expenditures,” or deductions and loopholes like the home-mortgage-interest deduction and the deduction for employer-sponsored health care, which are the two big ones; or maybe he’s more modest about this and places caps on those, not eliminating them entirely; or perhaps he sticks with something like getting rid of the state and local tax deduction. Finally, he lowers the corporate rate from the current 35 percent, but proposes closing several corporate loopholes, like energy-tax preferences for the oil and gas industry.
WWMD? That is, what would McConnell do–and Boehner, and Cantor, and the rest? Would they scratch their chins and say, “Gee, this is great. We’re delighted that the president has put something serious on the table, and we will work hard with him to find common ground”? Actually, they might say that, at first, just to pull the wool over people’s eyes. But in short order, the line from them and their confederates in positions of lighter responsibility would be: “This is a massive tax increase! Eliminating these deductions on middle-class people will raise their taxes, so he’s breaking his promise, see, we told you! The LeBron tax is just more ‘Democrat’ class warfare, more punishing the job creators.” “The corporate plan,” they’ll say, “sounds good on paper, but again, he’s attacking the job creators by eliminating these important deductions, and many corporations, especially small businesses”–you know they’ll throw that one in!–“are going to end up paying more.”

Hard to argue with that scenario. As for the ‘why’ of it, Tomasky adds:

If Obama meets Republicans halfway, and then they block a deal, the center will shift further to the right. Republicans know this. That’s why obstructionism suits them just fine.
And that’s just elected officials. At Heritage and Cato, they’ll comb through the fine print and find an Achilles’ heel, something that can be distorted to sound just hideous, which will of course be in there, because tax policy is unbelievably complex. And then, once Mr. Oxycontin and the Fox people start hooping and hollering about that, it won’t be long before the whole thing can be dismissed as something Marx would be proud of.
No they wouldn’t, you say? Why? Because their allegations wouldn’t be true? Oh, yes, that has regularly stopped them in the past. Or because there would be too much pressure on them to behave responsibly this time? Pressure from whom? The New York Times and Washington Post editorial pages? Please. Direct me to one instance–and no, the Post and the Iraq War doesn’t count, because that was the Post endorsing something Republicans were for anyway–when Eric Cantor has read a Times editorial and said, “Golly, these fellows make some very fair points, I must heed them.” The only pressure they pay attention to is from Limbaugh, Fox, and the base. And that pressure will consist entirely of one message: resist, at all costs, or perish.

Looking toward the future, Tomasky sees no reason to hope that the GOP will negotiate in good faith. “… There’s every reason to think it will be even worse in a second Obama term, because the base will be so enraged that the guy “stole” another election that the demand will be that the Republicans be even more obstructionist…”
The Republican strategy is ultimately very simple, says Tomasky: Resist all proposed compromises from the President and keep pushing the “center of gravity” to the right. But there is but one remedy, Tomasky sees: “What can change it? Not much. Losing lots of elections. If they’re ever down to 38 senators and 153 House members like the good old days, they’ll have to deal. Until then, Obama wouldn’t be a leader if he tried to negotiate with them in good faith. He’d be a fool.”
A harsh call. But there is absolutely nothing in the history of the President’s dealings with the Republicans to suggest it’s overstated.

Ed Kilgore asks a tough question in the title of a post at his Washington Monthly ‘Political Animal’ blog” “How Much Violence Against Women’ Do Republicans Support?” Kilgore explains:

If you’ve been following the debate in the Senate over the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act [VAWA], you know that Republicans are complaining that they don’t want the act to expire, but object to “poison pills” Democrats have added to the bill, particularly protections against domestic violence for undocumented women and for people in same-sex relationships.
But they are not handling the messaging of their position very well…This GOP exercise in damage control, however, may not be enough to spare their presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, for whom the VAWA issue is becoming another in a long series of examples of his weaselly refusal to take a distinct position. He’s sort of for VAWA renewal, but doesn’t think it should become a “political football,” and won’t say what version he’d support.

Kilgore quotes from Steve Benen’s Maddow Blog litany of Romney evasions on current newsworthy issues, including the Violence Against Women Act. he notes Benen’s observation that “The American electorate can tolerate quite a bit, but no one respects a coward.”
As Kilgore concludes, “…Maybe reporters navigating the Romney campaign’s evasions should try a different tack, asking exactly how much violence against women the candidate and his party are willing to accept? Maybe that will flush them out, and produce some straight answers.”

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.”