In the comments section following J.P. Green’s Friday post, “Limitations of the ‘Do Nothing Congress Meme” a commenter with the handle ‘massappeal’ flagged “Obama’s Chances Could Turn on One Key Indicator” by Alexis Simendinger at RealClear Politics. Here’s the crux argument from Simendinger’s post:

What if the incumbent president’s fate hinges on one basic economic question in 2012: Are the incomes of voters growing in the six months before Election Day? Barack Obama is likely to win a second term if real disposable incomes are stable or climbing in the two quarters leading into next year’s election, according to respected political science research…There is also a body of scholarship examining presidential elections over time that has uncovered predictive statistical conclusions. And here’s what that research shows: If we could gaze into a crystal ball and know whether personal incomes are climbing, flat, or falling — especially in key electoral states — between June and November 2012, we could place informed bets on the incumbent president’s fate….Real disposable income growth (that is, income growth adjusted for price changes), can produce predictive correlations that suggest outcomes a year from now.

Simendinger explains that the argument comes from Vanderbilt political scientist Larry Bartels, author of “Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age.” (Bartels and Princeton political scientist Christopher H. Achen crunch and analyze some key numbers in their 2004 paper “Musical Chairs: Pocketbook Voting and the Limits of Democratic Accountability.”)
Simendinger quotes Bartels: “Obama’s expected popular vote margin would be 5.17+3.49 x (2012 income growth). This implies that he is likely to be re-elected even if real incomes are stagnant in 2012, and even more likely to win if there is some real income growth in the next 12 months.” Further,

What is particularly intriguing about Bartels’ research is that Obama may be re-elected, based on the calculations, even if personal incomes are stagnant in 2012 — as they have been in the last year. But a late-breaking surge in income growth in the summer and autumn next year would clinch the election for the president, the research suggests…If Bartels and other political scientists are right about the benefits to incumbents of election-year economic upswings — and the voters’ decisive and “myopic considerations” about their own well-being — even a slight improvement in personal incomes in 2012 could be enough to deliver a victory to the president.
…If there are notable green shoots during the months prior to November 2012, Obama may be both lucky and victorious. The theoretical expectation is that voters next year will mentally drag their income evaluations into the voting booth and support the incumbent if they feel even marginally cheered about their perch in prosperity.

DCorps lead analyst Erica Seifert’s observation, made the October 6 TDS interview with her, that “pervasive underemployment” is more destructive for Democratic hopes than even unemployment may also reflect the importance of changes in real disposable income.
Yet, it’s hard to accept that this one statistic would trump all others, particularly in a worst case scenario. What will happen, for example, if unemployment, poverty, debt and gas prices are all rising, and somehow, owing to a statistical anomaly of some kind, real disposable income is improving?
Whether or not disposable real income growth is the ‘holy grail’ statistic for predicting presidential election outcomes is debatable. In terms of formulating political strategy, and messaging in particular, however, it does appear that real disposable income growth is a trend worth monitoring.

Every serious observer and participant in the formulation of Democratic political strategy is familiar with the work of Democracy Corps – the polling and strategy organization founded by Stan Greenberg and James Carville. Democracy Corps is unique in making all its polling research public and providing a perspective that is firmly partisan and progressive but insistently objective in its data collection and interpretation.
Democracy Corps is an independent project run by the polling firm Greenberg, Quinlan, Rosner Research (GQRR). Democracy Corps defines its role as “providing research, strategic advice, and a public voice to the issues important to the American people. It acts as a resource for the unions, public interest organizations, party and congressional leaders who are working for a more responsive government.”
But, while Democracy Corps frequent memos are read by essentially every major political commentator and analyst, there are few if any articles or commentaries that examine the unique aspects of D-Corps methodology and the quite significant methodological advances they have recently introduced.
In order to better understand these topics, The Democratic Strategist interviewed Erica Seifert, the co-author of recent memos with Stan Greenberg and the chief coordinator of D-Corps day to day activities.
Q – What is your background and how did you come to work at Democracy Corps?
I actually have a PhD in political history and was an academic specializing in the recent history of political communication and candidate images before I arrived at Greenberg Quinlan Rosner. My academic training included substantial work in oral history and quantitative methods. Also, I like to think that, as an historian, I have a unique perspective–especially in terms of witnessing and analyzing trends in our research.
Q – What did you find when you got to GQRR and Democracy Corps?
What I found was that there was actually a wide range of backgrounds among the people who work here at the firm. There’s really no standard bio, there are social science people and quantitative people working together.
Q. Does GQRR have a formal methodology that it teaches new employees?
No, there is no one particular book or specific formal academic or technical methodology. The core methodology comes from the really vast internal knowledge-base that has been developed over the years and the extensive experience accumulated within the firm. The main training and orientation for new employees is a series of unique workshops that Al Quinlan, Jeremy Rosner, Stan Greenberg, and other in-house experts conduct.
Q – One thing that distinguishes D-Corps’ strategy Memos from other poll-based strategy analyses is the more extensive use of data from focus groups that is closely integrated with standard opinion polling. Many people – particularly Democrats – are often somewhat suspicious of focus groups because of their close connection with advertising rather than political science research. Is this sense of distrust at all valid?
Actually, the need for focus groups in political polling derives from the fact that opinion polls — and specifically the design of questions — is really quite subjective and subject to bias. We’ve all seen extreme examples of questions slanted to produce a particular answer but there’s a more subtle problem as well. We in D-Corps, for example, because we are progressives, could easily write questions that sound right to our ears but which fail to capture the linguistic and psychological framework that ordinary voters employ when they think about a particular political issue.
It’s for this reason that both Stan and Al insist on doing focus groups before writing poll questions. It’s simply too easy to write poll questions that sound right to you but not necessarily right to your audience.
As a result, we do focus groups to learn the language people actually use in normal conversation and how they spontaneously describe things. We use this information to improve our questions as well as to improve the messages we test. Focus groups allow us to hone the grammars and textures we use in our polls and messages.

Read more…

Lawrence Lessig has a HuffPo post, “#OccupyWallSt, Then #OccupyKSt, Then #OccupyMainSt,” which merits a thougthful read from everyone who is concerned that the Wall St. protests achieve something substantial. First, Lessig outlines the current predicament:

Writers by the dozen have lamented the influence that Wall Street exercised over Washington throughout the 1990s, leading up to the great collapse of 2008. A multi-billion dollar lobbying campaign, tied to hundreds of millions in campaign contributions, got Washington to erase its regulations and withdraw its regulators. One statistic summarizes it all: in 1980, close to 100 percent of the financial instruments traded in the market were subject to New Deal exchange-based regulations; by 2008, 90 percent were exempted from those regulations, effectively free of any regulatory oversight.
What is surprising — indeed, terrifying, given what it says about this democracy — is what happened after the collapse. That even after the worst financial crises in 80 years, and even after the lions share of responsibility for that crisis had been linked to finance laissez faire, and even after the dean of finance laissez faire, the great Alan Greenspan, expressly confessed that it was wrong, and that he “made a mistake,” nothing changed…We are more at risk of a major financial collapse today than we were a decade ago. And the absolutely obscene bonuses of an industry that pays twice its pretax profits in salaries are even more secure today.

Lessig adds, “The arrest of hundreds of tired and unwashed kids, denied the freedom of a bullhorn, and the right to protest on public streets, may well be the first real green-shoots of this, the American spring. And if nurtured right, it could well begin real change.”
In his WaPo op-ed, “Rescuing America From Wall St.,” Harold Meyerson notes the impressive coalition character of the protests:

Many of these groups have focused on immediate goals — such as stopping particular banks from foreclosing on more homes. They, along with unions, have demonstrated on Wall Street many times since the 2008 financial crisis. But only now, as Occupy Wall Street — an organization that they didn’t create — has grabbed the public imagination the past few weeks, are the myriad mobilizations commanding the media’s attention.
“It’s a confluence of planned and unplanned demonstrations,” says Stephen Lerner, a longtime organizer for the Service Employees International Union who once spearheaded the union’s successful campaign to organize big-city janitors and today helps guide the groups in New Bottom Line. “We build on each other. We go ping-ponging back and forth.”
Planned and unplanned, the groups are coming together. The imminent mixing of largely young and countercultural Wall Street occupiers with more seasoned and hard-nosed unionists and middle-class liberals may produce some clashes of style, but their shared anger at what banks have done to them — to all of us — should be sufficient to cement this nascent coalition. It had better be.

But Lessig, whose post is as hard on Democrats as it is on Republicans, urges that the protests get focused on corruption and campaign finance reform as central priorities for the protests:

…These protesters should see that they are that one striking at the root. They should understand that our system has been corrupted by money — even if the Supreme Court refuses to call it “corruption,” and even if political scientists are unsure about whether their regressions can show it. And they should recognize that until this root is hacked, the weeds of this corruption will continue to destroy this democracy, and this nation.
This corruption is our common enemy. So let this protest first #OccupyWallSt, and then #OccupyKSt. And then let the anger and outrage that it has made clear lead many more Americans to #OccupyMainSt, and reclaim this republic.

Lessig, like Meyerson, is optimistic about the potential of Occupy Wall St., given focus and discipline: “For if done right, this movement just may have that potential. What the protesters are saying is true: Wall Street’s money has corrupted this democracy. What they are demanding is right: An end to that corruption. And as Flickr feeds and tweets awaken a slumbering giant, the People, the justice in this, yet another American revolution, could well become overwhelming, and finally have an effect.”

In his Washington Post column, E. J. Dionne, Jr. asks a question worth pondering “Can the Left Stage a Tea Party?“. Dionne sets the stage:

.A quiet left has…been very bad for political moderates. The entire political agenda has shifted far to the right because the Tea Party and extremely conservative ideas have earned so much attention. The political center doesn’t stand a chance unless there is a fair fight between the right and the left.
…The absence of a strong, organized left made it easier for conservatives to label Obama as a left-winger. His health-care reform is remarkably conservative — yes, it did build on the ideas implemented in Massachusetts that Mitt Romney once bragged about. It was nothing close to the single-payer plan the left always preferred. His stimulus proposal was too small, not too large. His new Wall Street regulations were a long way from a complete overhaul of American capitalism. Yet Republicans swept the 2010 elections because they painted Obama and the Democrats as being far to the left of their actual achievements.

It was a clever strategy that paid off for the right. Whenever there is a void left by Democratic inaction, the right is always eager to fill it with their custom-tailored memes. In this endeavor they found a willing accomplice, not only in Fox News, but the MSM in general, which they played like a fiddle, as Dionne explains:

Conservative funders realized that pumping up the Tea Party movement was the most efficient way to build opposition to Obama’s initiatives. And the media became infatuated with the Tea Party in the summer of 2009, covering its disruptions of congressional town halls with an enthusiasm not visible this summer when many Republicans faced tough questions from their more progressive constituents.

The press loves conflict, especially when it provides lively video. This week progressives have an opportunity to generate some media interest of their own, as Dionne reports:

…Progressives will highlight a new effort to pursue the road not taken at a conference convened by the Campaign for America’s Future that opens Monday. It is a cooperative venture with a large number of other organizations, notably the American Dream Movement led by Van Jones, a former Obama administration official who wants to show the country what a truly progressive agenda around jobs, health care and equality would look like. Jones freely acknowledges that “we can learn many important lessons from the recent achievements of the libertarian, populist right” and says of the progressive left: “This is our ‘Tea Party’ moment — in a positive sense.” The anti-Wall Street demonstrators seem to have that sense, too.

While no one is betting that these events will attract the same level of soup-to-nuts coverage received by the tea party, at least it’s a start. Dionne relates how an activist left helped two Democratic Presidents who legislated impressive domestic policies:

What’s been missing in the Obama presidency is the productive interaction with outside groups that Franklin Roosevelt enjoyed with the labor movement and Lyndon B. Johnson with the civil rights movement. Both pushed FDR and LBJ in more progressive directions while also lending them support against their conservative adversaries…A real left could usefully instruct Americans as to just how moderate the president they elected in 2008 is — and how far to the right conservatives have strayed.

Chris Cillizza’s The Fix post “Republicans hold the edge in voter intensity ahead of 2012 elections, poll shows” makes a related point which supports Dionne’s argument. As Cillizza notes:

…If new numbers from Gallup are to be believed, this “intensity gap” is a major problem for President Obama as he looks toward 2012…The data showed that just 45 percent of Democrats say they are more enthusiastic about the 2012 presidential election than they have been in past elections, while 44 percent described themselves as less enthusiastic…Nearly six in 10 Republicans (58 percent), on the other hand, call themselves more enthusiastic about voting in 2012 than in past contests, while just 30 percent say they are less excited.

What apparently hasn’t sunk in yet among Democrats is the grim prospect of a GOP national trifecta — the huge consequences of having the Republicans control both houses of congress and the presidency. The enthusiasm gap indicates that some Democrats — as well as swing voters — need a wake-up call. It may be that more activism from the left can help provide it.

Republicans hope to exploit anti-immigration sentiment for political leverage. What they apparently don’t get is that there just isn’t that much of it, as TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira explains in today’s edition of his ‘Public Opinion snapshot’:

The latest evidence comes from a major survey by the Public Religion Research Institute. In that survey, respondents endorsed the view that increasing numbers of immigrants strengthens American society (53 percent) over the view that growing numbers of immigrants undermines traditional American customs and values (42 percent).

And the public has a more open-hearted attitude toward the principles behind the ‘Dream Act’ as well:

In the same survey, the public said, by 57-40, that undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children should be able to gain legal resident status if they join the military or go to college (this is the idea behind the DREAM Act, which conservatives blocked).

The GOP’s deportation hard-liners don’t have a lot of support, either:

Finally, the public overwhelmingly rejected a deportation-oriented approach to solving the country’s illegal immigration problem. They prefer an approach that combines securing our borders with providing an earned path to citizenship for illegal immigrants already here by 62-36.

It appears the GOP has miscalculated that alienating millions of Latino voters to win votes from conservative xenophobes is a sound strategy. More importantly, the data indicates that Dems are on solid ground in supporting a more humane and practicable immigration policy.

Jonathan Weisman’s report on “the surging Hispanic population in several states that figure to be crucial to the outcome of next year’s election” in the Wall St. Journal comes as welcome news to President Obama. As Weisman explains:

In Florida, the nation’s largest presidential swing state, the voting-age Hispanic population grew by nearly 250,000 people between 2008 and 2010, census data show. By contrast, the voting-age white population grew by 30,400.
Nevada added more than 44,000 voting-age Hispanics over the same period, more than double the increase of 18,000 voting-age whites. And in New Mexico, the voting-age Hispanic total rose by more than 36,000, outpacing the growth among whites of just over 19,000.
Mr. Obama won all three states in 2008–and two-thirds of Hispanic voters nationwide…He won North Carolina…by more than 14,000 votes. About 54,400 additional voting-age Hispanics have come to the state between 2008 and 2010, census data show.
…The Census Bureau reported Wednesday that Latinos made up 7% of voters in 2010, the highest percentage for a nonpresidential election since the bureau began collecting such data.

As one of the impressive companion graphics to Weisman’s article, the WSJ provides an instructive chart “Targeting the Hispanic Vote, State-by-State,” which anyone interested in Latino voter turnout should peruse for a few minutes.
Maria Cardona’s HuffPo article cited in J.P. Green’s Wednesday post addressed some of the GOP’s huge liabilities in campaigning for Latino votes. Weisman adds,

Mr. Obama may have one thing going for him: By huge majorities, Hispanic voters favor immigration bills that have languished since the Bush administration, and they largely blame the GOP for their failure, according to a new poll of Hispanic voters by Resurgent Republic
…Many Latinos read the GOP’s call for tough illegal immigration laws as an affront…Republican front-runners Mitt Romney and Rick Perry have sparred at debates over a law the Texas governor signed granting in-state university tuition to illegal immigrants.
Mr. Romney has called the law a magnet for illegal immigration. When Mr. Perry suggested at a recent debate that the law’s critics had no heart, the backlash among conservative voters was harsh.

And according to a Republican-commissioned poll,

Resurgent Republic asked Hispanics in Florida, Colorado and New Mexico whether they agreed that the best way to improve the economy was to increase government investment in job training, education and infrastructure, or by reining in government spending, lowering taxes and reducing excessive regulations.
In Colorado, a swing state, 56% sided with more government spending, as Mr. Obama has proposed, while 37% sided with less government, as Republicans propose. In Florida, the spread was 52% to 40%. In New Mexico, it was 59%-30%.

But there are also serious problems concerning Latino support for the President, as Wesiman explains. According Wall Street Journal/NBC News surveys, Obama’s August 2011 approval rating was down 14 percent among Latinos since June 2009. And some swing states have added more whites than Latinos. Further:

…Hispanic unemployment stands at 11.3%, higher than the 9.1% rate for the nation as a whole. And the president has failed to deliver a promised overhaul of immigration laws that would include a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

Weisman reports that the GOP is already running ads in Spanish on TV and Radio.
Dems have set up phone banks in NM and NV and canvassing in Hispanic suburban neighborhoods. President Obama spoke at a heavilly Hispanic Denver high school and the White House has already conducted an on-line roundtable on issues of concern to the Latino community. Weisman reports that “his re-election campaign is recruiting Latino neighborhood captains, canvassing coordinators, phone-bank hosts and data-management coordinators.”
Weisman didn’t discuss the possible effects of GOP voter suppression initiatives, like new identification requirements in some states, which will likely reduce Latino votes. Dems hope the laws will backfire and energize Hispanic voters to support Democratic candidates across the ballot.

Republicans continue to bash away at President Obama’s proposed American Jobs Act. But they haven’t made a dent in public support for the plan, as TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira explains in this week’s edition of his ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’:

In the recent CBS/New York Times poll, respondents supported cutting taxes for small businesses by 81-14; supported spending money on infrastructure such as bridges, airports, and schools by 80-16; supported cutting payroll taxes by 56-30; and supported providing money to state governments to prevent layoffs by 52-40.

As for funding the American Jobs Act, the poll indicates Americans are in solid agreement with the President:

Moreover, they support one of President Obama’s chief ideas for funding action on jobs. By 56-37, they agree that those earning $250,000 or more should pay more in taxes.

And another poll indicates that the President has considerable latitude to do even more:

Finally, by an overwhelming 63-18 in a recent Marist poll, the public thinks President Obama’s proposals do not go far enough. Clearly, the public believes the time for action has arrived.

The Republicans will no doubt keep plugging away with the negative spin. But the public clearly isn’t buying it, and Dems should benefit from the inescapable conclusion that only one party is offering constructive action.

Eric Benson has a New York magazine interview with TDS Co-Editor Stanley B. Greenberg on the topic of Independent voters. On who they are:

…Independents are a hodgepodge; it doesn’t work to look at them as having any common worldview. There are affluent suburban voters who are fiscally conservative and culturally liberal; there are seniors, who are more populist than the population as a whole; and there are a high number of white, blue-collar voters who are deeply angry and have been explosive in election after election. In 2006 and 2008, all these groups voted overwhelmingly for Democrats. In 2010, they voted overwhelmingly for Republicans. Right now, I don’t think we have a clue where they’re going.

On how Dems lost them:

…Seniors were very upset over health-care reform, the squeezing of their pensions, and being forced back into the job market. Non-college white voters saw themselves facing declining incomes and concluded that the economic-recovery effort didn’t have a lot to do with them. Suburban voters–who had reacted against the Evangelical, Bush Republican Party–became much more focused on fiscal matters than cultural matters. All of them moved against the Democrats probably a good year before the 2010 election.

On Obama’s chances with Independent voters:

Non-college whites are very populist. And older, non-college-graduate seniors are more populist than any segment of the electorate. They’re nationalist, they’re anti-immigration, and more than that they’re anti-Wall Street. What the president has done with his new proposals is exactly the kind of thing these voters might respond to. The idea that millionaires and hedge-fund managers ought to be paying their fair share is music to their ears.

The interview also touches on Greenberg’s views on the myth of Independents being centrists, the likelihood of a third party candidate getting their votes in 2012 and the fact that they are often “less engaged and informed,” among other topics. Benson’s interview elicits an interesting perspective from a top political strategist.

Gerald F. Seib’s “Blue-State Math Is Boon to Obama, Target for GOP” in today’s Wall St. Journal discusses the President’s Electoral College edge: “Specifically, there are 18 states plus the District of Columbia that have voted Democratic in all five presidential elections since 1992. Combined, they carry 242 electoral votes–90% of the votes needed for victory.” Seib also notes Obama’s trouble spots, most notably Ohio, “the juiciest target for Republicans.”
Media Matters for America reports on the Fox News week-long attack on government regulation, ordered by Roger Ailes. Elsewhere, ProPublica’s Marian Wang debunks the myth that government regulation is a job-killer.
In The Nation, John Nichols reviews the arguments for primary challenges to President Obama, noting Ralph Nader’s foray as an activist working inside the Democratic Party to change it. Although many progressives hold Nader’s hard-headed political analysis in high regard, CNN Opinion’s Donna Brazile makes a strong case that the net result of his campaigns thus far has been of great benefit to Republicans.
Lew Daly’s post “The Church of Labor” at Democracy addresses a provocative notion — that “collective bargaining is, ultimately, a victim not just of America’s right-leaning politics and market liberalism, but of America’s pervasive institutional and legal secularism–our so-called “wall of separation” between church and state.”
Republicans favorite tax stat these days is the one about the top 1 percent of all earners paying 40 percent of the taxes, usually followed by the question “isn’t that enough?” Robert Frank has a smart answer to the question in his Wall St. Journal article “Why the Rich Pay 40% of Taxes“: “…the top 1% share of income grew nearly five times faster than their share of taxes..”
On October 1, the CalTech-MIT Voting Technology Project will hold a major panel discussion on “Election Integrity — Past, Present and Future” at M.I.T.’s Kirsh Auditorium in Cambridge, MA. According to the Keene Sentinel, “The event will host a wide range of panelists from academia, systems and elections offices, and will have a relevance to all Americans with an interest in voting integrity where machines are involved — meaning practically everybody.” Indeed.
NPR’as Pam Fessler’s on line story “Voters May Face Slower Lines In 2012 Elections” suggests that there is more than a little to worry about regarding voting machines: “One of the big concerns is the impact budget cuts will have on voting machines. Most places bought new electronic equipment after the 2000 elections. But Charles Stewart, an election expert at MIT, says this new equipment is much more costly to maintain than the old punch-card and lever machines…”I don’t think many people, myself included, really recognized back a decade ago that this computerized equipment has a relatively short lifespan,” he says…”The worry, of course, is that either machines will fail, causing localities to have to kind of double up or to borrow machines, or not have enough on Election Day…”
In “Analysis: Democrats Hit Reset on Health Care,” Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar of the Associated Press writes that Dems are betting a lot on the GOP’s recent fumbles on Medicare. He quotes Democratic pollster Celinda Lake: “This is not a theoretical issue, it is a place where Republicans have taken votes that are very unpopular…It would be foolish of Democrats to waffle on this issue…Cutting Medicare is a much more dicey proposition in the general election. Medicare is popular even among the people who think it’s in trouble.”
Emily Ekins of the libertarian magazine Reason addresses the question “Is Half the Tea Party Libertarian?“, analyzing Reason-Rupe polling data indicating that the tea party is divided between social conservatives and “libertarian-leaners.” The data indicates that the tea partiers are fairly unified on economic questions, but some tea partiers may balk at voting for social conservatives.
Republicans are making a lot of noise about jobs, ‘job-killers’ and job-creation. But James Surowiecki argues in his “Jobs and the GOP” post in the New Yorker that Republican office-holders tend to get more of a free ride on jobs from voters – as a result of low voter expectations. The opposite holds true for Democratic political leaders and Democratic voters.
GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham has never provided a voice of sanity on foreign policy in his party. Having advocated military conflict with Iran, he now urges escalating U.S. military confrontation with Pakistan, despite their nuclear weapons, standing army of more than 600K and 500K in reserves. Juan Cole has the takedown here.
Maria Cardona’s “No Casa Blanca for the GOP” at HuffPo may be the definitive dismissal of Republican hopes for winning the Latino vote in 2012.

Michael Tomasky’s “Obama Plays to the Base” in The Daily Beast mulls over the Administration’s strategy and offers an alternative:

…The Obama people feel that amping up the base is their best play. And yet, many will counter, won’t this strategy perforce alienate still more independents? If he spends the year playing identity politics with blacks and Latinos and Jews, he’ll kill himself with those in the middle. Filling in the picture a bit more, Bill Galston posted an ominous piece at The New Republic looking at some Pew polling that shows that “average voters” think of themselves as twice as far from the Democratic Party as they are from the Republican Party. They said the precise opposite in 2005, heading into two elections in which independents gave Democrats majority support.
So how can Obama serve both masters, base and swing? It’s the age-old question, and there aren’t any easy answers…

Tomasky urges Dems to take a closer look at common ground shared by the base and Indies:

…But I do think Democrats often make a terrible mistake in thinking that base Democrats and independents have completely opposing interests. Democrats tend to think of independents as Republicans Lite. This is true on some issues. Independents like deficit reduction, for example–well, that is, they actually like real deficit reduction, not the phony Republican view of deficit reduction, which backs reducing the deficit as long as the cuts kick poor people in the behind one more time and tell rich ones they’re safe.
But independents aren’t that monolithic. Of the 35 or so percent of voters who call themselves independent, according to Democratic pollster Guy Molyneux of Peter Hart Research Associates, about two thirds are basically Democrats or Republicans who just prefer calling themselves independent but whose votes are pretty reliable. That leaves maybe 10 to 15 percent of the electorate that is truly independent–still a big chunk, for sure, and a crucial or perhaps the crucial key to winning most elections. There are two things about these voters, Molyneux says.
First, they take some conservative positions and some progressive ones. Some recent polling data from the Kaiser Family Foundation confirm this. You can see from it that while independents as a group are astonishingly right down the middle between Democrats and Republicans on a number of questions, there are a few on which they’re closer to Democrats, like protecting Social Security and being open to some defense cuts. But there’s something else important to them. “They also want someone who can run things, a person who can make things work,” Molyneux says.
This is what Democrats misunderstand about independent voters. Obama and his people seemed to think that over the summer, independents wanted them to cut a deal with the GOP on the debt ceiling. He’d look moderate, reasonable. So they cut it. Result: they lost about 8 points among independents, who hated the deal because it symbolized dysfunction and because the president looked weak.
Republicans as a rule don’t pander to independents in so slavish a way. Rather than trying to cater to independents’ presumed ideological preferences, Republicans try to say things that will resonate with independents’ emotional posture. Remember Bush in 2004. What did he say to woo independents? “You might not always agree with me, but you know where I stand.” It was a line that traded exactly on this quality independents look for that Molyneux describes. And it worked well enough–the guy won. What Democrats say to independents is precisely the opposite. Democrats say, “You might not know where I stand, but I’m always trying to look like I agree with you!” It’s kind of pathetic. And it’s the same old Democratic error of trying to win people over intellectually rather than emotionally.

Tomasky sees a winning strategy Obama can play:

There is, then, a way for Obama to inspire both the base and swing voters, and it’s absurdly simple: he needs to accentuate the items on which the two groups more or less agree and fight hard for them. I’d call it a radical stylistic posture on behalf of an ideologically modest agenda. There’s something in that for both camps–base and swing–to latch onto. To do that, Obama and his people merely have to start thinking more about the similarities between Democrats and independents than about their differences.

it makes sense. Instead of going crazy trying to figure out what Independents, who are not ideologically monolithic, believe, appeal to the values many of them share with Democrats and emphasize the policies that reflect them as strongly as possible in messaging. There’s no real downside, and it just might make the difference in a close election.