Over at OpenLeft, the ever-vigilant Chris Bowers has a useful rundown of primary elections in May and June. There are a lot of them, involving 22 states.
Among Chris’ many insights are that NC Republican Sen. Richard Burr’s robust lead in the polls over three Democratic rivals is basically a matter of name ID, nothing else; and that Joe Sestak has the money for a late ad push that should give him a decent chance against party-switching PA Sen. Arlen Specter.
If you are really into primaries, you can also take a look back at Ed Kilgore’s analysis of 2010 GOP primary fights, entitled the “Republican Civil War,” that was published about a month ago.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
The daily commentary about the Obama era has largely overlooked a trend that is now unmistakable—namely, the growing conservative sentiment in this country that goes well beyond the tea-party rallies and Glenn Beck’s rants.
Gallup offered the first piece of compelling evidence. On January 7, 2010, it reported that self-identified conservatives had increased from an average of 37 percent of the electorate in 2008 to 40 percent in 2009. (By contrast, moderates and liberals each decreased by one percentage point during that period.) Gallup based its conclusion on a synthesis of surveys taken throughout 2009, with a total sample of nearly 22 thousand and a margin of error of less than +/- one percentage point. It found, moreover, that ideological shifts among independents—a three-point drop in moderate identifiers, coupled with a five point-gain in conservative identifiers—accounted for most of the overall change.
The most recent Washington Post-ABC News poll underscores Gallup’s conclusion. The week of Barack Obama’s inauguration, 24 percent of respondents identified themselves as liberal, 42 percent as moderate, and 32 percent as conservative. In the latest survey period (March 23-26, 2010), by contrast, only 32 percent called themselves moderate, while 42 percent now regarded themselves as conservative—a remarkable 10 percentage-point shift. (Liberals remained unchanged at 24 percent.) I have not been able to find another survey in recent decades that gave conservatives that large a share, or moderates that small a share. While it’s easy to question the significance of a single poll, the liberal/moderate/conservative breakdown as measured by the Washington Post and ABC has averaged 22/38/37 during the Obama administration, versus 22/43/34 during George W. Bush’s second term—clear evidence of a shift toward conservatism among moderates.
These results are part of a polarization of the electorate that has been underway for a generation. While comparisons among polls using differing methodologies is dicey, trends within polls are revealing. In 1992, Gallup found that moderates averaged 43 percent, versus 36 percent for conservatives and only 17 points for liberals. By 2009, both conservatives and liberals had picked up 4 percentage points, while moderates had decreased by 7 points. To be sure, there have been twists and turns along the way. But the overall direction of the tectonic shift is clear.
Let’s take an even longer view. In a study published in the first volume of Brookings’ Red and Blue Nation?, the political scientist Alan Abramowitz examined two decades of evidence from the authoritative National Election Studies. In 1984, he found, 41 percent of voters were at or near the ideological midpoint, versus only 10 percent at or near the left and right endpoints of the scale. By 2004, only 28 percent were at or near the midpoint (a decline of 13 percentage points), while respondents at or near the endpoints had risen by 13 points, to 23 percent.
It remains the case that Washington is more polarized than the nation as a whole. The most recent analysis using the standard political science scoring system found zero ideological overlap between Democrats and Republicans in either chamber of Congress. Which means that in both the House and the Senate, the most conservative Democrat is more liberal than is the most liberal Republican. In the electorate, Democrats who consider themselves moderate or conservative still overlap with similar Republican identifiers. But as Republicans have shed liberals and moderates over the past generation, the overlap has diminished.
During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama was obviously aware of these trends, and he understood that Americans were tired of the kind of politics they had engendered. He took office pledging to reverse them. Quite obviously, this has not happened. Historians and political scientists will long debate whether it could have turned out differently, whether a different White House strategy might have weakened the Republicans’ early decision to present a united front in opposition. A plausible case can be made that an achievable bipartisan stimulus bill would have been less effective than the one adopted nearly along party lines—and that there was not enough common ground between Democrats and Republicans to produce significant health insurance reform. Still, it is hard to believe that any political party enjoys a monopoly on wisdom, so a situation in which the minority party gives the majority no incentive to accept the minority’s good ideas is bound to produce sub-optimal results.
Whatever the substantive merits of single-party legislation, there are other reasons to keep working toward more agreement across party lines. Political science research finds a strong inverse relation between the level of combat between the parties and citizens’ trust in their governing institution. While a measure of mistrust is functional in a democracy, excessive mistrust hampers democratic self-government. With trust at historic lows, we have reached that point. And progressives should remember that mistrust hampers those who wish to use government affirmatively more than it does those who seek to limit it.
Regardless, American politics now seems condemned to an extended period of intense polarization, with an expanding army of aroused conservatives fighting to halt and reverse what it sees as the deplorable Europeanization of our economy and society. I doubt that a politics so configured will be able to address our long-term economic problems—until a crisis forces us to. I hope I’m wrong.

This last Wednesday marked the end of the first reporting quarter for the finances of candidates for federal office. As is always the case, the money numbers tend to dribble out slowly into the public realm. At TPM, Eric Kleefield has a summary of the earliest news.
Probably the most interesting item is the $2 million that Lt. Gov. Bill Halter raised just in March in his primary challenge to Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR). It’s also worth knowing that embattled Sen. Harry Reid now has $10 million in cash on hand for his tough campaign for survival.

So what might readers of this and other serious sites have missed yesterday while they were being so, well, serious? Fortunately, The Atlantic‘s Niraj Chokshi did a handy-dandy organized summary of April Fool’s Jokes on the web. I kinda like the Starbucks “announcement” of two new coffee sizes: Micra and Plenta.

The following commentary from leading Democratic strategist Robert Creamer is cross-posted from The Huffington Post. Creamer is the author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win.
The political conventional wisdom has already concluded that Democrats will suffer major losses in November midterm elections. Indeed, if the election were held today, that might be true. There have been very few midterms in modern political history where the party that holds the White House has not lost a lot of seats in the first midterm after its President first took office.
But there are six months and a great deal that Democrats can do to succeed this fall.
Rule #1: Keep our eyes on the prize. Democrats have four goals in the coming midterms that should define our allocation of financial and political resources. In descending order of importance they are:

* Maintain control of both houses of Congress. Loss of control of one of the two houses would be a catastrophic blow to achieving a transformative progressive political agenda.
* Assure our ability to actually pass progressive legislation. All Democratic seats are not created equal. We lost 34 Democratic votes on the recently passed health care legislation. Obviously the loss of ten Members who voted yes for the legislation would be a much bigger problem for the health care agenda than the loss of ten “no” votes. That means that all things being equal, our resources should be focused on candidates that support the President’s agenda rather than those who consistently vote no. Let’s face it, from a legislative point of view, nobody noticed when Alabama’s Parker Griffith suddenly became a Republican instead of a Democrat – he always voted like a Republican anyway.
* Use the elections to prove that support for a progressive agenda is good politics. Of course succeeding in the first two goals will go a long way to generate that kind of narrative. But our resources should be focused with special concern to show Members of Congress that the Party as a whole – and Progressives in particular – have the backs of the Members that stood tall for progressive values even though they represented marginal districts.
At the same time, it would be enormously useful if we made examples of several Members who abandoned that agenda – especially those that represent safe Democratic seats. Several come to mind where the filing deadline for the Democratic primary has not yet passed. And as Niccolo Machiavelli noted, you don’t have to punish all of your enemies – just hang one in the public square.
* Take beachheads for Democratic power. As we maximize the goals above, we should remember that it is almost always better to elect any Democrat to any district than to elect a Republican. That’s especially true in areas where we need to build a Democratic presence over the long haul. Two examples come to mind. In Illinois’ 13th Congressional District, Scott Harper is challenging Republican Judy Biggert. The 13th District includes big portions of Illinois’ DuPage County that has a growing Democratic base. Electing a Democratic Congressman there would greatly strengthen the ability of Democrats to win state and local office by strengthening the Party’s infrastructure and presence there.
The other is Florida’s heavily Cuban 25th District that has been dominated by Republicans but is trending more Democratic. Joe Garcia, who did well there last cycle against an incumbent, is considering a run for what is now an open seat. A victory there would help Democrats continue to woo young Cuban Americans away from their traditional Republican roots.

Rule #2: Midterm elections are all about turnout. In 1994 Democrats did not lose control of Congress because of a huge swing among persuadable voters. We lost because Republican voters turned out, and ours stayed at home.
That means two things.

* First, for the next six months we have to be all about inspiring the Democratic base. Of course victory in legislative battles is itself enormously inspiring. The polling shows that the health care reform victory caused the level of “intensity” among Democratic voters to pull even with Republicans. We have to continue winning. And we have to continue to draw clear distinctions between our positions and those of the Republicans – particularly on issues where we have the high political ground, such as holding the big Wall Street Banks accountable. For immigrant voters – and especially Latinos – we have to deliver on fixing the broken immigration system.
* Second, we have to remember that turnout is about execution. Studies show that one knock on the door within 72 hours of the election increases the propensity to turn out by 12.5% — a second knock, almost as much. One of the most powerful messages in the upcoming election is: “I won’t get off your porch until you vote.” Field operations must have a bigger priority this cycle than ever before.

Rule #3: We can’t afford to allow the Republicans to make the midterms a referendum on Democratic performance. It must be framed as a choice between the failed Republican policies of the past and the Democratic program to lay a foundation for sustained, widely-shared economic growth.
Bush and the Republicans created an economic disaster in America. It will take a long time to clean that mess up. We must frame every discussion in terms of the choice between the failed policies that got us here, and our policies for the future.
That means two things:

* First, we have to deliver. Until last week, the Republican hoped their winning narrative would be that Democrats can’t deliver – that Washington is gridlocked. Passage of health care and student loan reform helped closed the book on that story. But we have to continue delivering – not just talking.
* And, of course, by Election Day, people need to see clear evidence — even glimmers — that those policies are working in their own lives and those of their neighbors. Reports and pronouncements from Washington won’t be enough.

Read more…

As we noted on this day last year, we will not indulge in any April Fool jokes today. Any weirdness we happen to write about will be real. It’s a sign of the times that this advisory seems necessary.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Last week, CBO issued its analysis of President Obama’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2011. The news was not encouraging. Here are the basic findings:

•“If the President’s proposals were enacted, the federal government would record deficits of $1.5 trillion in 2010 and $1.3 trillion in 2011. These deficits would amount to 10.3 percent and 8.9 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) respectively.”
•“Measured relative to the size of the economy, the deficit under the President’s proposals would fall to about 4 percent of GDP by 2014 but would rise steadily thereafter. … By 2020, the deficit would reach 5.6 percent of GDP.”
•“Under the President’s budget, debt held by the public would grow from $7.5 trillion (53 percent of GDP) at the end of 2009 to $20.3 trillion (90 percent of GDP) at the end of 2020. … Net interest would more than quadruple in nominal dollars (without an adjustment for inflation); it would swell from 1.4 percent of GDP in 2010 to 4.1 percent in 2020.”

So what? In the short term, one might argue, we need the deficit spending to prop up demand until a self-sustaining economic recovery begins. Even in 2020, the debt to GDP ratio will be lower than it was at end of World War Two, when growth induced by military spending gave way to the longest economic boom in U.S. history.
A March 21st speech by John Lipsky of the International Monetary Fund offers a compelling retort to that line of thinking. Lipsky points out that while economic growth after 1950 steadily reduced debt relative to GDP, today’s surge in government debt throughout the advanced economies is occurring “at a time when pressure from rising health and pension spending is building up.” Furthermore, he notes, “the projected government debt increase in the advanced economies is only partly due to discretionary fiscal stimulus. In fact, such measures have accounted for only about one-tenth of the projected debt increase. Thus, merely winding down the stimulus will not come close to bringing deficits and debt rations back to prudent levels, considering the projected increases in health care and other government spending.”
This matters for the real economy, because over the long term, large public debts are likely to lead to higher real interest rates and slower growth. In fact, the IMF has estimated that staying on the current trajectory of debt accumulation could reduce growth in advanced economies by as much as half a percentage point annually compared with its pre-crisis performance and expectations.
This is not an idiosyncratic forecast. Using three different models, CBO estimated the impact of the president’s budget on economic output. All three showed negative effects between 2016 and 2020, after the deficit-induced stimulus has run its course. Based on a broad historical analysis of prior fiscal crises, economists Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhardt estimate that allowing debt held by the public to rise to 90 percent of GDP would diminish annual economic growth rates by a full percent point—twice the IMF’s estimate. And of course, all other things equal, slower growth means slower improvements in our standard of living and less capital available for investment, private and public. Meanwhile, there is a compelling case that we’re under-investing in infrastructure and education.
In the face of this looming challenge, our political system is doing nothing to prepare the American people for the hard choices that lie ahead. The hyper-polarized parties are in no mood to compromise on their core commitments. Despite first-rate leadership (Alan Simpson as co-chair and Bruce Reed as executive director), many of the parties’ appointees to the president’s bipartisan fiscal commission are hard-liners. It will take skillful management of the process to avoid a total deadlock.
The parties’ failure to come clean has generated a climate of denial. Not surprisingly, a Bloomberg survey released March 24 showed that most Americans support tax increases only for the wealthy. They reject increases in income taxes that would hit the middle class, along with options such as higher out-of-pocket payments for Medicare services and an increase in the Medicare eligibility age. We can expect to live much longer on average than our parents and grandparents, and most of us work in less physically taxing occupations than they did. Still, we reject increasing the normal retirement age for Social Security.
Winston Churchill famously remarked that you can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they’ve tried everything else. I hope he’s right, because we’re getting close.

At Open Left, Chris Bowers makes a small but important point about the stability of public opinion polling, and the continuing narrow Democratic advantage in the generic congressional ballot, that we’ve recently seen despite the turbulence of events in Washington:

The continuing Democratic advantage is significant since polls of “all adults” have almost entirely washed out of the system. CNN, Daily Kos, and the Economist are among the many organizations that have moved away from polls of all adults in favor of polls of registered voters. In theory, such a polling shift should have been beneficial to Republicans, since Republican voting groups have a higher voter registration rate than Democratic voting groups.
It remains to be seen if Democrats will be able to maintain their narrow advantage when polls inevitably shift from “registered voters” to “likely voters.”

Some pollsters, of course, most notably Rasmussen, have been employing “likely voter” screens all along, which helps account for their relatively high showings for Republicans across the board. But Chris is absolutely right: the longer polls remain stable, the more likely they are relatively accurate predictors of what will happen in November.

So you can definitively take David Petraeus off that 2012 Republican presidential list:

I thought I’d said no about as many ways as I could. I really do mean no. We have all these artful ways of doing it. I’ve tried Shermanesque responses, which everybody goes and finds out what Sherman said was pretty unequivocally no. I’ve done several different ways. I’ve tried quoting the country song, ‘What Part of No Don’t You Understand?’ I mean, I really do mean that. I feel very privileged to be able to serve our country. I’m honored to continue to do that as long as I can contribute, but I will not, ever, run for political office, I can assure you.

The idea of another Eisenhower scenario had been tempting some Republicans (particularly Iraq-focused neocon types) to talk about a Petraeus candidacy. Or maybe the buzz simply reflected an honest look at the GOP’s 2012 field, which is less than impressive at present.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Sunday night’s House vote on health reform clarified the contours of the mid-term elections. The contest has been nationalized, with two dominant issues—the economy and health care—and one overriding theme: the proper role of government.
The administration and Democratic congressional leaders should not believe that the new health care legislation will speak for itself. In fact, the debate over the next eight months may well be as robust and consequential as was the debate during the past eight months. If the public can be persuaded to modulate its doubts about the wisdom of health reform, House Democrats may be able to minimize their losses, as the Republicans did in 1982. If not, the results could resemble the catastrophe of 1994.
Three recent surveys define the challenge Democrats face between now and November. In a Pew Research Center survey released last Thursday, only 38 percent of the respondents said that they favored the health care bills currently in Congress, while 48 percent were opposed. A CNN survey made public on March 22 showed an even more negative reaction: 39 percent in favor and 59 percent opposed. Although the March Kaiser Health Tracking poll found somewhat more support for the pending congressional legislation, it showed that only 42 percent of the people wanted an up-or-down vote on that legislation; 36 percent said Congress should go back to the drawing board, and 20 percent wanted Congress to drop the topic entirely. A plurality of 45 percent favored a bipartisan approach over a Democrats-only bill. Forty-one percent believed that the proposed bill would force them to change their existing health care arrangements. Only 35 percent thought it would make them and their family better off; 32 percent said worse off, and 28 percent said no difference. (Again, the CNN survey was even more negative: 47 percent of respondents thought it would make them and their families worse off, and only 19 percent expected to be better off.) Fifty-five percent of the Kaiser respondents and 70 percent of the CNN respondents thought the bill would increase the budget deficit—a significant finding in light of rising public concern about our fiscal future.
A Gallup survey released this Tuesday, after the bill’s passage, paints a somewhat rosier picture for Democrats: 49 percent said it was a “good thing” the bill passed, with 40 percent calling it a “bad thing.” Democrats were overwhelmingly satisfied (82 to 11), Republicans dissatisfied (79 to 16), while independents were split down the middle, 45 satisfied to 47 not. Nonetheless, there were signs of a continuing gap in motivation between the bill’s proponents and detractors. Only 29 percent of Democrats described themselves as “enthusiastic” about the bill’s passage, versus 41 percent of Republicans who said they were “angry.” Among independents, 20 percent were angry, versus 10 percent enthusiastic.
So where is the opening for the Democratic counterargument? There are four areas of opportunity. First, the Kaiser poll has long shown a strong plurality (often a majority) supporting the proposition that the country as a whole would be better off if Congress passed health reform, and voters often ask “How are we doing?” not just “How am I doing?”
Second, both surveys suggest that the public regards the congressional legislation as superior overall to the status quo. Pew reports that while 51 percent think that health care costs would increase if the proposal passed, 63 percent think costs would increase if it didn’t. And according to Kaiser, far more think that key areas—health care costs, access to insurance, and quality of care—would improve with reform than with the status quo.
Third, there are appealing features of health reform that begin quickly and will make a tangible difference in the lives of individuals and families—among them, allowing young adults to remain on parents’ policies until age 26 and eliminating preexisting conditions as grounds for denying coverage to children.
And finally, despite their current adverse judgment about the health reform bill, Americans continue to trust President Obama and the Democrats on this issue more than they do the Republicans. Even the CNN survey, while strongly negative about the politics of the bill overall, found President Obama more trusted than congressional Republicans by a margin of 51 to 39 percent, and congressional Democrats more trusted than congressional Republicans by 45 to 39 percent.
Half a century ago, political scientists Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril observed that while Americans are ideologically conservative, they are operationally liberal. If the debate between now and November is generic—about the role of government—Democrats will probably lose. If the debate is more specific—comparing the bill to the status quo and pointing out its concrete advantages—the public’s view may well become much more favorable.
One thing is clear: Democrats will have to be more focused and effective in the next eight months than they were in the past eight months. Their wobbly, ever-changing rationale for health care reform nearly undermined the entire effort. To raise their game, the White House and congressional Democratic leadership would be well advised to take a page from the standard Republican playbook: decide on the key points to emphasize, agree on punchy language to describe them, and stick to that script between now and November. In electoral politics, repetition is a necessary condition of persuasion.