In this month’s edition of the Forum, a free online political science journal, D. Jason Berggren, a doctoral candidate at Florida International University and a lecturer at the University of Georgia, delivers a fiery review of Thomas Schaller’s Whistling Past Dixie, which outlines a “non-Southern strategy” for the Democratic Party. Schaller has previously written on the same subject for TDS. And our managing editor, Ed Kilgore, has conducted a friendly but pointed joust with Schaller at Salon.
Berggren’s 26-page jeremiad is notable not only for its extraordinary length, and its emotion, but for its slant. Unlike Kilgore, he rarely if ever disputes Schaller’s empircal claims about the irrelevance of the South to future Democratic victories. Instead, he focuses obsessively on the long line of progressive observers who have preceded Schaller in criticizing southern culture and arguing that Democrats should actively campaign against the region’s values. In other words, he basically calls Schaller a bigot, and implicitly ties the Maryland professor’s argument to the anti-southern sectionalism that in southern eyes helped touch off the Civil War.
Schaller’s response to the review, in the same publication, not only repeats his (largely unrefuted) arguments about the 2006 Democratic coalition, but hotly denies any anti-southern animus, suggesting that his book only talks about “southern conservatives” as the enemy.
But here’s the irony of the debate Schaller touched off and Berggren continued with such heat: will it matter in 2008?
For the vast majority of Americans, a presidential standard-bearer defines his or her party. Unless Jeri Thompson is a much better campaign manager than she appears to be at the moment, the GOP will likely go into 2008 under the banner of Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney, neither of whom come off as even remotely Southern. With either of them at the helm, the Republican Party might be losing it’s very public Southern twang for quite a while.

Ah, primary season. It’s the wonderful time of year when party activists get to sit down in the intimate setting of a boisterous rally and hear their candidates’ strongest values and desires–you know, the ones they forget immediately after winning the nomination. In a country with wide cultural and social differences, some strategizing on issue positions is necessary in order to win elections. But how much shifting can you get away with and still avoid the devastating label of “flip-flopper”?
This question is addressed by a recent APSR article published by Margit Tavits of Mizzou. In her article, Tavits uses a cross-national dataset of 20 democracies–including the U.S.–to test whether shifting position yields political dividends or losses (in terms of vote totals), and under what conditions. For the purposes of her study, she divides issue positions into two categories: economic or “pragmatic” issues (such as tax policy, regulation, and economic planning), and social or “principled” issues (such as traditional morality, social justice, equality, and environmentalism). A full list of the issues can be found in the original article.
Tavits finds that, on average, shifts on pragmatic issues benefit politicians politically, whereas shifts on social issues are harmful. Since it seems like there is potential for a lot of overlap between issues designated as either “pragmatic” or “principled,” the waters are muddied somewhat. But attempting to moderate or reverse one’s positions on strong, clearly principled issues like abortion, gay marriage, or religion’s place in public life appears to be one ticket to a lost election. If you’re on the record supporting liberal social policies and you’re worried about the South and Midwest, it’s probably a better bet to remain passionate on the stump, while not exactly leading with those issues.
The same could go for moderates in those ideological primary battles. Giuliani gets it on abortion. So does Clinton on the War. If Tavits knows what she’s talking about, we can only hope that the Republicans nominate Mitt Romney.

by Scott Winship
Longtime readers of TDS–by which I mean those of you who read it last fall–remember the, um, spirited debate we hosted over an essay by Third Way, “Missing the Middle“. Authors Anne Kim, Adam Solomon, and Jim Kessler argued that Democrats’ economic message to the middle class failed to resonate with voters because it was unduly pessimistic and focused on security rather than opportunity. Their critics responded that economic insecurity is prevalent–often with good reason. Secondarily, discussants asked, “Where’s the Beef?”, noting the absence of a coherent policy agenda that flowed from their analysis.
Today Third Way rolled out its initial effort to respond to these criticisms–“The New Rules Economy: A Policy Framework for the 21st Century“. The report begins by debunking “myths” of neopopulism and conservatism. It then takes the next step of presenting nine “new rules” of today’s economy, as well as proposals to address the gaps between our old-rules policy framework and the new rules. You could think of it as a “third path”, no, a “middle way”, or….what’s the phrase I’m looking for?…….
Hil-larious kidding aside, progressives will recognize that there is nothing mushily centrist about Third Way’s policy agenda, though because it rejects the neopopulist critique of the new economy it is not as expansive as many progressives would like. Still, there’s no denying the progressivity of an agenda that advocates wealth-promoting and inequality-reducing “worth at birth accounts”, making college more affordable, greater funding for continuing education, training for workers in industries vulnerable to foreign competition to prepare for better employment in high-growth industries, expanded portability of fringe benefits, expanded child care funding, and having the federal government take over responsibility for some of the health care costs that businesses currently bear (among other laundry-list items). To be sure, it’s a framework viewed from 10,000 feet, but Third Way has a permanent project dedicated to fleshing out the details of these and other ideas.
Seems like an agenda even neopopulists could embrace. Give it a look-see. How does it compare with other progressive policy agendas you’ve seen?

by Alan Abramowitz
Alben W. Barkley Professor of Political Science
Emory University
The South is the most conservative and most Republican region of the country. In both the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, the Democratic presidential candidate failed to carry a single state of the old Confederacy, although Al Gore probably did win a majority of the intended votes of Floridians. And even though Democrats made modest gains in the South in the 2006 midterm elections, Republicans continue to hold the large majority of the region’s Senate and House seats.
Looking at the bleak Democratic landscape in the South, Tom Schaller argues in Whistling Past Dixie that not only should Democratic presidential candidates write off the South, they should actively campaign against southern values in order to maximize their electoral prospects in the rest of the country. What Schaller is advocating is not just a non-southern strategy for Democrats, but an anti-southern strategy.
The assumption underlying Schaller’s argument is that not only is the South more conservative than the rest of the nation, but that southern values are now so antithetical to those of voters outside of the region that trying to appeal to southerners will only reduce a candidate’s appeal outside of the region.
But is it true that a candidate who appeals to voters in the South will reduce his appeal in the rest of the country? Based on an examination of the evidence from the past six presidential elections, the answer to this question is a loud and clear no. In fact, the evidence supports the opposite conclusion: the better a presidential candidate does in the South, the better that candidate will do in the rest of the country and, especially, in the key battleground states that determine the outcomes of presidential elections.
In order to test the viability of Schaller’s anti-southern strategy, I examined the correlations among Democratic presidential candidates’ vote margins (Democratic percentage minus Republican percentage) in five states across the last six presidential elections. The five states that I chose included two southern states, Georgia from the Deep South, and North Carolina from the Rim South, and three battleground states, Pennsylvania from the Northeast, Ohio from the Midwest, and Colorado from the Mountain West. The results are displayed in Table 1.

Not only are all of the correlations positive, all of them are very strongly positive—a correlation of 1.0 indicates a perfect relationship between two variables, and most of these correlations are very close to 1.0. It is clear that over the last six presidential elections, the better the Democratic candidate did in Georgia and North Carolina, the better that candidate did in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Colorado.
There is no reason to believe that the positive relationship between a presidential candidate’s appeal in the South and that candidate’s appeal in the rest of the nation, including the key battleground states, will change in the future. The better the Democratic (or Republican) candidate does in the South in 2008, the better that candidate will do in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Colorado that are critical to winning the presidency. That is because southern voters respond in the same way to the candidates and issues as voters in the rest of the country.
No matter whom the Democrats and Republicans nominate for president in 2008, the South will almost certainly be the most difficult region for the Democratic candidate. But is also almost certain that no matter whom the Democrats and Republicans nominate for president in 2008, the better the Democratic candidate does in the South, the better that candidate will do in the rest of the country including the key battleground states and the better that candidate’s chances will be of winning the presidency.

by Scott Winship
(Comments on Matt Stoller’s essay on the New Left and the netroots, cross-posted at http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/swinship/2007/jan/17/talkin_bout_my_generation)
I have a somewhat different take on what to make of the “new movement” centered on the netroots than the older—sorry, wiser—discussants that have responded to Matt thus far. As someone who at age 34 could be part of this movement demographically but doesn’t feel altogether comfortable in it, my take also differs from his. I am on the record elsewhere as believing that the netroots is ideological and ideologically liberal. Like Ed, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Matt agrees with me, given the resistance I’ve received to this argument. So let me instead focus on the questions of where the current movement comes from and where it is going.
First, I agree with Matt that the movement has grown out of the frustrations and anger of those on the left, though I think Matt only gets at part of the explanation. He is right to note that the events dating from the Clinton impeachment – including the perceived theft of the 2000 election, the perceived timidity of the Democratic Congress in 2002, and the outrages of the Bush Administration – are largely behind the rise of the netroots. But there is something else too, something that is implicit (if not explicit) in huge swaths of the Compiled Works of the Liberal Blogosphere.
That “something” – alluded to in Matt’s reference to “Democratic complacency in the Iraq debate in 2002” – is frustration with the incrementalism of the Bill Clinton years and the Clintonite wing of the Party in general. I know that Matt has recently read Todd Gitlin's magnificent The Sixties as part of his research on the New Left, and I am currently working my way through it as well. Early on, in explaining why the children of the Fifties were “lost” to their complacent liberal parents (liberal in the “Cold War liberal consensus” sense) and embraced the confrontational New Left movement of the Sixties, Todd eloquently makes an observation with much relevance for understanding today’s netroots:

In politics, nothing is so unsettling as half a success. After a catastrophe, the next generation rebuilds from scratch. After a heroic victory, they inherit the triumph. But half a success tantalizes and confuses; it dangles before the eyes a glaring discrepancy between promise and performance.

It may be true that the netroots are an older group than is often recognized – my own inclination is to be skeptical until some good data is available, and no, there is no good data yet available – but in reading the most popular writers of the “activist” blogosphere, one is struck by how often they acknowledge that their political experience goes only as far back as the Clinton impeachment. Many of the most prominent netroots activists demonstrate little appreciation for how electorally awful the years between 1966 and 1992 were for Democrats. Consider this the flip-side of Max’s complaint of ahistoricity.
From Lyndon Johnson’s blow-out victory over Barry Goldwater in 1964 through 1965, my boss Stan Greenberg notes in his Two Americas, Johnson was supported by clear majorities of the electorate. But that changed in 1966, as urban rioting and Vietnam took its toll on his agenda:

The Republicans picked up 8 governorships, including Ronald Reagan’s victory in California; doubled their number of state legislators in the South; gained a net of 47 seats in the House; and picked three new senators in the South.

To belabor the point, 1966 precedes the rise of the conservative think tanks and foundations in the early 1970s. It is only two years after Goldwater’s trouncing (so much for those “years in the wilderness” suffered by the right). The political history of the next quarter-century is clear enough: Richard Nixon wins as George Wallace peels off the Democratic South, Nixon successfully woos the Wallace voters in ’72 and destroys the last Democratic nominee to openly run as a liberal, a moderate southern Democrat squeaks out a win over a Republican incumbent who had been successively an unelected vice president and unelected president (and who represented the party of Watergate), the dark years of Reagan, the victory of George H. W. Bush on the strength of Lee Atwater’s culture-war strategy, and finally – finally – a clear Democratic win by a moderate southern governor from Arkansas. All the while, ideology and party grew increasingly aligned, swelling the Republican ranks and reaching an apogee in the 1994 election, when the GOP captured both chambers of Congress.
Clinton, of course, went on to drive liberal activists mad by failing to pass universal health care, favoring trade agreements, signing the welfare reform bill, and declaring the end of the era of big government. Al Gore’s campaign in 2000 was pushed to the left by Bill Bradley’s initially strong primary challenge, and his famously populist acceptance speech made many liberals swoon like Tipper after “The Kiss”. But when he lost – and despite the atrocious U.S. Supreme Court ruling, the various recount scenarios would have yielded different results – much of the left at least took solace in the fact that Clintonism was apparently behind them.
But Clintonism as a term for political timidity came to be blamed for Democrats’ allowing the Bush tax cuts to pass, despite the fact that electoral realities put strong pressure on Democratic senators from red states to vote for the bill. With little credibility on national security after 30 years marked by the public relations genius of the McGovernik left (the forerunners of the Kucinich-worshipping Department of Peacers of 2004) as well as the Third-World romanticism of 1970s liberals (the forerunners of the U.N.-elevating left of ’04), Carter’s weakness around the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iran hostage crisis, and the death of Soviet Communism under Reagan/Bush, Democrats in Congress were vulnerable to claims by Bush II that they were insufficiently strong on national security, and they buckled to his will. When Republicans re-took the Senate in 2002, “Clintonism” was a convenient scapegoat.
It is this lack of historical appreciation – this lack of understanding of political imperatives – and its attendant lack of patience that unites the New Left of the 1960s with the netroots today. It is the promise and peril of political naïveté—the admirable impulse that led me as a 22-year-old college senior in 1995 to hunger strike for 5 days for what I thought to be an important cause, an impulse the potential destructiveness of which is laid bare in the disclosure that the cause was establishing an Asian-American Studies program immediately rather than waiting for the university bureaucracy to vote on it.
While the New Left eventually over-reached, it did so after achieving extraordinarily important progress in civil rights and civil liberties, and it eventually brought about the end of a war that proved hopelessly unwinnable. Those victories might not have been possible with an “appropriate” historical appreciation. Can the netroots and its fellow-travelers have a similarly positive impact? The answer will depend on whether they are able to read the public mood correctly, whether they correctly judge how—and how quickly—the public can be brought along, and whether their causes are as compelling as the defeat of Jim Crow.
New Democrats—young and old—fear that the New New Left—young and old—will miscalculate in addressing each question, or worse, will not even acknowledge these are legitimate and crucial questions. (How does Matt know, for instance, that the “new movement” is a majority, non-silent or otherwise?) Like other committed Democrats, we hope for their success and will work and fight alongside them on many endeavors, but we will also point out that whatever ’60s activism achieved, it also handed the country to the Republicans for more than a generation. The netroots better be prepared to tell us what we’ll get in return this time around to justify such a result.

by Scott Winship
Commenter “David” notes an error that I made in my response to Tom Schaller’s roundtable discussion piece from a couple of months back. I claimed that just 2 of 28 Democratic governors led southern states, which was badly wrong. I’ll let David speak for himself:

I’m unclear what states you count as “southern,” but going with the Old Confederacy, I count *five* Democratic governors, in VA, NC, LA, AR and TN. That doesn’t leave you with a majority of governorships outside the South, at least using ordinary math.

For the record, I apparently misread the election map I examined and counted as in the Dem column only the two states where Dem governors were elected in November (rather than adding the sitting governors in the other Southern states). I then subtracted 2 from 28 to get a non-Southern majority of 26. Dumb, dumb mistake — an example of writing up something far too quickly.
David makes some other criticisms in his post that I take issue with, which you can consider for yourself at the link above.

by Ruy Teixeira
(cross-posted at www.washingtonmonthly.com/showdown06)
The blizzard of polls released over the weekend and today suggest some tightening of the race, but do not appear to fundamentally alter the assessment I offered five days ago in my last update. Tuesday should still be a very good day for the Democrats.
Start with Bush’s approval rating. Taking the latest polls into account, Charles Franklin’s trend-based estimate now stands at 38 percent. Pretty bad for the incumbent party.
Turning to the generic congressional ballot, confusion abounds, so let me try to separate signal from noise as best I can.
There have been seven polls released in the last couple of days. Here are the results for likely voters (LVs):
CNN (Fri-Sun): +20D
Newsweek (Thu-Fri): +16D
Time (Wed-Fri): +15D
Fox (Sat-Sun): +13D
USA Today/Gallup (Thu-Sun): +7D
ABC News/Washington Post (Wed-Sat): +6D
Pew (Wed-Sat): +4D
Quite a spread! And here are the same polls, this time for registered voters (RVs):
CNN (Fri-Sun): +15D
Newsweek (Thu-Fri): +16D
Time (Wed-Fri): +15D
Fox (Sat-Sun): no RV data
USA Today/Gallup (Thu-Sun): +11D
ABC News/Washington Post (Wed-Sat): +10D
Pew (Wed-Sat): +8D
Somewhat closer together, but still a fair amount of variation.
Here are some observations on these data that may help make sense of them.
1. Charles Franklin’s trend-based estimate (which actually doesn’t include the most recent two polls, CNN (+20D) and Fox (+13D)) still estimates the Democratic advantage at 11 points.
2. The average LV Democratic advantage in these 7 polls is around 12 points. The average RV Democratic advantage is around 13 points. Still very good in either case.
3. Note that, reflecting the widely varying methodologies these pollsters use, the relation between RVs and LVs in these polls varies widely. Some (CNN) have the Democratic advantage among LVs actually larger than among RVs; some have it exactly the same (Time, Newsweek); and some have it smaller (Pew, Post, Gallup–interestingly by exactly the same 4 point margin).
4. Of course, it is entirely possible that some of these pollsters’ LV methodologies are better than others. And there are certainly reasons to be skeptical that Democrats will actually manage a double digit lead in the popular Congressional ballot on election day. So let’s say that, for example, Gallup has it about right–and they do have a good track record in the last several offyear elections.
Well, as Gallup points out, a seven point lead ain’t chopped liver. Here’s some of what they have to say:

Gallup has modeled the number of seats a party will control based on that party’s share of the national two-party vote for the House of Representatives using historical voting data in midterm elections from 1946 to 2002. The model takes into account structural factors such as the party of the president and the majority party in Congress entering the elections. The results suggest that a party needs at least a two percentage-point advantage in the national House vote to win a majority of the 435 seats. Based on this historical analysis, the Democrats’ seven-point margin suggests they will win a large enough share of the national vote to have a majority of the seats in the next Congress.
More specifically, taking the final survey’s margin of error into account, the model predicts that the Democrats could gain anywhere from 11 seats on the low end to 58 seats on the high end — with 35 seats being the most likely number. Given that Democrats need to gain just 15 seats to wrest control from Republicans, a Democratic takeover appears likely.

5. Some of the variation in the LV samples is no doubt due to varying estimates of how many Democrats vs. how many Republicans are projected to be in the voting electorate. Pew, which gives the Democrats the smallest estimated lead, has Democrats and Republicans at parity among likely voters. Gallup gives the Democrats a 2 point edge in representation among LVs. And Fox, whose estimated Dem lead among LVs is very close to the average of all these polls, gives the Democrats a 4 point representation edge.
It will be interesting to see on election day who’s got that part of equation right.
6. Turning to independents, even in the Pew poll, independents are giving the Democrats a 10 point advantage. Gallup and Fox have independents voting Democratic by 15 and Newsweek has the margin at 25. This will be an important data point to track and indicates, even at the low end of this range, the Democrats will be well-served by high turnout of independents in this particular election. To remind folks once more of the historical context on the independent vote:

As far back as I can get data (1982), the Democrats have never had a lead among independents larger than 4 points in an actual election, a level they managed to achieve in both 1986 and 1990. Indeed, since 1990, they’ve lost independents in every congressional election: by 14 points in 1994; by 4 points in 1998; and by 2 points in 2002.

So this election could represent quite a turning point in this pattern.
As for the race by race data, not a great deal has changed since my last post five days ago. For example, the Bafumi-Erikson-Wlezien seat shift model, which forecasts the level of seat shifts through computer simulations of the 435 individual House contests, looks like it would produce about the same result today as it did two weeks ago (a 32 seat Dem gain), if I’m understanding the inputs into their model correctly. (This is very similar to Alan Abramowitz’ forecasting model–not based on computer simulations–which calls for a Democratic pickup of 29 seats).
Also, Democracy Corps has released their final survey of 50 competitive Republican House districts and they’re showing a slightly compressed, but still impressive, 5 point Democratic lead in the named Congressional ballot in these districts. Note also, that the DCorps survey shows the Democrats with a 16 lead among independents in these districts.
Majortity Watch has not done any new polls, so nothing to report there. Over at Pollster.com, where Mark Blumenthal and Charles Franklin collect all the available public polling on all the House races their current scorecard assigns 219 seats to the Democrats with 29 tossups. Assuming the Democrats and Republicans split the tossups, that would bring the Democratic total to 233 seats–a gain of 30 seats over where they now stand.
Over in nonpartisan pundit-land, Charlie Cook is holding steady in his prediction of a 20-35 seat Democratic pickup (let’s pick the midpoint and call it 28 seats). Stuart Rothenberg has the Democratic gain between 30 and 36 seats (let’s call it 33). And Larry Sabato has the Democratic gain pegged at 29 seats.
You know, I think I’m beginning to detect a pattern here. It will be interesting to see how it all turns out when the real world talks back.
Turning to the Senate, the latest Pollster.com 5-poll averages show the Democrats up by 6 in NJ and 4 points in MD, the two seats the Republicans have been given some chance of picking up. And they are leading by 1,3,13,6,12 and 2 points, respectively in MO, MT, OH, RI, PA and VA. Thus, figuring strictly on the basis of these data, one would see the Democrats picking up six seats, but with agonizing nail-biters in at least MO and possibly also in VA and MT.
Of course, several of these races are so close in the polls, one can hardly pronounce with a huge degree of confidence that the Democrats will, in fact, get their six seats. But it certainly seems like a reasonable possibility. Checking our nonpartisan pundits, it’s worth noting that both Rothenberg and Sabato see the Democrats getting the six seat pickup. Cook is more circumspect, calling for a 4-6 seat Democratic pickup.
Well, that’s it for the updating. On to the biggest poll of ’em all: election day!

by Scott Winship
As part of our new pre-election issue, we commissioned a piece by RT Strategies’s Thomas Riehle, a long-time Democrat and respected pollster. While his piece was primarily about the kinds of new voters who will be added to the Democratic coalition after the elections, many readers objected to Riehle’s characterization of the netroots in a tangential point toward the end of the piece. For critiques, see the discussion section at the end of the piece.
The editors and I want to emphasize that The Democratic Strategist does not endorse the positions taken by its contributors — it is a forum for diverse perspectives throughout the Democratic community. In addition, we are adamantly committed to empiricism to the greatest extent possible. That said, it is impossible to write a meaningful commentary without going beyond the data in any way. It will always be necessary to extrapolate, speculate, and make inferences.
As managing editor, I retrospectively realize that I should have asked Riehle to elaborate on his argument about the strategies advocated by the netroots and by “old-timers” prior to publication. The question now is, given my oversight, what is the appropriate course of action. Were Riehle’s argument indefensible, the answer would be — as a number of commenters have called for — a retraction.
I have chosen a different approach. Thomas Riehle strongly believes — as do we– that his claim is defensible. Taking advantage of the magazine’s web-based medium, Riehle has provided a good-faith response to his critics in the discussion section to his piece, which will be appended to his piece in a note for future readers. In it, he reiterates and extends the credit he gave the netroots in his piece for their early advocacy of expanding the playing field. At the same time, he defends the limited assertion he made that it was “old-timers” who were the first unwavering advocates that the Party widen the ’06 election to take advantage of a late electoral wave. The editors and I, while not necessarily agreeing with him, believe that Riehle’s comments clarify that his point is not one that is simply patently false. Of course, we are also committed to airing all of the views we receive on his argument, as the tough-but-reasonable criticisms in the discussion section attest to.
To the extent that I could have avoided or mitigated this controversy by asking Riehle to elaborate his point before we published the piece, I personally apologize to our readers and to Riehle. The magazine believes the approach we have chosen is the most appropriate one. I expect that many readers will air their disagreement in comments to this post and to Riehle’s, and that is all to the best, as I know Riehle would agree.
One final thought from me, removing my official managing editor hat and donning my independent blogger cap. It is disheartening when people representing one side or another in Democratic debates — and both the Establishment and the netroots include guilty parties — impute ill motives to their opponents, who they generally do not personally know. The view that Thomas Riehle is on another planet when it comes to understanding the netroots — whether I agree with it or not — is defensible. Absent supporting evidence, the view that he is trying to steal credit from the netroots on behalf of the Establishment is not. This sort of accusation of bad faith happens on both sides, but our efforts to come together as a Party are not served by such claims.
Thoughts?

by Ruy Teixeira
cross-posted at the Washington Monthly’s Showdown ’06 blog
When I last checked in about the state of the race–about ten days ago–things looked pretty good for the Democrats. Now they look even better.
Take the generic congressional contest, for example. In the nine polls finished since 10/20 that are listed on PollingReport.com, the Democrats’ average lead is 14 points. That’s huge by historical standards. Democrats haven’t seen these kind of leads this late in an off-year election campaign, since the elections of 1974 and 1982, when they gained 43 and 26 seats respectively.
Of course, the generic congressional contest does not tell you directly about how the myriad individual races will turn out (we’ll get to the race by race data in a moment) so some caution is advised in assessing just what this gaudy lead is likely to mean for the Democrats on election day. But here’s some food for thought. Three political scientists, Joseph Bafumi, Robert Erikson and Christopher Wlezien, have recently released a paper that forecasts the level of seat shifts from the generic congressional vote question, using model-based computer simulations of the 435 individual House contests.
The gruesome methodological details may be found in the paper, but the bottom line is that their simulations predict a 32 seat pickup for the Democrats. As we shall see when we get to the race by race data, this is not such a crazy prediction.
But before we get to the race by race data, let me flag a couple of more things from the national-level data. One is the probable role of independents in this election. As I remarked in my initial post on this blog:

The Democrats are also running even larger leads among independents in the generic Congressional ballot–typically 6-7 points higher than their overall lead…..
With that in mind, consider the following. As far back as I can get data (1982), the Democrats have never had a lead among independents larger than 4 points in an actual election, a level they managed to achieve in both 1986 and 1990. Indeed, since 1990, they’ve lost independents in every congressional election: by 14 points in 1994; by 4 points in 1998; and by 2 points in 2002. So, even leaving questions of relative partisan turnout aside (and I suspect the Democrats will do better, not worse, in this respect in 2006), the implications of a strong Democratic lead among independents in this year’s election, if it holds, are huge.

National polls continue to confirm a very wide lead for Democrats among independent voters. For example, the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll showed the Democrats running an amazing 28 point lead among independents, a finding that was discussed at length in the Post story on the poll. As I have continually stressed–and the mainstream press is now starting to pick up on–the Roveian fire-up-the-base-and-screw-the-middle strategy only works mathematically if losses in the political center can be minimized. Now they can’t and the GOP is likely to pay the price–and very probably not just in this election.
Let me also draw your attention to a very interesting study released by the Pew Research Center that, among other things, compares a wide range of demographic groups’ current voting intentions to their voting intentions at this point in the 2002 campaign. If you read one poll in detail this election cycle, let it be this one. The Pew data show huge swings toward the Democrats among many important voter groups including seniors, middle income voters, non-college educated voters, whites, rural residents, married moms, white Catholics–the list goes on and on. In effect, these shifts have turned yesterday’s swing voters into Democratic groups and many of yesterday’s Republican groups into swing voters.
Turning to the race by race data, polls show an ever-widening number of House seats in play. And, according to data from the Pew Research Center study and from a series of polls from Democracy Corps, Democrats are favored overall by voters in these districts. The latest Democracy Corps analsyis–“Iraq Weakens Republican Hold” is particularly noteworthy, since it shows Democrats making especially good progress in “third tier” competitive GOP seats, where GOP incumbents had the best chances of holding onto their seats. The reason, as the memo’s title implies: Iraq. As more and more voters insist on seeing a change in this area, the fault lines are going deeper and deeper into GOP territory.
The scale of the possible seat shift can be assessed by looking at a number of different sites. A project of RT Strategies and Constituent Dynamics called “Majority Watch” has been polling 60 competitive House districts–55 of which are currently held by Republicans–and currently characterizes 24 of these districts as strong Democratic, 18 as leaning Democratic and 2 ties. Splitting the 2 ties, that indicates a possible Democratic gain of 38 seats (43 wins minus the five seats they already hold in the competitive 60 seats).
Over at Pollster.com, Mark Blumenthal and Charles Franklin look over all the available public polling on House races and assign 222 seats to the Democrats with 25 tossups. Let’s say the Democrats and Republicans split the tossups (though in a wave election like this one, it’s more plausible that these races would break toward the Democrats). That would bring the Democratic total to 234 seats–a gain of 31 seats over where they now stand.
The political scientists’ forecasting model prediction of 32 seats doesn’t see so far-fetched in light of these data. It’s also worth noting that Charlie Cook now predicts Democratic gains of 20-35 seats (with a hedge toward a higher number than 35). Using the midpoint of his range, that would put the Democrat gain at around 28 seats–again, not far off the 32 mark.
Turning to the Senate, the latest Pollster.com 5-poll averages show the Democrats up by 5 in their only truly competive seat (NJ) and leading by 5,6,10 and 11 points, respectively in MT, RI, OH and PA. Then Webb has popped into a 3 point in VA–reversing a deficit to Allen that he had running for a number of weeks. After that, McCaskill-Talent is now dead-even in MO and Ford is down a point to Corker in TN. Therefore, it is possible that the real nail-biter in this election could be MO, if VA does come through for the Dems and Corker manages to hold on against Ford in TN.
So, things look good–very good–for the Democrats. What could turn this situation around for the GOP? At this point, it appears that the GOP is putting its faith overwhelmingly in one factor: turnout. Rev up their 72 hour turnout program they argue and–presto!–many of those Democratic margins will disappear on election day and the Democratic wave won’t amount to much more than a splash.
I am highly skeptical. As I and others have been arguing for awhile, the GOP turnout machine is overrated and is simply not capable of turning defeat into victory in the manner alleged by GOP operatives and apparently believed by many in the press and even some Democrats. In this regard, I strongly recommend reading Mark Mellman’s very nice deconstruction of the GOP turnout myth in today’s edition of The Hill. Read the whole thing, but here’s some of what he has to say:

How much difference can turnout really make? Consider the punishing arithmetic. Take a House race that this year would otherwise be 52-48 Democratic. What would turnout efforts have to achieve to overturn the putative victory?
Use white evangelical Protestants as an example. They comprised 23 percent of the national electorate in both 2000 and 2004, so let’s say they are the same proportion of our imaginary Congressional District. Say the 72-hour program was spectacularly — increasing their turnout by 20 percent while every other segment of the electorate held constant. In that case, evangelicals would constitute 26.4 percent of the electorate.
Assume for the sake of argument they continued to give the GOP the same 78 percent of their votes they gave to George Bush in 2004. Such heroic efforts would still result in a Democratic victory. And if white evangelical Protestants only offered 68 percent of their votes to Republicans, all that work would result in less than a 1-point shift in the vote. And that calculation makes the very unlikely assumption that one side enjoys great success while the other does nothing.
How likely is a 20 percent increase in turnout based on a GOTV effort? The best serious academic estimate is that all the GOTV work in the presidential campaign of 2004 increased turnout not by 20 percent, but by about 3 percent….
Can’t micro-targeting help them achieve spectacular successes? Anyone who has ever modeled data knows there is much more salesmanship than science in Republican claims about these efforts. Our firm and others on the Democratic side have been using these models for half a dozen years or more and we know they can make our efforts much more efficient; expand our GOTV and persuasion universes; and provide message guidance. So when races are otherwise marginal, the lift models provide can make all the difference between winning and losing. But no model is going to turn what would otherwise be a 5-point loss into a victory.
But didn’t the GOP prove its efforts were much more effective than the Democrats’ in 2004? No. Check the data. In Ohio’s base Democratic precincts turnout was 8.2 points higher than it had been in 2000. In base Republican precincts, turnout increased by a slightly lesser 6.1 points. Winning a state is not the same as doing a better job on turnout.
As important as turnout and GOTV efforts can be, the GOP needs to find something more to hold back this wave.

Well said. Readers would be well-advised to keep Mellman’s analysis in mind as they read the press coverage leading up the election and get ready for what should be a very exciting and interesting election night.

by Scott Winship
If they’re from Alexandria or Falls Church (outside DC) or Charlottesville (home of UVA), forward them this link: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/10/24/111047/27 and tell ’em to call their local elections board.
I’m more optimistic about chance to regain the Senate than Chris Bowers is — Webb is within the margin of error of most polls, and this race could be key to control of the Senate. It’s really important….