Stan Greenberg and James Carville have sent out a Democracy Corps Memo entitled “October Surprise?,” which offers data-based hope that, contrary to the common wisdom, a broad rout of Democratic candidates is not a done deal — and with the highly specific messaging tested, Dems can do much better than expected. Their analysis is based on a poll conducted 10/2-4 by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for Democracy Corps. As the authors explain in the Analysis:

We are very close to believing that the 2010 election can move to a new place. Our latest poll shows the Democrats with a 6-point deficit–and any shift will have a significant impact on the number of House seats and the hold on the Senate. This conclusion and recommendations on strategy and message are based on a special program of weekly October polling aimed at producing an ‘October surprise.’
The national poll conducted October 2-4 by Democracy Corps and Greenberg Quinlan Rosner shows real movement — similar to changes reported by NBC News/Wall Street Journal and ABC News/Washington Post in the past week. The changes are summarized below:
* The Republican lead in the named congressional ballot with likely voters has come down 4 points.
* The image of Republican incumbent members (named) has become less positive in the last month.
* The number of strong Democratic voters has gone up 4 points.
* The mood about the state of the economy has become slightly less negative.
* Democrats have gained on the Republicans on key issues: the economy, the deficit and being on your side, and Democrats have re-emerged with an advantage on Social Security and retirement.

Greenberg and Carville warn, however,

Now, it is still ugly out there. Over 60 percent still say the country is on the wrong track, unchanged; the president’s disapproval is stuck at 52 percent; Republicans are marginally more popular than Democrats, though not much; Republicans maintain their standing on government spending and health care. Unfortunately, voters now are still more inclined to cast a vote against spending than against big corporations and for the middle class — very much in line with the vote.

Nonetheless, say the authors,

These results are full of opportunity. When you have a wave election, nothing moves and your messages fall flat, but that is not the case a month before the election. Voters respond to messages — and we can change what this election is about. The messages tested here reduced the Republican margin another 3-points — significant in itself — but more importantly, they revealed voters who are starting to pay attention and respond to clear statements about the stakes and choice.

As for the specific constituencies Democratic candidates can leverage to good effect:

The biggest shift in the vote comes with:
* Younger women, under 50 years (a 9-point net shift in congressional vote)
* Unmarried women (+8 points)
* West and Northeast (+8 and +6 points, respectively)
* Moderates and independents (+7 points)
* White seniors and white older women (+6 points)
Indeed, it is now clear that Democrats can make late gains with independents and moderates, women and older voters. Strategically, we must first act to extend Democratic support to independents and other groups that have been highly supportive in recent years; and then second, we must act to engage Democratic voters.

And all Democratic candidates and campaigns should pay close attention to Carville and Greenberg’s carefully-focused messaging suggestions:

This survey points strongly to two dominant messages and attacks:
1. The first and strongest centers on changing Washington to work for the middle class and American jobs, not corporations and Wall Street. It is strengthened by attacks on Social Security and Medicare, critical for the middle class. The messages are strongest with voters under 40, younger women and unmarried women. It is strong with ‘winnable’ and base voters – giving it greater prominence.
2. The second, very strong message, centers on made in America, creating American jobs and opposing Republicans who support trade agreements and tax breaks for companies that export American jobs. This message is powerful with older women and seniors – and it is buttressed by attacks on Social Security and Medicare and on trade issues.
In future polls and focus groups, we will seek to integrate and short-hand these messages.
The strongest message is set out…below. The Democrat is the one who wants to change Washington so it is not run by corporate lobbyists and Wall Street, but works for the middle class. He or she supports tax cuts for middle class and small business and new American industries, while the Republican has pledged to maintain tax cuts for the top 2 percent and protect the right to export American jobs.
“We have to change Washington. That means eliminating the special deals and tax breaks won by corporate lobbyists for the oil companies and Wall Street. (REPUBLICAN HOUSE CANDIDATE) has pledged to protect the tax cuts for the top two percent and the big tax breaks for companies who export American jobs. I’ll take a different approach with new middle class tax cuts to help small businesses and new American industries create jobs. Let’s make our country work for the middle class.”
This message is quite powerful with the ‘winnable’ voters Democrats need to get to expand their support; also with white unmarried women and whites under 40 years. These last two groups were critical to the new Democratic base of 2006 and 2008 – but support has lagged. But they seem ready to move.
Please note that this message is weaker if it fails to begin with a ‘change Washington’ message. That straight middle class/corporate message is much weaker with these groups. Democratic candidates must be talking about change – with a populist tinge – to get heard this year.
There is a second message that centers on made in America, creating American jobs and opposing the Republicans who supports trade agreements and tax breaks for companies that export American jobs. The message is strongest with older women and seniors and with independents. These can be used in a targeted way, while working in our next poll and focus groups to bring these two messages together.
“My passion is “made in America,” working to support small businesses, American companies and new American industries. (REPUBLICAN HOUSE CANDIDATE) has pledged to support the free trade agreements with Colombia, Panama, and South Korea and protect the loophole for companies outsourcing American jobs. I have a different approach to give tax breaks for small businesses that hire workers and give tax subsidies for companies that create jobs right here in America.”
This message framework for the election is helped by an attack on the Republican candidate for supporting trade agreements and tax breaks that lead to lost American jobs. Those attacks are very strong with white older women and seniors.
We did test a robust form of the message that the president is using. It is painfully weaker than these messages. We made the message very populist and focused on continuing efforts to help unemployed, new industries that create jobs, and ending tax breaks for exporting jobs. It says that the economy shows signs of life, but the Republican candidate wants to go back to Bush and the old policies for Wall Street that cost us 8 million jobs. It is very strong with core Democrats and African-American voters, but compared to the other messages, it falls very short: 25 points weaker with ‘winnable voters’ and whites under 40 years, 20 points weaker with white unmarried women, and 9 points weaker with white older women. That message framework cannot extend the Democratic vote.
The strongest attack on the Republicans centers on Social Security and Medicare – that have re-emerged as issues as Republican candidates, the Tea Party and House Republican leaders decided this is not a third rail. It is the strongest attack here.
“(REPUBLICAN HOUSE CANDIDATE) has pledged to make sweeping cuts, including cuts to off-limit programs for the middle class, like Social Security and Medicare. The Republicans plan to privatize Social Security by shifting those savings to the stock market, and ending guaranteed benefit levels. Medicare as we know it will end, as seniors will have to purchase private insurance using a voucher that will cover some of the costs.”
This attack raises serious doubts with almost 60 percent of the ‘winnable’ voters and white older women.
Democrats must engage voters – and indeed, there is some evidence that Democrats are starting to come back into the electorate – reflected in the polls. The message with the greatest intensity for self-identified Democrats is our form of the “don’t go back to Bush” when Wall Street ruled and 8 million jobs were lost – and the Obama message centered on an on-going agenda.
The ‘don’t go back to Bush’ message scores no more strongly than the ‘change Washington for the middle class’ message among our strongest voters (37 percent of the electorate) and with the 43 percent currently voting Democratic for Congress – and much weaker among the group of winnable Democratic voters. That leads us to recommend against this message. Except for African-American voters, our messages to extend our vote do as well with the base as our base-oriented message. This allows for much greater unity of message.

Democrats are not likely to find a more well-reasoned analysis of the current political moment — nor get better messaging guidance.

To those used to this year’s significant variation in polling results for different contests, the latest batch of contradictory surveys may not seem different. But what’s happening now largely reflects the switchover most pollsters have completed from the use of less to more selective samples (or in some cases, the same samples with new weighting or adjustment factors) as part of an effort to determine likely voters.
Nate Silver’s got a good summary of the wild variations produced by different LV models in terms of the generic congressional ballot:

Just this past weekend, for instance, a Newsweek poll showed Democrats 5 points ahead among registered voters — already a good number for them — but with a larger lead of 8 points among likely voters (Newsweek calls them “definite voters”, but it’s basically the same thing ). That is, it showed a 3-point likely voter gap in the Democrats’ favor. By contrast, as we noted, the Gallup poll shows as much as a 15-point swing in Republicans’ favor when a likely voter model is applied.

Mark Blumenthal has published a very good basic primer on why LV numbers differ so much from each other, and from other measurements of the electorate. He begins by presenting the most famous model, that used by Gallup, which combines a series of questions to poll respondents about their intent to vote and their past voting history, with an adjustment based on an overall estimate of turnout. Blumenthal then notes the other best-known approaches:

* The CBS/New York Times variant, which is similar to the Gallup approach except that rather than select specific respondents as likely voters, it weights all registered voters up or down based on their probability of voting.
* The use of two or three questions to simply screen out voters at the beginning of the interview that say they are not registered and not likely vote.
* The application of quotas or weights to adjust the completed interviews to match the pollster’s expectations of the demographics or regional distribution of likely voters.
* The application of quotas or weights to match the pollster’s expectations of the party affiliation of likely voters. I break this one out separately because it remains among the most controversial likely voter “modeling” tools.
* Sampling respondents from lists that draw on official records of the actual vote history of individual voters, so that when the pollster calls John Doe, they already know whether Doe has voted in past elections.
* Finally, many believe that the use of an automated, recorded-voice methodology rather than a live interviewer is itself a useful tool in obtaining a more accurate measurement of the intent to vote.

Hardly just technical differences in these approaches, eh? And without impugning anyone’s motives, it should be obvious that LV models that depend on imposing some sort of expectation about the partisan composition of the electorate could nicely coexist with partisan bias.
In any event, most LV models tend to converge a bit and become more accurate as election day approaches and registered voters make up their minds whether to participate. At present, though, it’s important to have some idea about how individual pollsters determine likelihood to vote, and how that might reflect the results. . .

This should come as no surprise to regualar readers of this site, but there’s a new survey just out from the Public Religion Research Institute that shows once again that the supposed antipathy of the Christian Right and the Tea Party Movement is a chimera. Among self-described Tea Party Movement members:

* Nearly half (47%) also say they are part of the religious right or conservative Christian movement. Among the more than 8-in-10 (81%) who identify as Christian within the Tea Party movement, 57% also consider themselves part of the Christian conservative movement.
* They make up just 11% of the adult population–half the size of the conservative Christian movement (22%).
* They are mostly social conservatives, not libertarians on social issues. Nearly two-thirds (63%) say abortion should be illegal in all or most cases, and less than 1-in-5 (18%) support allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry.
*They are largely Republican partisans. More than three-quarters say they identify with (48%) or lean towards (28%) the Republican Party. More than 8-in-10 (83%) say they are voting for or leaning towards Republican candidates in their districts, and nearly three-quarters (74%) of this group report usually supporting Republican candidates.

The Tea Party Movement is largely a radicalized cohort of Republican voters who are by no means libertarians or anything else new under the sun. They are just a lot noisier now, and have a new set of props and some rhetoric borrowed from several very old strains of conservative extremism. They aren’t going away any time soon, but nor did they come out of nowhere in response to the policies of Barack Obama. We all need to get used to it.

As we enter the stretch run of this midterm cycle, the latest crosstabs from Gallup´s tracking poll show once again that while turnout among self-identified Democrats may be a problem, support for the president and his policies really isn´t.
For the week ending on October 3, the President´s job approval rating among Democrats is 81%; among liberal Democrats 84% (moderate Democrats are at 79%); among African-Americans it´s at 90%; and among Hispanics 61%. Perhaps it´s random noise unrelated to the emergence of Social Security as an issue in many Democratic campaigns, but the president´s job approval ratings among voters over 65 has suddenly jumped to 45%, the highest level since early June.
To compare Obama to the last two Democratic presidents in terms of base sentiment, at this point in his presidency Bill Clinton´s job approval rating among Democrats was at 69%, Jimmy Carter´s was at 60%.
Disaffection in the Democratic base is not Barack Óbama´s or the Democratic Party´s principal handicap.

If Democratic media wizards don’t make an ad out of Bob Herbert’s column in today’s New York Times, take it as a signal that the party’s media mavens are utterly clueless. Here’s a vivid image from Herbert’s column, begging to be captured in a widely-televised Democratic political ad:

It’s beyond astonishing to me that John Boehner has a real chance to be speaker of the House of Representatives….I’ve always thought of Mr. Boehner as one of the especially sleazy figures in a capital seething with sleaze. I remember writing about that day back in the mid-’90s when this slick, chain-smoking, quintessential influence-peddler decided to play Santa Claus by handing out checks from tobacco lobbyists to fellow Congressional sleazes right on the floor of the House.
It was incredible, even to some Republicans. The House was in session, and here was a congressman actually distributing money on the floor. Other, more serious, representatives were engaged in debates that day on such matters as financing for foreign operations and a proposed amendment to the Constitution to outlaw desecration of the flag. Mr. Boehner was busy desecrating the House itself by doing the bidding of big tobacco.
Embarrassed members of the G.O.P. tried to hush up the matter, but I got a tip and called Mr. Boehner’s office. His chief of staff, Barry Jackson, was hardly contrite. “They were contributions from tobacco P.A.C.’s,” he said.
When I asked why the congressman would hand the money out on the floor of the House, Mr. Jackson’s answer seemed an echo of Willie Sutton’s observation about banks. “The floor,” he said, “is where the members meet with each other.”

Do the American people want such a guy controlling the U.S. House of Representatives? I think not. But it’s up to Democrats to show them who the Republican speaker-in-waiting really is. Herbert has pretty much written the script. All the ad-meisters have to do is hook up a little creative re-enactment.
The scene above should be enough. But, if you need more, Herbert’s got it:

…The amount of democracy-destroying money that manages to make its way into the sleazy environs of what is now known as Boehner Land has increased to a staggering degree.
The Times’s Eric Lipton, in an article last month, noted that Mr. Boehner “maintains especially tight ties with a circle of lobbyists and former aides representing some of the nation’s biggest businesses, including Goldman Sachs, Google, Citigroup, R.J. Reynolds, MillerCoors and UPS.
“They have contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to his campaigns, provided him with rides on their corporate jets, socialized with him at luxury golf resorts and waterfront bashes and are now leading fund-raising efforts for his Boehner for Speaker campaign, which is soliciting checks of up to $37,800 each, the maximum allowed.
The hack who once handed out checks on the House floor is now a coddled, gilded flunky of the nation’s big-time corporate elite.”

Herbert’s got more, much more, so extensive are Boehner’s and the GOP’s predations. Commend Herbert for writing a great column — his Pulitzer is long-overdue. But Boehner’s history should be dramatized, so the public can see exactly what members of congress have been witnessing for years and who will be running the House if they vote for Republicans. If Dems don’t show them, who will?

In his latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’ at the Center for American Progress web pages, TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira examines the opinion data concerning health care reform, and finds the GOP meme that the public is “angy” about it overstated. As Teixeira explains:

Conservatives have been predicting for months that the health care reform bill passed in March would over time generate massive public opposition. So where is it?
Consider results of the most recent Kaiser Health Tracking Poll, the most thorough ongoing assessment of public opinion on the bill. The poll asked respondents whether they had a generally favorable or unfavorable opinion about the law. It elicited a 49 percent favorable to 40 percent unfavorable verdict…Doesn’t sound like massive opposition to me.

The constituency favoring quick repeal of the legislation is even smaller, according to Teixeira:

…The poll also asked a follow-up question of those with an unfavorable view to see if they wanted to give the bill a chance to work or have it repealed as soon as possible…Just over a quarter of the public has both an unfavorable view of the bill and wants to see it repealed as soon as possible. This looks even less like massive opposition.

So, how “angry” is the public about HCR?

…Certainly some angry people are out there–32 percent of the public does say that “angry” describes their feelings about the health reform law. But they are actually fewer in number than those that say they are pleased about the law.

Less than a third, after months of nonstop GOP fear-mongering and distortions about HCR legislation. As Teixeira puts it, “None of this is to say everyone loves the new law or even understands it. But the idea that the public is rising up in angry opposition to the law is clearly wrong.”

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
The United States is in a fiscal bind. Last week saw the release of two reports which vividly illustrate the policy dilemma we face–but they also point to a strategy we could use to overcome it.
The first appeared on September 28, when CBO Director Doug Elmendorf presented an analysis of our fiscal policy choices before the Senate Budget Committee. Among his key findings: Cutting taxes is good for the economy in the short-term but bad in the long run. Making all the Bush tax cuts permanent, as Republicans are demanding, would increase real GNP between 0.5 and 1.4 percent in 2011 and 2012 but would decrease it between 1.1 and 1.6 percent in 2020. Making the cuts permanent for individuals with incomes of $200,000 or less, and married couples with incomes of $250,000 or less, would increase real GNP between 0.4 and 1.1 percent in 2011 and 2012 but decrease it between 0.9 and 1.3 percent in 2020.
It turns out, however, that we need not choose between the next two years and the next decade. CBO finds that a temporary extension of the tax cuts delivers about two-thirds of the short-term benefits provided by permanent extension–0.3 to 0.9 percent gains in real GNP if tax cuts are extended through 2012 for everyone, and 0.2 to 0.7 percent if the upper incomes are excluded–with much smaller negative effects (around 0.3 percent losses) than do the permanent extensions.
Then, on October 1, the IMF published its latest world economic outlook. Chapter 3 of this report examines the macroeconomic effect of deficit-reduction plans (“fiscal consolidation”) in 33 advanced economies. The key finding: While deficit reduction typically reduces GDP and job growth in the short-term, it boosts them in the long-term. A fiscal consolidation plan equal to 1 percent of GDP reduces GDP by about 0.5 percent within two years and raises the unemployment rate by 0.3 percentage point while domestic demand–consumption and investment–falls by about 1 percent. In the long-term, however, the IMF study finds that “for every 10 percentage point fall in the debt-to-GDP ratio, output rises by about 1.4 percent in the long term.”
Granted, these reports are not uncontroversial. The IMF’s claim that fiscal consolidation is contractionary in the short term is contested by scholars such as Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna who find the opposite, using a different methodology. And some staunch Keynesians do not believe that there is a significant relation between debt-to-GDP ratios and economic growth, at least during the next decade. Still, it is suggestive that these two high-quality reports point in the same direction.
Consistent with the thrust of both the CBO and IMF reports, Maya MacGuineas and I have just issued a 10-year budget outline that reduces the debt to GDP ratio in 2020 from a projected 90 percent to 60 percent while maintaining a broadly stimulative policy between now and 2012. We do this with a 50/50 mix of program spending cuts and revenue increases, phased in over time so that the impact on the deficit is backloaded. If the IMF estimates are right, this would boost America’s GDP by about $900 billion in 2020–almost $3,000 per person–without undermining an economic recovery now proceeding painfully slowly.
These findings have an obvious bearing on the issues that American policymakers will soon be forced to engage. Between now and the end of the year, two blue-ribbon fiscal commissions will issue their recommendations. By next February, the president will offer his 2012 budget proposals to a new Congress, whose political balance will differ significantly from its predecessor.
Most pundits predict little except gridlock over the next two years, and they may be right. Between now and the next presidential election, we will find out whether two political parties who disagree sharply about the proper role of government can come together to promote the long-term national interest. But the rest of the world won’t be standing still just because we are, and every year of inaction imposes a cost on our future.

Ever since the Tea Party rallies and demonstrations began in April 2009, articles in The Democratic Strategist have repeatedly noted that the wildly inflated crowd estimates the organizers promoted were a two-edged sword. On the one hand they certainly cheered up the participants in the events and gave conservative publications a useful propaganda tool. But, at the same time, they also produced among the Tea Party activists a profoundly distorted notion of themselves as genuinely representing the vast, indeed overwhelming, majority of Americans — an illusion that has fueled their purge of more mainstream and more electable GOP candidates in favor of true believers and in consequence significantly weakened the GOP’s long term prospects.
As a result, Democrats and progressives should steadfastly resist the temptation to try to measure the success or value of Saturday’s event by arguing about whether it was as large, or larger, than either Glen Beck’s Restore Honor rally on August 28th or the much smaller Tea Party rally organized by Freedomworks this September 12th. Glen Beck’s rally, it must be remembered, was heavily promoted by the largest single TV network in America, featured the two most prominent and mediagenic national figures in the Tea Party conservative world, and provided an outlet for protest by people who felt profoundly marginalized by the preceding election. To create a roughly comparable sociological situation, one would have to imagine that, in 2006 — when liberals and Democrats were livid with fury at George W. Bush — Teddy Kennedy, Hillary Clinton and Coretta Scott King (had she still been alive at the time) had all jointly headlined a Washington march that was relentlessly promoted by CNN, NBC and all of the major liberal blogs and magazines.
The One Nation rally, in contrast, had no TV promotion, no major speakers, and no major and passionate unifying issue like the outrage liberals and Democrats felt in 2006 toward the Bush administration. As a result, the fact that it was almost certainly not as large as Beck’s August 28th rally but rather perhaps as large or larger than the September 12 Tea Party rally of this year should be considered neither surprising nor disheartening.
What is important, on the other hand, is not simply to recognize that the rally nonetheless represented a major step forward for the progressive movement, but, more important, to recognize three significant weaknesses that were exposed by the event.
First, although the formation of the coalition of 300 organizations that called the rally represents a major advance for the American progressive movement, the only sector of the new coalition that was actually able to mobilize large numbers of participants to attend the rally were the major progressive trade unions. There were substantial contingents at the rally from SIEU, the UAW, AFSME and the NEA. Each of these groups filled one of a variety of pre-divided sections of the mall between the Lincoln Memorial and the World War II memorial.
On the other hand, however, there were no comparable mobilized mass contingents from other major components of the coalition such as the Latino, GLBT, progressive youth or even African-American organizations. To be sure, there were many individual participants with shirts and signs reflecting their allegiance to organizations that represent these communities, and there were various clusters of hundreds who marched together under the banners of these groups. But there should have been clusters of thousands of people marching under those banners rather than just hundreds if these sectors of the coalition still retained the ability to mobilize their supporters in the way that major grass-roots organizations could in the past.
In truth, this is not a surprise. The ability to motivate and mobilize people to come to a demonstration in Washington does not arise spontaneously. It is built on the base of solid local grass-roots organizations. For many progressive groups this grass-roots foundation has withered greatly in the last few decades, leaving them with “supporters” whose support is to a large degree verbal or abstract and cannot be translated into mass action.
The second, related weakness that was revealed by the Washington rally was the startling absence of the progressive netroots. There was no large organized participation visible from any of the major internet based organizations – MoveOn, Daily Kos, Netroots Nation, Huffpo, Democrats.org, FireDogLake, Open Left and so on. While it would be understandable that participants in these online organizations might not be able to arrive at the rally together, the fact that none of these groups joined together in any organized presence for themselves once at the demonstration reflects a very significant disconnect between the virtual and real-world progressive movements. If the progressive netroots is not able to organize and play any significant part in real world progressive actions like mass demonstrations, its strength and relevance for progressive politics is substantially less than is often assumed.
Finally, the rally revealed that this new coalition has not yet developed any common vision or unifying program that could give it the coherence to play the role a leading progressive coalition must inevitably try to assume. The various speakers at the rally reasserted the outlooks and perspectives of their individual organizations but there was no common conceptual framework or agenda for action that could unify the audience at the rally once they returned home.
In particular, it was striking to note the absence of any clear recognition that the Republican Party has basically sabotaged the Obama administration and is now planning to paralyze the operation of government in order to prevent the enactment of policies with which they disagree. This is a profoundly radical and indeed “insurrectionary” program for an American political party and is one which the new progressive coalition will inevitably find itself compelled to oppose. As of yet, however, the looming threat has not even been clearly defined.
None of these weaknesses are intended to be criticisms of the new coalition or to diminish the substantial step forward that the One Nation rally represents. For the first major action of a new political force, the Saturday rally was more than enough of an achievement.
But as a movement that takes itself seriously, however, the new “One Nation” coalition must not imitate the infantile behavior of the Tea Party and make absurd overestimations of the attendance at its event or promote the notion that it already represents the majority of the country. There is hard work ahead, and no time to waste before getting started.
.

At pollster.com, Republican pollster Kirsten Soltis penned a very interesting article late last week pointing out that many surveys this year are showing levels of conservative ideology in the electorate that are difficult to credit based on historical trends:

At the House level, the exit polls have shown that moderates have outnumbered conservatives — and by considerable margins — in every election since at least 1984. In fact, even in 1994, when the Gingrich revolution swept a wave of conservative members into Congress, moderates still outnumbered conservatives. Sure, the gap closed significantly from the 1992 election, but we still did not see the number of conservatives even reaching parity with moderates, much less exceeding them….
Why then are so many of our public polls showing samples with an ideological makeup that looks nothing like this, with conservatives outnumbering moderates?

Soltis has no particular answer for her own question, but neither does anyone else. It’s not clear whether the phenomenon she’s talking about is a function of polling errors, a stronger-than-ever appearance of midterm turnout disparities favoring conservatives, a genuine and unprecedented ideological shift in the population, or just noise disguising the fact that the liberal-conservative-moderate choice pollsters offer respondents isn’t that meaningful to begin with. Still another possibility is that a lot of regular Republican-voting “moderates” now identify as “conservative,” which means the “shift” might have zero net effect on voting behavior.
But the numbers are very weird, and Soltics has some advice for her fellow GOPers:

This isn’t to say that pollsters with very heavily conservative samples are wrong. It isn’t out of the realm of possibility that a massive structural change is occurring in the American electorate this year that has conservatives making a massive jump — so massive as to eclipse that of 1994.
But what it does say to me, as a Republican, is that we ought to stop dancing in the end zone before we’ve scored a touchdown. It tells me that two-and-a-half decades of data show things aren’t as wobbly as they seem, that the electorate doesn’t change its ideological makeup radically, and that polls with more conservatives than moderates just might be painting a rosier picture than we all might find ourselves looking at on election day.

All in all, this is looking more and more like a cycle in which the post-election analysis is going to be difficult and very important.

If the campaigns of 2010 seem more intense than usual, one reason may be early voting. So note Carolyn Crist and Melissa Weinman in their article “Early Voting Is a Game-Changer: Campaigns react to 45-day stretch of casting ballots” in the Gainesville (GA) Times.
The authors cite a huge uptick in early voting in the Peach State:

In the 2008 general election, more than half of voters came in early, about 2 million of the 3.9 million total in Georgia. That showed a large jump from the 2004 election, in which early voting was only allowed for specific reasons. In that election 387,596 voted early of the 3.2 million voters, or about 9 percent.
…Heath Garrett, a Republican political strategist, said early voting has caused a “monumental shift” in the way political campaigns operate. Because the early voting period is so new, there is still a lot to learn.
“Most of the campaigns in Georgia are learning from the 2008 election. 2008 showed that most campaigns, other than the presidential campaigns were not prepared for the impact of early voting,” Garrett said.

As you might imagine, early voting has created a bit of an earthquake in political advertising, sort of a ‘twin peaks’ phenomenon, as Crist and Weinman explain:

Now that voters head to the polls early, campaigns have to catch them early as well. Garrett said campaigning has become more expensive as a result.
“It’s almost like you have to have the same resources you had in the last week to 10 days in a campaign before early voting, but then you have to add onto that the resources to allow you to advertise and engage the electorate in the weeks leading up to early voting,” Garrett said.
“With your paid advertising, you have to peak just before and right around the beginning of early voting, which is 45 days prior to Election Day. And then you have to sustain some kind of paid advertising now for that entire period of time. Then you have to repeak as you get into the week of what we call advance voting heading right into Election Day.”
Garrett said there is a big difference between what the gubernatorial and Senate campaigns can do and how the down-ticket races cope with the costs of early voting.
In a state with a population of 10 million, the cost of advertising and direct mail in Georgia is expensive…”Those campaigns don’t have the budget to do television or radio so they really have to rely on good, old-fashioned grass-roots campaigning,” Garrett said.

The authors add:

[Republican] Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle’s campaign officials said volunteer efforts have been prolonged.
“With an increasing number of early voters casting their ballots before TV commercials air and mail arrives, it’s more important than ever to establish a grass-roots organization that can build support for a candidate prior to early voting,” said Ryan Cassin, Cagle’s campaign manager. “This is why the lieutenant governor has worked so hard to cultivate an aggressive grassroots network in all 159 counties, and grow his team of supporters on social media like Facebook.”…Cagle still plans traditional forms of outreach, such as TV and mail ads, during the latter stages of the campaign. But the grass-roots effort has played a large part of the early campaign, Cassin said.

There are concerns about how early voting affects the overall quality of campaigns, explain Weinman and Crist:

Douglas Young, a political science professor at Gainesville State College, isn’t so sure the 45-day time frame is a good idea…”On one hand, I respect the desire to try to help more people vote because things can always come up unexpectedly on Election Day with the weather or car trouble,” he said. “However, I’m troubled by the fact that Georgians can vote so early. If you look at American history, so often in the last six weeks of campaigning is when important debates occur. So many other events can take place after people have voted.”
This includes news media uncovering new information, candidates disclosing each other’s potential weaknesses and the release of financial information, he said…”A good survey might poll those who voted several weeks early before more information came out and how many regret having voted early,” Young said. “I think a week or two weeks is gracious time to get your act together and get to the polls. Six weeks out is long before relevant information may come out.”

Go negative early seems to be the new political mantra:

Garrett said the effect of such prolonged negative campaigning has yet to be seen…”If you’re in a competitive race, the negative attacks all start earlier,” Garrett said. “I think we’re going to learn a lot this year from that kind of impact.”

Early voting may also amplify the utility of ‘new media,’ especially at local levels, report Crist and Weinman:

Grassroots and social media campaigning is certainly helping Chad Cobb, a Democrat running for Georgia House District 26…”I’m not doing signs because I haven’t had financing as far as getting those, but I do hope to do a radio ad and newspaper ad the week before Election Day,” he said. “Facebook is a gold mine for campaigning. That’s what I started in June knowing I didn’t have a Democrat opponent for the primary. After that, I knew I could reach out and talk to the people in my district. It’s more of a grass-roots campaign.”
For Carol Porter, the Democrat lieutenant governor candidate, social media also is the answer…”Early voting has changed the way we think about campaigns, and the new dynamic is Facebook, Twitter and all the other ways you reach people where they are,” said Liz Flowers, Porter’s press secretary. “Websites are a more prominent campaign tool than in the past, and Carol gets up every morning to post something on Facebook and Twitter. It’s not something the staff does, which happens in other campaigns. She puts down what is on her mind so people can directly connect to her.”

Early voting has apparently added intensity to the traditional ‘boiler room’ GOTV effort, as well, report the authors:

The Democratic Party of Georgia has set up 15 field offices across the state – its most ambitious field program ever – and filled them with people to call registered voters and encourage them to vote early, party spokesman Eric Gray said.
So far, the offices have made more than 100,000 calls statewide. That effort frees up candidates, who are under more strain with the early-voting timetable than the traditional model of nearly everyone voting on the first Tuesday in November.
“This is still pretty new territory we’re trying to navigate,” Gray said. “The candidates have to be everywhere for six weeks before the election instead of one week.”

As a resident of Georgia, I’ve been somewhat awed by the ubiquity of former Democratic Governor Roy Barnes’ internet banner attack ads, lambasting his Republican opponent for Governor, Nathan Deal as “too corrupt, even for congress.” I do a good bit of political net-surfing, and I’ve seen his ads, which I assume are keyed to net-surfer’s zip codes, flickering on websites everywhere during the last month or so. Barnes is surging nicely in a major “red south’ race that pundits are rating in toss-up territory.
Deal has responded with a YouTube video, “…If you go early and get the voting out of the way, you can just fast-forward through all of those bad commercials that my opponent is running,” Deal says.
Game-changer that it is in individual campaigns, early voting hasn’t yet translated into a significant expansion in overall voter turnout. In their article, “Reducing the Costs of Participation: Are States Getting a Return on Early Voting?” in the Political Research Quarterly, Joseph D. Giammo and Brian J. Brox cite “the puzzle” of why governments have implemented early voting when it hasn’t had much enduring effect on turnout, and note further, in the article abstract:

…Early voting seems to produce a short-lived increase in turnout that disappears by the second presidential election in which it is available. They also address whether the additional costs to government are worth the negligible increase in participation. They conclude that these reforms merely offer additional convenience for those already likely to vote.

Makes sense. Folks well-organized enough to vote early would likely vote even if the early opportunity isn’t available. We might see some improvement as boomer generations mature. But I don’t think early voting is the “killer app” for overall turnout that internet/cell phone voting or automatic registration might be.
For the campaigns of 2010, however, expect those candidates who have planned well for early voting to have an edge.