One of the key political terms in which variable definitions cause a lot of confusion is “battleground states.” In the context of a presidential general election, the term ultimately means states that the two major party candidates target with time and money, particularly as election day nears. In earlier stages of the presidential cycle, the term is more speculative, as reflected in the inveterate promises of this or that candidate to “expand the battleground” by placing more states into play. Early general election polling–particularly now that state-by-state polls have become more common–is often the source of such speculation; that’s why you hear talk from the Obama campaign that the Democrat will at least throw a scare into McCain in such previously invulnerable GOP bastions as Georgia or North Carolina, and why McCainiacs like to tout outlier polls showing him well ahead in PA or competitive in CA.
Over at OpenLeft, Chris Bowers has made an effort to identify the likely 2008 battleground states by a more scientific method: using the close 2004 race as the baseline, and adjusting the numbers to reflect recent demographic trends, with the final ranking also reflecting polling evidence and common sense. Chris also takes the simple but often forgotten step of stipulating a very close general election, not just because he thinks that’s likely, but because the very term “battleground” becomes misleading in an electoral blowout. That’s why he assigns such states as Florida and Pennsylvania–almost invariably described as battleground states in most lists–to McCain and Obama, respectively, on the theory that if McCain’s leading in PA or Obama’s leading in FL down the homestretch, the candidate is probably going to be well ahead nationally. (He also views IA and MN as Obama states in a close race, and WV and MO as McCain states in a close race). This doesn’t mean the campaigns will ignore such states in the general election; it is, instead, a prediction of where the big effort will and won’t be made in the final push.
Chris comes up with a list of eight likely battleground states, with five (CO, NH, OH, NM and WI) leaning to Obama, and three (MI, NV and VA) leaning to McCain.
You can quibble with his list, which Chris acknowleges as very preliminary, but it is based on a sound methodology that generally avoids the pro-Obama temptations of overinterpreting positive 2006 election results or making outlandish assumptions about turnout, and the pro-McCain temptation of giving the Arizonan a thumb on the scales in every state where Obama did poorly in this year’s primaries.
One important point that Chris doesn’t explicitly address, but that we might as well get used to, is the recurring possibility of an election in which the popular vote winner loses the electoral vote, and thus the election. It obviously happened (with an assist from the Supreme Court) to the benefit of Republicans in 2000, and could well have happened to the benefit of Democrats in 2004 (in the latter case because Kerry’s percentage margin of defeat in states like OH, IA and NM was a lot smaller than his overall popular vote deficit). Given the likelihood that Obama will run better in solid red states than is usual for a Democrat, you’d have to guess–and it is just a guess–that he’s the more likely victim of this sort of miscarriage of political justice. But you wage election campaigns with the system you have, and those who fear an electoral vote/popular vote split better get behind the state-based National Popular Vote initiative (which would reward EVs to the national popular vote winner) pronto.

One of John McCain’s most important political assets is his reputation as the scourge of congressional porkmeisters. It represents a nice “three-fer” for the Arizonan, by (1) reinforcing his “maverick” image as a man unafraid of malefactors in either party; (2) appealing to conservatives who are convinced that runaway federal spending is the Bush-era GOP’s great sin, evidencing the betrayal of “conservative principles;” and (3) enabling him to support tax policies even more irresponsible than Bush’s, on grounds that he will pay for old and new tax bennies with a brave and vicious attack on federal spending.
That’s why I strongly recommend a short but efficient piece by Jonathan Chait in The New Republic that takes a sledgehammer to McCain’s carefully constructed edifice of fiscal responsibility, built almost entirely on the foundation of the GOP nominee’s famous antipathy to congressional appropriations “earmarks.”
First, says Chait, McCain conflates “runaway federal spending” with domestic appropriations that are in fact the least of our fiscal problems:

In fact, the growth of government under Bush is mostly due to higher spending on defense and homeland security, which have grown from 3.6 percent of the economy to 5.6 percent. Domestic discretionary spending (that is, programs other than entitlements) has fallen as a share of GDP, from 3.1 percent to 2.8 percent.

Second, McCain conflates “excessive domestic appropriations” with earmarks, those infamous “special projects” inserted into appropriations bills by self-promoting members of Congress:

McCain is promising to cut taxes by $300 billion per year on top of the Bush tax cuts, which he would make permanent. In addition to this, he promises to balance the budget in his first term. When asked how he could possibly pull this off, McCain has asserted that he could eliminate all earmark spending, saving $100 billion per year.
I don’t find this explanation persuasive. The first point I’d make is that $100 billion is, in fact, less than $300 billion. The second point I’d make is that McCain won’t even cut $100 billion, or anywhere close. By conventional measures, earmarks only account for $18 billion per year. McCain gets his number by employing an unusually broad definition of what constitutes an earmark. McCain’s definition includes things like aid to Israel and housing for members of the military that are not “pork” as the term is understood. When asked if he would eliminate those programs, he replied, “Of course not.”

Third, when pressed on any particular earmarked project, McCain invariably retreats into an attack on the earmarking process, instead of attacking the project as pork, making his claims of vast future savings completely illusory:

The Washington Post recently did a long reported story on the bear DNA project that McCain has made the butt of so many jokes. (“Three million to study the DNA of bears in Montana. Unbelievable,” scoffs one McCain ad.) The Post found that the project is a tool for measuring the bear population in Glacier National Park and has a sound scientific basis. When contacted by the story’s author, McCain’s campaign gave a familiar reply: “Senator McCain does not question the merits of these projects; it’s the process that he has a problem with.” If McCain won’t even commit to zeroing out his single favorite example of government waste, it’s not clear that he’ll save any money at all.

In other words, that brave pork-fighter and spending tightwad John McCain is actually the worst kind of conventional Washington politician when it comes to fiscal policy, supporting very specific tax cuts that create huge budget deficits, and then railing against “pork” and its congressional purveyors in the abstract, and by meaningless anecdote. In this respect, as in others, he resembles no one as much as George W. Bush.

Just as everyone is still struggling to absorb the import of the yesterday’s loud but murky DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee ruling on MI and FL, the votes are largely in for the Puerto Rico primary, which Hillary Clinton won by a bit more than a two-to-one percentage margin, and by roughly 140,00 popular votes.
This outcome will once again create a dialogue-of-the-deaf over the officially meaningless but symbolically significant (at least according to HRC supporters) total popular vote issue. Most pro-HRC counts exclude four Caucus states where raw votes were not officially tabulated, and also give Obama zero votes in MI, where his supporters were forced to vote for “Uncommitted.” Most pro-Obama counts include estimates of the four caucus vote totals and either exclude MI as tainted or give Obama all the “Uncommitted” votes. (Another, by RenaRF at DailyKos, excludes primaries or caucuses in jurisdictions that don’t participate in the general election, denying HRC her PR margin and Obama some small victories elsewhere).
There is no such thing as an “official” popular vote count, since again, it really doesn’t matter in the official nomination process. But with only SD and MT–two small states where Obama is expected to win but not overwhelmingly–still left to vote, it’s reasonably sure that both campaigns will claim a total popular vote victory after Tuesday. The two things no one can deny is that it was, in retrospect, an awfully close race, but one in which Barack Obama will finish with a lead in pledged delegates, and barring some implosion in his general-election standing, the nomination. The general feeling is that he’ll cross the threshold to a total majority of pledged and announced-superdelegate votes by the end of this week.

The DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee did a good job of resolving the dispute over what to do about the Florida and Michigan delegates. The compromise, which seats their entire state delegations and allows each delegate to cast a half vote, looks like one which an overwhelming majority of Democrats can live with. I would expect that a tiny percentage of Democrats at most will vote for McCain or stay home in November because of it. That’s probably about as good a compromise as could be expected.
Some Clinton supporters feel she deserved better. According to the NYT wrap-up, she gets 19 more FL delegates than Obama, giving her a total of 52.5 percent of FL’s 211 delegates, close enough to her 49.8 percent of Florida’s Democratic primary voters. But she only got a 5-delegate pick up in MI, for a total of 53.9 percent of MI delegates, close enough to her 55 percent of MI voters in the Dem primary, especially considering that Obama was not on the ballot. The argument that ‘Hey, he took himself off the ballot’ didn’t count for much. Nor should it. He should not be penalized for following the spirit of Party rules. Clinton supporters can argue that she deserved a few more MI delegates, while Many Obama’s supporters feel the Committee was generous in giving her any edge in MI delegates. In all, the Committee awarded Clinton a net gain of 24 delegates.
The Clinton campaign can’t gripe much about the composition of the deciding committee. They had an edge in terms of their supporters being a at least a plurality of the Rules and Bylaws Committee, and probably a majority. And the two chairs of the committee, Alexis Herman and James Roosevelt were both former Clinton Administration officials. That should put a chill on making too much of the “we wuz robbed” argument.
Bottom line is that there was no compromise that would make everybody happy. This one seems fair enough.
The contest may continue at the convention, starting with the credentials committee. It’s a close race and both campaigns would be remiss if they didn’t press their respective cases throughout the process. Both Obama and Clinton seem poised to support their Dem opponent if she/he is the Party’s certified nominee.
As for the future, the DNC and all Democrats should press the case for primary reform, starting the day after the general election, so we don’t have to go through this divisive exercise again. Senator Levin has a fair point in arguing the injustice of letting New Hampshire and Iowa have disproportionate influence in every presidential election. Other states should have a fair opportunity to go first, and the Rules and Bylaws Committee should begin moving in that direction.
Given the experience of the ’08 primary season, however, we may soon see some jockeying on the part of the states to see who goes last. Imagine the clout CA, TX or NY could wield if their primaries were the last in the nation.

This morning’s staff post linked to the essential reading all good political junkies should undertake in preparation for tomorrow’s DNC Rules and Bylaws meeting in Washington to resolve the Michigan and Florida delegate issue. Walter Shapiro’s Salon piece on the subject provides a good preview of the likely outcome:

Despite desperate cries from the Hillary Clinton camp to count every delegate from these two outlaw primaries, which she won, the contours of a half-a-loaf deal are already in place, according to Democratic insiders. Key figures on the Rules Committee informally agreed by telephone Wednesday night to seat the entire Florida delegation based on the Jan. 29 primary, but to give them each only half a vote. The same principle would be applied to Michigan, but there are still unresolved complications over how to handle the “Uncommitted” delegates chosen in the Jan. 15 primary in which Barack Obama’s name was not even on the ballot.
Under this 50 percent compromise, the beleaguered Clinton would gain a 28-delegate edge (19 from Florida and nine from Michigan), not counting the half-votes from the 53 superdelegates from the two rogue states. With Obama nearly 200 delegates ahead and the clock nearing midnight for Clinton, the Rules Committee’s verdict is likely only briefly to delay the anointment of a Democratic nominee.

As Shapiro and others note, a legal brief from DNC lawyers suggesting that party rules limit the Rules & Bylaws Committee from seating more than half the MI and FL delegates paved the way for this solution, which also puts Democrats in line with the sanctions meted out to MI and FL by the Republican Party.
The big issue to watch for tomorrow, however, is how the Clinton campaign reacts to the half-a-loaf deal. They’ve certainly shown no overt signs of accepting a compromise, given the demonstrations they are organizing for the meeting, demanding that both states get full delegation votes.
But the situation really does pose a terrible strategic dilemma for HRC. Accepting the deal would only narrow Obama’s delegate lead marginally, but it would ratify the popular vote results for MI and FL. Depending on how caucus states are counted, and pending the results of the last three contests (where HRC’s popular-vote count is in danger of being undermined by a low turnout in Puerto Rico), party-wide acceptance of the MI and FL votes might bolster her cumulative-popular-vote-victory argument. This is about the only weapon she has left with superdelegates (other than electability claims that aren’t strongly supported by general election polls).
Accepting the deal, though, would presumably foreclose the option of an effort through the Credentials Committee prior to and at the Convention to seat all of the MI/FL delegates, which is the only way under current conditions that HRC can get close enough to Obama’s delegate counts to have any chance to deny him the nomination. On the other hand, rejecting the deal and clearly indicating she’s continuing the battle all the way to Denver could produce a negative superdelegate reaction, and perhaps divisions in her own camp.
The underlying reality for quite some time has been that HRC’s slim hopes for victory depend almost entirely on some terrible development for the Obama campaign that makes her largely theoretical electability arguments tangible and urgent. It hasn’t happened, and the primary season is about to end.
Still, there’s a path she could take that would avoid the appearance of a deeply divisive and largely hopeless fight all the way to Denver. She could accept (with misgivings) the MI/FL deal, get through June 3, make her last pitch to superdelegates, suspend (but not abandon) her campaign, and then sit tight and try to pay some bills. If the Obama campaign does somehow implode, and he’s running fifteen or twenty points behind McCain in the weeks before the Convention, HRC could revive her campaign, and the superdelegates could flip en masse to Clinton if they wished. At that point, her popular-vote-victory claims would provide a nice rationalization for repudiation of the putative nominee by a panic-stricken party leadership.
This course of action, and the period of reconciliation it would invite, might also increase the currently low odds of an Obama-Clinton Unity Ticket, if that’s indeed HRC’s goal, as many observers believe.
I have no clue if this reflects the thinking within the Clinton camp. But she’ll have to make up her mind pretty soon, and the brinksmanship reflected in her rhetoric on MI and FL, and her encouragement of a sense of grievance among her supporters, can’t be sustained much longer without serious negative consequences for her own and the party’s political future.

In his latest National Journal column, Mark Blumenthal provides an excellent brief summary of what we can learn and what we can’t learn from early general election polls, both of the national and the state-by-state variety, in terms of the electability arguments being made on behalf of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. He concludes that both Obama and Clinton have entirely plausible “paths to victory” in a general election, though Clinton at present has a somewhat larger group of “reachable” states from which to cull 270 electoral votes. He also warns readers that polling evidence from some key states is sparse, of uneven quality, and most obviously, very early.

Tomorrow is a huge day for the Democratic presidential race, and Salon.com‘s Walter Shapiro has a preview of “The fight over Florida and Michigan,” as does Christi Parsons of the Chicago Tribune‘s Washington Bureau. L.A. Times political reporter Mark Z. Barabak addresses the issue in a FAQ format and Marie Horrigan of CQPolitics reports on the infighting among Michigan Dems over proposed solutions. See also MSNBC First Read, which names the 30 members of the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee who will make the decision and also identifies the candidates 21 of them support (13 back Clinton, 8 favor Obama and 9 are uncommitted). First Read pundits Chuck Todd, Mark Murray, and Domenico Montanaro consider three possible outcomes of the Committee’s deliberations.
Eric Kleefeld riffs on “What’s Obama’s Route To The White House?” over at TPM Election Central, a good companion piece to Robert Creamer’s HuffPo article “Obama’s Path to Victory in November.”
Ilan Goldenberg, policy director of the National Security Network, has an article in The American Prospect, “It’s Time to Stop Talking About Soft Power,” which should be of interest to those who followed James Vega’s five-part series on Democratic policy and military strategy here at TDS.
Chris Kromm of Facing South mulls over Poblano’s 538.com simulations to answer an interesting question: “Election 2008: Are there any Southern presidential ‘swing states’?”
Paul Maslin, pollster for candidates Howard Dean in ’04 and Bill Richardson in ’08, tackles a question of increasing interest for Dems: “Will the youth vote win it for Obama this fall?”, also at Salon.com

Over at The Corner, Ramesh Ponnuru linked to my post yesterday predicting that the McCain campaign would inevitably head to the gutter in an effort to frighten voters about Barack Obama. Ramesh responded:

I will make a prediction of my own: The Democrats are almost certain to treat any campaign that threatens to deprive Obama of the presidency as negative and nasty.

I suspect where he’s going with this is the rejoinder that “comparative” campaigning is entirely legitimate, and that complaints about “negative” campaigning are sometimes efforts to avoid public scrutiny of one’s record or “character.”
Fair enough. But as my post discussed at some length, there are specific reasons that the attack on Obama won’t be some sort of high-minded analytical examination of his voting record or policy platform–or even of his “experience”–but will instead focus on “character” issues that represent little more than an effort to raise invidious fears about Obama’s “otherness.”
I got into this analysis as a meditation on Mark Schmitt’s argument that the only real message left to Republicans this year is an “American identity” appeal that battens on public fears of the unfamiliar. But let me come at this from another angle.
McCain is a candidate with a lot of built-in handicaps in terms of the partisan fundamentals, the mood of the country, and the issues landscape. He also suffers from a palpably unenthusiastic party base, and will be the first Republican presidential candidate in eons to struggle with a financial disadvantage. Against these handicaps, he has to capture the electoral “center” while shoring up his base. And he’s facing a Democratic nominee with his own appeal to the “center,” as measured by tangible support in the primaries and the polls from independents and even some disgruntled Republicans.
There are two ways to “capture the center” in electoral politics. One way is to occupy it with popular and transpartisan policy positions that create the impression that the candidate is bigger than his or her party, and is in alignment with the public’s needs and aspirations. (That, of course, runs the risk of discouraging the party base.) The other way is to push your opponent out of “the center” with attacks on him or her as “extremist,” which has the added benefit of helping to fire up your own base.
It is theoretically possible to campaign both ways. That, in fact, was what Richard Nixon did in 1972, through a series of strategic moves that appealed to various Dem-leaning voter and interest groups, while savaging McGovern as a pacifistic nimrod surrounded by drug legalizers, abortion supporters and welfare rights advocates. Bill Clinton arguably pulled off a milder version of the take-the-center, push-the-other-guy-out strategy in 1996.
Can John McCain really occupy the political center in the course of a long general election campaign? It’s doubtful. His “centrist” reputation is largely the product of a brief moment in his career–his 2000 nomination campaign–and the friends (in the news media) and enemies (in the conservative movement) that moment earned him. He’s spent much of this electoral cycle so far erasing all the positions that once made him look like a “maverick,” engaging in conspicuous love-ins with the high poohbahs of conservative economic and cultural orthodoxy. And it’s very likely that McCain’s long honeymoon with the news media is coming to an end, in part because of clever and systematic Democratic efforts to upbraid the media for the “free ride” they’ve given the Arizonan, and in part because this year’s Democratic nominee, unlike the last two, is not a man the media instinctively dislike (au contraire)
Moreover, McCain’s most distinctive policy position going into the general election is his identification with the idea of “victory” in Iraq. That will continue to be a very hard sell.
So given John McCain’s positioning, and a political and financial landscape which will deny him any breaks, it’s simply hard to deny that his best bet will be to try to push Obama out of the center, which is what conservative opinion outlets and operatives are going to do anyway.
It is also theoretically possible that McCain’s attacks on Obama could be substantive, and focused on policy positions and a Senate voting record that Republicans will describe as “liberal, liberal, liberal” in the grand old fashion of the last three decades. But this may well be the first presidential election in the last three decades where voters would actually prefer a “liberal, liberal, liberal” to anyone tainted with the GOP label.
It will be vastly easier for the McCain campaign to talk about the Rev. Wright, and flag pins, and Michelle Obama’s alleged lack of patriotism, and Obama’s “radical friends,” and under the radar screen, about secret Muslims and interracial families.
Maybe McCain would personally prefer to make his campaign an exchange of views on weighty matters of war and peace and prosperity and values and “reform.” I’m sure Ramesh Ponnuru would prefer that, too. But like it or not, the GOP and its candidate are out of step with the country right now on a wide array of issues, and the GOP “brand” is going to be a huge drag on McCain. It would be naive to think that his campaign won’t exploit the “character” loophole in the general rules of issues-based campaigning to make this election not about policies, but about the unknown, and to many voters frightening, prospect of a country led by this unprecedented politician named Barack Obama. And once McCain starts down this road, he won’t be able to come back.

At the Politico today, Ben Adler has an article assessing the three women (all governors) most frequently mentioned as possible running-mates for Barack Obama: Janet Napolitano of AZ, Kathleen Sebelius of KS, and Claire McCaskill of MO. As the headline and lede suggest, Adler’s hypothesis is that these three women differ from Hillary Clinton in that they are not “polarizing,” as though this is somehow a typical gender problem. That annoying detail aside, the piece is interesting in that Adler chooses to assess the governors through the eyes of Republicans in their states. And while it’s obvious from the tone of their comments that there’s not a lot of genuine bipartisan affection in play in any of the three states, the governors do get high marks from their opponents for having world-class political skills. It’s worth a read.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist

Senator John McCain’s campaign fairs poorly in CNNPolitics.com‘s story, “GOP strategist: Democrats outmaneuver GOP over GI Bill.” The legislation, which McCain opposed, provides for a modest expansion in benefits for veterans with three years of post 9-11 service.
McCain argued that the bill would reduce military retention by 16 percent and discourage service members from becoming noncommissioned officers. However, GOP strategist and former Mike Huckabee campaign chairman Ed Rollins reportedly said of McCain’s opposition to the bill, which last week passed the U.S. Senate by a hefty 75-22 margin:

I think John McCain has been outmaneuvered…Sometimes in politics, there are intellectual issues and emotional issues…John McCain is going against veterans groups; he is going against a constituency that should be his. … But I think he is on the wrong side of this issue.

As for the political fallout, CNN quotes Rollins:

A lot of Republicans are voting for this, and I think to a certain extent as it moves forward there will be more and more. There will be tremendous pressure from veterans groups past and present and I think you will see a lot of bipartisan support for this as well…Intellectually, John McCain may be right, the president may be right. Emotionally, you are on the wrong side, you can never win an emotional battle in an intellectual argument.

While the occasionally insightful Rollins may have a point about intelllectual arguments rarely winning emotional battles (ala Drew Westen), I have doubts that McCain is on very solid intellectual ground with his argument about the bill hurting military “retention rates” by 16 percent. It just sounds a little too precise. Can any study accurately predict what military personnel will decide to do out of context? If our trained soldiers perceive a real threat to national security, would we really lose 16 percent? With respect to Iraq, on the other hand, we ought to be scaling back a lot more than 16 percent of those soldiers who put in three very tough years, anyway. It seems a lame excuse for opposing a bill that would help America’s veterans.
McCain has tried to distract attention from the issue by bashing Obama for not having served in the military. As for veteran status as a pivotal factor, Rollins points out that “George Bush’s father was a war hero lost the veterans’ vote to Bill Clinton…Same way with Bob Dole, a war hero lost the vote.”
In other words, military service is a significant plus for any political candidate. But it does not necessarily protect a candidate from the consequences of exercizing poor judgment on major issues, especially at a time when the candidate’s political party is having its own very serious problem with “retention rates.”
McCain has an alternative veterans’ benefits bill that would base education benefits on a sliding scale according to an individual’s years of service, and some version of it may eventually pass. His opposition to a military benefits bill supported by 75 Senators nonetheless puts him squarely in league with the out-of-touch Bush-Cheney ideologues who have a tight fist for vets, while squandering billions of taxpayer dollars on military contractors of questionable integrity to prolong a horrific military quagmire, with no end in sight. “Hey, I’m a vet” and even a war hero narrative may have less political resonance in such a context.