For all of the media coverage and water-coooler buzz about global warming as an issue of concern, it checks in fairly low in priority rankings, when it is listed at all. Most recently, it ranked 7th in a New York Times/CBS News poll conducted 7/9-17.
But such rankings of the importance of issues may understate the depth of concern many people have about global warming. A national survey conducted by Yale University, Gallup and the ClearVision Institute 7-23-26 and released last week indicates that 40% of respondents now say that presidential candidates’ positions on the issue will “strongly influence” their vote in both the presidential primaries and general election.
The survey also found that 85 percent favored requiring automakers to increase the fuel efficiency of cars, trucks and SUVs to 35 mpg, “even if it meant a new car would cost up to $500 more.” In addition, 82 percent of respondents want to require that at least 20 percent of electricity comes from renewable sources, even if it costs an extra $100 annually. However, two-thirds of respondents opposed raising gasoline taxes and 71 percent were against raising electricity taxes to curb carbon emissions.
Democrats have a significant edge in addressing global warming. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll conducted 7/27-30 found that 48 percent of adults said the Democratic Party would do a “better job” of addressing the issue, while only 9 percent favored the Republicans.
Democrats are expected to provide the needed leadership on the issue, a challenge that is proving increasingly difficult for a party well-short of a veto-proof majority. As Daniel W. Reilly explains in his post on the topic at The Politico, “Democrats have held more than 120 hearings on global warming and have delivered countless speeches in this Congress. Yet a climate change bill is still in the drafting stages in the Senate.”
With a president hostile to environmental reform in the white house, enactment of global warming reforms could be more than a year away. But clearly, the low regard the public has for the GOP’s commitment to curb global warming gives Dems an advantage. In light of the alarming greenhouse gas threshold announcement in today’s WaPo, highlighting the difference between the parties on the issue could make a pivotal difference in the ’08 presidential and congressional elections.

Lots of progressive activists are agonizing about John Edwards’ campaign fundraising woes. But the more dramatic money saga is on the Right, where third quarter fundraising numbers appear to confirm that Mike Huckabee, for all of his yeasty ideological and personal qualities, just can’t raise the dough.
After all, Huckabee is almost perfectly positioned to finish second or third in Iowa. Were he to beat Fred Thompson there, he’d not only become the Hot Item in the Republican race, but would probably become the overwhelming favorite of the Christian Right. Moreover, he’d roll into New Hampshire touting a national sales tax plan that makes both corporate and “populist” conservatives drool. He’s got the rock band; he’s got the humor; he’s got the weight loss; he’s got the Kevin Spacey looks. He’s got every political insider in the hep world expecting him to make a move and keep the contest interesting.
As the old saying goes: If he had some ham, he’d make a ham sandwich, if he had some bread (pun intended).
With every imaginable realistic-longshot advantage, Huckabee raised about a million in the third quarter. By contrast, Ron Paul, whose only real function in the campaign is to ensure that candidate debates don’t sound like a jingoistic echo chamber on Iraq, raised five times that much. Ol’ Fred raised nine times that much. And though we haven’t seen Sam Brownback’s numbers yet, I wouldn’t be surprised if the doomed Kansan outraised Huckabee.
Unless something changes real fast, Huckabee’s campaign will become a talking point in every professional fundraiser’s pitch to future political campaigns.

Speaking of Iowa, there’s new data on the current preferences of those almighty likely Caucus-goers. It’s the latest installment (and the first since May) of the Des Moines Register’s Iowa Poll, which has a large impact because the results are so often referred to in the Register‘s much-followed campaign coverage.
Among Democrats, the major news was another confirmation that Hillary Clinton’s in the lead (contradicting the recent Newsweek poll of Iowa showing Obama in the lead). More important than the numbers (Clinton 29, Edwards 23, Obama 22, Richardson 8, Biden 5) is the finding that HRC is supported by nearly half of those (one-third of the total) who say they’ve definitely made up their minds. The poll could also pour a bit of cold water on the Richardson campaign; the Guv was at 10 percent in the Iowa Poll back in May.
On the Republican side, the poll shows the two candidates who dissed Iowa by skipping the August State Republican Straw Poll slipping into fourth and fifth place, with Rudy Guiliani falling from 17 percent to 11 percent since May, and John McCain diving from 18 percent to 7 percent. The major beneficiaries of that lost support appear to be Mike Huckabee, now in third place with 12 percent, and Fred Thompson (not a candidate back in May), who’s now at 18 percent, trailing front-runner Mitt Romney (29 percent, down 1 from May). Fred’s robust support levels are somewhat surprising; he’s only been in the state once since his touring-the-State-Fair-in-a-golf-cart fiasco in August. But that doesn’t mean he’s necessarily got the kind of organization that could convert that support into Caucus results. Once again, Iowa Exceptionalism is on display in this poll, which provides no evidence of the Rudy boom or the McCain revival that national polls have shown.

Eriposte at The Left Coaster takes a stab at answering an interesting question, “Is Hillary Clinton a ‘Corporate Democrat’“? Eriposte concludes that front-runner Clinton is less “corporate” than many Dems might believe, according to her track record. However, Eriposte flags Ari Berman’s Nation article “Hillary Inc.” making the opposite argument persuasively enough. It would be helpful if a smiliar analyis was applied to all of the candidates. For a good gateway link to the AFL-CIO voting ratings of candidates who are senators or congress members according to their votes on labor issues, click here.

From his perch at the Top of the Ticket blog at the L.A. Times, Andrew Malcom flags a fun feature at Beliefnet.com about the presidential candidates’ religious talk:

It’s called the God-o-Meter and it’s billed as “a scientific measure of God-talk in elections.” It’s a joint operation between Beliefnet and Time magazine and it rates candidates on the basis of what they’re saying about religion and the religious communities’ reactions to them.

As you might imagine it’s quite a horse-race in the GOP field, with Huckabee, McCain and Romney leading the pack with a three-way tie at 8 points. Readers may be surprised, however, to learn which Democratic presidential candidates also score an 8 on the God-o-Meter: Barack Obama and Bill Richardson, indicating perhaps that position on the left-right political continuum has little to do with the propensity for God talk. Dodd and Giuliani have the lowest scores, Dodd being the only candidate to refuse to talk about his religious beliefs in detail on principle and Giuliani because, well, “he doesn’t like to either,” according to Malcom.
(For readers seeking clues about their own spiritual direction, Beliefnet also has a 20-question quiz, “Belief-O-Matic,” which ranks the religious faiths and denominations most closely alligned with the test-taker’s beliefs. Despite the flip test name, the questions are thoughtfuil and provocative.)

Media Matters’ Paul Waldman has a very angry article up at The American Prospect that can best be described as a cry of rage and frustration at the predominant position of Iowa (and to a lesser extent New Hampshire) in determining the Democratic presidential nomination, despite another three years of handwringing about the irrationality of the situation. Waldman’s take is distinctive mainly insofar as he assigns principal blame for Iowa’s continued power to the political press corps rather than to the candidates, the DNC, or to Iowans themselves.
I dunno about that. The DNC and the candidates, acting in concert, could have neutered IA and NH for this cycle, simply by refusing to recognize delegates chosen there, and by refusing to campaign there, just as they’ve successfully neutered efforts by MI and FL to change the calendar. The one point (which Waldman doesn’t raise) on which the media seem most responsible is with respect to the DNC’s one timid effort to interfere with the Duopoly, the authorization of a post-IA, pre-NH Caucus in Nevada. If current media coverage is any indication, NV’s theoretically important results aren’t going to get much attention at all as the press corps flies from Des Moines to Manchester in January (indeed, NV could lose its position entirely if IA and NH move up in response to the Republicans’ authorization of significant early events in MI and FL).
Waldman’s argument (echoed by Kevin Drum and Matt Yglesias) that Iowa’s power is actually increasing strikes me as an overstatement of a situation that’s attributable to completely coincidental candidate dynamics. Given the total domination of the field, financially and in terms of national appeal, by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, it’s true that for Edwards, a loss in IA will likely be the end of the road. But HRC can obviously survive an IA loss, and so could Obama, particularly in the case of an Edwards defeat which would create a one-on-one competition that is bound to help Obama. And for Richardson, Dodd or Biden, an upset third-place (much less second-place) finish in IA would represent a new lease on life, not a death sentence.
And look at the Republican side of the campaign: the two leading candidates (according to national polls) for the GOP nomination are both pursuing post-IA victory strategies (one, Fred Thompson, seems to be pursuing a post-IA, post-NH strategy). Sure, the refusal of candidates to boycott MI and FL is a factor here, but in part it’s because there are so many delegates to be won later. Maybe the media will crown Romney the nominee if he wins IA and NH anyway, but it’s just as likely that IA will create a viable dark horse like Huckabee who will muddy the waters.
By examining the low participation rates in the Duopoly events, Waldman does effectively dispute the much-heard claim that voters in IA and NH have earned their power by developing a tradition of careful and knowledgeable candidate vetting, essentially performing a public service for the rest of us, who would prefer to tune in much later. Iowa’s especially low participation rates are, of course, less attributable to apathy than to the peculiar demands associated with spending a long, cold evening listening to boring speeches, mastering the arcane Caucus rules, and also voting on party platform issues. But Waldman’s point is well-taken: it’s not like we’re witnessing the revival of Athenian democracy in IA or NH every four years.
He does not, however, grapple directly with the other common argument for beginning the nominating process as we do: it forces candidates to engage in a form of retail politics that keeps them from simply becoming actors in TV ads. Lest we forget, the first major effort to challenge the Duopoly on the Democratic side–the southern-based version of Super Tuesday held in 1988–produced what was then dubbed a “tarmac campaign” where the candidates never engaged with voters at all, and the results simply confirmed what had happened earlier in NH.
We obviously need a new system for nominating candidates for president. But we need a “system,” not just something that’s different from the status quo. The remarkable durability of the Duopoly has always suggested to me that the best opportunity to abolish it would be in a cycle where an incumbent president is running for re-election without intra-party opposition (a situation that Democrats have only enjoyed once since 1964). Maybe that could happen going into 2012. But shhhhhhh! Let’s don’t talk about it much, or Democrats in Iowa and New Hampshire may start eliciting pledges to maintain the Duopoly forever.

The folks at Third Way have a poll and analysis out this week on the politics of abortion. The poll, by the Feldman Group, was actually conducted back in July. The analysis, by Third Way’s Rachel Laser, is new.
The main value of the poll is two-fold: first, instead of trying to force people into “pro-choice” and “pro-life” camps, it encourages expressions of ambiguity, best indicated by the fact that sizable majorities of Americans appear to simultaneously believe that abortion is the “taking of human life” and a practice that should basically be up to women and their families and doctors, not government. Second, the poll is pretty sophisticated in showing significant shifts of opinion on ancillary issues like emergency contraception, depending on whether the question links the subject explicitly to that of abortion prevention.
On a quick reading, the poll analysis seems to suggest that talking about abortion prevention (which is exactly what Third Way thinks progressive politicians should do) can backfire if perceived as a “dodge” of the underlying issue of abortion itself. But the only way around that is to self-label oneself as “pro-choice” before embracing the common ground of abortion prevention, which undoubtedly shrinks that common ground. Short of simply identifying oneself with the morally incoherent views of so many Americans, it’s hard to see a position that won’t ultimately fall prey to the polarized labels. And while reaching out to “the other side” does have the value of lowering temperatures, let’s not forget that we may well be one Supreme Court appointment away from a situation where yes-no questions about the legality of abortion become impossible to transcend.

For your Friday mirthmaking, check out Kos’s jolly take on the new GOP “wide stance” logo and its hidden symbols. Suffice it to say that the designer has not exactly created an artistic triumph of the highest order. Hundreds of comments add to the merriment.

I concluded the previous post by suggesting that Christian Right leaders needed some evidence that their Threat to take a walk if Republicans nominated Rudy Giuliani was shared by actual voters. Well, turns out (via TPMCafe’s Election Central) that there’s a new Rasmussen poll providing just that. It suggests that fully 27 percent of Republicans would go third-party in a hypothetical Giuliani-Clinton contest.
A poll showing support for an unnamed third-party candidate more than a year prior to an election is not terribly solid proof of what voters would actually do after a vicious and polarizing D versus R campaign. But it could raise some serious doubts among Republicans who don’t much like Giuliani but see him as the one guy who could hang onto the White House.

Just in case anybody in Republican elite circles wasn’t paying attention over the weekend when Christian Right leaders gathered in Salt Lake City and then threatened to abandon the GOP if Rudy Giuliani is its presidential candidate, two of those leaders stood on some of the largest MSM soapboxes to repeat The Threat.
On Monday night, Family Research Council president Tony Perkins went on Anderson Cooper’s CNN show and suggested not very subtly that conservative evangelical defections would make a Giuliani nomination “Hillary Clinton’s ticket to the White House.” And today, Perkins’ mentor, Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, has an op-ed column in the New York Times making it clear that while Christian Right leaders aren’t united on a lot of things (including a candidate for president), they are united in the determination to take a walk if Rudy’s leading the ticket in 2008.
The timing and nature of The Threat is hardly coincidental. As yesterday’s Washington Post/ABC poll illustrated, electability is far and away Giuliani’s most valuable credential: fully half of Republicans in that poll said Rudy was the strongest candidate on that front. Perkins and Dobson are trying to raise every possible doubt about the ultimate truth of that proposition.
Sometimes threats are empty, of course. At The FundamentaList, Sarah Posner dismisses this one:

The idea that the Christian right would endorse a third-party candidate is ludicrous, given its pathological need to defeat Hillary Clinton and ultimately maintain sway over the White House. Focus on the Family’s James Dobson has a history of threatening defection from the GOP to endorse a third-party candidate. He has never followed through because he’s savvy enough to know it would render him irrelevant. No doubt the leaks were designed to put pressure on the GOP, not to nominate Giuliani.

Talk like that, of course, will also put pressure on Christian Right leaders to put up or shut up, and the real test of The Threat down the road will be the relative willingness of rank-and-file conservative evangelicals to rule out Rudy, and more importantly, to unite behind a candidate who could actually beat him.