Heat wave got you feeling a little limp and ragged? Hie thee to Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball, where Sabato and U. Va. Center for Politics colleague David Wasserman have an energy jolt for battle-weary Dems in their article “The 2006 Midterms: Guilt by Association? Trends show an impact on contests across the nation.” The authors paint an encouraging picture of campaign ’06 as the 100 day countdown begins:

Surer signs are emerging that something more substantial than a “micro-wave” is heating up this summer. Historical trends and big picture indicators–generic congressional ballot tests and approval ratings of President Bush’s job performance in particular – have always been heavily stacked against the GOP in this “sixth year itch” cycle, but aggregations of more race-specific indicators are now suggesting that Republicans are headed for their most serious midterm losses in decades.
…more voters and local Democratic leaders than ever before seem ready to cast aside their personal affections for longtime GOP incumbents for the sake of sending Congress and the Bush administration a message. Possible Democratic takeover seats such as Rep. Johnson’s and Virginia GOP Rep. Thelma Drake’s, which seemed implausible targets as recently as a year ago, have slowly moved down the pipeline into contention, are now fully engaged by party committees alongside the nation’s most competitive. These are the kinds of movements that are characteristic of “macro-wave” elections, the only kind of election that would flip the leadership of Congress to Democrats this year.

Sweet. And it gets even better, say Wasserman and Sabato:

In the past month or so, it’s appeared as if Democrats have been on the upswing almost effortlessly as members of the GOP have suffered under the burden of the administration’s sagging numbers. More individual races are attracting the attention of voters and donors as Election Day comes into closer view, the overwhelming preponderance of finance reports and voter surveys released in the last month have shown races moving in principally one direction–towards Democrats.
…But often the story is best told by the polls that aren’t released: in the past month, the Crystal Ball has encountered a veritable ocean of polling data released by Democratic candidates and consultants touting substantial (if unbelievable) advances, but GOP firms haven’t been nearly as eager to release private polling. As long as this remains the horse-race storyline, it won’t be hard to tell which party is entering the final stretch of 2006 with confidence in their prospects.

And the authors are jacking up their assessment of Democratic prospects in November:

In this inhospitable climate, the GOP could well get burned worse than initially expected. At this stage, the Crystal Ball is shifting its outlook from a Democratic gain of 6-8 to a Democratic gain of 12-15 seats in the House. We also believe that our original guestimate of a Democratic gain of 2 or 3 seats in the Senate is probably too low; we now expect a Democratic Senate gain of a minimum of 3 seats and a maximum of 6 seats…In the governorships we will now be surprised if Democrats do not pick up at least 4 net governorships, bringing them to a total of 26 of the 50 statehouses. The Democratic gubernatorial gains could even be as high as 6 statehouses.

But, echoing the conclusion of an earlier DCORPs study, Sabato and Wasserman have a cautionary proviso:

Democrats cannot truly capitalize on the withering political climate faced by the GOP unless they succeed in convincing large numbers of voters to evaluate their home-state Republican candidates through the powerful lens of national displeasure. In other words, the size of Democrats’ gains will be contingent upon how well they play the game of guilt by (Bush) association as Republicans seek to escape the shadow of their unpopular chief executive.

Fair enough, and we suspect that there will be no shortage of Democratic candidates eager to accept this challenge.

by Scott Winship
For those who just can’t get enough of my netroots obsession, the American Prospect has published a piece by yours truly that synthesizes the various posts I’ve written here and refines the points I’ve been trying to make. Like everything in The Daily Strategist, my opinions and perspectives do not represent The Democratic Strategist, and I suspect that only one of my bosses would fully embrace the article. I still like the other two though.

Jim VandeHei’s WaPo article “Democrats Scrambling To Organize Voter Turnout” reports growing concern among Dems that their GOTV program is lagging behind the GOP’s ground game. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has joined the critics, says VandeHei:

Pelosi — echoing a complaint common among Democratic lawmakers and operatives — has warned privately that Democrats are at risk of going into the November midterm elections with a voter-mobilization plan that is underfunded and inferior to the proven turnout machine run by national Republicans.
…”What the party really needs is to get serious about local, volunteer-based” operations, said Jack Corrigan, a longtime Democratic operative. “The last-minute, throw-money-at-it approach . . . does not really solve the fundamental failure to organize that is there. The DNC is moving in the right direction, but needs to do more, fast,” he said.

VandeHei quotes DNC Chairman Howard Dean’s reply that “What many people do not realize is that…we are turning our operation into a 50-state, get-out-the-vote effort.” Dean is asking donors for $25 per month for the Dems’ GOTV effort.
The GOP turnout program does sound better-coordinated in VandeHei’s description. But pro-Democratic groups, including the AFL-CIO, America Votes and MoveOn are also gearing up for a major turnout effort. In addition, it appears that GOP resources will be stretched a bit thinner in November. L.A Times staff writer Janet Hook reports mounting evidence that a good many of the GOP’s historically “safe” House of Reps seats are now being aggressively contested — and more vigorously defended.

by Scott Winship
OK…which one of you guys is responsible for this? Believe it or not, I had no role in putting that together.
As you may recall, I’ve been pretty tough on the demographic research firm American Environics. (see here, here, and here). My biggest criticism has been that their data appears to contradict the respected American National Election Study, showing strange trends and implausible levels of authoritarianism. The statistic that always seemed craziest to me was their claim that in 2004, 52 percent of Americans – not 52 percent of men, mind you – agreed that “the father of the family must be the master in his own house”. Fifty-two percent? Surely no more than, say, 30 percent of women would agree with that, meaning that 70 percent of men would have to agree. No way.
And the NES justified my disbelief: 78 percent of adults agreed that “women should have an equal role with men in running business, industry and government”. Only 16 percent agreed in the General Social Survey that “women should take care of the home, not the country”. My current boss, Ruy Teixeira, and I came up with a number of other reasons to question their data.
Well, let me backtrack a little bit. I recently saw AE’s principals, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, give a presentation on their research. The first “interesting…” moment came when they announced that their survey had a question that matched the NES “equal role” question I just cited. They found that 87 percent – compared with our 78 percent – agreed that women should have an equal role. In other words, both surveys implied that Americans think men and women should have equal opportunities outside the home, but AE’s implied that a majority believes fathers should rule the home.
But I still wasn’t buying it. I next went to a breakout session that Nordhaus and Shellenberger gave. This was one of those times where I just couldn’t let go of something. So when I saw an attendance sheet being passed around the room, I got an idea that I shouldn’t have pursued…but I did. The conference was mainly comprised of state and local elected officials. All of them had seen Nordhaus’s and Shellenberger’s first talk. I wrote at the top of a sheet of paper, “What percentage of your constituents would agree that the father must be the master of his home?” I made three columns: State, Male Constituents, and Female Constituents. And then I passed it to my right, telling my neighbor that, “We’re supposed to pass this around.”
Then I watched as the survey made it to Nordhaus’s immediate left, was walked over to the attendee on Shellenberger’s immediate right, and eventually made it back to me. You can’t imagine how much I enjoyed this. I held onto the survey and later tallied up the responses.
Well, in the end I found that the average attendee thought that 43 percent of her or his constituents agreed with male supremacy in the home. “Interesting…” moment number two.
Of course, there were umpteen million problems with my “survey”. So late that night, when I should have been sleeping, I was instead looking for more evidence. Eventually I stumbled upon a polling data archive [$] that included a question that was worded almost just like the AE question. This question – in a 2000 survey administered by the marketing research firm DDB Needham Worldwide – asked whether respondents agreed that “the father should be the boss in the house.” And you just know what’s coming, don’t you? “Interesting…” moment number three. The survey found that 44 percent of adults agreed.
Nordhaus and Shellenberger found that people were becoming more male supremacist between 1992 and 2004, so the AE figure for 2000 is presumably lower than 52 percent. That puts the DDB Needham figure and the AE figure reasonably close – maybe eight points apart – but it’s still a fairly notable discrepancy.
Similarly, while AE’s data showed that 40 percent of Americans agreed that “men are naturally superior to women” in 2004, the DDB Needham data put the figure at 30 percent in 2003.
Now this sounds like I’m poking another stick in the eyes of Nordhaus and Shellenberger, but actually, I’m feeling a little better about their data. Their survey includes Americans as young as 15, and I suspect that if N&S excluded the 15-17-year-olds, their male supremacy figures would drop a little bit more, basically because a lot of teenagers are immature or disproportionately come from families and cultures with more traditional family roles.
Nonetheless, there are still a number of discrepancies between the AE data and the NES, including trends that go in opposite directions. In a perfect world, AE would provide access to their data, or at the very least more detail about their survey methods. But AE’s data is understandably proprietary, given that they operate in a competitive market. It should be easy enough, though, for them to provide additional basic tabulations so that others can compare them to other polls.
Anyway, how depressing is it that something like one in three American adults basically believes that women are inferior to men?….

For a revealing look at the GOP skinny on some specific House of Reps races, read Kos’s post “House 2006: Reynolds names names.” Kos provides NRCC head Tom Reynolds’s assessment of endangered GOP incumbents, along with the NRCC perspective on vulnerable Dem incumbents, both culled from Reynolds’ recent Roll Call article. Kos reports the DCCC’s take on Reynolds’s analysis, noting that Reynolds, who has eliminated all mention of the word “Republican” from his own campaign’s website, is also vulnerable.

In the wake of the renewal of the Voting Rights Act, The Boston Globe‘s Joseph Williams has an article discussing the pros and cons of “majority-minority” districts from a progressive point of view. As Williams explains, celebrations of the Act’s renewal are tempered with a growing concern about the dilution of the African American vote:

But the renewal overshadowed a quiet but growing debate among Democrats: whether mostly black voting districts in cities like Petersburg — which helped elect the state’s first African-American House member in more than 100 years — should be diluted to spread around liberal voters and help elect more Democrats get to Congress.
While most black politicians and activists agree with the concept of “majority-minority” districts, others say they’re a mixed blessing: By sweeping a concentrated number of black voters into fewer districts, the Voting Rights Act’s unintended effect may be to increase racial polarization and help preserve Republican congressional power

Williams adds,

Some Democrats, including some African-Americans, believe their party has better odds of retaking Congress if African-American voters are divided among many districts, leaving just enough of a percentage in any one district to elect minority candidates while helping more Democrats run competitively in surrounding districts.

Since African Americans vote about 90 percent Democratic, finding the right balance is a difficult challenge. Democrats squeemish about addressing such raw political calculations should take note that Republicans’ are more than eager to overload districts with African American voters. As Williams notes:

…Republican-dominated legislatures try to design districts with the maximum possible number of minorities — such as the 2d district of Louisiana, which is 63.7 percent black and elected Representative William Jefferson to Congress with 79 percent of the vote.

The point is echoed by University of Virginia elections expert Larry Sabato “The Democrats have an enormous number of excess votes in these majority-minority districts.” Maryland Political Scientist Ron Walters disagrees, pointing out that 60 percent African American voters may not be enough to secure minority representation in some districts.
The debate will continue to intensify at the state level, where congressional districts are redesigned. (For a more in-depth analysis of the issue, see Thomas F. Schaller’s article). If Democrats do as well as expected in the gubernatorial races this fall, and win a few key state legislatures, they will soon be faced with increasingly difficult redistricting decisions to secure the Party’s future.

by Scott Winship
Apologies for the lack of posts, but I’m realizing that when I have a roundtable discussion to coordinate, posting has to take a backseat. I’ll do better though. Please. Don’t go.
What’s the matter with Kansas? Possibly nothing, according to a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by Duke economist Jacob Vigdor [pdf] (go Blue Devils!). This conclusion isn’t that novel, but rather than pointing to cultural issues as the reason that working class voters vote Republican, Vigdor argues that voters’ well-being depends not only on their standard of living but on their living standards relative to others in their reference groups.
I’ll be honest with you – you don’t want to read this paper unless you love the Greek alphabet. It has a deceptively catchy title – “Fifty Million Voters Can’t Be Wrong” – but a whole lotta math. But here’s the gist. Research indicates that individual evaluations of well-being depend on how others are doing. Vigdor considers two types of “others” you and I might compare ourselves to – people in a similar economic situation as us, and people who are geographically near us. He proposes a mathematical model relating political preferences to income and income relative to a reference group. Theory predicts a number of ways that relative income could affect political preferences, and real-world trends and patterns can be cited that are consistent with these predictions. If the predictions are borne out and accurately reflect reality, then the finding that relative income affects political preferences can explain why the working and middle classes tend to vote Republican and why they have not become more Democratic than they have as inequality has increased in recent decades.
Whew! Got that? OK, let me break it down more slowly.
Vigdor’s theory of relative income predicts that the more income inequality there is in a geographic area, the more support there will be for redistribution among the poor and among the rich who are altruistic. The idea is that when a poor person looks around and sees rich people, she is more inclined to support redistribution than if she looks around and sees only poor people. When an altruistic rich person encounters lots of poor people, she will be more likely to support redistribution than if she only comes across other rich people. Among the working and middle classes, support depends on how many rich people there are, how many poor people, and how altruistic voters are. With more rich people, for instance, the working and middle classes will support redistribution because they will benefit. When Vigdor estimates the key “parameters” in his mathematical model using statistics, he finds that the estimates are consistent with these predictions.
An implication of Vigdor’s findings is that one reason support for the Democratic Party among the working and middle classes failed to increase more as inequality grew is that segregation between the rich and everyone else has been on the rise for several decades. That means that today, the poor and the working and middle classes are less likely to see rich people when they look around than they were in, say, the 1960s.
Additional support for Vigdor’s theory comes in his finding that the relationship between income inequality and support for Al Gore in 2000 is stronger in urban counties than in rural ones. That is, in cities, people can look around and see whether there are many or few rich people, while in rural areas with low population density, it’s more difficult to do so.
Vigdor’s theory also predicts, and his data supports the predicton, that poor, working-class, and middle-class voters should have been less likely to vote for Gore the more poor people there were in their county. Rich individuals should have been – and were – less likely to vote for Gore the more high income people there were.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly for the Kansas question, Vigdor’s theory predicts that if voters compare themselves to people who are in a similar economic situation, then working- and middle-class voters should be less likely than poor or rich voters to support the Democrats. That’s because of the particular way that income is distributed in the U.S.
As income increases from $0 to a working-class income, the number of people at each income level gets larger and larger. That means that more often than not, when people in this income range (“the poor”) compare themselves to other poor people, they will find that there are more poor people doing better than them than worse. They will thus tend to support redistribution.
On the other hand, as income increases from a working-class income to an upper-middle-class income, the number of people at each income level gets smaller and smaller. When people in this income range (“the working and middle classes”) compare themselves to other similarly-situated people, they will find (more often than not) that there are more working- and middle-class people doing worse than them than better. Consequently, they will tend to oppose redistribution.
Finally, as income increases from an upper-middle-class income to an upper-class income, the number of people at each income level continues to get smaller and smaller, but the decline is not very steep. When the rich compare themselves to their peers, they will tend to find that there are nearly as many people doing worse than them as there are doing better. The rich will tend to be indifferent toward redistribution.
These predictions about support for redistribution are also supported by Vigdor’s data. Vigdor notes that since the New Deal, the income distribution in the U.S. has changed so that more people fall in the “working and middle classes” range where comparing oneself to one’s peers will produce opposition to redistribution. He also speculates that if, in the post-Civil-Rights-era South, poor whites began to compare themselves not to other poor whites but to even poorer blacks (who would not have been considered a proper reference group during Jim Crow), then southern whites would have become less redistributionist and would have moved into the Republican column, which is of course what happened.
It’s important to note that – as with all models – the estimates produced are accurate only to the extent that the model accurately depicts reality. The point of Vigdor’s analysis is not that his estimates are the final word or that relative income is the be-all, end-all, but that under fairly basic assumptions about how different factors affect political preferences, a relatively simple model applied to real-world data confirms the predictions made before he began playing around with the data. The evidence implies that Democratic underperformance among working- and middle-class voters is due in part to the tendency of people to compare themselves to others and to a number of social patterns that made this tendency prevent people from becoming more Democratic.
Incidentally, I remain a Blue Devils basketball fan even though a) their engineering school denied my undergraduate admissions application and b) Coach K is allegedly a big conservative. Don’t forget to check out the roundtable discussion on redistricting, electoral competition, and targeting of districts.

Democrats interested in longer-range strategy should check out a Sunday WaPo article by Chris Cilliza and Zachary A. Goldfarb, “Atlas Group Strives to Map Out Success for Democrats.” According to the article, three veteran Democratic strategists, Mary Beth Cahill, Steve Rosenthal and Michael Whouley are launching “The Atlas Project” to design a “comprehensive strategy” to win votes in a dozen ‘battleground’ states. The authors say the innovative project will “analyze election data, interview local Democrats, and mount a polling and targeting effort” beginning right after the November elections. Rosenthal, former head of America Coming Together (ACT), says the Atlas Project will provide

a more thorough targeting analysis than has ever been done before…In the heat of an election, it seems we’re always playing catch-up…Our goal with this project is to bring together the best strategic thinkers — the innovators at the state and national level — to learn from what’s been done over the past several elections.

Polling firms Garin Hart Yang Research Group, Penn Schoen & Berland and Brilliant Corners have already been retained, and Copernicus Analytics has been recruited to analyze the data so political messages can more effectively win the support of specific constituencies. The first Atlas Project strategy ‘road maps’ should be available by January ’08.

A new bipartisan poll of likely voters in 50 of the most competitive districts of the U.S. House of Representatives indicates that Democratic candidates have a significant advantage three months ahead of the November elections. The poll, conducted 7/19-23 by Democrat Stanley Greenberg and Republican Glen Bolger for National Public Radio, indicates that Democrats have a 6-point lead over Republicans in the 50 districts — up 18 points from 2004, when Republicans won these districts by 12 percent.
The 50 districts were selected, according to rankings by leading political analysts, including The Cook Political Report, Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball, the Rothenberg Political Report and National Journal’s Hotline. Of the 50 selected districts, Republican congressmen held 40 of the seats, with 9 for Democrats and 1 Independent. 12 of the 50 seats were open, with 10 held by Republicans, 1 Independent and 1 Democrat. As Bolger says of the 50 districts:

This is where the effort is going to be made. This is where the money’s going to be spent , and this is where the messages are going to be the sharpest…This is where the House hangs in the balance.

Less than a third of the respondents, 29 percent, said they planned to vote for the incumbent. Only 14 percent said they would “definitely” vote for the incumbent, compared to 24 percent who said they would “definitely” vote against the incumbent. The Democrats’ largest — and most surprising — margin of support, +13, came on the so-called “values” issues, including flag-burning, stem-cell research and gay marriage.
However, the poll indicated that values issue ranked 7th among voters priorities in chosing a candidate, behind the war in Iraq; jobs and the economy; taxes and spending; health care; and terrorism and national security.
Two thirds (66 percent) of Democratic respondents said they were “very interested” in the November elections, compared to 56 percent of Republicans saying the same. Among all LVs surveyed, 54 percent said they were “more enthusiastic about voting than usual,” compared to 41 percent who said so during the last mid-term election in 2002. Generic Democratic candidates had a +7 point advantage over Republicans among LV’s “if the election were held today.” Dems had a +31-point advantage in voting for competitive Democrat-held seats and a +4 point advantage in contests for GOP-held seats.
President Bush’s job approval among LVs in the 50 competitive districts was 42 percent, with 55 percent disapproval, slightly better for him than recent figures for the nation as a whole.

Support for U.S. intervention in international conflicts is down, according to a poll conducted 7/21-25 by New York Times/CBS News. As Jim Rutenberg and Megan C. Thee note in their wrap-up story on the survey:

By a wide margin, the poll found, Americans did not believe the United States should take the lead in solving international conflicts in general, with 59 percent saying it should not, and 31 percent saying it should. That is a significant shift from a CBS News poll in September 2002 — one year after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — when the public was far more evenly split on the issue.

The poll also found that 58 percent of Americans believe that the U.S. “does not have a responsibility” to resolve the conflict between Israel and other Mideast nations, but do support an international peacekeeping force on the Israel-Lebanon border.
Rutenberg and Thee cite “a strong isolationist streak in a nation clearly rattled by more than four years of war” and add that 56 percent of those polled support “a timetable for reduction of United States forces in Iraq.” Further, a majority of respondents support U.S., withdrawall “even if it meant Iraq would fall into the hands of insurgents,” say the authors. And a large majority clearly see U.S. Iraq policy as a fiasco:

More than twice as many respondents — 63 percent versus 30 percent — said the Iraq war had not been worth the American lives and dollars lost. Only a quarter of respondents said they thought the American presence in Iraq had been a stabilizing force in the region, with 41 percent saying it had made the Middle East less stable.

The poll had some good news for Dems, with 53 percent of respondents saying they held a “positive view” of the Democratic Party, compared to 37 percent saying the same for the GOP. Asked who they would vote for “if the election were held today”, 45 percent of RV’s chose the Democratic candidate in their district, compared to 35 percent for the Republican.