This item by Ed Kilgore is cross-posted from The New Republic, where it was first published on January 26, 2009.
The ideas and policy proposals in Barack Obama’s 2011 State of the Union Address were anything but fresh and original. Much of it could easily have been harvested from any number of interchangeable speeches given during the last 20 years–not just by presidents by members of Congress, governors, mayors, and CEOs–from both parties. Yet that may have been exactly the point. By staking his claim to decades of well-worn political detritus, I think Obama has set a cunning political trap for his enemies.
A crash program for economic competitiveness? We’ve heard it dozens of times, and Obama’s speech mainly substituted new global rivals for old ones. Harrumphing about how education and a skilled workforce are they key to national prosperity? Obviously an old theme. Reorganizing major federal departments was one of Jimmy Carter’s signature initiatives. Tax simplification was one of Ronald Reagan’s. Making government a lean, mean efficiency machine has been promised many times, most notably by Bill Clinton. Across-the-board spending freezes, support for small business entrepreneurs, growing green jobs, better infrastructure, boosting exports (without, presumably, those pesky imports)–we’ve heard it all. One conceit–the “Sputnik Moment”–was so old that you wonder if the president’s young speechwriters just found out about it.
And that’s the beauty of Obama’s address. He basically put together every modest, centrist, reasonable-sounding idea for public investment aimed at job creation and economic growth that anyone has ever uttered; and he did so at the exact moment that the GOP has abandoned the very concept of public investment altogether. He’s thrown into relief the fact that Republicans no longer seem interested in any government efforts to boost the economy, except where they offer an excuse to reduce the size and power of government.
Paul Ryan’s deficit-maniac response played right into Obama’s trap: Ryan barely mentioned the economy other to imply that every dollar taken away from the public sector will somehow create jobs in the private sector economy (a private sector economy wherein, as Obama cleverly noted, corporate profits are setting records). For those who buy the idea that government is the only obstacle to an economic boom, this makes sense. But for everybody else, the contrast between a Democratic president with a lot of small, familiar ideas for creating jobs and growth, and a Republican Party with just one big idea, is inescapable. It’s a vehicle for the “two alternate futures” choice which Obama will try to offer voters in 2012.
Moreover, Obama’s tone–the constant invocation of bipartisanship at a time when Republicans are certain to oppose most of what he’s called for, while going after the progressive programs and policies of the past–should sound familiar as well. It was Bill Clinton’s constant refrain, which he called “progress over partisanship,” during his second-term struggle with the Republican Congress. During that period, the Republicans being asked to transcend “partisanship” were trying to remove Clinton from office. And Clinton wasn’t really extending his hand in a gesture of cooperation with the GOP but, by creating a contrast with their ideological fury, indicating that he himself embodied the bipartisan aspirations of the American people and the best ideas of both parties. It was quite effective.
By playing this rope-a-dope, Obama has positioned himself well to push back hard against the conservative agenda. Having refused to offer Republicans the cover they crave for “entitlement reform,” while offering his own modest, reasonable-sounding deficit reduction measures, he’s forcing the GOP to either go after Social Security and Medicare on their own–which is very perilous to a party whose base has become older voters–or demand unprecedented cuts for those popular public investments that were the centerpiece of his speech. Either way, in a reversal of positions from the last two years, Obama looks like he is focused on doing practical things to boost the economy, while it’s Republicans who are talking about everything else. Boring it may have been, but as a positioning device for the next two years, Obama’s speech was a masterpiece.

This item by Ed Kilgore was first published on January 21, 2009.
House Republican spending-cut talk has been all over the lot during the last year. Remember Paul Ryan’s 2010 “Road-Map” document, designed to shut up critics who said GOPers were unwilling to commit to any specifics? Republicans soon backed away from the Road-Map because it included major structural changes in Social Security and a “voucherization” of Medicare. GOP interest in “entitlement reform” was also undercut by the failure of the Bowles-Simpson commission to draw much support from either party for a entitlement-cuts-for-tax-increases deal.
A focus on discretionary spending as opposed to entitlements was also encouraged by the emergence of current-year appropriations as the flashpoint of the deficit debate. And even before that, Republicans incautiously threw out a $100 billion figure for immediate appropriations cuts in their campaign-stretch-run “Pledge to America.” John Boehner eventually backed off that number, arguing that it was measured from Obama appropriations requests rather than actual spending. And then, this week, the hyper-conservative and very influential House Republican Study Committee released a proposal for very, very large permanent cuts in non-defense discretionary spending that would accompish both the $100 billion first-year target and a supposed ten-year harvest of $2.5 trillion (with lots of magic asterisks thrown in for TBD across-the-board reductions); the numbers suggest a 40% reduction over what would be necessary to continue current services. Maybe this is just a mine canary to test the willingness of Republicans to support cuts far beyond anything ever seriously proposed in the past, but House Majority Leader Eric Cantor immediately made positive noises about the package.
With me so far? The next cookie on the plate was the announcement that Paul Ryan would provide the official GOP response to the State of the Union Address.
So where are Republicans headed on spending? One thing that’s clear is that none of their proposals include defense or homeland security spending. A second thing that’s clear is that it’s entirely possible to promote discretionary cuts in the short-term and entitlement cuts later on (indeed, the Road-Map backloads entitlement cuts by “grandfathering” current beneficiaries). And a third thing that’s clear is that Republican squeamishness on big domestic appropriations cuts is a product of the popularity of most of the programs they would cut, not some concern about the impact on the economy. Republicans appear to have fully and universally drunk the kool-aid of 1930s-era belief that cutting public employment or public benefits somehow can’t damage the economy via reduced consumer demand.
On this last point, the most telling recent quote was from RSC member Tom McClintock (R-CA):

Presidents like Hoover and Roosevelt and Bush … and now Obama, who have increased government spending relative to GDP all produced or prolonged or deepened periods of economic hardship and malaise.

So don’t expect Republicans to embrace the pump-priming Keynsian theories of that notorious socialist Herbert Hoover.
The Democratic response to this mania will obviously depend on which budgetary strategy the GOP decides to pursue. It’s clear some sort of bait-and-switch from Tea Party “cut it all” rhetoric will occur, but whether Republicans will lurch in the direction of shutting down whole major federal functions or going after Social Security and Medicare is very much in the air.

This item by Ed Kilgore, James Vega and J.P. Green was first published on January 18, 2009.

President Obama’s memorial speech in Tucson has established a solid foundation for the creation of new social norms to reduce the role of violent extremist political rhetoric in American public life. But our politics will quickly revert to its previous state if political commentators and politicians cannot define a clear and reasonably unambiguous “line in the sand” between what should be considered acceptable in political discourse and what should be viewed as unacceptable.
One social norm that is already emerging is that specific threats of violence are simply no longer acceptable. It is unlikely that we will hear overtly threatening remarks again anytime soon about “meeting census surveyors at the door with shotguns”, or “watering the tree of liberty with blood” in mainstream political discourse. Nor are we likely to see men appearing at political rallies with assault weapons strapped to their backs without there being serious and strenuous outcry. Among elected officials there will for some time probably even be a self-imposed ban on “humorous” remarks about “my close friends Smith and Wesson” or coy references to “second amendment remedies” that imply the threat of using guns and violence to achieve political goals.
This in itself will certainly be healthy, but it will not prevent the gradual (or not so gradual) return of the kind of rhetoric that portrays politics as a desperate, life or death struggle between literally evil and subversive, “un-American opponents of freedom and liberty” on the one hand and “heroic patriots” standing against them on the other (in the comparable left-wing rhetorical framework the dichotomy is between embattled “defenders of traditional democratic values” and “racist, right-wing crypto-fascists”). Simply creating a norm against clear threats of violence will not by itself reverse the broader “climate of hate” or “lack of civility” in politics.
Yet neither a “climate of hate” nor a “lack of civility” are sufficiently precise to create a clear new social norm. In fact, because of this imprecision, they are already being subject to criticism and even ridicule on the grounds that “politics is necessarily passionate” and “metaphors don’t kill people, people kill people.” A number of conservative commentators have dismissed the notions as typical nanny-state political correctness run amok.
As a result, we need a standard that reasonable people can consistently apply and insist upon — one that distinguishes what is acceptable from what is not acceptable.
Politics as Warfare, Political Opponents as “Enemies”
For some time TDS has been arguing that there are two key concepts that lie at the root of both political extremism and the climate of violence: The notions of politics as warfare and political opponents as enemies. This is how a TDS Strategy Memo put it last year:

For most Americans, the most critical — and in fact the defining — characteristic of “political extremism” – whether left or right – is the approval of violence as a means to achieve political goals. Opinions on issues, no matter how “extreme” or irrational they may be do not by themselves necessarily make a person a dangerous “extremist.” Whether opinions are crackpot (e.g. abolish all paper money) or repulsive (e.g. non-whites should be treated as sub-humans) extreme political opinions are not in and of themselves incitements to or justifications for violence.
As a result, there is actually one very clear and unambiguous way to define a genuinely “extremist” political ideology — it is any ideology that justifies or incites violence.
Underlying all extremist political ideologies are two central ideas – the vision of “politics as warfare” and “political opponents as enemies.” While these notions are widely used as metaphors, political extremists mean them in an entirely concrete and operational way. It is a view that is codified in the belief that political opponents are literally “enemies” who must be crushed rather than fellow Americans with different opinions with whom negotiated political compromises must be sought.

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This item by Ed Kilgore is cross-posted from The New Republic, where it was originally published on January 6, 2011.
We’ve all heard that Democrats are in for a very difficult two years. The new GOP majority in the House of Representatives will wage a campaign to disable health reform, financial regulation, and the EPA; stonewall executive and judicial appointments; slash nondefense discretionary spending (thus undermining the economic recovery); gut Social Security and Medicare; and launch investigations into every possible White House indiscretion–potentially leading to a vote for impeachment. Democrats’ only recourse will be to practice what Howard Dean famously derided as “damage control”–to abandon hope for big progressive accomplishments and hunker down until 2012, like the Clinton administration did after the Gingrich Revolution, defending government from the worst excesses of those who would like to eliminate it altogether.
There’s only one problem with this scenario: the time-frame. Politicos and pundits are used to thinking in two-year cycles, and it’s easy to convince oneself that, in 2012, Obama will be able to capitalize on an improved economy, favorable voter-turnout patterns, and a weak GOP presidential field in order to sweep into office with a renewed mandate. But that misses a big part of the picture. Even if Obama wins reelection by a comfortable margin, it’s most likely that the House will remain in Republican hands and Democrats will lose seats in, and perhaps control of, the Senate–and beyond that, Republicans will probably do fairly well in 2014. In other words, we could be looking not at two years of damage control, but six.
Consider the Democrats’ congressional prospects in 2012. Republican successes at the state level during the past two years have given the GOP an extraordinary advantage in the decennial redistricting process. They control the governorship and both houses of the state legislature–known casually as holding the “trifecta”–in 20 states, compared to ten for Democrats. They’ve achieved this trifecta in six of the eight states that will gain representation in the 2012 round of redistricting. (As well as in three of the ten states that will lose seats, compared to two for Democrats.) While Republican gerrymandering will be restrained by rules mandating a “nonpartisan” redistricting process in some states, such as Arizona and Florida, as well as provisions in the Voting Rights Act, this will still provide them with a far-reaching advantage. Control over so many state houses and legislatures puts them in a strong position to shore up the marginal seats they just won in states like Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, and South Carolina–as well as to destabilize Democratic incumbents who succeeded by narrow margins in places like Georgia and North Carolina.
We can’t be precise about how all of this will shake out. But it is reasonably clear that, to take back the House in 2012, Democrats would have to approximate the feat they pulled off in the banner year of 2006 while facing a changed and more hostile political map. Redistricting aside, a number of places where veteran Blue Dog Democrats lost in 2010–including three in Tennessee, two in Mississippi, and one each in Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, and Alabama–are heavily Republican districts that are very unlikely to flip back in the foreseeable future.
The Senate picture for Democrats in 2012 is not much better, for the simple reason that 23 of the 33 seats that will be contested then are currently held by Democrats, reflecting the 2006 landslide. To put it another way, Republicans could lose Senate races by a 19-14 margin and still recapture the chamber (or by a 20-13 margin if they win the White House). Meanwhile several Republican senators, including Orrin Hatch of Utah, Dick Lugar of Indiana, Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, and Olympia Snowe of Maine, will go into the 2012 re-election cycle more worried about right-wing primary challenges than about general election contests.
It’s far more difficult to predict what will happen in 2014, but we do know that the Senate class up for reelection will be disproportionately Democratic, since it swept into office during the wave election of 2008. Barring any retirements or deaths Democrats will be defending 20 seats and the Republicans just 13. Moreover, in 2014, the same kind of Republican-skewed midterm electorate that appeared in 2010, dominated by older white voters, will likely reemerge, creating another wind at the Republicans’ backs.
So what’s my point, other than to pour cold water on Democratic hopes for a quick revival after a really bad midterm election? It’s that progressives need to begin adjusting their expectations. Up until now, many Democrats have judged Barack Obama according to the hopes he inspired in 2008–that he might not only undo the damage inflicted on the country by George W. Bush, but end more than three decades of conservative ascendancy and usher in a period of progressive reform. We have been judging Obama according to our wish-list: the public option, cap-and-trade, repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” And we have been disappointed when he fails to deliver.
That’s not the best way to look at the rest of the Obama presidency. Instead of hoping for a quick return to the box-checking of the 111th Congress, progressives will have to gird themselves for a long, hard struggle with conservatives–one in which avoiding defeat will more often than not have to stand in for victory. Today’s radicalized GOP is not focused on any positive policy agenda, and it does not share with Democrats the fundamental philosophical goals that make principled compromise a likely prospect. The Republicans who just took control of the House of Representatives are playing for keeps. The party’s goal for the next six years will be to wreck the public sector–fundamentally altering the social safety net, de-funding investments in our children and our economic future, and rendering the government’s regulatory apparatus deaf, dumb, and blind–and liberals must realize that preventing or reducing that wreckage is an essential, and even noble, task which we should learn to value if not love.
When the day does come that Democrats again enjoy big majorities in both houses of Congress, a robust economy, and a popular mandate to govern, it would be a matter of fundamental importance that the safety net, a functioning public sector, and an array of progressive commitments are still in place. In addition to what he has already achieved, that may well be Barack Obama’s legacy, and it would be a good one.

This item by Ed Kilgore was originally published on January 5, 2011.
If the “fundamentals“–turnout patterns, the political landscape, and a bad economy–made big Democratic losses in 2010 inevitable, what could Democrats have done to minimize the damage?
The answer to that question is obviously one that different observers will answer differently. There are three challenges faced by Democrats in 2010 that I think most progressives would agree represented major problem areas: (1) Intraparty and inter-institutional divisions; (2) an intransigent and unified opposition; and (3) difficulties in formulating and conveying an effective message.
Intraparty divisions extended in two directions, with progressives expressing periodic dissatisfaction with the White House and congressional (especially Senate) leaders on both message and policy, especially with respect to relations with Wall Street, “bipartisanship,” health care reform, civil liberties, Afghanistan, and the late-session tax deal, while deficit hawks and Blue Dogs (categories which overlapped) demanded more bipartisanship, less ambitiously progressive legislation, and “cover” for Democratic candidates in vulnerable seats. Democrats from various parts of the party often expressed frustration with the White House for perceived disorganization, passivity, and insufficient focus on the economy, and there’s little question that House and Senate leaders and the president’s team had trouble coordinating with each other.
The sources of progressive unhappiness with the White House are pretty obvious, and go back to expectations raised during and immediately after the 2008 campaign for an aggressive administration that would reverse the policies of the Bush administration, redeem longstanding progressive goals on a wide range of issues, and reengineer the Obama campaign organization into an ongoing grassroots movement bent on practical achievements. The economic circumstances faced by the new administration in late 2008 made an immediate hash of many of these expectations, and the decision that avoidance of a global depression required major subsidies for, and cooperation with, the battered financial sector tainted Obama’s image among progressives along with other elements of the electorate.
Subsequently the struggle to secure enough Republican (and in the case of health reform, conservative Democratic and industry) support for the administration’s agenda became an ongoing source of friction between the White House and party progressives, particularly when such efforts seemed to secure diminishing returns. Yet conservative Democrats (in office, at any rate; grassroots self-identified conservative Democrats, like their progressive counterparts, remained much more supportive of the president than their putative spokesmen) increasingly shared the Republican charge that the administration had overreached in pursuing health reform and climate change legislation, and in seeking more progressive income tax rates.
It’s entirely unclear that Democratic defections in the electorate had much to do with the midterm results (as noted in the last post, the relatively low turnout of self-identified Democrats was largely attributable to demographic turnout patterns of long standing rather than conscious dissatisfaction), but the disgruntlement of activists and elected officials has an indirect impact on campaigns and a direct impact on messaging and legislative strategy.
One principle all Democrats should be able to agree on is that entirely legitimate efforts to influence Democratic leaders (from the president on down) and seek leverage should not stray over the line into threats, insults, or open opposition. Progressive charges of “betrayal” against the president on this or that issue had no constructive impact other than as an exercise in venting. Blue Dog efforts in Congress or on the campaign trail to distance themselves from the rest of the party and/or to form unilateral coalitions with Republicans were equally destructive. By the same token, occasional outbursts against “the Left” from the president or the White House staff carried the unsavory aroma of triangulation.
While there is no question that Democratic congressional leaders need to exercise party discipline (perhaps more than they have done in the past) on key votes, ultimately Democratic primary voters are the only arbiters of the boundaries of the Big Tent. With respect to self-proclaimed Democratic voices who are not exposed to the discipline of Democratic voters–pundits, former officeholders, and “experts”–the habit of unfriendly criticism and the echoing of Republican talking points (particularly from cozy sinecures in conservative media outlets) should be considered disqualifying, regardless of claims to represent Democratic principles or traditions.
Now I acknowledge there are some progressives who sincerely belief a Big Tent Party is incapable of competing successfully with an ideologically driven and unified Small Tent Party like today’s GOP, largely based on the vague, but to some self-evident, theory that politics is about noise, and the most harmoniously noisy voices win all debates. A parallel theory that focuses more on the content of party messages than on their unanimity and volume holds that political success is based on maximum party differentiation and conflict. These issues invariably lead to the second challenge that faced Democrats in 2010, the consummation of the movement conservative conquest of the GOP.

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This item by Ed Kilgore was originally published on January 4, 2011.
With 2010 now over, and an entirely new and less favorable political climate clouding the skies in Washington and many states, it’s appropriate to take a quick but definitive look back at the political lessons of this last year.
After having mulled over the midterms for a good while, I’m convinced their preeminent lesson to Democrats is to avoid overthinking what happened on November 2.
It’s easy, after we all painstakingly followed every daily twist and turn in the Obama administration’s strategy and tactics during its first two years, to assign a great deal of political freight to mistakes it made or opportunities it did not embrace.
But the best starting point for assessing the impact of things Democrats did or didn’t do is to look at the impact of things beyond their control. And preeminent among those are the condition of the economy (largely inherited from the Bush administration) and the very different turnout patterns in 2010 as compared to 2008.
To boil a lot of data down to a simple conclusion, it appears that about half the swing from Ds to Rs between 2008 and 2010 was attributable to changes in turnout patterns rather than to changes in voter preference, as you might suspect when you see exit polls showing a dead heat in 2008 presidential preferences among 2010 voters (actually, given the well-established tendency of poll respondents to “remember” they voted for the winning candidate, the 2010 electorate would have almost certainly elected John McCain president).
Now it has often been asserted that the 2008-2010 changes in turnout patterns were themselves attributable to the mistakes of the Obama administration or Democratic congressional leaders–i.e., that the “enthusiasm gap” between Republican and Democratic voters (a turn of phrase often used as though “enthusiasm” is interchangeable with “willingness to vote”). But the counter-indication to that diagnosis is the simple fact that 2010 turnout patterns were fairly typical for midterms; what’s changed is that as of 2008, the tendency to vote Republican became positively correlated to age (at least among white voters), a pattern that persisted in 2010. Latino and (to a lesser extent) African-American turnout also tends to drop between presidential and midterm elections.
A less tangible but equally significant structural factor is the nearly universal experience of parties losing congressional seats in midterms two years after taking over the White House, a sort of voter reflex that has occurred in all sorts of circumstances. The only exceptions in living memory to the “midterm swoon” rule happened in 1934, the first New Deal election, and in 2002, the first election after 9/11.
Add into the standard midterm turnout patterns and the “midterm swoon” the “over-exposure” problem–a landscape in which a very large number of traditionally marginal House districts were held by Democrats after the very successful 2006 and 2008 cycles–and it’s reasonably clear in retrospect that major Republican gains in the House in 2010 were inevitable the day after the 2008 elections, regardless of the bad economy and anything in particular Democrats in office did or didn’t do.
But you can’t, obviously, ignore the economy as a factor in the 2010 elections; indeed, many observers, particularly among political scientists, consider it the preeminent factor. A thorough analysis done in 2009 by Sean Trende suggests that very high and persistent unemployment has regularly produced big midterm losses for the party in power (though there really aren’t enough examples to support any particular predictions of particular losses). Another probable indicator of the impact of the bad economy is the sharp break against Democrats in 2010 by independent voters, who typically had very high “wrong track” perceptions of government and low approval ratings of Obama, but didn’t exhibit much support for Republican policies or the GOP itself.
Some progressive Obama critics might well argue that perceptions of responsibility for the bad economy were fatally influenced by the failure of the White House to aggressively blame Wall Street or corporations. But outside the Republican base, most 2010 voters were far more likely to say they blamed George W. Bush or Wall Street than Obama for the bad economy, so it’s not clear much could have been done (other than producing a better economy) to insulate Democrats from a general “wrong track” tendency to express dissatisfaction by voting against the party in power.
So adding it all up–normal midterm turnout patterns, the natural reaction to a new administration, over-exposure of Democratic House seats, and the anti-party-in-power impact of a bad economy (regardless of “blame” for it), you can account for most of the Democrats’ midterm losses before even getting into an evaluation of Democratic policy proposals or messaging. Meanwhile, such ephemera as the relationship between Obama and outspoken elements of the progressive coalition claiming to represent the Democratic “base” are even more dubious as major factors, particularly when you look at the Obama’s consistently high job approval ratings from self-identified liberal Democrats, and the evidence that unhappy Democrats may have been more likely to vote than those pleased with Obama’s performance in office.
None of this is to suggest that policies and messaging, or strategy and tactics, didn’t matter in 2010, or that more mechanical factors like money and the eclipse of Obama’s 2008 mobilization effort didn’t matter, too. But given the vast attention paid to such factors as opposed to the structural issues I’ve emphasized here, any consideration of lessons learned in 2010 should prominently feature a much closer look at the fundamentals, which many Democrats need to understand precisely in order to grasp how they may work in Democrats’ favor in 2012.

This item is by TDS contributor Lee Drutman, senior fellow and managing editor at the Progressive Policy Institute. It is cross-posted from ProgressiveFix, and was originally published on December 16, 2010.
As Democrats shift from licking their wounds to figuring out how to win back the House in 2012, the obvious question is: what will it take? Or at least, what will it take besides the obvious triumvirate of a solidly recovering economy, a healthy dose of Republican overreach, and a bit of luck?
Over the next several weeks, I’m going to be taking a closer look at the 66 seats (net 63) that Democrats lost, asking some questions about the character of these lost districts with the goal of putting a finer point on what Democrats need to pay attention to in order to get those seats back. In this post, I’m going to focus on the role of manufacturing, race, and education.
But first a quick look at the map: Democrats lost seats all over the country: 23 in the South, 20 in the Midwest, 15 in the Northeast, and eight in the West.
The bulk of post-election commentary has blamed the losses on the fact that the incumbent party almost always loses seats in a mid-term election and the fact that Democrats were being blamed for a bad economy.
But yet California, where unemployment is 12.4 percent, did not yield a single Republican pick-up (though California is famous for having very safe districts, so this may not be a fair test.). In Oregon, where unemployment is 10.5 percent, Democrats held the five (out of six) seats they maintain.
Manufacturing
One industry that has been hit particularly hard in the recession is manufacturing. Of course, the decline in manufacturing has been going on for a long time. In 1950, roughly three in ten U.S. employees worked in manufacturing. Today manufacturing jobs account for just 8.9 percent of U.S. nonfarm jobs. In the 2000s, manufacturing lost roughly one-third of its jobs, falling from 17.3 million people to 11.6 million people.
In most cases, these are jobs that are not coming back, leaving communities that depended on them demoralized and angry. How much of a factor was this in the 2010 elections?
Across the 66 Republican pick-up districts, manufacturing accounts for, on average, 11.9 percent of the jobs. That’s three full percentage points higher than the national average of 8.9 percent. In roughly three quarters (73 percent) of the districts Democrats lost, manufacturing accounted for more than the national average of 8.9 percent of the jobs.
Not surprisingly, this was most pronounced in the Midwest, where the 21 districts Republicans picked up averaged 14.4 percent of manufacturing jobs as a share of total non-farm employment. But it was also pronounced in the Northeast and the South. In both regions, manufacturing accounted for 11 percent of the jobs in the districts Democrats lost, two points above the national average. Only in the West did the districts the Democrats lost have less manufacturing than the national average, averaging only 6.9 percent of the economy. This was the region in which Democrats lost fewest seats – only nine.
To understand the potential importance of declining manufacturing as a key to the Democrats’ losses, consider Pennsylvania’s 11th District, which includes Scranton and Wilkes-Barre. Democrat Paul Kanjorski had held the seat since 1985, but was ousted by Lou Barletta by a 55-to-45 percent margin. The district gave Obama 57 percent of its vote, and was one of only nine Republican pick-up districts that voted for Kerry. Manufacturing accounts for 16.9 percent of jobs in the district.
Or Wisconsin’s 7th District (northwest and Central Wisconsin), where Republicans picked up a seat formerly held by long-time incumbent David Obey, and a district both Obama and Kerry carried as well. Manufacturing accounts for 17 percent of the jobs in the district. Likewise with the 17st District of Illinois (northwest Illinois) – held by a Democrat since 1983, went for both Kerry and Obama, and 14.3 percent of its jobs come from manufacturing.
Education and Race
Democrats also have a problem with non-college educated whites. This has been a long-standing challenge for Democrats. Many of these voters feel frustrated and left behind by economic changes related to the loss of manufacturing jobs and global competition. They don’t see Democrats as helping them out. They wonder why they can’t seem to get ahead, and they want answers and somebody to blame.

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This item by Democratic strategist and TDS advisory board member and contributor Mike Lux, author of The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, is cross posted from Open Left. It was originally published on December 10, 2010.
Rather than writing just another blog post today, I am feeling the need to write an open letter to the President.
Dear Mr. President,
I think I speak for a lot of folks in writing this letter, although I readily admit that some of my progressive friends have given up on you and are talking about a primary challenge, and others still support you strongly no matter what. But there are a lot of us who find ourselves genuinely conflicted about your Presidency and your relationship with the progressive community.
Like millions of other Democrats, I went all out for you in the campaign, giving money, knocking on doors, making phone calls, being involved in groups who were helping you, helping out in every other way I could think of to help. Like hundreds of thousands of other progressive activists, I have spent many hours and given much money over the last two years working on behalf of your stimulus package, your health care reform bill, and your financial reform bill. Having lived through the Jimmy Carter years, when Carter governed as a moderate and was challenged in many different ways by progressives yet was still successfully labeled a liberal by Republicans, I have written time and time and again that progressives’ fate is inextricably linked to your fate whether either of us wants it to be, and that progressives should do whatever we can to make you a successful President. And I still believe that. No one wants you to succeed more than I do.
So here I am, along with so many others, out here fighting- really fighting- for everything you say you believe in. On health care, you said you were for a public option, for negotiating drug prices on Medicare, against taxing workers’ health care benefits, and that is what I and so many others who are your supporters fought for. On taxes, you said you were against the wealthiest of Americans having their Bush tax cuts extended, and that is what your supporters fought against. On these and so many other issues, we have fought by your side for what you said you were for.

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This staff post was originally published on December 3, 2010.
Writing in HuffPo, TDS contributor and Board of Advisors member Alan Abramowitz has a compelling rebuttal to the GOP meme that their midterm victories signal a massive rejection of progressive principles and policies. Abramowitz, author of The Disappearing Center: Engaged Citizens, Polarization, and American Democracy, crunches data from the Gallup News Service Governance Poll, conducted 9/13-16, and explains:

…While Americans often support conservative principles in the abstract, large majorities of Americans continue to support an active role for government in addressing a wide variety of societal needs and problems.
…On matters of principle, Americans in 2010 leaned strongly to the conservative side. For one thing, self-identified conservatives greatly outnumbered self-identified liberals: 43 percent of Gallup’s respondents described themselves as conservatives compared with 37 percent who described themselves as moderates and only 20 percent who described themselves as liberals. In addition, when asked about the role of the federal government in dealing with the nation’s problems, fully 58 percent of Gallup respondents felt that the government was “trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses” while only 37 percent felt that the government “should do more to solve our country’s problems.” Similarly, those who felt that there was too much government regulation of business and industry outnumbered those who felt that there was not enough government regulation by a 50 percent to 28 percent margin. Finally, 59 percent of Gallup’s respondents felt that the federal government had too much power compared with only 33 percent who felt that the federal government had the right amount of power and a miniscule 8 percent who felt that the federal government had too little power.

Then Abramowitz addresses the respondents’ views on “specific societal needs and problems,” and finds,

…94 percent of the public felt that government should have major or total responsibility (4 or 5 on the scale) for “protecting Americans from foreign threats.” National security is one of the few areas of government responsibility that typically receives overwhelming support from Americans of all partisan and ideological stripes.
It is perhaps more surprising, given Americans’ endorsement of broad conservative principles, that 76 percent of Gallup’s respondents felt that government should have major or total responsibility for “protecting consumers from unsafe products” or that 66 percent felt that government should have major or total responsibility for “protecting the environment from human actions that can harm it.” And it is perhaps even more surprising that 67 percent felt that government should have major or total responsibility for “preventing discrimination,” that 57 percent felt that government should have major or total responsibility for “making sure all Americans have adequate healthcare,” that 52 percent felt that government should have major or total responsibility for “making sure all who want jobs have them,” or that 45 percent felt that government should have major or total responsibility for “providing a minimum standard of living for all Americans” (versus only 33 percent who felt that government should have little or no responsibility in this area).
Even a policy as radical by contemporary standards as “reducing income differences between rich and poor” drew the support of 35 percent of Americans (versus 45 percent who did not see this as an appropriate responsibility of government). The only area where the large majority of Americans rejected a substantial role for government was “protecting major U.S. corporations in danger of going out of business” which drew the support of only 19 percent of the public.

All in all, hardly the slam dunk preference for conservative polices McConnell, Boehner and other Republican leaders say most Americans embrace. Further,

It wasn’t just liberals who supported governmental activism. Even self-identified conservatives frequently endorsed governmental activism on specific issues. For example, 63 percent of conservatives, along with 84 percent of moderates and 87 percent of liberals, supported a substantial role for government in the area of consumer protection. And despite strong opposition to recent healthcare reform legislation by conservative pundits and politicians, 33 percent of conservatives, along with 71 percent of moderates and 81 percent of liberals, supported a substantial role for government in ensuring access to healthcare.

Abramowitz devises an interesting scale depicting support for government activism among various demographic groups as indicated by the poll, and concludes,

Despite the dramatic gains made by the Republican Party in the 2010 midterm elections, support for activist government remains very strong in the American public. Evidence from the recent Gallup News Service Governance Poll shows that today, just as in the 1960s, Americans tend to be ideological conservatives but operational liberals. They endorse conservative principles in the abstract, but support efforts by government to address specific societal needs and problems. These findings suggest that attempts by congressional Republicans to weaken or eliminate government programs in areas such as consumer rights, health care, income security, and environmental protection would be politically risky. While such policies might appeal to the conservative base of the Republican Party, they would almost certainly be unpopular with a majority of the American public.

Abramowitz makes the point that Ideological Conservative Operational Liberal (ICOLs?) voters have been a significant segment of the electorate for decades — which, come to think of it, may help explain why Republicans seem to prefer broad brush liberal-bashing to analyzing opinion data issue by issue.

This item by Ed Kilgore is cross-posted from The New Republic, where it was originally published on December 3, 2010.
It’s time to smack down, once and for all, the idea that President Obama will face a serious primary challenger in 2012. This trope has been popping up ever since the 2008 general election, when horserace-hungry pundits speculated that Hillary Clinton would try to knock off the Democratic nominee four years down the road. And it’s only gotten worse with the rise of the “angry left,” which thinks Obama has been too eager to compromise with Wall Street and the Republicans, and considers itself the representative of the Democratic base.
Now, in the aftermath of this month’s “shellacking,” mischief-making pundits have seized on a couple of polls to burnish their narrative: One is from AP/KN in late October, showing that 47 percent of Democrats want the president to be challenged by another Democrat in 2012 (with 51 percent opposed); and one came from McClatchey/Marist just before Thanksgiving, showing 45 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents favoring a primary challenge (with 46 percent opposed).
Sounds pretty dangerous for Obama, right? Well no. For a substantive primary challenge to occur, a coherent bloc of Democratic voters–whether liberal or moderate–would have to sour on Obama and coalesce behind another candidate in such a way that threatens the president’s hold over his base. There’s just no sign of that happening. For instance, the very same AP/KN poll shows that three-quarters of Democrats want to see the president re-elected; i.e., they’re not really discontented with Obama and they just like the idea of a primary that gives them options. Likewise, the McClatchy/Marist survey doesn’t show a single bloc fed up with Obama and preparing to bolt for a latter-day Howard Dean: Given a choice of hypothetical challenges, 39 percent of Democrats and leaners preferred a candidate from the left of the president, and 40 percent a candidate from the right.
What’s more, Obama’s straight approval ratings among rank-and-file Democrats are very high. According to Gallup’s latest weekly tracking poll, 81 percent of self-identified Democrats give Obama a positive job approval rating. Among liberal Democrats, who are supposedly the most likely to rebel, the number rises to 85 percent. Let’s compare that to the last three Democratic presidents, two of whom faced serious primary challenges: At equivalent points in their presidencies, Bill Clinton had a positive job rating among Democrats of 74 percent; Jimmy Carter’s rating was 63 percent; and Lyndon Johnson had a rating of 66 percent. And Carter’s and LBJ’s numbers had to fall by ten or twenty more points before either attracted another contender.
The racial politics of the Democratic Party also make a serious primary challenge less likely. Sure, some progressives have been raging at Obama as of late. But anyone credibly threatening to topple Obama would have to pry away a significant chunk of Obama’s support among African Americans–and in case you haven’t noticed, Obama is the first black president. His job approval rating among African Americans is currently 89 percent, and it has not gone below 85 percent at any point of his presidency. Can you conceive of a left-wing revolt that runs directly counter to the manifest wishes of the largest and most loyal segment of the Democratic base? Imagine Hillary Clinton launching her 2008 candidacy without any of the goodwill that her husband’s presidency had engendered among African Americans.
Above all, primary challenges to incumbent presidents require a galvanizing issue. It’s very doubtful that the grab-bag of complaints floated by the Democratic electorate–Obama’s legislative strategy during the health care fight; his relative friendliness to Wall Street; gay rights; human rights; his refusal to prosecute Bush administration figures for war crimes or privacy violations–would be enough to spur a serious challenge. And while Afghanistan is an increasing source of Democratic discontent, it’s hardly Vietnam, and Obama has promised to reduce troop levels sharply by 2012.
Most importantly, who would run? Hillary Clinton has ruled it out categorically. Al Gore’s electioneering days appear to be long over. There’s been talk of Russ Feingold running (mainly based on a misunderstanding of an “I’ll be back” statement he made on election night which seems to have referred to a future Senate race). Dean would win headlines, but has a poor reputation in Iowa, where any progressive challenge would have to be launched. There are no guaranteed primary vote-getters out there like Estes Kefauver in 1952, and certainly no one close to the stature of Ted Kennedy. And there’s a reason no incumbent president has actually been defeated for re-nomination since the nineteenth century.
So that’s it. What we are likely to see is a marginal opponent: a Dennis Kucinich, or a Harold Ford, or some celebrity who hasn’t held office but is willing to spend some money. More serious comers will be chased away by the hard, cold reality of what it would take to mount a presidential campaign against the White House in places like Iowa and Nevada and New Hampshire and South Carolina. And President Obama will be left facing challengers similar to Pete McCloskey or John Ashbrook, who came at Richard Nixon from the left and right, respectively, in 1972. To the extent that these candidates are remembered at all, it’s as roadkill on the way to Nixon’s renomination.