This item by J.P. Green was originally published on June 12, 2012.
In my June 8 post on “The Recall in Broader Perspective,” I briefly referenced the GOP meme “that public workers have extravagant pensions, propagated by Republicans who amplify a few horror stories as emblematic of public worker retirement benefits.” It’s part and parcel of a broader Republican scam vilifying public workers as overcompensated in general.
For a revealing example, see Josh Barro’s Bloomberg.com post, “Does Obama Know Why the Public Sector Isn’t ‘Doing Fine’?” in which he spotlights city employees of San Jose, CA, where

…Costs for a full-time equivalent employee are astronomical and skyrocketing. San Jose spends $142,000 per FTE [full-time employee] on wages and benefits, up 85 percent from 10 years ago. As a result, the city shed 28 percent of its workforce over that period, even as its population was rising.

The unspoken, but unmistakable gist of Barro’s post is “See, those greedy public workers are responsible for causing their own layoffs.” Without even taking a look at nation-wide data, Barro is clearly suggesting in his post’s title that San Jose’s experience is somehow typical of public workers in cities across the nation. Worse, he takes it a step further and blames public worker unions in his concluding sentence, “If the president wants to know why state and local governments can’t afford to hire, he could start by asking his own supporters in public employee unions.”
That’s why Romney can say stuff about President Obama like “He says we need more firemen, more policemen, more teachers. Did he not get the message in Wisconsin?” and get away with it, while media dimwits point their fingers at Obama for his one gaffe in three years.
Had Barro clearly presented his horror story as an exceptional case, that would be defensible. Or had he backed it up with some credible national data, you could grudgingly credit him with a solid argument. But he didn’t do that because he couldn’t.
As David Cooper, Mary Gable, and Algernon Austin of the Economic Policy Institute note in their report, “The public-sector jobs crisis“:

Despite these significantly higher levels of education–and contrary to assertions by some governors in recent state-level debates–the most rigorous studies have consistently shown that state and local government employees earn less both in wages and total compensation than comparable private-sector workers (Keefe 2010). Using data from the Annual Social and Economic Supplement of the Current Population Survey and standard regression models for wage analyses, we compared the wage income of private-sector employees with that of state and local government workers. After controlling for education, experience, sex, race, ethnicity, marital status, full-time/part-time status, number of hours worked, citizenship status, Census region, metropolitan status (whether residing within or outside the boundaries of a major metropolitan area), and employer size, we find that state and local government employees make, on average, 11.7 percent less in wages than similar private-sector employees.

if those greedy public workers can be faulted for their extravagant compensation packages, what should be done about their better-paid private sector cohorts?
Look, none of this is to deny that there are public worker pension/salary horror stories. But it takes a pretty shameless media to imply that extravagantly compensated public workers are the norm. Is it too much to ask that some honest journalists call Romney out on it?

This item by J.P. Green was originally published on June 7, 2012.
Ron Brownstein has a couple of recent posts tracking white working class political attitudes that should be of interest to presidential campaign strategists. In “Working Class Whites Still Wary of Obamacare,” he explains:

The problem, as on almost all issues relating to government’s role, is centered on whites, particularly those in the working class. According to figures provided by Kaiser, in their latest survey, 35 percent of non-white respondents believe that the law will benefit their family. That compares to just 14 percent who believe they will be worse off (the remaining 39 percent don’t think it will make much difference). Whites offer nearly a mirror image: just 18 percent believe the law will leave their family better off, compared to 38 percent who believe they will be worse off as a result.
The skepticism among whites is most concentrated among whites without a college degree. Just one-in-seven of them believe health care reform will personally benefit them or their family. Among college whites about one-in-four expect to personally benefit from the reform.
Gallup Polling in March 2010 found that while few whites expected to personally benefit from the law, a majority of them believed it would benefit low-income families and those without health insurance. That suggested they viewed health care reform primarily as a welfare program that would help the needy but not their own families. Kaiser didn’t replicate that question in their latest survey, but it may have detected an echo of that sentiment in the finding that twice as many whites believed the law would benefit children than thought it would help their own family.

Ironically, adds Brownstein, “…non-college whites are uninsured at much higher rates than those with degrees; for that reason, the law would personally benefit far more of them than the college-educated whites who are somewhat more open to it.” Yet, “the targets of that effort remain entirely unconvinced that the law will benefit them. Rather than ameliorating their skepticism that government will defend their interests, it appears to have only intensified it.”
Brownstein warns that the skepticism about the ACA is “another brick on the load Obama is carrying with white working class voters, who appear poised in polls to reject him at levels no Democratic presidential nominee has experienced since 1984.”
In another post, “How Diversity Divides White America,” Brownstein addresses white working class attitudes towards immigrants revealed in the just released Pew Research 2012 Values Survey:

Among college-educated whites who identify as Democrats-an increasingly central pillar of the party’s coalition-over four-in-five say that the immigrants do not threaten American values. But nearly two-thirds of Republicans without a college degree-an increasingly central pillar of the GOP coalition-do consider immigrants a threat to American traditions…That overwhelming unease among the blue-collar (and older) white voters central to GOP electoral prospects today represents a huge hurdle for the Republican strategists who want the party to expand its Hispanic outreach.

One conclusion to be drawn from both of Brownstein’s articles is that the Obama campaign should upgrade it’s outreach to white workers as a large constituency which benefits from Obama’s reforms, yet remains unpersuaded — doubt which the Republicans are eagerly prepared to reinforce in their ad campaigns.

This item by Ed Kilgore is cross-posted from The New Republic, where it was originally published on June 4, 2012.
Now that Mitt Romney is officially the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, and we have some distance from the primaries that decided it all, it’s time to consider the lessons. Otherwise, poor memories, shaky analysis and self-serving spin will combine to congeal a conventional “wisdom” that is anything but.
As someone who obsessively chronicled every twist and turn of this very odd nomination contest for TNR, here are my five top takeaways:
1.Mitt Romney is a very lucky man. The Republican Party’s dominant conservative wing resisted his nomination as long and as hard as it could, but in the end, had no better options. Herman Cain was not ever going to win the nomination. Nor, likely, was the immensely vulnerable, highly unpopular Newt Gingrich or the extremist Michele Bachmann, both of whom were an oppo researcher’s dream. The two potentially viable rivals were Tim Pawlenty, who gambled everything and lost on the fool’s gold of the Ames Straw Poll in Iowa last summer, and Rick Perry, who ran one of those rare, amazingly inept presidential campaigns that are a constant reminder of the importance of minimal competence in politics. It’s a sign of Romney’s vulnerability that Rick Santorum–whose 2006 Senate defeat told you everything you needed to know about how well he wore on voters, and how much ammunition his record provided his opponents–came within a few thousand votes in Michigan of sending Mitt’s campaign into a potential death spiral and the national GOP into a panic. Anyone who tells you Romney’s nomination was pre-ordained by some iron law of succession or some shadowy “Establishment” was obviously not paying much attention to how the deal actually went down.
2. Conservatives reasserted their control of the GOP. You’ll also hear that Romney’s nomination was a victory for Republican “moderates” over “movement conservatives” or their latest grassroots incarnation, the Tea Party. Don’t believe it. Yes, hard-core conservatives would have preferred a different nominee–for the most part, someone who wasn’t running, like Jim DeMint or Mike Pence or Marco Rubio–but they had issues with virtually everyone in the actual field, and more importantly, they got what they needed from Romney, who was, as everyone seems to have forgotten, their own preferred candidate in 2008. He’s atoned for his health care heresy by promising about ten thousand times to repeal ObamaCare root and branch. He’s on board with the twin pillars of the Small Government counter-revolution, the Cut, Cap and Balance Pledge, and the Ryan Budget. He’s foresworn increased taxes as any part of any budget deal, however large. He’s met all the basic social-issues litmus tests of the Christian Right. He was by most measures the hawkiest of all the candidates on foreign policy issues. And for good measure, he tacked hard right on immigration policy in order to croak Rick Perry. Thanks to his “flip-flop” problem and conservative hyper-vigilance, there will be no back-tracking by Romney between now and November, or most probably, between now and the end of time. Mitt’s no stubbornly independent cuss like John McCain. He’ll stay bought.
3. 2012 is not just “about” the economy. The primaries did not notably feature debates among Republican candidates about how, exactly, to bring the U.S. economy back. In part that’s because they were in total agreement on the big points: both fiscal and monetary stimulus of the economy are terrible ideas; excessive federal spending and extension of housing credit to irresponsible poor and minority folk caused the Great Recession; and a systematic agenda of universal deregulation, public-sector austerity, health-care rationing to reduce costs, restriction of collective bargaining rights, and high-end (including corporate) tax cuts are the prescription for recovery. That this is the conservative movement’s permanent non-cultural agenda for good times and bad is the tip-off that even the GOP’s “economic” plans are about an ideological commitment to smaller government–extending very nearly these days to a complete overturning of the New Deal and Great Society legacy–rather than any shrewd macroeconomic strategy. Beyond that, there is no question the primaries reflected an abiding preoccupation with cultural issues, whatever the candidates professed, viz. the endless angels-dancing-on-pins distinctions on whether to ban “abortifacient” contraceptives as well as clinical abortions, the war on Planned Parenthood, and the final plunge of the GOP (and for that matter, the Catholic Bishops) into full harness with the Christian Right’s long-standing position that church-state separation represents a “war on religion.” It’s hard to imagine much of anything about the subject-matter of the primary contest that would have changed had the economy been booming.
4. Super-PACs have changed politics. Whether it’s simply a matter of the drift towards uncontrolled campaign financing accelerated by Citizens United, or the hyper-mobilization of an unprecedented group of politically active billionaires, there’s no question the Super-PACs played a big role in the nomination contest. Newt Gingrich’s Palinesque media-bashing debate performances had a lot to do with his candidacy coming back from the grave twice, but he would have remained a novelty candidate like past debate phenoms had not it been for Sheldon Adelson’s decision to give him the resources to run an actual campaign. It was Romney’s Super-PAC that destroyed Perry in Iowa, Gingrich in Florida, and later on, Santorum in the Midwest. And when the losing candidates’ own sugar daddies (Adelson and Santorum’s friend Foster Friess) closed the checkbooks, it was all over. The same forces (and many of the very same people) may be about to save Scott Walker’s bacon in Wisconsin, and are in the process of challenging the assumption that the sheer power of paid media can’t win a presidential general election.
5. The crazy nomination process is here for another four years. The dog that didn’t bark in 2012 was the usual chorus of complaints about the crazy-quilt nominating process itself–the disproportionate power of the early states, and the buyer’s remorse of voters and elites stuck with a nominee they didn’t want. The stretched-out nature of the primary calendar–which kept Romney from formally claiming the nomination until late May–was part of that non-event. So, too, was the rapid consolidation of support behind Romney once he essentially clinched the nomination in Wisconsin if not earlier. There will be some grumbling about the procedural glitches that allowed Ron Paul’s minions to dominate delegate selection events long after the deal had gone down, but for the most part, minor adjustments should suffice. We’ll be stuck with the same crazy system in 2016.

This item by J.P. Green was originally published on May 25, 2012.
Yesterday I flagged an AlterNet post by Leo W. Gerard, international president of the United Steelworkers union about a coalition of shareholders, workers and public interest groups mobilizing to address outrageous executive pay, environmental and worker safety concerns. I expressed hope that this coalition would also address corporate contributions to political campaigns.
Having just read a New Republic article, “Reining In Corporate $$, The Back Door Approach,” I can report that such stockholder’s campaigns are already well underway. According to the author, Alec MacGillis, here quoting from a WaPo article by Tom Hamburger and Brady Dennis:

…Reformers have decided that their best hope for trying to rein in secret spending is to straight to corporations. As The Post reports: “One of the most polarizing fights over money in politics has been unfolding this spring at annual corporate meetings, where shareholders are mounting an intensifying effort to push companies to disclose the money they spend on lobbying and political campaigns. The transparency push, playing out at shareholders meetings from coast to coast this spring, has received cheers from campaign finance reformers and some corporate governance experts. It has drawn ridicule from critics such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who see the effort as an attempt by liberal groups to squelch the voice of the business world….

MacGillis adds:

…The Sustainable Investments Institute, a Washington nonprofit that tracks shareholder resolutions, found that 109 — nearly a third of those up for votes at annual meetings in 2012 — sought more disclosures about spending on politics and lobbying….To date, 101 major companies have agreed to disclosure and board oversight of some of their political spending, according to Bruce Freed, president of the Center for Political Accountability, which rates companies on the issue. Freed and others argue that disclosure can help executives and directors avoid reputational risk to their firms.

Naturally big business leaders and their journalistic apologists are in an uproar about the shareholder movements for disclosure of political donations, even though most of the resolutions have been defeated. But some companies, like Microsoft, are beginning to see the upside of transparency of their political donations.
As Dan Bross, Microsoft’s senior director of corporate citizenship, puts it, “As a company, we believe in openness, transparency and accountability…We are doing what we believe is right.”
As MacGillis notes, the shareholder movement does nothing to directly force more transparency among wealthy individuals or privately-held companies. However, he adds that “the momentum toward encouraging disclosure from corporations is as good as any place to start when the other avenues are blocked.” It seems to me that, by setting a higher standard of accountability, the shareholder movement may yet have a positive effect on individuals and privately-held companies.
The shareholder campaigns should not be considered a substitute for legislation and litigation to compel transparency in political donations. But they can contribute to public awareness that transparency of corporate political donations is both desirable and possible.

This item is by Ed Kilgore is cross-posted from The New Republic, where it was originally published on May 22, 2012.
In the two months since Eric Fehrnstrom’s “etch-a-sketch” gaffe, many political observers have waited for the iconic moment when Romney would move to the center or distance himself from the toxic conservative ideological battles of the primary season. But without much notice, that etch-a-sketch moment has already happened.
No, Romney has not shifted positions. Nor has he disrespected the conservative activists whose votes and trust he sought so relentlessly since 2007. What his campaign has done, however, is radically narrow its focus to a single message, one particularly attractive to swing voters: that this election is purely and simply a referendum on Obama’s economy. This focus comes at the expense of the philosophical, social, and cultural topics that dominated the primary season from beginning to end. There’s one problem though: His party’s conservative base may not let him get away with it.
Barely an hour goes by these days without a Romney surrogate staring into a camera and intoning like an incantation that the election is about nothing other than Obama’s responsibility for a poor economy. As Jonathan Chait recently noted, even the much-asked question on Romney’s poor standing with Hispanic voters is routinely answered by citing the economic sufferings of Hispanics and the certainty that they, too, will ignore every other factor and vote for Mr. Fix-It.
The narrow focus of Romney’s campaign makes it easier for him to deal with right-wing efforts to drag the campaign discourse into dangerous areas. This was evident in last week’s brouhaha over reports that billionaire Joe Ricketts and star GOP consultant Fred Davis were discussing a $10 million super PAC ad campaign resurrecting the president’s relationship with Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Romney’s campaign quickly repudiated the proposed ad, but just as quickly, RNC chairman Reince Priebus brought things back on message, accusing the Obama campaign of using criticism of the proposed ads to distract from the only issue that matters: Obama’s responsibility for a poor economy.
So long as his campaign doesn’t look like it’s on the verge of losing–as McCain looked in the fall of 2008 when conservatives began openly protesting his reluctance to bring up Jeremiah Wright–Romney can probably avoid visible conservative criticism for failing to raise a broader, cultural critique of Obama as a secular-socialist elitist whose association with Wright and Bill Ayers shows he hates America.
But there are other, less controversial, issues important to conservative voters that don’t nicely fit into a monomaniacal focus on the unemployment rate or monthly job figures. Romney is fortunate that Republicans agree that debts, deficits, and the size of government are all highly germane to the case for “firing” Obama on purely economic grounds. But many conservatives are concerned about these themes not because they affect the country’s short-term economic prospects, but for more ideological reasons: because they are morally offended by federal programs that “redistribute” wealth, or by the very idea of progressive taxation, or by the religious implications of environmentalism.
And unsurprisingly, many conservatives want their ideological motivations to be reflected in the Romney campaign’s rhetoric. As a result, Romney has been all but forced to endorse Paul Ryan’s budget, which makes explicit the conservative desire to abandon the Great Society safety net and to reverse any public-sector policies that alter the “natural” market-based distribution of wealth. In that way, the Romney campaign has the economic themes of a “centrist” campaign, but, in order to placate the concerns of his base, the details of speeches and other communications sometimes often veer into fringe territory. It is an open question how long the candidate can finesse this tension.
Beyond the cluster of economic-fiscal issues, there are a host of cultural issues which Romney’s campaign is trying to avoid, but which both conservative activists and the Obama campaign may insist he discuss. One of these is “religious liberty”–defined as the right for conservative religious organizations to discriminate against gays and lesbians or against reproductive rights for women. Another is same-sex marriage, an increasingly unavoidable campaign issue that pulls the campaign away from its focus on the economy. Conservative activists will also be eager to campaign against Obamacare, particularly if the Supreme Court forces the issue directly into the center of the presidential contest.
And even if conservative activists–and the Obama campaign–don’t succeed in broadening Romney’s economic focus, another factor may intervene: The economy could improve. more than is currently projected between now and November. Chait’s article on the Romney campaign’s economic monomania suggests it will shift to a “Plan B” argument that the economy is just not improving enough. But instead, they may be forced to refocus on all those broader ideological issues–religious liberty, same-sex marriage, and health care, and perhaps more–that they’re currently trying to avoid. If that happens, then both conservative activists and their enemies in the Obama campaign will get something they want, and the etch-a-sketch will shake up the message yet again.

This item by J.P. Green was originally published on May 22, 2012.
If you were unaware of the stakes in the upcoming Wisconsin recall election on June 5th, John Nichol’s report in The Nation provides some perspective:

…Wisconsin is witnessing the most ambitious set of recall elections in American history: not just the executive branch but the most powerful legislative chamber could be flipped from Republican to Democratic control. If Walker and his allies are removed from office, the results will be seen across the country as a rejection of the false premise that cutting taxes for the rich while attacking unions and slashing services will somehow spur job growth. Walker promised that his policies would create 250,000 jobs. Instead of growth, the governor’s austerity agenda has brought about what the Bureau of Labor Statistics identifies as the worst pattern of job losses in the nation…

Democrats have a solid, well-experienced alternative to Scott Walker’s polarizing leadership:

…Walker’s Democratic challenger, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, argues that the governor abandoned fiscal common sense and “created an ideological civil war…in the State of Wisconsin….Former Senator Russ Feingold hails Barrett, a former Congressman, as “a lifelong progressive [who]… stood with me in voting against the deregulation that led to the Wall Street crash, opposing the Patriot Act, and reforming our system of campaign finance.” Barrett also broke with Democratic and Republican presidents to oppose NAFTA and champion labor rights. But the Democrat is not just ideologically distinct from Walker. Whereas Walker’s a my-way-or-the-highway pol, Barrett is known for getting people to work together. Though his pragmatic approach to balancing budgets frustrated some local unions in Milwaukee and led to a split in the labor movement over whom to back in the primary, Barrett has now united unions and the party in the campaign to defeat Walker.

In terms of economic resources for Barrett’s campaign, progressives face a tough reality:

…Barrett spent around $1 million to win his primary; Walker has already burned through $21 million, and his billionaire backers have spent millions more on “independent” ads. The unprecedented spending on behalf of Walker and his allies has made these recall elections an example of what campaigning has come to look like in the Citizens United era: Democrats can’t hope to match the staggering level of corporate cash raised by the GOP, so they will have to accelerate grassroots organizing and get-out-the-vote drives. Wisconsin will test the prospect that people power might yet beat money power…

Dems and progressives have a big edge in ‘feet on the ground’ in the WI race, and both sides agree that this election will likely come down to turnout mobilization. But recent polls show Walker surging, so Walker’s money edge could prove decisive. Clearly, Tom Barret could use some help. If your Democratic governor is in good shape politically and/or financially, or if the governor’s race in your state is a done deal, or if there is no governor’s race at all in your state, consider a donation to Tom Barrett’s campaign at his ActBlue page right here.
The important thing for Dems to keep in mind about June 5th is that it’s not just about Wisconsin and public unions. If Walker wins, it will green-light intensified union-bashing by Republicans across the country and ultimately threaten living standards even for unorganized workers. But if Barrett wins, it will help rebuild the labor movement, check big money in politics and energize progressives for the November elections.

This item by Ed Kilgore is cross-posted from The New Republic, where it was published on May 10, 2012.
President Obama’s surprise announcement yesterday that he now supports marriage equality for same-sex couples brought great joy to two very different groups of people. The first were same-sex couples and LGBT folk, as well as Democrats who no longer have to apologize for a president whose position is still “evolving.” The second group is a little less obvious: the cultural crusaders of the Right, who can now make a stronger argument that social issues should be a focus of the Republicans’ campaign strategy.
Mitt Romney’s campaign strategists are caught in between, left with a strategic dilemma. Using the issue of same-sex marriage to try to mess with Obama’s electorate base–blacks and Hispanics–will be incredibly tempting. But a strident anti-gay marriage campaign, while it may excite conservative interest groups, distracts from Romney’s preferred focus on the economy–and poses a major risk of alienating swing voters and independents.
Republicans can’t ignore that the conservative point of view on same-sex marriage is clearly, if slowly, losing ground in the general electorate. Polls have consistently shown support for marriage equality achieving plurality if not majority support during the last couple of years. Typical was a Gallup survey last week that showed 50 percent of Americans supporting legalized gay marriage, with just 48 percent opposing it. Just as important, the shrinking percentage of Americans opposing gay marriage is increasingly concentrated in the GOP, which reduces their value as swing voters. The same Gallup poll showed self-identified independents supporting gay marriage by a 57-40 margin, far closer to the Democrats’ 65-34 division than to the Republicans’ 22-to-74 split.
And voter intensity on this topic has shifted even more dramatically. According to NBC-Wall Street Journal survey data, in 2004–the last presidential year when this topic was thought to have mattered–opponents of gay marriage enjoyed a greater than two-to-one margin over supporters (62-30). But fully 51 percent of Americans strongly opposed gay marriage, while only 18 percent strongly supported it. As of March 2012, strong supporters of marriage equality (32 percent) have caught up and even passed strong opponents (31 percent).
That’s the demographic reality Obama recognized, preempting what was beginning to look like a real problem for him this summer. There was a growing movement–endorsed already by eleven state party chairs–to place support for marriage equality in the 2012 Democratic platform. Given the president’s total control of the platform process, he would eventually have had to embrace it or squelch it; there’s not much of a middle ground any more on the basic proposition of marriage equality.
Despite all the deterrents for waging an anti-gay marriage campaign, Republicans are sure to fixate on how this will affect two crucial factions of the Democratic voting base: African-Americans and Hispanics. The most recent Pew survey on the subject showed African-Americans opposing gay marriage by a 49-39 margin. That’s a considerable improvement in support for marriage equality from the 63-26 margin of opposition Pew found in 2008, but given the increasingly heavy support of white Democrats for marriage equality, still a pretty striking anomaly. And a 2011 Pew poll suggested that Hispanic Catholics remain more likely to oppose gay marriage than white Catholics. Hispanic Protestants tend to be more conservative on nearly all issues, but as (usually) evangelicals, they are especially likely to oppose gay marriage. Given the GOP’s general problem with Hispanics–due to a recent bender on immigration policy, not to mention hostility to a social safety net–it will be tempting for them to try to make this a wedge issue.
Their model may be Ohio in 2004, when an anti-gay marriage ballot initiative and the Bush campaign’s intensive outreach effort to African-American churches may have made a crucial difference in the state that decided the presidential election. But following that strategy is unlikely to pay off as easily this year. That’s because there won’t be as many gay marriage initiatives on state ballots in November this year as in many recent cycles, and they’ll largely be in states that Obama is certain to carry (Maine, Minnesota, Washington, and Maryland).
So any effort to use the issue will have to involve more overt partisan politicking, which some conservative evangelical ministers–and particularly African-American ministers loath to openly oppose the first African-American president–will be reluctant to embrace. Republicans could deploy targeted, under-the-radar appeals on same-sex marriage, but it will be tricky to do so without letting the passions associated with this and other cultural issues get out of hand, creating a distraction at best and a backlash at worst. Perhaps Republicans would have been better off in the end had Obama “evolved” a bit more slowly.

This item by J.P. Green was originally published on May 9, 2012.
While many believe that Senator Lugar’s defeat by a right-winger, who believes Paul Ryan’s budget is not conservative enough, gives Dems a good shot at a pick-up, yesterday’s elections were generally hailed by conservatives, especially in NC, where voters approved a constitutional amendment to ban same sex marriage. Campbell Robertson of The New York Times got it right in his lede; the big story in NC was the record turnout.

As expected, North Carolinians voted in large numbers on Tuesday for an amendment that would ban same-sex marriages, partnerships and civil unions, becoming the 30th state in the country and the last in the South to include a prohibition on gay marriage in the state constitution…About half a million people voted early, a record for a primary in the state, and turnout on Tuesday was unusually high as well.

Further down in Robertson’s article, he notes, “Opponents had raised almost twice as much money as the amendment’s supporters and had a robust network of volunteers and get-out-the-vote workers.”
The ad war was also fierce in NC, and no doubt GOTV muscle is even more effective in non-presidential elections, in which overall turnout is normally smaller. There was also a lot of interest in the gubernatorial primary and some congressional races — Republicans hope to pick up as many as four congressional seats in NC alone. But it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the NC vote supports the argument that investing significant financial resources into GOTV is cost-effective, even for conservatives. And it’s clear that tea party GOTV in Indiana was instrumental in defeating Lugar.
Despite Democratic chest-beating about our superior ground game, one of the lessons of yesterday’s elections is that Republicans can leverage it to good effect also. Yes, Dems have a GOTV edge, particularly with experienced union campaign and turnout workers. But Republicans are not clueless about campaign warfare. They will also be investing heavily in GOTV in the months ahead.
Also in The Times, Jeff Zeleny reports on the intensifying debate among Dems regarding the strategic deployment of financial resources in ads or GOTV. As Zeleny reports, key Dems leaders are concerned that a $100 million plan by liberal donors to lift voter turnout could duplicate Obama campaign efforts already in place and undermine Dems air war:

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, and other officials conveyed concern that Democratic candidates could be at a disadvantage if the contributors, many of whom had stayed on the sidelines of the 2012 campaign until now, decide not to spend money on television ads that push back against a torrent of attacks from conservative “super PACS” in the presidential election and Congressional races.
…”The idea that these progressive groups are essentially re-creating the wheel is perplexing and troubling,” said David Krone, the chief of staff to Mr. Reid. “Why go off and build a redundant grass-roots and get-out-the-vote organization that the Obama campaign is clearly invested in?”

Zeleny adds that many Dem strategists still believe that “television advertising was the most powerful way to win races. Democratic strategists have spent months trying to lure Mr. Soros and other donors into the fray of election spending…”Why would they rule out this tried-and-true medium?” Mr. Krone said on Tuesday. “I can guarantee the Republicans are covering all bases and will have a coordinated plan.”
The Obama campaign is reportedly in pretty good shape in terms of preparations for the ad campaign, with Jim Margolis as chief ad guru (profile of Margolis and his strategy here). But down ballot, many Dem candidates are in urgent need of funding for ads.
The debate will likely continue until all possible ads buys are made. No one really knows what is the optimum allocation of pro-Democratic funds into the air war and ground game. But Krone is right that it would be folly to assume that the GOP will come up short in funding either offensive.

This item by Ed Kilgore is cross-posted from The New Republic, where it was originally published on May 3, 2012.
The cool, professorial Barack Obama may not be the most natural politician to espouse a populist message. And being the incumbent doesn’t help: Rhetoric that makes voters feel more aggrieved about their current condition isn’t likely to win him any votes. But Obama can still run on a populist platform. In fact, he has to. Not because it’s the best way to argue for his agenda–because it’s the best way to bash his opponent, Mitt Romney.
It’s fitting that most of the discussions of the advantages and pitfalls of populism for Obama are focused on rhetoric. On a policy level, a sitting president has a relatively limited window for populist agenda items. Obama has supported a tax surcharge on the very wealthy, tax penalties on companies outsourcing jobs, greater regulation of banks and insurance companies–these all command strong popular support in the general electorate. But there are some populist positions that Obama simply can’t assume without the kind of reversal of positions that a vulnerable incumbent is not about to undertake. Obama is not going to say TARP (or his implementation of it) was a mistake; that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is a corporate stooge; that economic globalization needs to be resisted by every possible means; or that private health insurance ought to be abolished.
But if by “going populist” one means criticizing the excessive power of wealthy private interests in the economy, society, and politics–and the Republican policies designed to defend or increase it–then the President has significantly more latitude, which he clearly has signaled his willingness to use. How far can he credibly go in the direction of unrestrained rhetorical populism? In his TNR essay on this subject yesterday, Geoffrey Kabaservice argued that Obama would be constrained by his personality: a populist tone, he suggested, is alien to the persona of a President who is “nobody’s idea of ‘just folks.'” But American history has shown that populist rhetoric doesn’t have to come from the heartland. Franklin Roosevelt was nobody’s idea of “just folks” either; that didn’t keep him from inveighing against economic royalists, or from quoting his equally patrician relative Theodore Roosevelt in denouncing “malefactors of great wealth.”
Kabaservice associates Obama with John F. Kennedy’s “cool,” but an identically privileged background did not prevent JFK’s two brothers from striking populist notes. On one occasion in 1968, Robert F. Kennedy was speaking to a medical school audience about the need for better health care for the poor, and one of the future physicians asked him sarcastically where he expected to get the money for such social luxuries; without hesitation Kennedy responded, “From you.” As RFK showed, it’s possible to combine populist heat with the progressive light of a “common national purpose” message.
In fact, a more populist tone is not only possible for Obama, it’s essential. While voters may hold him primarily responsible for the economy, they will judge his performance based on their sense of the trouble he inherited from Bush and the resistance he’s facing from Bush’s party. That means, to use the all-purpose terms devised by Democratic wordsmith Bob Shrum, Obama has to convince the electorate that he’s been “fighting for you” and is “on your side” against the policies of a party beholden to sinister rent-seeking corporate actors.
Most importantly, Obama badly needs to make sure this is a “choice election,” and not a referendum on Obama’s first term. That means he needs to run on Mitt Romney’s flaws, and not only on his own accomplishments. And because of Romney’s own background and economic agenda, a populist message is the best way to do that. Romney is running almost entirely on his reputation as a corporate wizard; his economic policy platform is about liberating “job creators” from taxes and oversight; and he has embraced the Ryan Budget, a domestic policy blueprint that aims at a government-engineered redistribution of resources from the bottom to the top of the income ladder. If Obama does not draw attention to the obvious class nature of Romney’s background, agenda, allies, and beneficiaries, then he is in danger of letting Romney get away with the suggestion that he’s simply offering an alternative path to full economic recovery–not a path for the wealthy to acquire more wealth.
For Obama to represent the national interest and the welfare of the broad middle-class, as those fearing a populist approach so often suggest, he’s going to have to establish that Mitt Romney is a creature of moneyed special interests. And like it or not, that means Obama must wage rhetorical battle against America’s elite. That’s not to say that the President will have to model himself on William Jennings Bryan; for the purposes of this election, RFK would suffice.

This item by Ed Kilgore is cross-posted from The New Republic, where it was originally published on April 25, 2012.
Of all the issues on which Mitt Romney will be tempted to execute an “Etch-a-Sketch” moment as he heads into the general election, immigration is the most pressing. Remember, on immigration Romney didn’t just rely on his super PAC to slur his opponents; he identified himself robustly with the nativist strain in the GOP. This worked out fine in the primaries: It helped him snuff the existential threat of Rick Perry’s candidacy, and provided additional fodder for his team’s crucial attack on Newt Gingrich after the South Carolina primary. The general election, though, is a different proposition. With the Hispanic community an increasingly large part of the electorate, Romney will need to campaign for at least some part of the Hispanic vote, and his rhetoric in the past few months doesn’t leave him with many options to do so.
Romney himself recently acknowledged his need for Hispanic voters to an elite GOP donor audience in Florida:

Predicting that immigration would become a much larger issue in the fall campaign, Romney told his audience, “We have to get Hispanic voters to vote for our party,” warning that recent polling showing Hispanics breaking in huge percentages for President Obama “spells doom for us.”

But as eager as Romney is to pivot, the vocal positions he took earlier in this campaign will make it very hard for him to do so. There are two lines it will be difficult for Romney to cross without inviting fresh charges of flip-flopping: his opposition to “amnesty,” which largely rules out any comprehensive immigration reform proposal that includes large-scale legalization; and his loud embrace of “self-deportation” of undocumented workers. This latter position, which seemed relatively mild in the context of GOP primaries where many voters favored forced deportation, now identifies Romney with the various state efforts inspired by Arizona’s SB 1070, which are designed to make life very difficult for illegal immigrants–and which tend to make life difficult for Hispanics generally. (Indeed, Romney has repeatedly endorsed SB 1070, calling it a national model, even as it receives a new burst of publicity as the Supreme Court hears oral arguments against it this week.)
Romney has nonetheless begun moderating his hard-line positions, with somewhat muddled results. His staff is now suggesting that Mitt’s endorsement of SB 1070 was partial, mainly based on the law’s features forcing employers to verify the documentation of workers. And there are reports that he’s no longer treating Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, one of the drafters of the Arizona law, as his principal advisor on immigration issues. Romney has also expressed interest in the idea of a “Republican version” of the DREAM Act, though he’s been hesitant to endorse Marco Rubio’s proposal to give undocumented people temporary legal status if they go to college or enter the military, presumably because that might discourage “self-deportation.”
Introducing these kinds of nuances into Romney’s immigration positions may not elicit a backlash, but it’s questionable whether it’s enough to win over skeptical Hispanics. Yet any explicit flip-flop by Romney on immigration will reinforce his image as a calculating prevaricator. That will not only hamper his ability to establish credibility among Hispanics, it will damage his appeal to swing voters. He also has to be sure to protect his right flank, particularly since the white independent voters he desperately needs tend to harbor some nativist sentiments. (Its unclear if such latent xenophobia will be affected by news that the flow of undocumented workers entering the country has largely ended and net migration from Mexico has officially reached zero.)
Of course, many pundits think Mitt just needs to put someone with a Spanish surname on the ticket to attract Hispanic voters. But the two most likely candidates, Marco Rubio and New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez, both have plenty of other flaws (the first-term governor Martinez raises the specter of Sarah Palin; a recent PPP poll shows Rubio not helping Romney even among Florida Hispanics as a running-mate.) In any case, both Rubio and Martinez have repeatedly said they are not interested in joining the ticket.
Romney has previously said that Hispanics care more about the economy than about immigration policy. With his stance on immigration, he better hope that’s true–and that he can get a large enough minority of that vote to win battleground states. And if all else fails, I suppose, he always has the nuclear option: arguing that the polygamous colony his great-grandfather founded south of the border makes him a “Mexican-American.” That’s sure to go over well.