This item by Ed Kilgore was originally published on October 7, 2010.

I apologize if this site has lately become “enthusiasmgap.com,” but for Democrats, properly understanding the turnout patterns we are likely to see on November 2–what they do and don’t represent–is going to be kind of important to the strategy chosen going forward.
Nate Silver has definitively weighed in on the subject, and reached conclusions that we’ve been offering for a good long while now: much of the “enthusiasm gap” between the two parties is structural, and has to do with the differential turnout patterns of various demographic groups in midterm elections (with Democrats currently more dependent than in the past on low-midterm-voting groups like under-30s and Latinos); and part of it is that a radicalized conservative base is indeed very excited by their conquest of the GOP:

The enthusiasm gap has more to do with abnormally high levels of Republican interest in the election than with despondent Democrats.
Gallup periodically asks a question about whether voters are more enthusiastic than usual about voting in the midterms. When they did so in March, shortly after passage of the health care bill, 57 percent of Democrats said they were more excited than usual about voting in the November elections. This was, in fact, the highest figure that Gallup had ever recorded among Democrats in a midterm year (they began tracking the question in 1994). The problem for Democrats? Some 69 percent of Republicans also answered the question affirmatively. As I wrote at the time, “if the Democrats’ total was record-breaking, Republicans just blew the competition away in Usain Bolt-type fashion….”
Also, we should remember that the Democrats usually have some trouble turning out their base at the midterms, since they rely on constituencies, like young voters and racial minorities, who traditionally do not vote in large numbers in these elections. Their 2010 numbers, therefore, mostly reflect a return to normal (in fact, perhaps slightly better than normal). It was 2006, when Democrats were energized by the Iraq War and other perceived excesses of the Bush administration, that was the odd year out.

There are two big takeaways that Democrats must understand from the enthusiasm gap data. The first is that it’s a mistake to primarily assign turnout disparities to an insufficiently progressive agenda from the Obama administration. Maybe a different agenda would have been a good idea on policy grounds, or might have had a different impact on the congressional dynamics. But there’s really little evidence that the discouragement we see among progressive elites is that widely shared among rank-and-file Democratic voters, whose relative likelihood to vote or not to vote is more easily explainable by structural factors.
Second, Republicans may be benefitting today from the hyper-excitement of its radicalized conservative base. But they will pay a price in the long run for the sort of agenda and rhetoric they are being driven to. That will become immediately evident in the 2012 cycle, when GOPers are forced to disclose their extremist hopes and dreams for the country, in the context of an electorate that is automatically less favorable.
For those who simply can’t buy the idea that there hasn’t been a calamitious deterioration of support for the Democratic Party since 2008, it’s important to remember that the electorate we are likely to see on November 2 would have almost certainly vaulted John McCain to the presidency two years ago. The 2008 coalition isn’t dead; it’s quite literally not showing up, by the sort of small margins that only matter on election days.
And those who are engaged in GOTV activities this year should take courage in the fact that they are not only helping offset the impact of an excited conservative base right now; they are also setting the stage for a 2012 battle in which the political winds are very likely to change direction, even before Republicans finish celebrating whatever gains they secure on November 2.

This item by James Vega was first published on September 29, 2010.
Several weeks ago TDS predicted that the exposure of the deceptive editing of a videotape of a speech by Shirley Sherrod–and the resultant discrediting of right-wing propagandist Andrew Breitbart — would produce a trend toward even more extreme tactics by the media “action groups” now functioning on the right.
Yesterday, CNN reported on one such action — a plan by Andrew Breitbart’s most famous protégé, James O’Keefe, to trick a female CNN reporter into entering a phony “pleasure palace” filled with pornography, alcohol and sex toys and then to attempt to seduce her while secretly taping the encounter. The goal of the plan was either to embarrass and discredit CNN or else to essentially blackmail them into improving their treatment of right-wing activists in an upcoming documentary.
At first glance the plan seems utterly absurd and infantile – so much so as to be literally delusional (O’Keefe apparently believed that he actually had a realistic chance of succeeding in the planned seduction) and many in the media will be tempted to ignore it on these grounds.
But this is a tremendous mistake. Even a person who explodes in furious indignation at a vile set-up like this the very first instant they encounter it can be made to look like a participant by careful video editing and stage management (e.g. the con-man can say “But this is what you said you wanted yesterday on the phone” or “That’s not the impression you gave me when we had that hot phone call last night”. Carefully edited, a secretly taped video of something like this trap can easily be made to appear ambiguous or even incriminating simply by innuendo – e.g. “Why was she there in the first place?”, “Maybe she just got cold feet at the last minute”)
But the real danger for Democrats right now is not this particular trap – it’s the more sophisticated ones that can easily be sprung on Election Day.
Let’s face it. It is a trivially simple task to find one or two Black or Latino men in any city in America who, for a sufficient bribe, would be willing to show up at a polling place and suddenly begin shouting and brandishing wood canes or telescoping security batons of the kind that is now sold in any martial arts store. As little as 20 or 30 seconds of “amateur” video of such actions would be more than sufficient to create another national “scandal” like the New Black Panthers case that Fox has already elevated to mythic status. Three or four incidents like this in November would be sufficient to create a propaganda firestorm and delegitimize any elections Democrats happen to win.
The defensive strategy Democrats must employ is simple. Democratic poll-watchers and ordinary voters must immediately insist – in front of camera and witnesses — that any suspicious “intimidators” should be immediately arrested, booked and fingerprinted. If those “intimidators” then turn out to be paid agents of right-wing media action groups, the organizations that paid them should then be criminally prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and also sued in civil court for six or seven figure judgments. The Southern Poverty Law Center has successfully destroyed several white supremacist groups using this tactic and it is now past time to start deploying similar tactics against today’s right-wing media action groups.
To put it simply, the best Democratic strategy for preventing phony incidents of voter intimidation on Election Day is to make it very clear in advance that if the perpetrators are caught, the price will be so high that even totally cynical and immoral right-wing organizations will fear the consequences.
In contrast, the biggest mistake Democrats can make is to dismiss events like James O’Keefe’s attempted sexual blackmail of a CNN reporter as unimportant. On the contrary, O’Keefe’s aborted “black op” illustrates the profoundly dangerous extremist mind-set that many on the right now share. There are many right-wing activists who are just as cynical, dishonest and extreme as O’Keefe; Democrats cannot count on all of them being equally stupid.

This item by J.P. Green was originally published on September 21, 2010.
As the political ad wars heat up for the Fall stretch of the midterm campaign, television is still regarded as the pivotal media, according to a recent Ad Week report (via Reuters) by Mike Shields. Conversely, spending for digital media has been disappointing this year, as Shields explains:

Following the recent digital-savvy campaigns led by Obama and Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown, many expected a slew of imitators to emerge during the 2010 midterms, leading to a surge in online spending. But political ad insiders say that with the exception of a handful of digital-focused campaigns, few candidates are dumping dollars onto the Web, outside of social media and search. And with six weeks or so to go before Election Day, not many watchers are expecting a sudden surge.
According to Borrell & Associates, political spending on digital media should double this year vs. 2008, reaching $44.5 million. Despite that hefty growth rate, “that’s really not much,” said Kip Cassino, Borrell’s vp of research. Some estimates place digital spending at 1 percent of total political media dollars. “There’s more of it, but it’s still a fraction,” said Evan Tracey, president, campaign media analysis group, Kantar Media.
“Spending has just not developed this year,” said Ted Utz, managing director of the local rep firm Petry Digital. Utz said his company works with around 10 top political ad agencies. “They are staffed up and poised to place digital money, and it’s been really anemic…

Rightly or wrongly, it appears most political campaigns, or the ad agencies advising them, believe that television still provides the most powerful message machine, as Shields explains:

Perhaps the biggest factor holding back digital spending is political consultants’ love affair with TV, which, according to Cassino, gets two of every three dollars spent in this arena. TV has a long track record of getting people elected, particularly in local congressional races, where a candidate might be running “for the 10th or 11th term,” said Cassino. “So they hand digital planning to the kid who comes in as a volunteer.”

Shields notes that political consultants tend to be skeptical about banner ads, and that there is a dearth of studies assessing the impact of digital ads. Of the spending for digital advertising, most of the growth has been in search ads — Google search ads are up 800 percent over 2008, and there has also been an uptick in “locally targeted Facebook self serve ads,” along with some growing campaign interest in YouTube “promoted videos.”
Shield’s article did not break down the remaining 32 percent of political ad spending in terms of print, telephone, radio, billboards, direct mail and other media, all of which can be useful in “micro-targeting” specific constituencies. But it’s clear that political campaign budget managers and consultants still see television as the best way to reach everyone.
Shields quotes a ‘veteran online political ad operative,’ who says that candidates still treat digital media “as a stepchild. “Look at Meg Whitman in California,” he said of the former eBay CEO. “She’s putting all her money in TV.”
With respect to Democrats in particular, more spending on digital ads might nonetheless be a cost-effective investment, especially given concerns about turning out the progressive base. But it’s not hard to understand the lopsided investment in television in light of internet demographics. according to one demographic analysis, 38 percent of seniors age 65+, who turn out to vote in impressive numbers, are internet-active, vs. 93 percent of 18-29 year-olds, 81 percent of age 30-49 and 70 percent of those 50-64 years of age.

This item by Andrew Levison was originally published on September 8, 2010.
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In recent days, as increasingly negative projections regarding the November election have appeared, a substantial number of Democrats have been seized with a genuine sense of panic. Many political commentaries have tended to suggest that what is happening may not be just the result of structural factors like the lower participation of pro-Obama groups in off-year elections or the deep recession. Rather, they suggest that a major shift in basic attitudes is occurring – that many Americans are now shifting their allegiance to the Republicans and abandoning Obama and the Democrats. Many Democrats have a sinking fear that support for Obama and the Dems is somehow collapsing.
In order to seriously evaluate this view we have to begin by recognizing that the raw data collected in opinion polls does not come with its own built-in framework for interpretation. Rather, most political opinion poll data is cognitively “shoehorned” into one of two distinct mental models: the “horse race” model or the “sociological” model.
The horse race model is based on the image of two candidates in competition for office and assumes that most voters are continually listening to and evaluating information about the candidates and are therefore very strongly influenced by campaign events like party conventions and televised debates as well as by the daily news headlines. In one formal model in political psychology — called the “online processing” model — voters are visualized as keeping a constantly updated running tally of their impressions of both candidates.
Most national political commentary implicitly accepts the horse race model and generally describes voters as though they were indeed constantly reviewing and revising their impressions and evaluations of candidates and policies. In consequence the ups and downs of candidate approval or voting intentions measured in opinion polls are assumed to be a real-time reflection of this ongoing process.
The sociological model, on the other hand, visualizes a voter’s political attitudes, including decisions about which political party or candidate to vote for, as to a substantial degree determined by an interlocking set of basic value systems that are acquired during childhood socialization and which are then used to determine what the person considers “good” or “bad” and “right” or “wrong.” Once any particular candidate, policy or issue is clearly labeled, categorized and judged within a person’s network of basic value systems, the process of then deciding whether or not to support the candidate or express approval of a particular policy is essentially automatic. Change in these value-based attitudes occurs slowly if at all.
A person’s basic value systems are inherently and inescapably rooted in his or her specific culture and, after the 2000 election, political commentators became very sharply aware of the deep social division of America into the two distinct cultures of “Red vs. Blue” America – the “Red” America that tended to be white, male working class, rural, small town and southern vs. the “Blue” America that tended to be urban, coastal, educated, female and non-white. Numerous commentators noted that these two cultures had very distinct value systems that shaped the evaluation of particular candidates, political parties, polices and issues in dramatically different ways.
In academic political science there is vast literature that studies the demographic and social roots of attitudes like political partisanship, views about issues and candidate choice and few if any political commentators would seriously deny the importance of these underlying social and demographic factors. But, as a practical matter, most daily and weekly political commentary adopts a purely horse race model in which voters are implicitly treated as if they were completely autonomous decision-makers who are reacting entirely to the latest political events.
This approach is understandable since political commentators necessarily try to focus on what is new and novel. The drawback, however is that this perspective can also induce very severe tunnel vision. It needs to be balanced by also looking at current opinion data from a large-scale sociological perspective as well.

Read more…

This item by J.P. Green was originally published on September 7, 2010.
It appears that the entire left blogosphere has its collective knickers in a wedgie today over the latest round of downer opinion polls regarding the Democrats’ midterm prospects, and not without reason. Dylan Loewe, however, is marching to a different drummer over at the HuffPo, where he goes all Polyanna in the midst of epidemic doom-saying, also not without reason. Here’s Loewe, excerpted on the topic of the Dems’ longer-than-midterm, prospects:

…There is actually plenty of reason to be optimistic about the future of the Democratic Party — and the progressive ideals it represents. You just have to be able to look past November to see it…But if you step back, look beyond the current moment, and consider the broader context, you’ll see that Democrats are actually in tremendously strong shape for the long term. What happens this November isn’t inconsequential. But it’s also likely to be a temporary bump on a road toward Democratic dominance.
…It seems difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile that idea with the reality that Republicans may be on the verge of taking back Congress. And yet, that’s where we find ourselves: Republicans are about to win a ton of seats. And they are also about to spend a generation in the minority.

Loewe, author of the newly-published Permanently Blue, conjures up an optimistic vision of America’s demographic future, with Democrat-favoring Latinos becoming a pivotal force in forthcoming elections, along with other minorities and young voters. He points out that President Obama should have a significant financial edge in 2012, while the increasingly fractious GOP stable of presidential candidates will be squandering their financial resources on attacking each other.
And Loewe’s optimism on the topic of “The Millenials” may be a little over the top, particularly in light of some of the most recent polls:

Take the younger generation, for example. The Millennials. This is a group that gave Barack Obama two-thirds of its support in 2008, and has consistently awarded the president high marks throughout his first two years. I suppose that’s not all that surprising given that they are, without question, the most socially liberal generation in American history.
Why should that worry Republicans? Because every year between now and 2018, 4 million new Millennials will become eligible voters. That means that 16 million more will be able to vote in 2012 than in 2008, and 32 million more in 2016. Even if they turn out in characteristically low numbers, they will still add millions of new votes into the Democratic column. By 2018, when the entire Millennial generation can vote, they will make up 40 percent of the voting population and be 90 million strong. That’s 14 million more Millennials than Baby Boomers, making the youngest generation the largest in U.S. history.
How can the Republican Party possibly court a generation this progressive, and this substantial, without losing its tea party base? And how can they survive on the national stage if they don’t?
This isn’t a formula for Republican dominance. It’s a formula for Republican extinction.

But Loewe concludes on a less ambitious note:

But November should be understood in context. This is the last election cycle in which this congressional map — designed predominantly by Republicans — will be used. And it will be the last year Republicans can depend on ideological purification without serious retribution at the polls.
The country is changing dramatically, and in ways that are sure to benefit Democrats. That’s why I’m so optimistic about our future. It’s why you should be too. November might be an ass-kicking. But it’s poised to be our last one for quite a long while.

Much of what Loewe is saying has been said before, particularly by TDS co-editor Ruy Teixeira and his co-author John Judis in their book, “The Emerging Democratic Majority” and in Teixeira’s “Red, Blue, and Purple America: The Future of Election Demographics” Loewe could have also added that the Republicans won’t be able to do much of anything, other than more obstruction, unless their midterm wave is big enough to override presidential vetoes, a prospect no observers are taking very seriously.
But it’s good to be reminded in these dark days of Democratic doom-saying, that one midterm election does not necessarily launch a new political era, and it just might be a little blip, the last little victory in a long time for a party without vision or solutions, other than tax cuts as the panacea for all ills.

This item by Ed Kilgore was originally published on September 2, 2010.
In analyses of the current political climate, an awful lot of stock has been placed in the so-called “enthusiasm gap” between Republicans and Democrats. Sometimes this “gap” is based on polling that actually asks voters about their level of enthusiasm towards voting this year. The problem with such measurements, of course, is that “very enthusiastic” voters don’t get an extra vote; the key variable is willingness to vote, not the degree of passion with which a vote is cast.
More often than not, though, the “enthusiasm gap” has become synonymous with the more meaningful idea that Republicans will have a turnout advantage in November. And while this probability is frequently identified with a relative level of unhappiness among Democrats for the Obama administration and/or congressional Democrats, it cannot be repeated too often that midterm turnout is invariably higher among older and whiter voters. And it just so happens that the Democratic support base as of 2008 was unusually correlated with the youth and diversity of voters.
That’s true today as well. Looking at Gallup’s latest presidential job approval tracking poll, Obama’s positive ratings remain inversely correlated with age, and thus with the proclivity to vote in midterms, ranging from 56% among 18-29 year-olds; to 38% among over-65s. His approval rating among nonwhite voters, another traditionally underperforming demographic group in midterms, is 65% (among African-Americans, it’s 90%).
Meanwhile, 78% of Democrats and 73% of self-identified “liberals” approve of the President’s job performance. These are not optimal numbers, but nor do they suggest a deep malaise. At this point in his presidency, 70% of Democrats approved of Bill Clinton’s job performance, and he went on to win re-election handily. And since it’s de rigour to compare Obama to Jimmy Carter these days, it’s worth noting the 52% job approval rating among Democrats for Jimmy Carter at this point in his presidency (Carter’s Democratic approval rating eventually bottomed out in the autumn of 1979 at 40%).
None of this provides any Democratic comfort for the midterms themselves, but it should be reasonably clear that structural factors account for much of the “enthusiasm gap.” And the minute the 2012 presidential cycle begins, the same factors will create a much more positive environment for Obama, even if you don’t consider the unimpressive Republican presidential field.

This item by Ed Kilgore was originally published on September 1, 2010.
The primary defeat of incumbent Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski (confirmed by her concession yesterday) by former judge Joe Miller is generally being interpreted as another scalp for the Tea Party Movement in its assault on Republicans deemed too moderate on this or that key issue. But there’s something going on a bit deeper, if you consider Alaska’s exceptional dependence on the federal government and the past political track record of politicians like Murkowski’s mentor, the late Ted Stevens, who aligned themselves with the anti-government GOP but emphasized their ability to “bring home the bacon” via appropriations.
In endorsing Miller on behalf of his Senate Conservatives Fund, Jim DeMint emphasized this dimension of Murkowski’s defeat:

Joe Miller’s victory should be a wake-up call to politicians who go to Washington to bring home the bacon. Voters are saying ‘We’re not willing to bankrupt the country to benefit ourselves.’

Now it wouldn’t be quite right to accept DeMint’s characterization of either Alaska voters’ motivations or Miller’s ideology at face value. After all, when Miller calls for abolishing the federal Department of Energy, he’s appealing to the rather selfish desire of Alaskans to control their “own” energy resources–whose value is a lot higher than any federal earmark– regardless of what it means nationally.
But it’s true that there’s an element of collective self-denial among those conservatives who are genuinely willing to take on federal spending categories that are popular among their constituents. Miller is just the latest of a number of Republican Senate candidates this year who have called for phasing out Social Security and Medicare. DeMint himself has long described these programs, along with public education, as having seduced middle-class Americans into socialist ways of thinking.
As Republican pols from Barry Goldwater to George W. Bush can tell you, going after Social Security and Medicare is really bad politics. And they’ve yet to come up with a gimmick, whether it’s “partial privatization” or grandfathering existing beneficiaries, to make major changes in these programs popular (I seriously doubt the very latest gimmick, “voucherizing” Medicare, will do any better once people understand the idea). Indeed, Republicans notably engaged in their own form of “Medagoguery” by attacking health care reform as a threat to Medicare benefits.
Yet the sudden Tea Party-driven return to fiscal hawkery among Republicans, particularly if it’s not accompanied by any willingness to consider tax increases or significant defense spending cuts, will drive the GOP again and again to “entitlement reform.” In Senate candidates like Rand Paul and Sharron Angle and now Joe Miller, we are seeing the return of a paleoconservative perspective in the GOP that embraces the destruction of the New Deal/Great Society era’s most important accomplishments not just as a matter of fiscal necessity but as a moral imperative.
You can respect this point of view even if you abhor its practical implications. But there’s little doubt it represents political folly of potentially massive dimensions. Certainly Democrats owe it to these brave conservatives to take them seriously in their desire to free middle-class seniors from the slavery of Social Security and Medicare, and draw as much attention to it as possible.

This item by Ed Kilgore was originally published on August 30, 2010
Having read in various places that Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” event in Washington turned out to be an apolitical nothing-burger–albeit a bizarre attempt to appropriate the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.–I resolved to watch a video of Beck’s entire 56-minute speech.
It was, without a doubt, one of the more vacuous and cliche-ridden speeches I have ever heard, with vague injunctions to the crowd to look to the future, take responsibility, love their children, get right with God, and stand up for their values. It even ended with that most cliched secular popularization of a fine old hymn, the bagpipe version of “Amazing Grace.” If it was, as so many observers suggested, a primarily religious address, it’s likely that the attendees could have heard a better-crafted and more instructive sermon in virtually any of Washington’s houses of worship.
So was it all just a Beck-a-ganza aimed at marketing his “brand” at the expense of any real purpose?
I might have thought so, until the final portion of his speech, when he started talking about “black-robed regiments” of clergy who, in Beck’s typically distorted reading of history, were the vanguard of the American revolution against godless Britain, and now, after more than two centuries of national infidelity, were being remustered by Beck himself as embodied by the clergy sharing his rostrum. They represented, Beck asserted, 180 million Americans, and they were determined to put God back in charge of the country. As Peter Montgomery of AlterNet (via Digby) has shown, the regiments were led by such theocratic warhorses as David Barton, the “Christian Nation” historian who has devoted his career to the destruction of church-state separation.
Beck’s rather frank appeal to theocracy–a non-sectarian theocracy, to be sure, but one that enshrined a “firm reliance on Divine Providence” as involving very clear rules of individual and national behavior–was the real thrust of his address. And in fact, the bland nature of most of his speech ironically reinforced its radical intent. Anyone who shared any sort of commitment to basic moral values, religious piety, or patriotism ought to go along with what people like Glenn Beck and his allies consider the obvious implications of such commitments in politics: a hard-core conservatism recast as a restoration of faith and national honor. Thus his core audience, the true believers who traveled to Washington to participate in this event, and those who watched it live on Fox, were comforted to know that their political preferences were a faithful reflection of the views of Moses, Jesus Christ, the Founders, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King.
Most readers will probably discern in Beck’s appeal the familiar M.O. of the Christian Right: an effort to divinize a secular political agenda–much of it revolving around the golden calf of absolute private property rights–while anathamizing any opposition as hostile to religion. And that’s why Beck’s game was best revealed not on Saturday, but on Sunday, when he attacked President Obama’s religion as a “perversion:”

During an interview on “Fox News Sunday,” which was filmed after Saturday’s rally, Beck claimed that Obama “is a guy who understands the world through liberation theology, which is oppressor-and-victim.”
“People aren’t recognizing his version of Christianity,” Beck added….
“You see, it’s all about victims and victimhood; oppressors and the oppressed; reparations, not repentance; collectivism, not individual salvation. I don’t know what that is, other than it’s not Muslim, it’s not Christian. It’s a perversion of the gospel of Jesus Christ as most Christians know it,” Beck said.

But Beck is really attacking the idea that anyone can be godly who doesn’t believe God’s Will on this Earth happens to coincide pretty much precisely with the agenda of the right wing of the Republican Party of the United States, circa 2010. All the banalities of his “Restoring Honor” speech depend on identifying piety with his brand of conservatism. And in the effort to set himself up as prophet and pope, he’s in dire danger of setting himself up for a truly biblical fall.
As was illustrated by the strong reaction back in March to his injunctions to Catholics to fight the very idea of “social justice,” Beck is not in the best position to define orthodoxy and heterodoxy in Christian theology. As a Mormon, his own theology is often demonized by conservative evangelical Protestants as a perversion or worse. And in fact, you’d think that anyone associated with an often-persecuted religious minority would be afraid of the power of “black-robed regiments,” and more sympathetic to Barack Obama’s view that doubt about God’s Will on Earth is a distinctively Christian perspective on church and state.
But Beck’s made his choice, seeking to make his radical politics both more acceptable and more militant via identification with the very impulse of religiosity. In adopting the prophetic stance, Glenn Beck is perhaps making a bid to reconcile the Tea Party Movement with the Christian Right (not that they are necessarily two different groups of people), under his leadership. If that’s not what he’s up to, then maybe the “Restoring Honor” rally truly was a nothing-burger, and Beck himself is destined to spend his declining years not as a prophet, but as a late-night infomercial figure promoting motivational materials available at an affordable cost.

This item by Ed Kilgore was first published on August 20, 2010.
There’s quite a boom market right now for theories about what Barack Obama’s done wrong, and/or what he could or should have done right but didn’t. The most impressive of those, as noted here the other day, was by John Judis, who makes the case that a “populist” approach could have positioned Obama and the Democratic Party much better for the midterms and for 2012.
Matt Bai of The New York Times also penned an influential piece arguing that Obama’s focus on legislative accomplishments has fatally interfered with his ability to project big national political messages.
Now comes Ezra Klein with a succinct rejoinder to anyone trying to essay some single-bullet theory explanation of Obama’s political standing, or where it might be if he had adopted a different strategy.
Ezra begins by tartly noting that we’ll never know what might have happened in some parallel universe where Obama did what Judis or Bai think he should have done. But using objective measurements against the only recent presidents who took office in similar circumstances–Carter, Reagan and Clinton–Obama’s approval ratings look reasonably good:

Obama’s current approval rating of 44 percent beats Clinton, Carter and Reagan. All of them were between 39 percent and 41 percent at this point in their presidencies. And all of them were former governors who accomplished less legislatively than Obama has at this point in his presidency. That seems like a problem for Bai’s thesis. At least two of them are remembered as great communicators with a deft populist touch. That seems like a problem for Judis’s thesis.

Indeed. But Ezra goes on to make a point about the midterm results we are anticipating that’s become something of an obsession for me: the Democratic “losses” in the House everyone’s talking about are from the base of a strong Democratic majority. With the sole exception of 1934, the first midterm after the beginning of the Great Depression, and 2002, the first election after 9/11, every new president since Theodore Roosevelt has seen his party lose House seats in the first ensuing midterm.
But “gains” and “losses” are always relative. All 435 Members of the House are up for re-election. If Democrats lose 37 seats, they will have won the midterms, albeit by a reduced margin from 2006 and 2008.
All in all, while theories of what Obama woulda shoulda coulda done are interesting and sometimes informative, context is still essential in understanding the extent to which his actual conduct in office has or hasn’t damaged his political status. As Ezra concludes:

There’s plenty to criticize in Obama’s policies and plenty to lament in his politics. But when it comes to grand theories explaining how his strategic decisions led him to this horrible — but historically, slightly-better-than-average — political position, I’m skeptical. There are enormously powerful structural forces in American politics that seem to drag down first-term presidents. There is the simple mathematical reality that large majorities are always likely to lose a lot of seats. There is a terrible and ongoing economic slump — weekly jobless claims hit 500,000 today — that is causing Americans immense pain and suffering. Any explanations for the current political mood that don’t put those front and center is, at the least, not doing enough to challenge the counterfactual.

Selah.

This item by J.P. Green was first published on August 15, 2010.
Politico‘s Ben Smith presents a memo by Administration poll analyst Joel Benenson arguing that “Republican unpopularity could be the Democratic Party’s best defense against its own unpopularity.” According to Benenson’s bullet points:

• Today’s NBC/Wall St. Journal poll underscores the fact that with fewer than 90 days until the mid-term elections, the Republican Party’s standing is at one of its lowest points ever and its competitive position vs. the Democrats looks much as it did in the summers of 1998 and 2002, neither of which were “wave” elections.
• The NBC/WSJ poll shows that not only is the Republican Party’s image at its lowest point ever in their polling, their ratings are still lower than Democrats’ and their party image has worsened much more than the Democrats when compared with the last midterm elections in 2006.

See also Ed Kilgore’s post on the survey here. Further, Benenson adds,

• Only 24 percent of Americans gave the Republicans a positive rating while 46 percent were negative for a net of -22 (28 percent were neutral). This positive rating is not only a historic low, it is down 9 points since May — just three months ago. In addition, in July of 2006, a year in which Republicans lost 30 seats, their rating stood at 32 percent positive, 39 percent negative for only a -7 net rating or a change in the net rating of -15. During the same period the Democratic rating slipped only slightly by a net of -4 points from 32/39 in July 2006 to 33/44 today.
• This overall outlook is also consistent with an ABC/Washington Post poll from a month ago (7/13/10) that showed Americans’ confidence in Republicans in Congress to make “the right decisions for the country’s future” lagging behind Democrats:
– 73 percent say they are not confident in Republicans in Congress while 26 percent say they are, for a net negative confidence rating of -47 points.
– Democrats in Congress are at 32 percent confident (6 points higher than the GOP) and 67 percent who say they are not confident (6 points lower than the GOP), for a net confidence rating of -35, which is 12 points better than the congressional Republicans.
• When asked in the NBC/WSJ poll whether they prefer Democratic or Republican control of Congress after the November elections, 43 percent said Democrats and 42 percent said Republicans. While Democrats had a 10-point margin in 2006 when they gained 31 seats, the previous two midterms also showed a deadlocked preference in the summers of 1998 and 2002 in the NBC/WSJ polls. In both of those elections, the gains were only in single digits: 5 seats for the Democrats in 1998 and 8 seats for the Republicans in 2002.
• In addition, a Pew poll from early July showed that Republicans have a significant image deficit among Americans on the question of which party is “more concerned about people like me.” In that survey of 1800 Americans, 50 percent said Democrats were more concerned about people like them while only 34 percent said Republicans were.

Cherry-picked as Benenson’s data may be, all three polls appear to be methodologically-solid. If Benenson is right, Dems are in a better position, image-wise than Republicans. There’s plenty of room for improvement for Dems, but the GOP is in a deeper mess in terms of the way they are viewed by the public.