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.

This TDS Strategy Memo by Ed Kilgore, James Vega and J.P. Green was originally published on November 30, 2010.
In a recent Washington Monthly commentary titled “None Dare Call it Sabotage,” Steve Benen gave voice to a growing and profoundly disturbing concern among Democrats – that Republicans may actually plan to embrace policies designed to deny Obama not only political victories but also the maximum possible economic growth during his term in order weaken Democratic prospects in the 2012 elections.
The debate quickly devolved into an argument over the inflammatory word “sabotage” and the extent to which the clearly and passionately expressed Republican desire to see Obama “fail” will actually lead them to deliberately choose economic and other policies that are most conducive to achieving that result.
But, among Democrats themselves, this particular question is actually just one particular component of a much broader and deeper concern — a very real and authentic sense of alarm that there is something both genuinely unprecedented and also profoundly dangerous in the intense “take no prisoners” political extremism of the current Republican Party. There is a deep apprehension that fundamental American standards of proper political conduct and ethical political behavior are increasingly being violated.
The key feature that distinguishes the increasingly extremist perspective of today’s Republican Party from the standards of political behavior we have traditionally considered proper in America is the view that politics is — quite literally, and not metaphorically – a kind of warfare and political opponents are literally “enemies”
This “politics as warfare” perspective has historically been the hallmark of many extremist political parties of both the ideological left and ideological right – parties ranging from the American Communist Party to the French National Front.
Historically, these political parties display a series of common features – features that follow logically and inescapably from the basic premise of politics as warfare:
I. Strategy:

• In the politics as warfare perspective the political party’s objective is defined as the conquest and seizure of power and not sincere participation in democratic governance. The party is viewed as a combat organization whose goal is to defeat an enemy, not an organization whose job is to faithfully represent the people who voted for it.
• In the politics as warfare perspective extralegal measures, up to and including violence, are tacitly endorsed as a legitimate means to achieve a party’s political aims if democratic means are insufficient to obtain its objectives. To obscure the profoundly undemocratic nature of this view, the “enemy” government–even when it is freely elected — is described as actually being illegitimate and dictatorial, thus justifying the use of violence as a necessary response to “tyranny”.
• In the politics as warfare perspective all major social problems are caused by the deliberate, malevolent acts of powerful elites with nefarious motives. An evil “them” is the cause of all society’s ills.
• In the politics as warfare perspective the political party’s philosophy and basic strategy is inerrant – it cannot be wrong. The result is the creation of a closed system of ideologically controlled “news” that creates an alternative reality.

II. Tactics:

• In the politics as warfare perspective standard norms of honesty are irrelevant. Lying and the use of false propaganda are considered necessary and acceptable. The “truth” is what serves to advance the party’s objectives.
• In the politics as warfare perspective the political party accepts no responsibility for stability – engineering the fall of the existing government is absolutely paramount and any negative consequences that may occur in the process represent a kind of “collateral damage” that is inevitable in warfare
• In the politics as warfare perspective the creation of contrived “incidents” or deliberate provocations are acceptable. Because the adherent of this view “knows” that his or her opponents are fundamentally evil, even concocted or staged incidents are still morally and ethically “true.” The distinction between facts and distortions disappears.
• In the politics as warfare perspective compromise represents both betrayal and capitulation. Destruction of the enemy is the only acceptable objective. People who advocate compromise are themselves enemies.

These various components all form part of an integrated whole. Seen as a coherent package they make it clear that politics as warfare is simply not an acceptable philosophy for an American political party. It is profoundly and unambiguously wrong.
It is easy to see examples of the various politics as warfare– based views and tactics listed above directly reflected in the statements and actions of the extreme wing of Republican coalition – they range from Michelle Bachmann and Sharon Angle’s winking at violence with references to “second amendment remedies” to Andrew Breitbart’s deliberate editing of a video to smear Shirley Sherrod, Glen Beck’s suggesting that George Soros was a Nazi collaborator, Fox News’ tolerating attacks on Obama as equivalent to Hitler and airing repeated suggestions that the miniscule New Black Panthers present a real and genuine national threat of stolen elections and Grover Norquist’s endorsement of a government shutdown over extending the debt limit, despite the genuine dangers this poses to international financial stability.
The list can be continued with many other examples from Eric Erickson’s RedState, Rush Limbaugh’s radio show and organizations like Freedomworks. An entire book has been written containing nothing but examples of recognized right-wing spokesmen subtly and not so subtly endorsing and encouraging the use of violence against liberals and Democrats.
And this politics as warfare perspective is not confined to the “fringes” of the Republican Party.

Read more…

This item by Ed Kilgore was originally published on November 16, 2010.
It’s becoming more and more obvious that the big dispute at the heart of most arguments about the larger meaning of the 2010 midterms elections is whether the U.S. electorate is moving ideologically to the Right in a way that gives Republicans a natural majority in the future. And the very core of that dispute involves the behavior of self-identified independents, who obviously shifted towards the GOP between 2006-08 and 2010, and who seem to be exhibiting more conservative attitudes generally.
Is this the same electorate across elections? Are these the same indies across elections? Or to put it another way, how much did the 2010 outcome depend on voters changing their minds as opposed to some voters showing up and other voters not showing up? And among independents in particular, is their voting behavior a function of reversible factors (e.g., the performance of the economy) or of new ideological proclivities?
We asked TDS Co-Editor Ruy Texeira, a well-established slicer and dicer of the electorate, these questions, and here is his immediate reaction:

Has the public shifted sharply to the right ideologically? Conservatives say the 2010 election proves this, But careful analysis of available data shows there is far less to this argument than meets the eye. Here’s why:
Conservatives turned out heavily for the 2010 elections but, among registered voters as a whole, the percentage of conservatives only increased by 3% between 2006 and 2010
In the 2006 election 32 of percent of voters were conservatives according to the exit polls. In 2010 42 percent were conservatives. So what explains this 10 point increase?
Have registered voters as a whole become that much more conservative over that time period? No, according to Pew the percent of conservatives only went up 3 points over that time period. So the increase in self-identified conservatives among actual voters is not nearly accounted for by the increase in conservatives among registered voters. This suggests exceptional turnout of conservatives in 2010 even controlling for the increase in their numbers.
The 3% increase in conservatives among registered voters occurred entirely among Republicans and already Republican-leaning independents – not because of increasing conservatism among either Democrats or genuinely non-partisan independents.
But why do we have more conservatives today among registered voters? That is an interesting question with an interesting answer. Working from the Pew data, one part of the answer is that self-identified Republicans have become more conservative (by 4 points).
The other part of the answer is that independent registered voters have become more conservative (by 7 points). But why have they become more conservative? The answer is that Republican-leaning independents, just like ordinary Republicans, have become more conservative (also by 7 points) and that Republican-leaning independents are now a larger part of the independent pool (now 40 percent of independents compared to 30 percent in 2006). As political scientists have noted over and over again independents who lean toward the Republican party act very similar to Republican partisans (and Democratic leaning independents act like Democratic partisans), so this is a hugely important fact in understanding the changing political behavior of independents.
Among the rest of the independent pool, there has either been no change in the number of conservatives (among non-leaning or pure independents) or a slight decrease (among Democratic leaning independents). So the increase in “conservatism” among independents is completely accounted for by the increased conservatism of Republican-leaning independents and the increased weight of Republican-leaning independents among independents as a whole.
There are now more Republican-leaning independents among independents in general than there were in 2006, but the main reason is that the number of actual Republicans has significantly declined.
OK, so why has the weight of Republican-leaning independents among independents increased? This is a tricky question, but possibly the most important single factor is that there has been an actual decrease in the number of straight Republican identifiers among registered voters (down 2 points) which has produced a concomitant increase in the number of Republican-leaning independents over the 2006-2010 time period. It’s also interesting to note that that this switch can account for most of the 3 point overall increase in independents over the time period.

Putting it all together, here’s how Ruy sums it up:

So overall we’re shifting Republicans around between straight identifiers and leaners, both straight Republican identifiers and leaners have become more conservative over time and they turned out at very high levels in 2010.
That’s the basic story. There is no big ideological shift here viewed across registered voters as a whole. It’s overwhelmingly an intra-Republican story.

To put Ruy’s analysis another way, people who are by and large going to vote Republican in most elections have become more conservative, and they did turn out disproportionately in 2010, for all sorts of reasons, including their age and ethnicity. This is not the same as suggesting that “swing voters” are moving to the right. It’s the failure to understand that a majority of independents aren’t really “independent” that sustains the illusion that indies are primarily swing voters who are now swinging hard to the Right and to the GOP.

This item by Ed Kilgore, James Vega and J.P. Green was originally published on November 3, 2010.
In the next several weeks two things are certain to occur:

• Dems will engage in a robust and often bitter debate about the strategic lessons of the elections
• The mainstream media will build this into a “Dems in disarray” narrative that will have major negative consequences for Democratic morale, mobilization and public image.

The problem is particularly acute this year because Democrats are now facing a Republican Party even more extreme and radicalized than the one that emerged after the mid-term elections of 1994. The conservative advances in this election will encourage conservatives and Republicans to immediately launch a broad and intense attack, not only on the administration, but also on the network of individuals, groups and institutions that support Democratic officeholders, candidates and causes. Unions, environmental groups, think-tanks, social cause organizations and foundations will all find themselves directly in the cross-hairs.
During this critical period, the “Dems in disarray” narrative and perception will significantly weaken Democrats ability to resist this assault. As a result, it is urgent that Democrats seriously try to agree upon certain basic understandings about how to maintain the maximum degree of unity and cohesion as a political coalition and community while still engaging in a robust internal debate about the meaning and lessons of the election.
On the one hand, long Democratic tradition and culture insures that advocates for the major strategic perspectives within the Democratic Party will all energetically argue for their interpretation of the election results. In the coming weeks several hundred articles and several thousand web commentaries, comments, posts and discussion threads will debate these assertions in intense detail.
On the central issue of Obama’s performance, the vast majority of these analyses will fall into one of the following six categories:

1. Obama is basically doing as well as is realistically possible in the circumstances – his unpopularity is an inevitable side-effect of his trying to pass controversial legislation in an adverse economic environment.
2. Obama has made substantial mistakes on various issues, but overall he still deserves support.
3. Obama adopted too radical an agenda. He should have embraced more moderate, centrist positions then those he chose.
4. Obama allowed himself to be caricatured as more radical than he and his programs actually are. He needs to substantially revise his rhetoric and behavior.
5. Obama was too cautious and timid in embracing a coherent progressive program. He needed to take a significantly more forceful and indeed radical stance in a number of different areas, the economy in particular.
6. Obama allowed himself to be dragged down into Washington’s permanent culture of corruption, a culture that embraces not only the White House but all of Congress and the political system. Democrats cannot achieve meaningful change without fundamentally reforming the entire system.

Whatever their choice among the six views above, analysts will also argue that five other specific issues also profoundly affected the election outcome (1) “structural” factors like the normal, more conservative demographic slant of off-year election voters and the unusual number of Democrats who were running for re-election from basically Republican districts (2) the bad economy (3) the exceptional “inside” view voters had of the “sausage making” for the health Care bill (4) the huge and unprecedented partisan role of Fox and the right-wing media (5) the massive surge of secret campaign contributions .
Yet, despite the inevitable outpouring of articles and commentaries on all these subjects, few Democrats will really expect any serious shifts in thinking to occur. Realistically, there are always enough ambiguities in election results to provide some support for any of the major points of view within the Democratic coalition and, as a result, the major intra-Democratic strategic perspectives have all been stable and enduring features of the Democratic Party’s ideological landscape for the last half-century. The truth is that all Democrats know perfectly well that in the next three or four months none of the six major viewpoints noted above is going to suddenly and magically disappear as a result of any new data or analysis that emerges from the intra-Democratic debate about this election.
As a result, there are two basic points of agreement on which Dems from all the major intra-party factions ought to be able to agree:

1. All of the major perspectives within the Democratic Party have a legitimate place and role in today’s Democratic coalition. While various elements of both the centrist and progressive wings of the party may sincerely believe that in the long run a smaller but more ideologically united party would ultimately be preferable, the present moment categorically demands a basic level of Democratic unity from every element of the coalition.
2. To successfully defend the Democratic Party and its allied institutions against the very powerful conservative offensive that will come after the election, advocates of all major perspectives must proudly and explicitly assert that there are basic values and core areas of agreement unite them with all other Democrats and that they are prepared to present a solid and united front against the external threat posed by Republican extremism.

This can be asserted — to the mainstream media and the country as a whole — as follows:
Disagreements among Democrats are arguments within a coalition and a community. We are all powerfully united by our profound opposition and deep sense of outrage at the socially irresponsible and politically extremist agenda that has been adopted by the Republican Party and we proudly stand together against it. We are united by our deep and profound belief that — As James Carville so eloquently expressed it in 1996 — “We’re right, you’re wrong”.
Do not mistake our diversity for disunity. Do not mistake our debates for division. Whatever our internal disagreements, they pale beside our common rejection of the extremist world-view that has permeated the Republican Party. We Democrats have a wide range of views within our coalition, but we stand together as one united political party in our dreams for a better future and our readiness to join together as one to confront and withstand conservative attack.
This should be a common ground for all Democrats. Dems from all sectors of the party and points of view should consistently express it, particularly when dealing with the mainstream media. Dems cannot stop the mainstream media from pushing the Dems in disarray” narrative but they can all energetically and forcefully push back against it at every opportunity.
Ed Kilgore
James Vega
J.P. Green

This item by Ed Kilgore was originally published on November 5, 2010.
In monographs for the Brookings Institution and the Center for American Progress, and in separate articles for The New Republic, TDS Co-Editors William Galston and Ruy Teixeira offer distinctive takes on what happened on November 2, with equally distinctive suggestion about what Democrats need to do to regain the electoral strength they displayed in 2006 and 2008.
In explaining the decline in Democratic fortunes for Brookings, Galston places great emphasis on the conflict between the public-sector activism that Democrats pursued–partly to implement their longstanding agenda, partly to deal with the economic emergency–and profound public mistrust in the institutions of government, which was only made worse by the economic situation and how the White House and congressional leaders dealt with it. And this, says Galston, exposed a fundamental ambiguity about perceptions of the President himself which was one a political strength, but then became a weakness:

Some expected him to be a liberal stalwart, leading the charge for single-payer health insurance and the fight against big corporations; others assumed that his evident desire to transcend the red-blue divide pointed to a post-partisan presidential agenda implemented through bipartisan congressional cooperation. It would have been difficult to satisfy both wings of his coalition, and he didn’t. As he tacked back and forth during the first two years of his presidency, he ended up disappointing both.
There was a further difficulty. While Obama’s agenda required a significant expansion of the scope, power, and cost of the federal government, public trust in that government stood near a record low throughout his campaign, a reality his election did nothing to alter. A majority of the people chose to place their confidence in Obama the man but not in the institutions through which he would have to enact and implement his agenda. Although he was warned just days after his victory that the public’s mistrust of government would limit its tolerance for bold initiatives, he refused to trim his sails, in effect assuming that his personal credibility would outweigh the public’s doubts about the competence and integrity of the government he led.[iii] As events proved, that was a significant misjudgment.

Obama’s efforts to negotiate these difficult straits, says Galston, only made matters worse, as key elements of the electorate came to accept Republican complaints about various administration initiatives:

Once elected, Obama in fact had not one but two agendas–the agenda of choice on which he had run for president and the agenda of necessity that the economic and financial collapse had forced upon him. The issue he then faced was whether the latter would require him to trim or delay the former, a question he answered in the negative. Denying any conflict between these agendas, he opted to pursue both simultaneously. A major health care initiative was piled on top of the financial rescue plan and the stimulus package, exacerbating the public’s sticker shock. And initiatives such as climate change legislation and comprehensive immigration reform remained in play long after it should have been clear that they stood no serious chance of enactment while pervasive economic distress dominated the political landscape.

In his TNR piece, Galston looks at the political mechanics of how the House was lost, and suggests that a strong rightward shift in ideology among independents since 2006, and a general decline in the percentage of Americans who perceive themselves as moderate, are not just factors that explain 2010 but represent a fundamental challenge to the Democratic Party:

According to the Pew Research Center, conservatives as a share of total Independents rose from 29 percent in 2006 to 36 percent in 2010. Gallup finds exactly the same thing: The conservative share rose from 28 percent to 36 percent while moderates declined from 46 percent to 41 percent.
This shift is part of a broader trend: Over the past two decades, moderates have trended down as share of the total electorate while conservatives have gone up. … Unless the long-term decline of moderates and rise of conservatives is reversed during the next two years, the ideological balance of the electorate in 2012 could look a lot like it did this year.

With his CAP colleague John Halpin, Teixeira has developed a take that focuses more on the structural background of the 2010 elections than on a narrative of what Obama and congressional Democrats did right or wrong over the last two years. As they succinctly put it in their TNR piece:

Why did the Democrats decisively lose this election? It’s not really a mystery. The 2010 midterms were shaped by three fundamental factors: the poor state of the economy, the abnormally conservative composition of the midterm electorate, and the large number of vulnerable seats in conservative-leaning areas.

Laying it out in greater detail for CAP, Teixeira and Halpin put it this way:

Independent voters, white working-class voters, seniors, and men broke heavily against the Democrats due to the economy. Turnout levels were also unusually low among young and minority voters and unusually high among seniors, whites, and conservatives, thus contributing to a massively skewed midterm electorate. The Democrats therefore faced a predictable, and arguably unavoidable, convergence of forces. Incumbent Democrats suffered a genuine backlash of voter discontent due to a weak economy with considerable concerns about job creation, deep skepticism among independents, poor turnout among key base groups, and strong enthusiasm among energized conservatives.

They go through these factors in some detail, and have this to say about the many conflicting theories circulating among the chattering classes:

Political commentators are notoriously prone to overinterpreting election results and extrapolating singular causes for victories and losses from a multitude of possible factors. These interpretations usually underlie some desire to influence ideological debates and power struggles or to shape media stories about the election. And 2010 is no different….
Years of political science research show fairly conclusively that structural issues explain most of the variance in election results. Context, candidates, and politics matter, of course. But progressives should examine the basics if they want to understand why 2010 happened as it did: the poor condition of the economy; a conservative-leaning midterm electorate; and a Democratic Party with many marginal seats to lose. Strategic and policy decisions certainly made some difference in the magnitude of losses, but in a horrible economy it’s difficult to escape the reality that Democrats were poised to lose a significant number of seats no matter what they did.

Given their widely varying takes on the election, it’s not surprising that Galston and Teixeira have different advice for Democrats going forward, with Galston expressing optimism about a more limited and less partisan agenda along the lines of President Clinton’s approach after 1994, while Teixeira and Halpin suggest a reengagement with those elements of the electorate that stayed home in 2010 but tend to vote in presidential elections. But they agree completely that positive action and positive results on the economy are a must.

This item by Ed Kilgore was originally published on November 3, 2010.
Last night’s returns contained a few surprises, but for the most part, were only surprising to people who hadn’t been paying much attention, and to those conservative commentators who had been predicting a Republican takeover of the Senate and House gains in the neighborhood of 80-100 seats. It was indeed a Republican “wave” election, but not what you’d rightly call a tsunami.
When it’s all said and done (projections of outstanding votes are very favorable to Michael Bennet of CO and Patty Murray of WA), it’s likely that Democrats will retain a 53-47 margin in the Senate, which means Republicans will not be in a position to tempt Ben Nelson or Joe Lieberman to “flip” and give them control. Had things gone a little differently in the very close Senate races in PA or IL, the margin could have gone even higher, but Democrats aren’t complaining.
It appears Republican gains in the House will wind up at around 64 or 65 seats. Looking quickly at the casualties, it appears the vast majority were either veterans in heavily Republican territory or Class of 2006-2008 “Democratic wave” members. Six wins were in southern open districts that were all but conceded months ago. There were virtually no out-of-the-blue upsets; as Nate Silver put it early this morning, it was a very “orderly wave.”
But Republicans did seem to enjoy some luck at the margins. They won the national House popular vote by between 6% and 7% (which means the final Gallup generic poll, predicting a 15-point margin, was indeed an outlier, along with Rasmussen, which predicted a 12-point margin). This margin would in theory normally produce a gain of about 55 seats. The excess peformance will be attributed to superior Republican vote “efficiency,” which is another way of saying that the advantage they obtained during the last round of redistricting endured to the end.
Speaking of redistricting, the worst news of the night for Democrats was in state legislative races. Republicans appear to have gained control of 15 state legislative chambers. In conjunction with gubernatorial wins, they obtained control of the redistricting process in several big states which will lose House seats (alway an opportunity for gerrymandering mischief), including Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Overall, governorships went about as expected (though several have yet to be resolved, including CT, which had a lot of polling place irregularites), with Republicans likely to control 29 or 30. If Rick Scott’s lead in Florida holds up, that will be a bitter defeat fr Democrats, though the impact might be mitigated somewhat by the simultaneous passage of a initiative creating an independent redistricting commission. Democrats were hit hard in the Rust Belt, where several long-serving term-limited Democratic incumbents had become so unpopular that the entire ticket suffered (i.e., PA, MI and WI). The national wave almost certainly extinguished several well-fought Democratic gubernatorial candidacies, including those of Ted Strickland in OH and Vincent Sheheen in SC.
Finally, something must be said about the electorate that produced these results. According to national exit polls, 2010 voters broke almost evenly in terms of their 2008 presidential votes; indeed, given the normal tendency of voters to “misremember” past ballots as being in favor of the winner, this may have been an electorate that would have made John McCain president by a significant margin. Voters under 30 dropped from 18% of the electorate to 11%; African-Americans from 13% to 10%, and Hispanics from 9% to 8%. Meanwhile, voters over 65, the one age category carried by John McCain, increased from 16% of the electorate to 23%.
These are all normal midterm numbers. But because of the unusual alignment of voters by age and race in 2008, they produced a very different outcome, independently of any changes in public opinion. Indeed, sorting out the “structural” from the “discretionary” factors in 2008-2010 trends will be one of the most important tasks of post-election analysis, since the 2012 electorate will be much closer to that of 2008. That’s also true of the factor we will hear most about in post-election talk: the “swing” of independents from favoring Obama decisively in 2008 to favoring Republicans decisively this year. Are these the same people (short answer: not as much as you’d think), or a significantly different group of voters who happened to self-identify as independents and turned out to vote?
We’ll also hear far, far more than is useful about the radical changes the White House needs to make in order to put the president in position to be re-elected in 2012. An even more pertinent question is how Republicans will deal with their electoral windfall, particularly given the realities of the much less favorable electorate they will face in 2012. When given the rather limited choice of supporting, as the “highest priority” for Congress, either “cutting taxes, reducing the budget deficit, or spending to create jobs,” exit polls show 18% wanting to cut taxes and 39% wanting to reduce the deficit. The newly empowered GOP, of course, is committed to both courses of action, which are incompatible without deeply unpopular spending cuts. And this fiscal problem is completely independent of the other furies unleashed by conservatives over the last two years, including a determination to deregulate corporations, turn back the clock on abortion and GLBT rights, and demonize the president (a demand of the “base” they will be in a position to indulge through their new perches in House committees).
Some analysts will make much of the defeat of several Tea Party champions yesterday, notably Christine O’Donnell, Sharron Angle, Ken Buck (if Bennet’s lead holds up) and perhaps, around Thanksgiving time, of Joe Miller. But put aside individuals candidates. Just as the Tea Party Movement represents the radicalization of the GOP’s conservative base, the Tea Party Movement itself has radicalized the Republican Party beyond the point of turning back. No “grownups” are going to rescue that party from the Class of 2010 and the now-invincible belief of conservatives that they won by moving hard right. So we may have to wait until 2012 to understand the true legacy of this election. This wave definitely has an undertow.

This item by Ed Kilgore was originally published on October 25, 2010.
Many journalists never bother to acnowledge when their theories or predictions don’t pan out. That’s not true of TAP’s Mark Schmitt, who’s acknowledging that his sanguine attitude towards what Barack Obama might be able to accomplish substantively and poltically via a sort of post-partisan pragmatism wasn’t terribly prescient after all:

Republican intransigence and Democratic fecklessness have been well chronicled. But the more troublesome error in the theory appeared only after those barriers were overcome. Obama’s legislative victories, the most significant for a Democrat since Lyndon Johnson, began to seem like a burden rather than a source of future strength. The Obama presidency isn’t over, but his theory of governing — that change is possible by bridging partisan differences and enacting incremental policies that would pave the way for bigger proposals — is defunct. What comes next?

As someone who shared much of Schmitt’s optimism, I guess it’s time for a little self-criticism as well. My own theory of “grassroots bipartisanship” suggested that Obama’s conspicuous post-partisan approach might either split the GOP or force it into a position of self-destructive extremism. The split never happened; in effect, the right wing of the GOP has killed off its moderate wing, such as it was. So the GOP has been encouraged (not that it needed much encouragment) to become extremist, but so far, has not paid any tangible political price for it. Indeed, GOP extremism has excited the party’s conservative base, boosting midterm turnout.
Now it’s almost certain that this short-term outcome is the result of the economic calamity and the inability of Democrats to do much about it that voters will praise (avoiding greater calamity will await the praise of historians). Combined with the pro-GOP tilt of the midterm electorate, and the usual midterm reaction to any new administration, the economy has been enough to largely insulate the newly radical GOP from the consequences of its own bad behavior.
But that’s the short-term outcome. Emboldened by their initial success, and pushed by an activist base that will now be convinced the GOP has a mandate for extremism, the Republican Party going forward is in a fine position to squander its midterm wins and remind swing voters why they got so throughly sick of Repubican rule in 2006 and 2008.
So I’m not ready just yet to accept that Obama’s original “theory of change” was fatally flawed, and might not succeed in the long run. But Schmitt’s obviously right: this is not where we were supposed to be two years after Barack Obama’s election, and fresh thinking about the strategic and tactical challenges facing progressivism and the Democratic Party are most definitely in order. But panic, or a kneejerk decision to emulate Republican extremism, are neither fresh nor a form of thinking

This item by J.P. Green was originally published on October 25, 2010.
No matter what happens in the mid term elections, expect an intensified debate about the future of the Democratic Party in general, and an even more heated discussion about the breadth of the Democratic Tent — more specifically what to do about the ‘Blue Dogs.’
The debate has been going on for a few years. But a re-opening salvo has just been fired by Ari Berman, in his New York Times op-ed “Boot the Blue Dogs.” Berman, a contributing writer for The Nation and author of “Herding Donkeys: The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics,” argues that the Democratic tent has gotten too big, and the time has come to purge the party of conservative Democrats who are obstructing not only the Democratic agenda, but also the party’s ability to grow. He makes a strong case:

With President Obama in office, some notable beneficiaries of the Democrats’ 50-state strategy have been antagonizing the party from within — causing legislative stalemate in Congress, especially in the Senate, and casting doubt on the long-term viability of a Democratic majority. As a result, the activists who were so inspired by Mr. Dean in 2006 and Mr. Obama in 2008 are now feeling buyer’s remorse.
…Democrats would be in better shape, and would accomplish more, with a smaller and more ideologically cohesive caucus. It’s a sentiment that even Mr. Dean now echoes. “Having a big, open-tent Democratic Party is great, but not at the cost of getting nothing done,” he said. Since the passage of health care reform, few major bills have passed the Senate. Although the Democrats have a 59-vote majority, party leaders can barely find the votes for something as benign as extending unemployment benefits.

Berman sees two pivotal benefits of dumping the ‘Blue Dogs’:

…First, it could enable them to devise cleaner pieces of legislation, without blatantly trading pork for votes as they did with the deals that helped sour the public on the health care bill. (As a corollary, the narrative of “Democratic infighting” would also diminish.)
Second, in the Senate, having a majority of 52 rather than 59 or 60 would force Democrats to confront the Republicans’ incessant misuse of the filibuster to require that any piece of legislation garner a minimum of 60 votes to become law. Since President Obama’s election, more than 420 bills have cleared the House but have sat dormant in the Senate. It’s easy to forget that George W. Bush passed his controversial 2003 tax cut legislation with only 50 votes, plus Vice President Dick Cheney’s. Eternal gridlock is not inevitable unless Democrats allow it to be.

Berman adds “Democrats aren’t ideological enough. Their conservative contingent has so blurred what it means to be a Democrat that the party itself can barely find its way.” He does not say exactly how Democrats should get rid of the Blue Dogs, but withholding financial support from them and otherwise disciplining Democratic members of congress who refuse to support the majority agenda are measures that have gained support among Democratic progressives who want to diminish the power of the Blue Dogs.
Single-payer, pro-choice, tax-the-rich, withdraw-from-Afghanistan progressive Democrat that I am, I worry about the effects of a wholesale purge of the Blue Dogs. I think it’s a mistake to stereotype all Blue Dogs as ideologues. Many are, but some are fairly progressive, and merely want to survive in their conservative districts, hoping to lead their constituents forward to a more progressive vision. Some Blue Dogs in marginal districts deserve a little wiggle room.
Use redistricting where possible to reduce Blue Dog numbers, while not cutting the number of Democratic districts, yes. Allocate less Party money to Blue Dogs and give it to needy progressive candidates in close races, sure. Invoke stronger party discipline with respect to committee assignments on those who fail to support the party a standard percentage of the time, of the time, absolutely.
As for conservative Democratic Senators (‘Blue Dogs’ is a term usually reserved for House members), it’s easier to draw a line in the sand. Cloture betrayal, as Ed Kilgore has persuasively argued, should invoke party discipline.
Generally, Dems should use more carrot and stick to sway the Blue Dogs in a progressive direction. But let’s not lose sight of the fact that majority status is so important for getting anything done in congress, that it would be a mistake to embrace a level of rigid ideological purity that denies Dems the speakership, committee chairs and the ability to enact legislation.

This item by Ed Kilgore was originally published on October 15, 2010.
There’s been quite a bit of buzz over the last few days about a TNR article by Sara Robinson of Campaign for America’s Future that argues progressives need to emulate conservative “brand-building” through professional marketing techniques and institution-building.
It’s not exactly a new argument. At TPM Cafe, Todd Gitlin, who strongly agrees with Robinson, notes:

I mean no disrespect when I say that some version of this piece has appeared during every election cycle of the 21st century, and a lot of good books have sounded the theme.

Sometimes, of course, arguments for “branding” or “promoting frames” for progressives are less about using savvy marketing techniques or paying attention to basic values and themes, and more about insisting that the Democratic Party enforce the kind of ideological consistency that has made “branding” a more mechanical undertaking for Republicans, at least since Reagan. Robinson acknowledges that progressives don’t have the sort of level of consensus as conservatives, but argues that disagreements must be submerged in the interest of projecting a clear message.
Personally, I’m all for using smart techniques in politics, and have spent a good chunk of my own career in training sessions aimed at helping Democrats unravel and articulate their values, policy goals, and proposals in a way that promotes both party unity and effective communications.
But it’s important to understand that conservatives have an advantage in “branding” that I don’t think progressives can or should match. The best explication of this advantage was by Jonathan Chait in a justly famous 2005 article (also for TNR) entitled “Fact Finders,” which argued that conservatives, unlike progressives have little regard for empirical evidence in developing their “brand,” and thus can maintain a level of simplicity and consistency in political communications that eludes the more reality-minded. Here Chait makes the key distinction:

We’re accustomed to thinking of liberalism and conservatism as parallel ideologies, with conservatives preferring less government and liberals preferring more. The equivalency breaks down, though, when you consider that liberals never claim that increasing the size of government is an end in itself. Liberals only support larger government if they have some reason to believe that it will lead to material improvement in people’s lives. Conservatives also want material improvement in people’s lives, of course, but proving that their policies can produce such an outcome is a luxury, not a necessity.

Thus conservatives are entirely capable of arguing that deficits don’t matter if they are promoting tax cuts, while deficits matter more than anything if they are trying to cut social spending; that tax cuts and deregulation are essential if the economy’s good, and tax cuts and deregulation are essential if the economy’s bad; and that particular totems like, say, missile defense, should be a top national priority both during and after the Cold War. Their agenda rarely changes, no matter how much the world changes, or how little evidence there is that their policy prescriptions work. The continued adherence of most conservatives to supply-side economics, that most thoroughly discredited concept, is a particularly important case in point.
As Chait notes, the refusal of progressives to ignore reality creates a real obstacle to consistency (and by inference, “branding”):

[I]ncoherence is simply the natural byproduct of a philosophy rooted in experimentation and the rejection of ideological certainty. In an open letter to Roosevelt, John Maynard Keynes called him “the Trustee for those in every country who seek to mend the evils of our condition by reasoned experiment within the framework of the existing social system. If you fail, rational change will be gravely prejudiced throughout the world, leaving orthodoxy and revolution to fight it out.” Note how Keynes defined his and Roosevelt’s shared ideology as “reasoned experiment” and “rational change” and contrasted it with orthodoxy (meaning the conservative dogma that market economics were self-correcting) and revolution.

What progressives gain in exchange for this sacrifice of the opportunity to pound in a simple message and agenda for decades is pretty important: the chance when in power to promote policies that actually work. And of all the “brands” that are desirable for the party of public-sector activism, competence is surely the best. Indeed, the most ironically perilous thing about the current political environment is that Democrats are paying a high price for the consequences of ideologically-driven incompetence–not to mention very deliberate efforts to destabilize the planet and promote economic inequality and social divisions–attributable to the last era of conservative control of the federal government.
The best news for progressives right now is that conservatives are engaged in another, and even more ideologically-driven, effort to promote their “brand” at the expense of reality. Indeed, one way to understand the Tea Party Movement is as a fierce battle to deny Republicans any leeway from the remorseless logic that will soon lead them to propose deeply unpopular steps to reduce the size and scope of government, while also insisting on policies virtually guaranteed to make today’s bad economy even worse, certainly for middle-class Americans. I’m willing to grant conservatives a “branding” advantage and keep my own political family grounded in the messy uncertainties of the real world.