As most readers probably know, one of the most relentless narratives of the 2014 election cycle was the claim that the Republican Party had “moderated” itself after its Tea Party-influenced bout with government shutdowns and other tokens of extremism, and was now operating under a “pragmatic” party leadership determined to govern, not obstruct. Not missing a beat, GOP and MSM opinion-leaders have carried that narrative into post-election spin.
But you know who isn’t buying it? Rank-and-file Republicans, as reported in a new Pew survey that I talked about at Washington Monthly today:

[The] new numbers from Pew…asked self-identified Democrats and Republicans if they’d prefer that leaders work with the other side “even if it disappoints” some party members, or instead “stand up” to the other side, even if that means “less gets done in Washington:”

[O]nly about a third of Republicans and Republican leaners (32%) want to see the GOP leadership work with Obama if it disappoints some groups of Republican supporters. About twice as many (66%) say GOP leaders should stand up to Obama even if less gets done. This reflects a shift away from wanting to see their leadership work with Obama in the wake of his reelection two years ago, but is little different than opinions among Republicans after the party’s 2010 midterm victory.
In contrast, about half (52%) of Democrats and Democratic leaning independents say Obama should try as best he can to work with Republican leadership even if it results in some disappointment among Democrats, while 43% say he should stand up on issues important to Democrats at the risk of less productivity in Washington.

There’s more of the same flashing signals elsewhere in the survey:

By a 57% to 39% margin, more Republicans and Republican leaning independents say their party’s leadership should move in a more conservative, rather than more moderate, direction. These views are little changed over the last four years.
And, as in the past, Democrats are more likely to say their party leadership should move in a more moderate direction (52% say this) than a liberal direction (41%). Yet the share saying the party should move in a liberal direction is now higher than it was following the 2010 midterms (41% today, up from 34%).

So the party whose rank-and-file wants the most conservative Republican Party in history to become more conservative, and also wants the most obstructionist congressional cadre in history to obstruct more, is the support base for all those “pragmatists” heading to Washington who want us to believe they’re determined to “get things done” come hell or high water.

My guess is that all the “pragmatism” talk is just positioning in order to blame Obama and Democrats for the gridlock just ahead. Yeah, Republicans may be more “disciplined” than before, but only in the service of a conservative movement bent on turning back the clock as soon and as far as it can.

In my last post here, I basically called for a renaissance of Democratic strategic debate as an urgent priority, and am gratified it got a robust response.
Probably the best way for me to encourage this debate along at this point is to note some real obstacles to clear-eyed strategic thinking. And I’m afraid we’ve been offered one by a Democratic senator who very nearly lost a “safe seat,” Mark Warner of VA, as I noted today at Washington Monthly.

Anybody who paid close attention to Mark Warner’s 2001 gubernatorial campaign probably remembers it as a strategic masterpiece. Facing a Republican with a Richmond-area base, Warner spent a lot of time in rural southwest Virginia, where no statewide Democratic candidate had done well for quite a few years. He won these areas, and no, the legends of Mudcat Sanders notwithstanding, he didn’t do it by sponsoring NASCAR race vehicles or even by putting up those ingenious “Sportsmen for Warner” yard signs festooned with hunting rifles and fishing gear (which I remember distinctly as a resident of rural Piedmont Virginia at the time). He won by spending a lot of time in the area and talking convincingly about how technology could enable poor and isolated rural areas to escape their geographical limitation and even leapfrog cities in growth and prosperity. It was pretty inspiring, actually, and it worked. Until it didn’t.
Four years later Tim Kaine ran to succeed Warner, and in part because his opponent had his own base in SW VA, he adopted an entirely different strategy focused on metro suburbs, and that worked just as well as Warner’s. A year later Jim Webb, a guy far better positioned to appeal to Scots-Irish mountain people than Warner could ever have been, won almost entirely by winning traditional Democratic urban/suburban areas. By the time Creigh Deeds–himself from rural central Virginia–ran for governor in 2009, Democrats were just getting killed in rural areas, as they were pretty much all over the country. And then Terry McAuliffe broke VA Democrats’ brief losing streak by concentrating on turning out “base” voters in the cities and the NoVa suburbs probably more than anyone ever had, and won narrowly.
I cite all this history as prologue to a comment by Mark Warner this week (as reported by WaPo’s Jenna Portnoy and Rachel Weiner), when he was asked why he didn’t emulate T-Mac’s strategy of focusing on Democratic “base” areas in a campaign where turnout was everything:

“My path has been very different from Terry’s or Tim’s or others’,” Warner said in an interview with The Washington Post before the election. “To the annoyance of some of my so-called staff, I’m going to Abingdon and Russell County now because Southwest Virginia gave me a start, and I’m not going to cede one part.”
The counties in that region voted for Gillespie, sometimes by more than 30 points over Warner.

Even the most brilliant strategy becomes a millstone when it’s not adapted to changing political circumstances. So beware of anybody’s iron “model” from the past on how to win elections. More often than not, the real lesson taught by successful political strategies is to remember that yesterday’s audacious and innovative approach can become today’s stale CW and tomorrow’s upset loss.

Yeah, this was a bad midterm election. We’ve known all along that the Senate landscape was terrible–uniquely terrible–and that the midterm turnout patterns virtually guaranteed major Republican gains, just as they did in 2010. We also knew the history of second-term midterms, and the impact of poor presidential approval ratings–which were especially poor in the Senate battleground states.
But the strong quality of some individual Democratic Senate campaigns, and a belief in the potential of the Bannock Street Project which aimed at changing the very nature of the GOPs large midterm structural advantage, led a lot of Democrats to expect a lot better.
It didn’t happen. But the main analytic task at the moment is to figure out how much of this bad midterm was due to inevitable “fundamental” factors that cannot be changed in the immediate future and how much is attributable to Democratic mistakes that can be corrected. That in turn will help determine the extent to which the Democratic road to recovery requires a fundamental change in strategy and tactics or a more modest turn to take advantage of presidential cycle opportunities–and new leadership.
You can make a pretty good case that turnout patterns alone dictated most of the 2014 results, particularly if you think more conservative members of pro-Democratic demographic groups showed up disproportionately at the polls. But then again, if Democrats are ever to govern again, they cannot simply wait out every midterm and hope for temporary redemption in the following presidential election.
So this is a very important period for Democratic strategic thinking and discussion. We don’t need a “struggle for the soul” of the party so much as a struggle to think clearly and avoid the temptations of self-delusion or despair.

As we sort through the various voter suppression measures being deployed by Republicans in the several states, it’s important to remember that pretty recently it was Gospel Truth that everyone should vote. That tradition has slipped away, to be replaced by a number of disreputable ideas, as I discussed today at the Washington Monthly:

There’s an age-old conservative ideological argument often embedded in the contrary presumption against universal voting–I discussed it at some length here. But people naturally are reluctant to fully articulate the belief that only those who hold property or pay taxes should be allowed to vote; that’s why such beliefs are typically expressed in private, with or without a side order of neo-Confederate rhetoric.
More often you hear that poor voter turnout is a sign of civic health. Here’s an expression of that comforting (if not self-serving) theory by the Cato Institute’s Will Wilkinson in 2008:

[L]ower levels of turnout may suggest that voters actually trust each other more — that fewer feel an urgent need to vote defensively, to guard against competing interests or ideologies. Is it really all that bad if a broad swath of voters, relatively happy with the status quo, sit it out from a decided lack of pique?

First of all, everything we know about the people least likely to vote is not congruent with an image of self-satisfied, happy citizens enjoying a “lack of pique” or trusting one another too much to resort to politics. But second of all, nobody’s asking anyone to stop living their lives and raising their kids and going to work in order to become political obsessives. Voting, and even informing oneself enough to cast educated votes (or to affiliate oneself with a political party that generally reflects one’s interests), requires a very small investment of time relative to everything else. And if the concern here is that voting interferes too much with “normal” life, shouldn’t we make it as convenient as possible?

The big issue here is that the presumption that universal voting is a good thing has been gradually replaced by the presumption that Americans must prove their worthiness to vote. And that’s a big deal:

Hedging on the right to vote takes you down a genuinely slippery slope that leads to unconscious and then conscious oligarchy and even authoritarianism. And so to paraphrase Bobby Kennedy, we should not look at eligible voters and ask why they should vote, but instead ask why not? There’s no good answer that doesn’t violate every civic tenet of equality and every Judeo-Christian principle of the sisterhood and brotherhood of humanity.

Restricting the franchise is a old and disreputable idea whose time has nonetheless come once again. It’s important to throw it right back once again.

As we near election day, after months of speculation about U.S. Senate races, it’s good to remember there are important downballot elections, and not just for statewide offices. State legislative races are hanging fire, too, and I wrote about them today at Washington Monthly:

Governing‘s Louis Jacobsen had an update of his unique race ratings just last week. The landscape is a lot like that of the U.S. House, and for a lot of the same reasons: Republicans will benefit from turnout patterns and redistricting, but their gains will be limited by Democratic under-exposure (when you’ve recently lost a lot of seats, there are far fewer marginal seats to lose).
Jacobsen shows a total of 18 chambers at some risk of changing party control, 11 from D to R and 7 from R to D. The biggest disruption could occur in Colorado, where Democrats control the governorship and both legislative chambers; all three are up in the air at the moment, with a shift to all-mail voting creating a lot of uncertainty. Republicans could gain total control in Arkansas by winning the governorship and hanging onto the House. Democrats hope finally to gain control of the New York Senate. And there will be some states where big shifts short of a change of control could be significant: e.g., in California, where Democrats are in danger of losing a supermajority in the Senate, and in North Carolina, where the backlash against a GOP legislature could give Democrats significant gains in both chambers.
As always on and after election night, beware of assessments of shifts in total state legislative seats, since those are wildly overinfluenced by the 400-seat New Hampshire House, where Republicans are very likely to make significant gains.

As the dust slowly settles, we’ll have a sense of the extent to which Republicans have consolidated the strong position they achieved through redistricting in many states, and the implications for policy ranging from abortion and voting rights to Medicaid expansion and economic development.

The strangest thing about the battle for the Senate going on this year is how much trouble Republicans are having in states won by Mitt Romney, and not necessarily the ones where they expected trouble. Contests in South Dakota, Kentucky and Georgia have all spent some time panicking Republicans, and none of those states has been put away by the GOP in the interim. But the biggest surprise still has to be Kansas, a profoundly Republican state with multiple struggling statewide Republican campaigns. Playing off Mark Benelli’s fine profile of events in Kansas for Rolling Stone, I discussed the plight of the GOP there at Washington Monthly today:

[Benelli’s] precis of how Sam Brownback made the state an experiment for the discredited fiscal theories of doddering supply-siders is an instant classic:

Back in 2011, Arthur Laffer, the Reagan-era godfather of supply-side economics, brought to Wichita by Brownback as a paid consultant, sounded like an exiled Marxist theoretician who’d lived to see a junta leader finally turn his words into deeds. “Brownback and his whole group there, it’s an amazing thing they’re doing,” Laffer gushed to The Washington Postthat December. “It’s a revolution in a cornfield.” Veteran Kansas political reporter John Gramlich, a more impartial observer, described Brownback as being in pursuit of “what may be the boldest agenda of any governor in the nation,” not only cutting taxes but also slashing spending on education, social services and the arts, and, later, privatizing the entire state Medicaid system. Brownback himself went around the country telling anyone who’d listen that Kansas could be seen as a sort of test case, in which unfettered libertarian economic policy could be held up and compared right alongside the socialistic overreach of the Obama administration, and may the best theory of government win. “We’ll see how it works,” he bragged on Morning Joe in 2012. “We’ll have a real live experiment.”
That word, “experiment,” has come to haunt Brownback as the data rolls in. The governor promised his “pro-growth tax policy” would act “like a shot of adrenaline in the heart of the Kansas economy,” but, instead, state revenues plummeted by nearly $700 million in a single fiscal year, both Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s downgraded the state’s credit rating, and job growth sagged behind all four of Kansas’ neighbors. Brownback wound up nixing a planned sales-tax cut to make up for some of the shortfall, but not before he’d enacted what his opponents call the largest cuts in education spending in the history of Kansas.

Brownback added political to fiscal risk by securing big bags of money from friends like the Koch Brothers and using it in a 2012 primary purge of moderate Republican state senators who didn’t support his fiscal plans. And it’s all blown up on him this year, with the shock waves potentially engulfing the state’s senior U.S. Senator. Binelli’s portrait of Pat Roberts as an “unloved Beltway mediocrity” who stands by trembling with fatigue as more famous and charismatic conservatives campaign to save his bacon is as acute as his portrayal of Brownback as a mad scientist whose lab has blown up.
Because of the nature of the state and the year and the outside (and inside, from the Kochs Wichita HQ) money flooding Kansas, Brownback and Roberts may survive–Brownback to preside over the damage he’s done to the state’s fiscal standing and schools, and Roberts to return to a final stage of his long nap in the Capitol. But both men have richly earned the trouble they are in.

At a minimum, Browback’s presidential ambitions are now officially laughable, and moderate Republicans have gotten his full attention. But it would be nice to see an object lesson taught in the limits of Republican extremism.

One of the things I dread about every Election Night is the tendency of pundits and spinners to over-interpret the results. It could very easily happen this year, because this has every appearance of being a sui generis election, and one with virtually no predictive value for the next cycle. I went through some of the reasons this is the case at TPMCafe today:

If Democrats hang onto the Senate, it could be a sign that the election was not as “nationalized” as expected, or inversely, that a national GOTV effort succeeded in helping them overcome the usual “midterm falloff” problem. And if Republicans win Senate control, it will show their ability to take advantage of a very favorable landscape and adjust to unexpected challenges like viable independent candidacies in Kansas and South Dakota, or underwhelming campaigns like those of Thom Tillis and David Perdue.
But is any of this an omen for what will happen in the next cycle, as big elements of the punditocracy will undoubtedly try to make it? Not so likely. 2016 will feature a different electorate (younger and more diverse) and a very different landscape. In the Senate, that landscape will go from being extremely pro-Republican this year (21 Democratic seats up, 8 in states carried by Romney, and 15 GOP seats up, just one in a state carried by Obama) to being extremely pro-Democratic in 2016 (24 GOP seats up, 7 in states carried by Obama, and just 10 Democratic seats up, none in states carried by Romney). Only three of this year’s Senate battlegrounds (North Carolina, Colorado and Iowa) are expected to be presidential battlegrounds (if a fourth, Georgia, becomes one, that will be very good news for Democrats).
Moreover, the issue landscape and candidate dynamics in 2016 are likely to be different. If the U.S. economy continues its slow but steady improvement, by 2016 the “economic issues” will likely focus on the quality rather than the quantity of jobs. While it’s possible the sort of plague-of-frogs international environment the U.S. is dealing with now will continue or even intensify, that’s hardly probable. And of course, whereas 2014 is an indirect and partial “referendum” on Barack Obama’s performance as president, 2016 will be more of a “two futures” campaign dominated by presidential nominees. The likely (though hardly certain) Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, is probably not going to be viewed as any sort of protege of or surrogate for Obama, thanks to her own vast public profile.

So this election matters, but not because it’s necessarily going to tell us much of anything about 2016. Fortunately, that cycle begins on November 5, so maybe some gabbers will forget to tell us the outcome has already been determined.

There’s been quite a bit of discussion during this midterm cycle about the “Personhood” movement and its efforts (via ballot initiatives and proposed federal and state constitutional amendments and statutes) to give zygotes the full rights of citizenship, in order to infallibly protect them from destruction via abortions, IV fertilization, or certain kinds of birth control.
But “Personhood” has become a real problem from pols who embraced that radical Cause and are now getting heat for it, including most notably 2014 Senate candidates Cory Gardner, Joni Ernst and Thom Tillis. So they’re distancing themselves from it, and even trying to depict themselves as “moderates” on reproductive rights issues because they don’t really share the Personhood movement’s most radical tenets. But it won’t go away that easily, as I discussed at Washington Monthly today:

In a fascinating look at the Colorado-based Personhood USA organization, Irin Carmon explains why this fring-y cause is getting so much attention this year, and why it’s deplored by both GOPers and “mainstream” antichoice groups. The bottom line is that its efforts are blowing the cover of a GOP/RTL strategy to incrementally ban abortions (and eventually “abortifacient” birth control methods) by focusing on controversial late-term abortions and such deceptive practices as the increasingly popular “medical conditions” restrictions that are shutting down clinics in a host of states. The Personhood folk hate the indirect strategy, and want to hold everyone’s feet to the fire to make sure they will embrace the least as well as the most popular antichoice measures.

What Personhood USA wants is culture change. Specifically, they want a culture where fertilized eggs are paramount, without exceptions, and anyone who stands in their way – including the woman carrying an embryo or fetus – is subject to the criminal code.
They aren’t there yet, but they’re getting closer. “Being around for six years,” [Personhood USA communications director Jennifer] Mason said, “we’ve changed the way the country talks about abortion.”
She’s right. Candidates who call themselves pro-life are being called out by parts of their base for not going far enough – far enough being Personhood. Evangelical Protestants being drawn into the previously Catholic terrain of the contraception wars are working from the Personhood playbook, and growing its coalition. The Supreme Court decision in Hobby Lobby, which refused to question Personhood’s unscientific claims in allowing religious owners of companies to opt out of covering contraception for their employees, was the biggest public relations coup yet for Personhood’s worldview.
Even Republicans who have at one point embraced Personhood and are now denying or deflecting their stances – as Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Iowa Republican Senatorial candidate Joni Ernst have -are still operating on Personhood’s terrain.

Here’s the key thing to understand:

Nor is Mason bothered by the sometimes fierce battles fought among anti-abortion factions on how Personhood is spoiling everything. “It’s important to note that they do agree on the goals,” she said of her fellow abortion opponents. “In fact, even before we got involved, Personhood has long been considered the end game for the pro-life movement.” She’s right about that too.

As is the case with a lot of arguments within the GOP and the conservative movement these days, regular old antichoice pols and the Personhood folk agree on principles and goals but differ on strategy and tactics. If they could run the country, they’d run it the same way, with no abortions legal anywhere and with IUDs and Plan B contraception either banned or under a legal cloud.

So the “Personhood” debate is a useful optic for understanding the relationship of the GOP with extremist groups, and why Republican claims of “moderation” are so often exaggerated at best and plainly deceptive at worst.

So we’re now down to the lick-log in the midterm elections, and some observers are spinning the latest polls to predict Total Victory for The Team, and some are arguing the polls are wrong. Nate Silver comes along at FiveThirtyEight to provide an empirical take on whether and how the polls may be wrong, and I distilled his wisdom at Washington Monthly:

Nate Silver has one of those posts today at FiveThirtyEight you feel like you should memorize, since it covers a lot of the misunderstandings and arguments left in this midterm election cycle.
First he takes on this year’s version of the “skewed polls” controversy of 2012, and reminds us that as it turned out the 2012 polls were generally off–but in favor of Republicans.
It’s a bit of a shock to read Nate’s data and realize that Senate polling averages in the last three weeks of the campaign have been off by more than 3% four times since 1990: twice showing “bias” towards Democrats (1994 and 2002) and twice towards Republicans (1998 and 2012). Bottom line:

On average since 1990, the average bias has been just 0.4 percentage points (in the direction of Republicans), and the median bias has been exactly zero.

Not much predictive value there.
How about turnout? Could the polls be missing the hidden effect of, say, the Brannock Street Project? Maybe, but they’re already showing a narrowed gap between registered and likely voters, a good sign for Democrats:

[T]he pollsters, at least as a group, are not expecting the sort of turnout gap they did in 2010. That year, the average poll had Republicans doing about 6 percentage points better among likely voters than among registered voters — a historically large difference. The average poll we’ve tracked this year has shown about a 3-point gap (favoring Republicans) instead — in line with the historical average in midterm years.
And remember, the question is not which party has the stronger ground game, but whether a stronger ground game will lead to benefits that aren’t reflected in the polls.

In passing, Nate also reminds us of election theories you still hear but that have been largely discredited: the Incumbent Rule (undecideds break towards challengers); the Bradley Effect (polls overestimate the vote of African-American candidates); and the Generic Ballot Tilt (the generic congressional ballot has a built-in Democratic bias).

The bottom line is that past experience doesn’t tell us much about the likely accuracy or inaccuracy of polls this year. What we do know is that the landscape, particularly for the Senate, is skewed heavily in favor of the GOP, and that Democrats are fighting impressively to overcome a lot of built-in obstacles. How much they need to overcome and whether they succeed is something we won’t know until November 4.

Like a lot of people, I’m gazing in awe at the “outsourcing” brouhaha in the Georgia Senate race, which is fascinating because David Perdue entirely brought it on himself. That actually kind of figures, as I observed at the Washington Monthly:

In the endless argument between political scientists and “traditional” political people about how elections are decided, I’m with the Poli Sci crowd more often than not, and don’t much believe individual “moments” in campaigns usually matter all that much. But there are obviously exceptions; nobody really thinks Todd Akin was done in by “fundamentals” in 2012.
And so, I suggested a while ago that there are two Senate candidates this year who strike me as especially capable of delivering the kind of gaffe that could blow up a campaign: Joni Ernst of Iowa and David Perdue of Georgia. Turns out Ernst’s problem is less what she is saying now (which is very little other than “farmer! farmer!”) than the crazy stuff she’s said in the recent past And that’s partially true for Perdue as well, insofar as his latest problem emerged from something Politico (operating on a tip?) found in a 2005 deposition wherein he allowed as how he’d spent most of his career “outsourcing.”
But then redeeming my faith in him as a gaffe-master, Perdue compounded the error by saying in the present tense that he was “proud” of his involvement in outsourcing, and Michelle Nunn’s campaign has not wasted a moment in exploiting the comment….
[T]hose who remember the palpable relief Republicans everywhere expressed when Perdue made a runoff spot and then won the nomination, the latest developments are kinda rich. Wouldn’t it be funny if GOPers ultimately wished they’d had Paul Broun or Phil Gingrey on the ballot in November?

In the meantime, Perdue’s making me look prescient, and making his backers look for more mud to throw at his opponent.