By now you’ve probably read all the basics about the stunning defeat of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in VA-07 yesterday (if you haven’t, see J.P. Green’s earlier post). I’ll confine myself to a couple of brief excerpts from my take late last night at TPMCafe about the bigger picture:

For the first post-primary Wednesday this year, I’m not having to poke holes in the pre-ordained MSM narrative for this campaign cycle, The Year of the Republican Establishment, wherein the Great Big Adults of the GOP were supposed to put down the unruly Tea Folk and position their “pragmatic” party perfectly for smashing victories in 2014 and maybe 2016 as well. I’d say the Republican voters of the 7th congressional district of Virginia put that meme to rest for the immediate future.

Ah, but wasn’t Lindsey Graham’s easy win in SC a counter-indicator, showing mainly that Cantor just ran a bad campaign which other Republicans can write off as an anomaly? I don’t think that’s the lesson they’ll take:

It’s unclear yet what Cantor’s demise means in terms of the succession to power in the House GOP. But there’s little question this contest will reinforce the tendency of Republican officeholders everywhere to protect their right flanks with all their might, and that’s a more important victory for “constitutional conservatives” than having Dave Brat in the House.
Interestingly enough, a Republican incumbent initially considered far more vulnerable than Cantor, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, romped to victory yesterday without a runoff over a field of six opponents trying to exploit his RINO reputation. Graham had the same kind of financial advantage as Cantor enjoyed, but also made himself a chief purveyor of red meat to “the base” in his abrasive exploitation of the Benghazi! “scandal,” and more recently, his suggestion that Barack Obama was courting impeachment by his handling of the Bergdahl exchange.
Cantor has been a conspicuous sponsor of the “reform conservative” band of intellectuals encouraging Republicans to think more deeply about a positive governing agenda. He might have done better by emulating Graham and finding some decidedly non-intellectual buttons to push among right-wing activists. That’s a lesson that won’t be lost on Cantor’s soon-to-be-former colleagues in Congress, and on the emerging Republican field for president in 2016.

Sure, running a good campaign is always a good idea, and so, too, are good constituent services, which are qualities Lindsey Graham had and Eric Cantor lacked. But in the end, it was the tribute Graham paid to the ferocious Obama-haters in his party that probably made the difference. He’ll stick around the Senate to torment the administration on every foreign policy issue, while the orphans of the “reform conservative” movement shop their policy tomes around in search of a new patron.

While most of the media attention on June 3 was devoted to Republican primaries, there were plenty of competitive Democratic primaries–especially for the U.S. House–as well. And in an article today for the American Prospect, the co-founders of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, Adam Greene and Stephanie Taylor, stake a claim on the results as part of an big progressive wave:

On Tuesday, in competitive primaries from New Jersey to Iowa to California, voters chose bold progressive Democrats over more conservative and corporate Democrats, handing big victories to the “Elizabeth Warren wing” of the Democratic Party.
Indeed, it was Progressive Super Tuesday. And it is the latest chapter in a larger story we’ve seen play out in American politics since the Wall Street economic wreck.
There’s a rising economic populist tide in America, sweeping into office leaders like Senator Warren, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, and a growing bloc of progressives in Congress.

While I respect the PCCC and what it’s trying to accomplish, I also think there’s danger in exaggerating intra-Democratic divisions, as I explained at Washington Monthly:

[I]f you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail, so Green and Taylor are just doing their jobs by suggesting that four primary outcomes are indicia of the March of Progress. But the examples they cite also indicate that any Struggle for the Soul of the Democratic Party occurring on June 3 was a mite less savage than what we are witnessing on the GOP side.
It’s interesting that Daily Kos Elections didn’t even mention ideology in its brief previews of three of the four races PCCC is claiming as victories of “bold progressive Democrats over more conservative and corporate Democrats” (yes, DKE is preoccupied with the nuts and bolts of campaigns rather than messaging, but if these primaries were waged as “struggles for the soul” I’m reasonably sure they would have mentioned it). It’s probably safe to say that in NJ-12 Bonnie Watson Coleman had a more progressive record and message than Linda Greenstein, but Coleman’s legislative leadership position and a money advantage helped, too. The same is true in IA-1, where Pat Murphy benefited from being a former House Speaker, and narrowly avoided being pushed into a district convention amidst a large field. And in CA-17, it’s not all that clear former Obama administration official Ro Khanna ran against Mike Honda “from the right,” as Green and Taylor put it, though I suppose there are tangible ghosts of the New Dem critique of traditional liberalism in Khanna’s claim that the incumbent wasn’t that interested in Silicon Valley’s needs in Washington. It might be premature to claim a victory for Honda as well, since they’ll have a rematch in November with much higher turnout (though Honda definitely outperformed expectations on June 3).
The most interesting characterization by Green and Taylor was of the third-place finisher in CA-33, Wendy Greuel, as “a former Republican with a history of accepting campaign donations from Big Oil and other special interests.” Greuel lost a general election spot to Ted Lieu, “who stood up for the 99 percent.” Just for grins, I looked at Greuel’s endorsement list, and there nestled among such famous reactionaries as Dolores Huerta and Kamala Harris and even Ed Begley, Jr., was none other than Bill de Blasio.
Now ideological labels are slippery, and Green and Taylor have as much right to define them as anybody else. But I don’t think it’s a terribly good idea for Democrats to emulate Republicans in treating their differences as equivalent in significance and heat to the Thirty Years War. I share the POV that the relative diversity of Democratic opinion is on balance a strength rather than a weakness. And while I admire the efforts of PCCC and others to hold candidates accountable for their views and positions, and agree that progressive accomplishments have sometimes been undone or diminished by wayward Democrats, and also agree that primaries are a perfectly valid venue for getting the best representation possible, the fact remains that treating someone like Wendy Greuel as an ideological leper is just bad politics.

As regular readers know, here at TDS we value intraparty openness and civility as a core principle, even as we encourage Democrats to remain true to their progressive values, policy goals, and loyalty to people in need. Those two impulses should not come into conflict, and won’t if we avoid the twin temptations of ignoring or exaggerating our differences.

The marquee contests in this week’s “Super Tuesday” primaries were Republican Senate contests in Mississippi and Iowa. And though the official score card assigned by much of the MSM was a tie in MS and a clear win in IA for the Republican Establishment, a deeper look suggests deeper problems for the GOP, as I explained yesterday at TPMCafe:

Had Thad Cochran eked out the narrow victory early returns seemed to indicate, the results, along with Joni Ernst’s comfortable win in Iowa, might have finally laid to rest the fears of Beltway Republicans that they are in danger of giving away Senate seats via erratic Tea Party nominees like 2010’s Christine O’Donnell and Sharron Angle and 2012’s Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock. A Cochran win would have been especially gratifying to the GOP Powers That Be, given the strong commitment outside conservative groups made to challenger Chris McDaniel, the state’s fertile ideological soil, and the aging incumbent’s inability to adjust to the savage tone and substance of contemporary conservatism.
But now a deeply wounded Cochran faces a three-week runoff campaign in which many factors — especially turnout — favor his opponent. And with the heavy investment of groups like the Senate Conservatives Fund and the Club for Growth in Mississippi as their best prospect for a Senate RINO “scalp,” it would take a phenomenal effort by the incumbent or a big gaffe by the challenger to change the momentum in this race. When the smoke clears on June 24, Mississippi will likely join Kentucky and Georgia as states where the loss of a Republican Senate seat in November is possible, and the dissipation of GOP resources better spent elsewhere is certain. Beyond that, Republican pols everywhere would know that not even four decades of genial service and effective money-grubbing for a very poor state, or the support of virtually everyone there ever elected to a position above dogcatcher, is enough to survive the ever-rightward tide of the conservative activist “base.”
Looking at Iowa, and more generally the post-primary Senate landscape, a likely Cochran defeat isn’t the only problem facing win-hungry GOP “pragmatists.” Joni Ernst joins North Carolina’s Thom Tillis — and potentially Georgia’s Jack Kingston, if he wins the July 22 runoff — as “Establishment” figures who’ve chosen the easy way to the nomination by adopting the most conservative positions and messages available, thus giving their Democratic opponents important general election talking points. As the king of GOP “pragmatists,” Mitt Romney, showed in 2012, it’s not always so easy to “etch-a-sketch” a new swing-voter friendly persona after spending months rushing to get in front of every movement conservative parade in sight.

Since the smoke cleared in Mississippi Wednesday morning, there have reportedly been agonized conferences involving both local and national Republican poohbahs who aren’t sure whether to go all out for Cochran in a runoff, cut their losses with a reduced financial commitment, or at least instruct Cochran’s campaign to avoid any scorched-earth tactics that might make McDaniel’s general election task more difficult if he’s the nominee. The 2014 primary cycle is not turning out to be a walk in the park for the Republican Establishment after all.

Many progressives hear red-state Democratic candidates distancing themselves from this or that policy of the Obama administration or the national Democratic Party and immediately blame it on cowardice or some sort of sellout to donors. But there’s a fundamental reality about what it takes for a blue candidate to win in a red states that needs to be taken into account. Here’s how I summed it up yesterday at Washington Monthly:

The realities that make this Democratic approach necessary are starkly illustrated by an important Alan Abramowitz article at Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball, showing that the once-abundant share of the electorate willing to vote for a Senate candidate of the same party as a president whose performance they don’t like has steadily dropped since 1980:

[O]ver this time period, voting decisions in these contests have become increasingly influenced by opinions of the incumbent president’s performance. This relationship set a new record in 2012. Ninety percent of voters who approved of President Obama’s job performance voted for a Democratic Senate candidate while 82% of voters who disapproved of the president’s performance voted for a Republican Senate candidate.
This trend portends problems for Democratic candidates in Red states like Georgia and Kentucky. Recent polls put Obama’s approval rating at 44% in Georgia and 34% in Kentucky. Moreover, in midterm elections like 2014, voters who disapprove of the president’s performance tend to turn out at a higher rate than those who approve of his performance.

Now just because the trend is towards a functional “referendum” on the president’s performance in Senate midterms doesn’t mean it’s reached some sort of all-consuming omega point, and there can obviously be circumstances where negative feelings towards non-presidential-party Senate candidates matter more than negative feelings towards the president. It just means the odds of success for candidates like Allison Lundergan Grimes and Michelle Nunn are lower than they would have been in the relatively recent past. Add in the racial dynamics that especially matter in the Deep South–as discussed by Nate Cohn at The Upshot yesterday–and you’ve got what he accurately calls “a narrow path” to victory for Democrats:

In the racially polarized South, where white voters have been trending Republican for more than a generation, the Democratic route to 50 percent is mainly a matter of racial demographics. Democrats must wait for more nonwhite voters to overcome their disadvantage with white voters.
That wait might end soon in Georgia, but not in this November’s election. In the midterm balloting, the share of whites will be around 64 percent of registered voters, down from 72 percent in 2002, when the Democratic senator Max Cleland lost re-election by 7 points. Ms. Nunn will need nearly 30 percent of white voters to prevail. If Mr. Cleland were running today, his 30 or 31 percent of white voters would probably be enough to squeak out a win.
But most Democrats running for federal office in Georgia fall well short of that 30 percent. The next-highest tally was Jim Martin’s 26 percent in 2008, when he lost a close Senate race to Saxby Chambliss, a first-term incumbent Republican running in a disastrous year for the G.O.P.

Now the “narrow path” for both Nunn and Grimes could be widened and smoothed by a rise in the president’s approval ratings, by Republican mistakes, and less visibly by the DSCC’s well-financed efforts to change midterm turnout patterns and thus refute the kind of calculations Cohn is making. But Democrats would be foolish to dismiss the tough terrain, just as Republicans would be foolish to imagine a Senate takeover in 2014 won’t be exceptionally vulnerable to reversal just two years hence.

There are legitimate arguments to be made about how red-state Democrats negotiate that “narrow path,” but the increasingly large role of presidential approval in determining downballot voting behavior means just fighting for the Obama agenda is not likely to be a viable option.

As the earlier staff post notes, the facile MSM take on the May 20 primaries is that the Republican Establishment rode to victory again. But when you look closely at the Senate contest in one key state, Georgia, it’s obvious that no “movement to the center” is underway. Here’s how I analyzed the results and trajectory at TPMCafe today:

One of the two “Establishment” candidates, Jack Kingston, ran a savagely ideological campaign that was on nearly every issue indistinguishable from a Tea Party crusade. He engaged in welfare demagoguery, embraced that hardy grassroots conservative pet rock, the Fair Tax, and bit the Chamber of Commerce hand that was feeding him by assaulting the Common Core education initiative as “Obamacare for Education.” And no one would have been surprised had he painted the National Journal “most conservative record in the race” emblem that was featured in all his ads across the shabby station wagon that this career appropriator and quite wealthy man used to signify his skinflintedness.
He narrowly defeated former Secretary of State Karen Handel — another former “Establishment” figure who was transformed into a fiery ideologue after narrowly losing the 2010 governor’s race — on a sea of money and via the pull of geography. He outspent Handel roughly 5-to-1 — not counting the million or so the Chamber spent on his behalf. Just as importantly, he banked a huge advantage over Handel in and just beyond his southeast Georgia congressional district, and she couldn’t make it up in her metro Atlanta stronghold while competing with three other North Georgia candidates.
One of those, of course, was first-place finisher David Perdue, who spent nearly as much (and also had significant out-of-state Super PAC help) as Kingston, while espousing a stern but generic “hard-core conservative” message, to use his term. If his performance in the primary on Tuesday was especially pleasing to Mitch McConnell, it would have to be tempered by the fact that the Romneyesque former corporate turnaround specialist vowed not to vote for another McConnell term as Majority Leader.
Will Perdue and Kingston now join hands in a genial “Establishment” runoff, sure not to give ammunition to Democrat Michelle Nunn, who has run ahead of both of them in some recent polls? I doubt it. Kingston has already gone after Perdue for alleged support of Common Core (which, of course, Perdue, whose cousin Sonny was a national leader in the initiative, denies) and joined Handel and the rest of the field in blasting the front-runner for a recent reference to the need for more federal revenues (which Perdue did not, amazingly, follow up by immediately intoning an anti-tax-increase oath). And Perdue fans have to worry a bit that their man does have a tin ear and a tendency to unforced errors (he single-handedly lifted Handel into contention by casually disrespecting her — and countless Georgia voters — for failing to go to college).
It will be interesting to see how Georgia Tea Folk line up for the runoff. Herman Cain is already in Perdue’s corner. Late in the night, major Handel backer Erick Erickson said he’d support Kingston. In an unusually long runoff campaign (nine weeks), with both candidates having access to plenty of money, the steady drift-to-the-right that characterized the entire primary field could continue.

So the idea that Republican extremism was taken off the table in this race because Paul Broun and Phil Gingrey lost is not only premature, but flatly inaccurate. The “Tea” label isn’t the exclusive brand of the far right, despite Republican and MSM efforts to claim the GOP is a chastened and disciplined “Establishment” party again.

Anyone interested in political demographics should remember two things about age cohorts: (1) they age, and (2) they change. At Washington Monthly yesterday, I wrote about a particular important discernable trend involving seniors–currently the bedrock of the Republican coalition–and how they may age and change in the near future:

[Y]ou definitely need to take a look at David Frum’s interpretation of new research on how the changing composition of the senior population is likely to affect voting patterns over time.
Frum begins by noting the central importance of the pro-Republican swing among seniors in the very recent past:

The emergence of the older voters as a massively solid Republican bloc is a post-Obama phenomenon.
The Pew survey explained the trend in a 2011 report. The Silent Generation that voted for Bush in 1988 had retained its conservatism into its retirement years. No news there. The news was among the next cohort, the Baby Boomers: After the year 2000, the Woodstock generation veered abruptly to the right.
In their youth, the Boomers had expressed strongly liberal views about the role of government. In 1989, asked to choose between a bigger government that did more for people versus a smaller government that did less, they opted for bigger government by a margin of 52-40. By 2007, that preference had reversed itself, 52-35, and it has remained reversed through the Obama years. Even more striking was the collapse in trust in government among the Boomers: In 1997, 38 percent of them trusted the government to do the right thing most of the time; by 2009, only 16 percent did so, the same suspicious percentage as their formerly more conservative “silent” elders….

This changing attitude towards government was most intense among (white) men, notes Frum, who were close to parity with women among the Baby Boomers now just reaching retirement age. These men drove the Republican senior wave, but their relative power is due to drop:

In 2010, the old as a group voted Republican because the lopsided hostility toward Obama among older men could overwhelm the mild preference for the president among older women. As the population ages, however, the ratio of men to women within the over-65 population should drop. The share of over-80s in the population is rising faster than men’s likelihood of surviving to 80. The changing sex ratio will sway the political outlook of the whole group.

Aside from gender ratios, there’s a considerable change in perspectives as seniors move from their late 60s to their 80s:

Old age comes later now. But when it comes, it changes people in the same way it always did. Women begin radically to outnumber men. (In 2010, the older-than-80 population included 4 million males and 7.2 million females). Personal savings are exhausted. (Average net worth drops by 25 percent between age 65 and age 75.) Dependency rises. Attitudes to government change.
The older you get, the more you appreciate Social Security and Medicare…and the more you mistrust proposals for reform that might affect current recipients. In 2009, 43 percent of people in their twenties were open to reforms in entitlements that might touch those now receiving Social Security and Medicare; only 27 percent of people in the strongly conservative groups older than 65 would consider it.
As yet, few published surveys break out the differences between people in their sixties and eighties. Working politicians notice it, though. As one very successful political operative told me, “The No. 1 concern of every voter over 80 is, ‘Will my check arrive on time?'”
There will soon be a lot more people digging in against benefits changes. The elderly population is poised to grow hugely quickly; the oldest of the old to grow faster still. Between 2000 and 2010, the total population grew 9.7 percent; the population older than 65, by 15.1 percent; the population older than 80, by 23 percent. That last group now numbers more than 11.2 million–and demographers expect it to grow even faster over the decades ahead.

All in all, Frum believes that as the Baby Boom generation ages, its Republican voting tendencies will abate and likely be reversed.

A vote’s a vote, of course, and it’s a huge mistake to think that pro-Republican groups will change while pro-Democratic groups will stay where they are. But particularly for those Democrats who are frustrated by the senior-driven Republican advantage in midterm elections, which makes multi-cycle Democratic progress so difficult, a more balanced senior demographic will be a most welcome development.

As a month full of Republican primaries continues, the Year of the Republican Establishment narrative beloved of both GOP “insiders” and major precincts of the MSM (some eager to bury the Tea Party, others determined to show the GOP is “moving to the center”) continues to struggle. Here’s an excerpt from my take on the Nebraska and West Virginia primaries at TPMCafe.

The dominant primary narrative for 2014, that the sensible, pragmatic Republican establishment was putting the “constitutional conservative”/Tea Party extremists back in their place, has somehow survived less than impressive establishment wins in Texas and North Carolina. At some point, the narrative may need to change, beginning with Tuesday’s results from West Virginia and Nebraska, where the establishment is again struggling.
In the one major contested primary in West Virginia, for the House seat currently held by Senate candidate Shelley Moore Capito, a carpetbagger from Maryland (he was once state GOP chairman in Maryland, but says he needed to move from that sinful secular socialist Blue State to secure “freedom”), Alex Mooney, won a comfortable victory over a field of six other GOP candidates. He was endorsed by the Senate Conservatives Fund, the Tea Party Express, the Madison Project, and Citizens United — all the ideological heavies. He’ll face Democrat Don Casey — another state party chair, but from West Virginia — in November.
Across the country in Nebraska, the marquee Senate race featured Republican establishment candidate and former state Treasurer Shane Osborn against college president Ben Sasse, with self-funding banker (and alleged “moderate,” as the other candidates hastened to accuse him of being) Sid Dinsdale. Sasse was endorsed by nearly every Tea Party and ideologically right-wing group in sight, including the Senate Conservatives Fund, FreedomWorks, and the Tea Party Express, plus Sarah Palin and Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Mike Lee (R-UT). Osborn was backed avidly by Mitch McConnell (R-KY). Sasse romped past Osborn by better than a two-to-one margin, as the establishment candidate finished third, narrowly behind Dinsdale. Sasse will face Democrat Dave Domina in November.
As Osborn’s sinking fortunes became obvious in the run-up to the primary, some elements of the Republican establishment tried to disclaim him or dismiss the contest as no big deal (just yesterday, Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin noted the two main candidates had similar positions — which you could have also said about the North Carolina Senate contenders a week ago, in a primary trumpeted across the land as a huge establishment victory — and dismissed the race as “irrelevant”). But it’s hard to avoid the impression that the spin would have been very different if Mitch’s boy had, as was originally expected in this race, beaten the Tea Party insurgents…
All in all, last night definitely represented a hiccup for the “Year of the Republican Establishment” narrative. I’m guessing the Powers That Be in the GOP and the mainstream media will emulate Rubin by dismissing the results and focusing their attention on next week’s primaries, when the establishment is expected to do better in Idaho (Rep. Mike Simpson appears likely to hold off a right-wing challenger), Kentucky (Mitch McConnell has bludgeoned Matt Bevin into submission), and perhaps Georgia (“outsider” businessman David Perdue and career appropriator Rep. Jack Kingston are leading most polls and could be headed to a runoff).

Yeah, Big Media Narratives die slowly, living on until they find the data to support them.

This week North Carolina kicked off the series of Republican primaries that have been so heavily billed as a death struggle between the Republican Establishment and the Tea Party. Predictably, Thom Tillis’ plurality win got heavy billing as a huge Establishment triumph that augered well for GOP prospects this November. I dissented from this lazy CW in a column at TPMCafe:

For “Establishment” Republicans, the good news is that their Senate candidate in North Carolina, House Speaker Thom Tillis, won yesterday’s GOP primary without a runoff, easing comfortably past the 40% victory threshold. Fiery “constitutional conservative” Greg Brannon was second with 29% of the vote, and Christian Right candidate Rev. Mark Harris trailing with 16%.
The bad news is that the victor emerges from the contest hard to distinguish from the extremists he defeated.
It’s not as though there was ever a great ideological distance between the candidates. Yes, Brannon is one of those conservatives who thinks the federal government should be confined to its original minimalist role; he was supported by Senators Mike Lee (R-UT) and Rand Paul (R-KY), both of whom campaigned for him in North Carolina. But Tillis boasted of his support for Jim DeMint’s “Cut, Cap, Balance” constitutional amendment that would permanently pare back federal spending and tie it to a fixed percentage of GDP.
Tillis was also able to parry Harris’ social conservative street cred (the Southern Baptist preacher was a leader in the successful drive to ban same-sex marriage in the state, and was endorsed by Mike Huckabee) with incessant statements of his own opposition to same-sex marriage, and boasted of achieving a restriction in abortion rights in North Carolina. He also came out for a “Personhood” Amendment (the linchpin for efforts to outlaw Plan B contraception and IUD devices as “abortifacients”) and was endorsed by the National Right to Life Committee.
All this positioning seemed prudent; even with his large financial advantage and high name ID, he won about the same percentage of the primary vote as did Texas “Establishment” icon David Dewhurst in his first Senate primary in 2012, before Ted Cruz dispatched him in a runoff. Tillis can thank his lucky stars his state’s primary victory threshold is 10 points lower. Looking forward to November, it’s worth emphasizing that at a time when the behavior of the Republican-controlled state government remains controversial, Tillis has branded himself as the leader of a “conservative revolution” aimed at turning back the clock on many years of moderate leadership and policies in the state. This messaging may have ruled out any “move to the center” maneuvering by the new Republican nominee.
The punctuation mark for the Speaker’s radicalized image may have come the day before the primary, when Kay Hagan’s campaign drew renewed attention to a 2011 video in which Tillis cooly lectured a Republican group on how to pit people with disabilities against people receiving other forms of public assistance, in what he called a “divide and conquer” strategy.
The video, which is sort of a nastier version of the Mitt Romney “47 percent” video, has the air of an instant classic, thanks to its unmistakable class and racial undertones. Unless some other conservative politician outdoes Tillis, the video will remain nationally and locally notorious for a long time to come, thanks to the especially devilish, manipulative nature of Tillis’ analysis of how to demonize public assistance recipients, a strategy he said he would pursue even if it killed him politically.
The New Republic‘s Brian Beutler, calling it a “Bond-villainesque soliloquy,” explains:

Class warfare? Check. Racist dog whistle? Check. A belabored explication of the political utility of racist dog whistling? Check. An acknowledgment that this strategy must be deployed at strategic moments, because it can backfire? Check. A further acknowledgment that admitting to the strategy can be career ending? Check.

All in all, the assumption that Tillis won’t have the general election handicaps to overcome that Brannon or Harris might have suffered from is not as strong as it was when the primary contest began, particularly now that Tillis has attracted so much national attention for his own hammerheaded ideological stances.

There’s always a lot of ongoing talk about the South as a political region, whether it’s as the dreaded source of Republican extremism or the land of hope for a future Democratic comeback. But definitions of “the South” vary, as I discussed at Washington Monthly in the context of a FiveThirtyEight survey on the geographical contours of the region:

“[T]he South” is a politically potent concept in which precision and context are often rather important. The general hazy historical perception is that “the South” during the Civil Rights Era transitioned from being solidly Democratic to being solidly Republican. Actually, as Sean Trende likes to point out, the Republican share of the regional presidential vote was 48% in 1952, 50% in 1956, 46% in 1960 and 49% in 1964–remarkably stable and competitive, though masking some pretty large subregional swings–even before the enactment of the Voting Rights Act. But after that Act, as late as 1976, Jimmy Carter (a southern Democrat, of course) was carrying the region by ten points. In 2000 and 2004, Republicans did indeed carry (if you credit the 2000 Florida results) every state in the former Confederacy. But then in 2008 Barack Obama muddied the waters again by winning Virginia, Florida and North Carolina and won the first two again in 2012.
I’ve gone through this brief history because an awful lot of rhetorical weight has been placed on the impact of the “Republican South” on the GOP, on the conservative movement, on non-southern voters, and on the general tone and character of U.S. politics–and quite rightly so.
Still, subregional variations in the South should by no means be ignored. Last week the New York Times‘ Nate Cohn created a bit of a sensation with a column suggesting (a bit more indiscriminately in the headline that he would have liked) that “southern whites” had now become nearly as overwhelmingly Republican as African-Americans were Democratic. Careful readers noted that Cohn was actually only describing white voters in a band of counties “from the high plains of West Texas to the Atlantic Coast of Georgia.” 2012 exit polls showed Obama winning 37% of the white vote in VA and 31% in NC. Upon my own inquiry, Nate noted on Twitter that the statewide Democratic share of the southern white vote in 2012 varied as follows: Kentucky 33%, Arkansas 26%, Tennessee 25%, South Carolina 22%, Texas 22%, Georgia 19%, Alabama 17%, Louisiana 12% and Mississippi 11%.
So in 2012, a white voter in Kentucky was three times as likely to vote for Obama as a white voter in Mississippi. I’d say that’s a variation worth noting when making generalizations about “the South”–not by Nate Cohn, who was careful, but by the very many people who are going to mis-characterize his work.

We are at a point in the 2014 election cycle when reliable predictive data is sparse and changeable, while spin is ever-abundant. Sometimes it’s not that easy to separate the two. I wrote about this problem today at the Washington Monthly.

As we have all observed, Nate Silver and other purveyors of “data journalism” have gotten a lot of flak early in this election cycle, some of it warranted, but much of it the kind of taunting schoolyard kingpins typically inflict on tyros they instinctively understand will be rich and powerful someday.
Close to the line between rational objection and special pleading is a column from National Journal‘s house conservative, Josh Kraushaar, who begins with this hackish complaint about 538’s early Senate projections:

[C]ount me underwhelmed by the new wave of Senate prediction models assessing the probability of Republicans winning the upper chamber by one-tenth of a percentage point. It’s not that the models aren’t effective at what they’re designed to do. It’s that the methodology behind them is flawed. Unlike baseball, where the sample size runs in the thousands of at-bats or innings pitched, these models overemphasize a handful of early polls at the expense of on-the-ground intelligence on candidate quality. As Silver might put it, there’s a lot of noise to the signal.

So? Has Nate somehow failed to observe that the projections will become more reliable the closer we get to November? Or is there something else he’s missing? Yeah, that’s it:

The models also undervalue the big-picture indicators suggesting that 2014 is shaping up to be a wave election for Republicans, the type of environment where even seemingly safe incumbents can become endangered. Nearly every national poll, including Tuesday’s ABC News/Washington Post survey, contains ominous news for Senate Democrats. President Obama’s job approval is at an all-time low of 41 percent, and public opinion on his health care law hasn’t budged and remains a driving force in turning out disaffected voters to the polls to register their anger. Public opinion on the economy isn’t any better than it was before the 2010 midterms when the unemployment rate hit double-digits. Democrats hold only a 1-point lead on the generic ballot in the ABC/WaPo survey–worse positioning than before the GOP’s 2010 landslide.

Now if cherry-picking the most bleak of national indicators and then comparing them to indicators that largely proved wrong in 2010 proves another Republican “wave” is on the way, then it will always, always seem apparent just on the horizon to those who want to see it. National indicators, BTW, are just as subject to change as state polls, and Silver, BTW, does factor in Obama’s approval ratings and economic conditions.
But then having done the journalistic equivalent of “trash-talking,” Kraushaar eschews said practice and offers his own, quasi-empirically based projections, which (with the exception of a strange, wonder-if-they-are-related paean to Iowa Senate candidate Joni Ernst) follow pretty much the same sorts of micro-indicators Silver uses.
So it’s tough to figure out when a guy like Kaushaar is spinning or telling us what he really thinks. That’s generally not a problem for Nate Silver.

Which is why I find nit-picking about data-based political journalism to be so often misguided. Criticize the data where it’s warranted. But when you do so, lay off the spin.