Earlier today TDS cross-posted a provocative op-ed by E.J. Dionne making the case that Democratic “moderates” have a stake in the revival of the “Democratic Left” as represented by Bill de Blasio and Elizabeth Warren. I’m a big fan of E.J.’s, and appreciate his effort. But at WaMo, I took issue with some of the implications of his argument:

Anyone who knows WaPo columnist E.J. Dionne can tell you he’s an enormously decent man who dislikes unnecessary conflict. So it’s entirely unsurprising that E.J. took it upon himself to assure “moderates” that the resurgence of the “Democratic left” is a good thing for them and for the country. He does so via a simplified version of the Hacker-Pierson “Off Center” hypothesis:

For a long time, the American conversation has been terribly distorted because an active, uncompromising political right has not had to face a comparably influential left. As a result, our entire debate has been dragged in a conservative direction, meaning that the center has been pulled that way, too.

And thus, the prescription:

When politicians can ignore the questions posed by the left and are pushed to focus almost exclusively on the right’s concerns about “big government” and its unquestioning faith in deregulated markets, the result is immoderate and ultimately impractical policy. To create a real center, you need a real left.

That’s true, in terms of the rather mindless echoing of whoever makes the most noise that is so annoyingly common in the MSM. But while positioning language like “left,” “right” and “center” is an indispensable short-hand in sorting out political tendencies, it can be taken to the point that it distorts what people who answer to (or are forced to associate with) such labels actually care about.
My colleague Martin Longman’s reaction to E.J.’s piece over at Booman Tribune illustrates part of the problem:

The problem is that, on any subject you might choose to consider, the right wing in this country is wrong, and they have enough power to keep us paddling in place at best, and, more often, moving in the wrong direction.
That a portion of the left is waking up to the problem is a good thing. But, nothing will come of it if it does nothing more than reinvigorate the center.

I suspect Martin’s objection would be widely shared by many progressives who don’t see themselves as simply a counter-weight to the Right for purposes of making “centrism” viable again.
But the positioning analysis also sells many “moderates” short as well. A lot of those folk (say, my colleagues at the Progressive Policy Institute who advocated what ultimately became Obama proposals on health care and climate change many years before Obama did) support “centrist” policies because they believe in them, not just because more liberal policies are politically difficult or because they favor bipartisanship as an end in itself. Moreover, many “moderates” or “centrists” don’t agree with each other all the time. Some (and I would put most though hardly all self-identified Democratic “moderates” in this category) share the left’s–which is to say the historic progressives’–values and policy goals, but disagree over program design or political strategy and tactics. Others hew to the kind of “centrism” that represents elites as against popular movements of the left or the right, or really do make a fetish of bipartisanship in a way that plays right into the conservative movement’s efforts to keep political debate on its own ground as defined by its own terms.
The bottom line is that all the positioning language should not obscure the sharp divisions between the Left (including the fairly large Center-Left) and the Right (including the small and shrinking Center-Right) over values and goals. Everyone legitimately on the Left favors, for example, universal health coverage; those on the Right just don’t, much as they pretend to favor “reforms” that would allegedly improve coverage.
What this means for the Left and Center-Left is that its advocates should respect each other’s point of view as something other than an instrument for their own success. They can and should argue and fight with each other over the specifics of policy and politics without for a moment forgetting the gulf that still separates them from those who champion unfettered capitalism or “state’s rights” or inequality as a positive thing or the perpetual disabling of the public sector or an “American exceptionalism” that becomes an excuse for militarism and unilateralism in foreign policy or a government-mandated return to the cultural values of the 1950s.
Much as I honor E.J. Dionne and his irenic motives, “moderates” shouldn’t think of the “revived left” as a cat’s paw any more than “true liberals”should think of moderates as sell-outs who don’t have the guts to advocate the correct policies. For all the silly “civil war” talk, a big portion of the success of the Right in skewing the political conversation is its essential unity. Karl Rove’s view of the ideal America isn’t that different from Ted Cruz’s, and should be equally horrifying to those on the Left and Center-Left. We should keep that in mind even as different factions on the progressive side of the spectrum maneuver with and sometimes against each other. A “revived Left” is good for “moderates” because it represents a new and enthusiastic set of allies, not a device for triangulation.

This is an important topic, and we’ll certainly return to it again, particularly if the specter of Democratic factionalism materializes more visibly.

Ever since the internal Republican argument over best strategy for dealing with the October/November government shutdown and debt default crisis, it’s become fashionable in the MSM to talk of a “GOP Civil War.” It’s become an even more common theme after congressional Republicans cut a small appropriations deal with Democrats, with Speaker John Boehner loudly denouncing “outside” conservative groups (presumably like the Club for Growth, Heritage Action and the Senate Conservatives Fund) that have been trying to intimidate Members to defy the leadership on key votes.
But the idea that Republicans are engaged in a “struggle for the soul of the party” over fundamental ideology, and that “pragmatists” or “moderates” are winning the fight, is a gross overstatement at best, as I argued in a recent column for TPMCare:

[N]on-Republicans need to accept that the GOP knows exactly where its “soul” is located, and has an agenda that is impervious to significant change. What keeps getting described as a “struggle for the soul” of the party or a “civil war” is generally a fight over strategy, tactics and cosmetics, not ideology. For the foreseeable future, the conquest of the Republican Party by the conservative movement, itself radicalized by the election of President Barack Obama in 2008, is the prevailing reality of politics on the Right, and the GOP’s practical options are accordingly limited to one flavor or another of that persuasion.
Why is that the case? There are a lot of contributing factors, including the GOP’s shrinking but homogeneous “base,” the supremacy of conservative ideological media, and the rise of heavily funded political players determined to root out heresy. But the most important source of rigidity is conservative ideology itself, which does not aim (as do most European conservatives) at “moderating” or countering the bipartisan policies of the past or the Democratic policies of the present, but aspires to a counterrevolution that “restores” what conservatives regard as immutable principles of good government and even culture.
It its most explicit form, that of the “constitutional conservatives” who really dominate discussion within the GOP and who are likely to produce their next presidential nominee, the only genuinely “American” policies, designed by the Founders according to both natural and divine law, involve a free-market economy with extremely limited government and a traditionalist, largely patriarchal culture. These policies, buttressed by an increasingly chiliastic view of the status quo (e.g., the “Holocaust” of legalized abortion, and the social policy “tipping point” at which an elite-underclass alliance will destroy private property and liberty entirely), simply are not negotiable.

So what’s all the arguing about in GOP circles? It’s not matters of the “soul:”

[A]ll Republican elected officials and operatives do not share a full commitment to constitutional conservatism, and naturally wish “the base” and its activist groups and agitprop centers would tone down their ferocious views so that their bettors could enjoy the fruits of political power. But movement conservatism is the context within which they must operate. And so we see the Karl Roves and the Mitt Romneys who just want the Oval Office, and the business leaders who just want to make money with less state interference, constantly alternating between signing every right-wing litmus test in sight and urging their dogmatic allies to be a little more pragmatic in order to appeal to this or that allegedly detachable constituency of women or Latinos or millennials who don’t share the dreams of The Movement. This inherently unequal struggle is what passes for “civil war” within today’s GOP. It’s a million miles away from the genuinely fraught intraparty battles of yore between Rockefeller and Goldwater or Ford and Reagan.

Skirmishes and power struggles? Sure, today’s Republicans and entirely capable of that. But let’s stop calling it “civil war.”

It should be safe to say that most analytically-oriented Democrats know that hanging onto the Senate in 2014 will be difficult, though hardly impossible. The landscape is bad in two respects: 20 of 33 seats up are Democratic; seven of those 20 are in states carried by Mitt Romney; and there were five Democratic retirements. Then there’s the turnout factor; as regular readers know, the normal “falloff’ in youth and minority voting in midterms has become especially damaging to the Donkey Party of late.
On the other hand, it will take six pickups for Republicans to gain control of the Senate. GOPers can’t afford many mistakes, and fractious primaries are on tap in KY, GA, SC, TN, WY, and perhaps other states.
Still, it is deeply annoying to see this pro-GOP tilted Senate landscape being touted in support of the latest conservative/MSM narrative of collapsing Democratic support-levels. I issued a protest and warning at Washington Monthly:

We might as well get used to this sort of headline: “The Hotline‘s Senate Race Ratings: Democrats On Defense.”
Now such headlines promote the ever-popular “Democrats in Disarray” meme, at present all the rage in light of the widespread pundit belief that Obama’s popularity is in free fall, and that the midterm elections will be all about negative feelings towards Obamacare. The subheader of the National Journal piece–“thirteen of the 15 seats most likely to switch are Democratic-held”–certainly reinforce that impression.

But if you actually read the National Journal piece on the rate ratings, the main news is no news….The main changes in the Hotline ratings involve lifting four races (CO, MN, NH and OR) into the lowest tier of possible long-shot turnover possibilities just in case things generally get worse for Democrats. In some cases the odds of an upset have been marginally upgraded because GOPers have managed to recruit actual candidates, but that’s a long way from projecting a “wave.” And nothing’s happened lately to reduce the possibility of GOP primaries in KY and GA producing a general election nightmare.
Still, reproduction of the same difficult fundamentals for Democrats in Senate races will be exploited by Republicans, and by some sensation-seeking MSM folk, into scary new developments. Don’t buy it.

It does make you wonder if we’ll see equivalent treatment of the next Senate cycle:

In 2016, the Senate landscape will turn sharply in favor of Democrats, as will the turnout patterns. Will we read a ton of “GOP In Disarray” stories then? We’ll see, but I doubt it.

Experiencing a bit of vertigo over assessments that Obama and Democrats were riding high and ready to crush the GOP in 2014 just a few weeks ago, but are now doomed to oblivion today, I took a look at some numbers at the Washington Monthly, and regained a bit of perspective. First, I quoted Jonathan Bernstein:

Obama’s popularity is probably at the low point of his presidency (again, depending on the adjustments, he’s either a bit below or a bit above his previous low. But it’s not any kind of unusually low low point (he’s nowhere near Truman, Carter, Nixon, W.), there’s no particular reason to expect the slump to continue, and myths aside no reason to believe he won’t recover if the news turns better. Granted, it’s hard to know what to expect from healthcare.gov, but it’s not as if it’s getting worse over time. I’m not saying his numbers will go up. Just that it’s more or less equally likely as further drops….

As for electoral effects? I wrote an item dismissing direct electoral effects of the shutdown against Republicans back last month; that post pretty much works now, in reverse for effects against Democrats. I should say: it’s far easier for sentiment against the president to translate into midterm electoral losses than it is for feelings against the out-party. So if Obama is unpopular in November 2014, it will hurt Democrats. But today’s frenzy about the ACA is going to be mostly forgotten by then, one way or another, just as the shutdown seems forgotten today. That’s probably even true, believe it or not, if the program totally collapses, although I don’t think that’s going to happen.

Then I gave a gander of my own to Gallup’s approval rating numbers:

After reading Jonathan Bernstein’s essay on the massive over-reaction to the president’s sag in approval ratings–some of it based, no doubt, on media cherry-picking of whichever polls had the lowest numbers–I went back and looked at Gallup’s weekly approval rating averages over the last few weeks.

The CW is that Obama and the Democrats were riding high–on the brink, perhaps, of a history-defying 2014 sweep of Congress–when the government shutdown ended. That week Gallup had Obama’s approval ratio at a 43/51 average. Now the CW is that Obama is sinking into second-term Bush-like oblivion, with Democrats abandoning him and Republicans roaring towards a conquest of the Senate. The latest Gallup weekly average of Obama’s approval ratio is at 41/52, a booming one-and-a-half point deterioration since the shutdown ended.

Looking at the two junctures in terms of internals, Obama’s approval rating among liberal Democrats has gone from 84% to 85% among Liberal Democrats, from 75% to 74% among Moderate Democrats, and from 69% to 62% among Conservative Democrats. His ratings are the same as before among Pure Independents, and actually up four points among Moderate/Liberal Republicans.

What does it all mean? Probably that most people aren’t breathlessly following events in Washington other than to register their heat and noise.

Democrats didn’t win the 2014 elections in October and they aren’t losing them in November. It’s time to chill a bit.

In the media-driven panic over cancellation of individual insurance policies that aren’t “grandfathered” and aren’t ACA-compliant, Democrats are in danger of forgetting they are going to be associated with the success or failure of Obamacare no matter what they do. That’s true of the congressional Democrats backing potentially Obamacare-unraveling “Keep Your Insurance” bills in Congress, and it’s also true of single-payer fans who are taking a bit too much pleasure in the problems with the private-insurance exchanges. Here was my comment at Washington Monthly about the need for “owing Obamacare:”

[I]t’s perfectly understandable that proponents of a single-payer system or those who thought a public option was absolutely essential to the kind of competitive system the ACA set up would note some of their concerns may have been vindicated, or that even as the Obamacare exchanges founder, the Medicaid (thought of as a single-payer program, though actually semi-privatized in many states) expansion is enrolling new people at a fairly robust pace in the 25 states where it’s proceeding.
Atrios–nobody’s idea of a neoliberal squish–offered a reminder of the political realities of Obamacare right now.

Whatever the merits of ACA, it is now something the Dems own. For decades I’ve watched Dems try to run away from things which have been surgically implanted on any politician with a D next to their name. It’s always bizarre and pointless. You’re the party of gay marriage, abortion, and Obamacare whether you like it or not.

That’s as true of single-payer fans as it is of those chasing after GOP “fixes” of Obamacare. If Obamacare doesn’t work, we go back to the status quo ante, not to some magic moment where Medicare For All becomes the national rage overnight.

Perhaps non-destructive “fixes” of this or that short-term problem with the exchanges or the cancellation of individual policies before the exchanges are functional can be found. But even as it took left-center Democratic unity to enact the Affordable Care Act, it will take left-center unity to prevent its destruction by a now-united Republican opposition.

Since the off-year Election Day, I’ve been noodling around with some exit poll comparisons for NJ and VA in 2009, 2012 and 2013 (sadly, there were no exit polls in either state in 2010, which would be useful to know about in looking ahead to 2014). I quickly discovered the composition of the electorate in both states was quite similar in 2009 and 2013–with one glaring exception in VA, as I wrote about at Washington Monthly:

In New Jersey the 2013 electorate looked an awful lot like it did in 2009, and quite different from its composition in 2012. The racial breakdown was 73% white, 14% African-American and 9% Latino in 2009, and 72% white, 15% African-American and 9% Latino in 2013. By contrast, it was 67% white, 18% African-American and 10% Latino in 2012. You see a similar pattern with the vote by age: in 2009, voters over 50 represented 55% of the vote while those under 30 were 10%. Yesterday voters over 50 were 59% of the vote while those under 30 were 10%. In 2012, over-50s were 49% while under-30s were 16%.
So New Jersey followed the expected pattern of an off year election producing a significantly older and whiter electorate than in a presidential year. Christie would have won with either electorate, but he did have a stiff wind behind him this year.
The age breakdowns in Virginia follow the same pattern. Over-50s were 54% in 2009 and in 2013, but only 43% in 2012. Under-30s were 10% in 2009 and 13% in 2013, but rose to 19% in 2012.
But the racial breakdowns broke the mold a bit: in 2009, the Virginia electorate was 78% white and 16% African-American (with 5% Latino or Asian). In 2012 it was 70% white and 20% African-American (with 8% Latino or Asian). And yesterday it was 72% white, 20% African-American (with 5% Latino or Asian). It’s unclear whether the McAuliffe campaign did an unusually good job of turning out the African-American vote, or something else was going on, but it is clear it was a key factor in his victory, since the additional 4% of the electorate that were African-American as compared to 2009 represented close to 90,000 votes. He won by just over 54,000.

Since I wrote that quick analysis, there’s been a lot of talk about the composition of the VA electorate resembling that of 2012, but little or no focus on the African-American vote specifically. This, too, I mentioned at Washington Monthly:

Now comes the magisterial Ruy Teixeira at TNR with a deeper look at Virginia, and he, too, focuses on the unexpected composition of the electorate:

In 2009, Virginia voters were 78 percent white and 22 percent minority. In 2013, they were just 72 percent white and 28 percent minority–not far off the 70/30 split in the 2012 presidential election. There you have the key to McAuliffe’s victory: Despite performing much better among white voters than the hapless Creigh Deeds, McDonnell’s Democratic opponent, McAuliffe would nevertheless have lost this election if the white/minority voter distribution had mirrored that of 2009. It was the increase in the minority vote that put him over the top.

But here’s the thing: according to the exits, the Hispanic/Asian percentage of the vote came in this year at 2009 (5%), not 2012 (8%) levels. And the age composition of the electorate was very much like that of 2009, not 2012. Nor was there any “super sizing” of the overall electorate; total turnout was up a bit from 2009, but nowhere remotely close to presidential levels. So what we are looking at is not some sudden change in the overall size or configuration of the off-year vote, but a pretty isolated but very significant surge in African-American turnout.
Ruy has no particular explanation for this phenomenon; nor have I. I’ve heard a few random folk cite the pre-election voter purge executed by Virginia (about 37,000 people suspected of dual registrations were disqualified, not the kind of purge most likely to overwhelmingly target minorities) as a provocation to black voters. And there’s a general sense that the McAuliffe campaign devoted a significant portion of its abundant resources to GOTV efforts, which would naturally affect African-American turnout. But that was quite a surge in the black vote, and Democrats looking ahead to 2014 ought to go to school on it.

So the mystery remains, but I’m sure there’s an answer that some Democrats in Virginia are chortling about.

In the debates over this week’s off-year elections, one of the major Democratic and MSM memes is that the Tea Party movement has lost major ground. Some say the Cuccenelli campaign defeat says so, or the Alabama Republican congressional primary says so. There are good reasons for this interpretation, but I’ve argued against it at the Washington Monthly:\\

My old buddy Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute offers his plenary take on what happened yesterday: he thinks it was pretty much a rout of the Tea Folk.

I don’t agree.

In considering Will Marshall’s argument that Tuesday’s primaries show that Tea Party influence on the GOP is on the wane, I countered with the suggestion that intimidation of Republicans by the Tea Folk is a more important part of its strategy than replacing “RINOs” in primaries.
A case in point is the ongoing pander-fest being conducted by Sen. Lindsey Graham, who faces divided and underfunded Tea Party primary opposition next year, and is trying to overcome conservative anger at his role in supporting immigration reform legislation and then ending the government shutdown.
First you had him risking the Mother of All Filibuster Wars with a threat to hold up all presidential nominations unless he’s given fodder for more Benghazi! investigations. Now we have this, via National Review’s Robert Costa (burnishing his credentials as the go-to conservative reporter of his era):
Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina is ramping up his pro-life efforts, and today unveiled the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which would prohibit abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy.

“These babies who have been taken out of the womb at 20 weeks can feel pain, and some have survived,” Graham says, in an interview with National Review Online. “We need to get the courts to establish this as a legitimate state interest to protect unborn children….”

The planted-axiom rhetoric about “babies” is as much the point as the legislation, which has no chance of passage (to the chagrin of “pro-life lawmakers” cited by Costa who clearly think Graham is grandstanding).

Graham, who is up for reelection next year, says it’s important to bring social issues back into the fold as the midterms approach. “The goal is to have a vote in 2014, to make sure we vote on it,” he says. “It’s worth having this debate. The more people understand what we’re trying to do, the more public support will grow over time.

More to the point, it will be harder to purge Graham as a traitor to The Cause if he’s out there fighting for the victims of the American Holocaust.
Another validator of the Tea Folk’s power to intimidate is its onetime hero Marco Rubio. Is there any right-wing meme, position, or opinion the man hasn’t embraced since his movement-conservative stock fell over the immigration bill? If so, I must have missed it. Just yesterday Rubio offered post-election analysis closely toeing the Movement line that Cuccinelli lost because the party didn’t give him sufficient resources, while Christie’s win had zero implications for the national party.
These are just data points, of course. But I’d argue that Graham’s and Rubio’s frantic efforts to propitiate radical conservative opinion are better measurements of the Tea Party’s influence on the GOP than a very narrow loss to a rigorously conservative and massively-financed candidate in Alabama.

Win or lose, the Tea Folk are doing well.

As discussed here back in 2008, a big part of Barack Obama’s approach to politics has involved efforts to force Republicans either to compromise or to split. As we all know now, the GOP has been extraordinarily resistant to pressure to compromise. And while Obama did succeed in peeling off a small but significant portion of prior Republican voters in 2008 and 2012, the long-awaited GOP split between old-school Republicans and the ascendant and increasingly radical movement conservatives hasn’t transpired, either.
In the wake of the government shutdown/debt default mess, there’s now fresh hope, and some fresh evidence, that things could be shaking loose within the GOP. I addressed this possibility rather skeptically at Washington Monthly today.

Today’s new revelations from the latest NBC/WSJ survey on favorable/unfavorable ratings for the GOP among its rank-and-file will doubtless fan speculation about a potential split. They show GOP favorability among self-identified Republicans dropping to 49/26 (as compared to 73/7 among Democrats). Moreover, non-Tea Party Republicans are exhibiting significantly more disgruntlement (41/32) than Tea Party Republicans (56/21). On top of that, in a hypothetical three-way generic congressional contest involving a Democrat, and Republican, and a third party/independent candidate, non-Tea GOPer are more likely to go indie (32% as opposed to 25% for Tea Folk). Chuck Todd and his colleagues at NBC’s First Read place a lot of stock in these latter numbers indicating that threats of defection from the GOP are now graver from “the center” than “the right.”

Maybe, but maybe not. When you stare at all these numbers, some problems emerge.

For one thing, while Republicans are broken down into Tea and Non-Tea factions, independents are not. Given the past tendency of Tea Folk to disproportionately identify as indies even though they almost all vote overwhelmingly Republican, Republican identifiers within the Tea Nation are obviously going to be relatively quite loyal.
More importantly, happiness and unhappiness with the current condition of the GOP is likely to have different meanings for different Republicans. If one stipulates that the GOP is dangerously right-wing these days, the numbers look a little different: add together the 56% of Tea Folk who feel good about it with the 21% who likely think the party should be more conservative, plus the 41% of non-Tea GOPers who are happy with the party’s direction, and you don’t exactly have a mandate for moderation, do you? (And this is totally aside from the reality that Tea Folk are significantly more likely to participate in Republican primaries).
As for the third-party support findings, they are indeed interesting, but in the absence of any identification of what kind of ideology an indie/third-party would stand for, it’s really just an indication of party loyalty, which brings us full circle. Fully 61% of self-identified indies in the survey say they’d support an indie/third-party candidate, but it’s hard to know what if anything that means if you don’t know whether we’re talking about a hard-core Tea Party candidate or some sort of Michael Bloomberg “centrist.”
So while pursuing a split in the GOP is obviously an important Grand Strategy goal for Democrats–it’s been a big part of Obama’s Grand Strategy from the get-go–and while Democrats are much happier with their party than Republicans, it’s a bit early for the Donkey Party to declare any kind of victory or even a major advance. If you add in the fact that elected officials are massively less likely to defy party discipline than the rank-and-file, perhaps the most we can say is that the preconditions for a GOP split are coming into view, but still at a great distance until such time as we see more evidence.

Democrats are just going to have to be patient, and work harder, if they want to see the GOP rupture or lose many millions of previous voters.

There have been two story-lines in a lot of the recent talk about Virginia’s off-year elections next week. One is that the likely victory of Terry McAuliffe, which would represent the first time since 1973 that the candidate of the party controlling the White House has won a Virginia gubernatorial contest, reflects a reaction to the government shutdown that will still echo in November of next year. And the second is that “purple” Virginia is in general a harbinger for a Democratic House takeover in 2014.
TNR’s Nate Cohn published a column pushing back on both these story-lines, noting that Ken Cuccinelli was in trouble long before the government shutdown, and that the kind of GOP-controlled House seats Democrats would have to win to retake control of the chamber are much “redder” than Virginia and are occupied by well-funded incumbents.
But at Washington Monthly I offered some reasons Virginia might indeed be a harbinger, depending on how the November 5 balloting goes:

What I’ll be most interested when the votes are in next Tuesday are turnout patterns (normally an off-year election like Virginia’s is even more skewed towards pro-Republican older white voter than a midterm) and whether McAuliffe did unusually well in demographic groups that went Republican in 2009, 2010 and 2012. If the Republican hold on old white folks is fading, that’s good news for Democrats in 2014 even in districts labeled solidly Republican due to their partisan character in 2008 and 2012.
Truth is, after 2010 confirmed the heavy shift to the GOP of the groups most likely to turn out in mid-terms and off-year elections, I figured it would be a good long while before a Democrat would win the governorship in a “purple” state with off-year elections like Virginia. There’s got to be a non-trivial reason for McAuliffe’s apparently easy win, and while it may perhaps be personal to Cuccinelli, there’s no reason to conclude that without post-election evidence.

Two polls out just today–one from Quinnipiac and another from Rasmussen–show the Virginia race tightening (though a third, from Roanoke College, has McAuliffe up by double-digits). So we’ll just have to wait and see. But again: any Democratic statewide win in an off-year election is potentially significant.

One of the perennial phenomena of contemporary politics is the periodic sighting of signs the Christian Right–along with the culture wars it promotes–is dead or dying. It’s so frequent a phenomenon that it’s always a good idea to be skeptical.
This week two different developments were bruited about as indicating a fast fade in the grip of the Christian Right on faith communities where it has flourished. This first was the appearance of a new political spokesman for the Southern Baptist Convention.I wrote this about it at Washington Monthly:

Andew Sullivan thinks the Christian Right may finally be on the ropes, and cites as evidence a Wall Street Journal profile of Russell Moore, the man who has succeeded the culture-warhorse Richard Land as chief political affairs spox for the Southern Baptist Convention.

Reading the profile, it’s clear Moore wants to turn the page rhetorically from Land’s many thunderbolts, beginning with welcome warnings of excessive church investment in political causes remote from its mission, and a more irenic attitude towards “sinners” if not sin. And he very clearly wants to dissolve the marriage of convenience between conservative evangelicals and the Republican Party.

But we’ve heard all this before, along with the same expressions of hope from liberals and secular folk (the profile features several) that these zealots are finally going back into their shell just like they did after the Scopes Monkey Trial. I’d remind everyone that a change in strategy and tactics for politically-inclined conservative evangelicals doesn’t necessarily reflect a change in goals or commitments, and also that a loudly proclaimed independence from the GOP has been a hallmark of the Tea Party Movement as well.

Sarah Posner, an adept observer of the Christian Right, added this observation:

The religious right is not a static movement. Although there are still some who go the fire and brimstone route, many others–particularly those telegenic enough to attain a position like Moore’s–are going to give the “culture war” issues a softer touch. But make no mistake: they still see these as cultural issues, and still see their essential role as engagement in the public square as witnesses for (their view of) Christ’s teachings.

The religious right is not a movement with one or even two or three or four leaders. Because it’s a political and cultural undertaking that is playing a long game–rather successfully–it has produced many disciples. (In contrast, liberals tend to see small moments within that long game–like Moore replacing Land–as more consequential than they should.) Moore has an office in Washington, and a press operation. He has a title. He’s smart and thoughtful. I read him. I follow him. He will be on your television a lot. But like with Land (although in a different way) this coverage will overplay his influence. He’s not a general. He can’t order a retreat.

Posner also notes this remark by Moore on Fox News which indicates a robust commitment to the “religious liberty” movement focused on resistance to the Obamacare contraception coverage manCATEGORY: Editor’s Corner

“You can see this happening all over the country not only related to Obamacare. This is just one fiery rafter in a burning house. Religious liberty is under assault all over the place in this country in ways that I think are probably more pronounced than we have seen since the founding era… People who are doing good things in their communities motivated by religious convictions are simply being driven out of the public square because they won’t sing out of the hymn book of the church of the sexual revolution. I just don’t think we can live this way as Americans.”

Not exactly a full retreat from the culture wars, eh?

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